Behind the Barrel

A good Japanese whisky slows you down. It asks for patience in a way few other spirits do, partly because the best of it has spent a decade or more sitting quietly in a warehouse while the world outside got louder. If you have ever paid far too much for a single pour of Yamazaki […]

American whiskey is the most commercially successful spirits category in North America, and for Canadian drinkers it is the one that sits closest to home. Bourbon and rye shaped the cocktails we still order, the barrels that mature much of the world’s whisky started their lives holding American spirit, and a growing share of the

I’ve walked a fair number of Kentucky distillery floors, and Maker’s Mark is one of the few that still feels like a working farm operation rather than a theme park. The place sits in Loretto, a small Marion County town, and it has been turning out its wheated bourbon since 1954. What struck me on

For most of the last century, Irish whiskey was the bottle you reached for when you weren’t thinking very hard. A Jameson and ginger ale at the pub. A duty-free purchase at Shannon Airport. Collectors largely passed it over, and the auction houses saved their good catalogues for Scotch. In hindsight, that indifference was a

There is a quiet satisfaction in pouring your own whisky and mixing something decent with it. Not a bar pour you overpaid for. Something you built at your own counter, with your own hands, the way you like it. I have been mixing whisky drinks at home for longer than I care to admit, and

Glenfiddich is the single malt most people meet first, and for good reason. Walk into almost any whisky bar in Canada and you will find the triangular green bottle on the shelf. It is the gateway dram for a lot of collectors, and it remains one of the best-selling single malt Scotch whiskies in the

Why Storage Matters Whisky is a distilled spirit made from fermented grain mash, and people have been making it for centuries. What you do with the bottle after you buy it matters as much as what you buy. Poor storage flattens the flavour, dulls the colour, and shortens the life of even a fine single

Canada has been distilling whisky longer than it has been a country. Commercial stills were firing in what is now Ontario by the early 1800s, decades before Confederation, turning surplus rye and corn into the spirit that would become the national default: light, mixable, and built from the grain this country grows best. If your

The whisky in your glass is changing, and the pace has picked up. Distillers are cutting carbon, finishing spirit in casks nobody would have touched twenty years ago, and selling bottles through online auction rooms that never close. For Canadian drinkers and collectors, this is a good time to pay attention. Sustainable Production Sustainability used

A bottle of Macallan 1926 has sold for well over a million pounds at auction. Whole casks of single malt change hands for tens of thousands before a drop is ever bottled. And a growing number of Canadian collectors are asking whether rare whisky belongs in a portfolio alongside stocks, property, and RRSPs. The honest