THE
FESTIVE DRAM BY MATT BAILEY
years as the world’s leading whisky club. 40 years. A 40-year-old whisky to match. A moment in liquid history. 40 years simultaneously feels like a long time and a short blip. It’s a lifetime of work in building the world’s leading whisky club, but barely a blip in the grand scheme of whisky production and enjoyment. Thousands of years of production, turning barley into spirit, and spirit into whisky. In that context, 40 years is barely a ripple in the ocean. In the context of how far we’ve come as a whisky club, it’s a tidal wave. 40 years
4
ago, Pip met a few friends on a farm and decided to bottle a single cask of whisky, and our ethos hasn’t changed much since. So, what did the world look like in 1983? Well, from my perspective, I wasn’t quite born yet…but from the angle of whisky production, it was a dire state of affairs for single malt. In Australia, you would have been lucky to find maybe six–seven different single malt brands at retail, and barely behind any pub or bar. Blended whisky was king, cask strength was basically nonexistent here, and the idea of regular ‘whisky tastings’ was some kind of voodoo I’m sure.
ABOVE: The never-ending peated cask at Whisky & Alement.
