INTERVIEW
Blair Bowman is known the world over as the brains behind World Whisky Day, an idea he came up with whilst studying Hispanics at Aberdeen University in 2012. He was living in Barcelona at the time, and was only 21, but he noticed that World Gin Day was trending on social media. As an avid whisky fan he immediately searched for World Whisky Day online. To his surprise it didn’t exist, so, he snapped up the domain name, rushed off to set up a Facebook and Twitter and just two years later World Whisky Day was being celebrated through 250,000 attendees at events, across 40 countries worldwide. In 2015, Blair sold the rights to his creation and, although he remains very much involved in a consultancy role, he now has moved onto new ventures within the world of whisky - most recently he has been running unusual tasting events which involves trying whisky in dark... and he has just published a book. I put a few questions to the whisky maestro.
How do you feel about World Whisky Day now? Has it achieved what you hoped it would? “Definitely, the fact that it’s in media diaries and pretty much every major whisky brand has engaged with it. Distilleries do special things on the day and bars all over the world put on special events. It’s definitely achieved its goal of reaching new people because it was always about bringing new people in to the industry.” What did you learn? “The biggest thing I learned was to collaborate. Originally worked on my own, but everything I’m doing now is much more collaborative than just working alone. And I’ve certainly been collaborative on my first book, The Pocket Guide to Whisky: Featuring the Whisky Tube Map. How did your book come about? “I met Nikki Welch at an industry event and she’d created a wine tube map about two years ago and she showed me the map and I sort of said to her there and then, “Why isn’t there a whisky one?” So last summer we fleshed out the idea.” What exactly is it about? “It’s basically a tube map for a city; every line is a different flavour profile, every station a different distillery. It’s all based on flavour, not geography. You find the whiskies you already know and see how they relate to other ones. The idea is if you like a certain whisky then the stations on either side are going to be quite similar.” You’ve also been involved in some quite different event recently. Drams in the Dark? “That’s been my most recent experiement. Drams in the Dark are multi-sensory tasting sessions. Guests turn up and the room is in near darkness to begin with and then it becomes completely dark. We usually have five or six different whiskies and five or six different food pairings, very small, bite sized pieces of food, varied in texture, the idea being that if you shut off one sense it heightens the others.”
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