This Week on WhiskyCast

Celebrating 13 Years of WhiskyCast! (Episode 739: November 11, 2018)

This episode marks our 13th anniversary of the very first WhiskyCast episode on November 12, 2005, and we’re celebrating with an old friend! Ian Buxton has been around the whisky industry for nearly 40 years, first as a marketing executive and now as a writer. He’s responsible for reviving Aeneas MacDonald’s classic book “Whisky” and sharing it with a new generation of whisky lovers, and his “101 Spirits to Try Before You Die” series of books has recently grown to include gins and rums along with whiskies. You’ll hear our conversation on WhiskyCast In-Depth. We’ll also have details on the public memorial service next week in Louisville for Master Distiller Dave Pickerell along with the rest of the week’s news, and we’ll have a new answer on the origins of the duty-free whisky business.

Farewell To a Whisky Maker (Episode 738: November 4, 2018)

This time around, we’re on the road in Kilkenny, Ireland, but with heavy hearts. The whisky world lost one of its leaders Thursday night with the death of Master Distiller Dave Pickerell in San Francisco. Dave was truly deserving of the Master Distiller title. After leaving Maker’s Mark in 2008, he helped dozens of craft distillers and entrepreneurs get into the whisky business, earning him the nickname of craft distilling’s Johnny Appleseed. We’ll honor his legacy in this episode, while also looking at the local whiskey scene in Kilkenny. Nine whiskey bars and one retailer make up the Kilkenny Whiskey Guild, and are working together to make Kilkenny a destination for whiskey lovers visiting Ireland.

WhiskyCast Tasting Panel: The Name’s Bond…Bottled in Bond

We’re tasting Bottled in Bond Bourbons this time around with members of the Monmouth Whisky Club in New Jersey. Rich Romano, Michael Timpanero, and Glenn Fuchs tasted the Henry McKenna 10-year-old Single Barrel, the Old Forester 1897 Bottled in Bond, and Old Granddad Bonded while other club members chimed in from the audience. Bottled in Bond whiskies have become more popular in recent years because of demand from bartenders for higher-proof whiskies that don’t get diluted as much in cocktails, but they’re also excellent on their own and usually offer good value for the price.

 WhiskyCast HD: Cleaning up Thousands of Bourbon Barrels at Barton 1792 Distillery

On June 22, 2018, half of Warehouse 30 collapsed at the Barton 1792 Distillery in Bardstown, Kentucky, spilling around 9,000 barrels of whiskey. The rest of the warehouse collapsed on July 4 with another 9,000 barrels. Crews have been working since then to recover as many barrels – and as much Bourbon – as possible. The site is closed to reporters, but Sazerac has released a video and new images showing cleanup work at the warehouse site.

If you’re in the Pittsburgh area, please join us for a special evening on November 26. We’re teaming up with the Pittsburgh Whiskey Friends club to raise money for HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, in memory of the victims of last month’s mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.

We’ll be recording an episode of the WhiskyCast Tasting Panel podcast that evening, and will be raffling off a place on the panel to one lucky attendee. Everyone attending that night will also taste the same whiskies and be part of the program as well, and we’ll also be raffling off some special prizes during the evening.

Please join us that night to support a very worthy cause and help us show the world that love is #StrongerThanHate!

If you were listening to the June 30, 2018 edition of NPR’s “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me,” yes, that was WhiskyCast’s Mark Gillespie you heard as a contestant during the “Listener Limerick Challenge” segment at the end of the show! We’ve been public radio fans for years, and are eagerly awaiting the arrival of Bill Kurtis’s special voice mail greeting for Mark’s mobile phone. If you didn’t get to listen to the show live, we’ve included links here so you can download the podcast version.

WhiskyCast has been around longer than any other whisky-focused podcast, and we’re celebrating the start of our 14th year of podcasts! Twice each week, we bring you the latest whisky news, along with in-depth interviews, tasting notes, and much more. Each podcast features brand-new content, and unless there’s a special occasion, we don’t do “best of” shows. However, there will be times when we’re traveling or during the holidays when we’ll produce just one show during the week.

If you’re just discovering us for the first time, here’s a bit of our own story. WhiskyCast pioneered the genre of whisky-focused podcasts back in 2005, when most people had never heard of podcasting! Since then, we’ve produced hundreds of hours of original – and free – audio and video content for whisky lovers like you around the world. Our community spans the globe, and we’ve done stories on whiskies made in the far north of Scandinavia all the way to the tips of South Africa and Australia – and everywhere in between. We’ve met many of you at whisky festivals and while visiting distilleries, and hope to meet many more of you over time.

Please explore the website. We’ve collected all of our past episodes here, and post the latest whisky news as it happens – often several days before the next episode of WhiskyCast. All of our web content is free, including Mark Gillespie’s database of more than 2,300 tasting notes for whiskies from around the world and our calendar of upcoming whisky festivals and tastings.

We’re able to do this thanks to the support of our advertisers – both past and present. They advertise on WhiskyCast knowing that they will never have any say over our editorial content, and may even have their ads running next to features on their competitors. They recognize the importance of independent, fact-based journalism devoted to telling the stories of whisky in a creative, yet ethically sound way focused on helping you learn more about whisky.

Slainte!

The WhiskyCast Team

Whisky Photo of the Week

We were in Ireland last week with the folks from Powers Whiskey, and this was the scene at sunset Wednesday at the Old Midleton Distillery. Listen to our midweek episode this week for more from Ireland.