I’ve quipped before that April 1 is the day every year that comedy goes to whisky blogs to die. Now, I don’t really read whisky blogs anymore but I assume this is still true. And so I must assure you that while this post is being made on April 1, it is not by any means an April Fools post. You might think that the lack of humour in it might already be a tip-off in that direction but see above about whisky blogs and comedy. The question, of course, that many of my original readers have asked and answered for themselves in the last five or six years is whether this is still a whisky blog. When I started the blog, just over 11 years ago, there was no possibility of confusion on this point. Whisky content was pretty much all there was for a while. Then restaurant reviews began to creep in, followed by recipes, and eventually by food commentary. The whisky focus got increasingly diluted even though the whisky content didn’t actually get reduced. I’ve been posting three whisky/booze reviews a week pretty steadily for most of the last decade. Most of my whisky readership, however, has evaporated in the last few years, with only a few die-hards still checking in regularly. Now I’m about to give them even less reason to do so.

Yes, in the 12th year of the blog’s life I am going to be reducing the volume of whisky reviews quite drastically. This is not because I have lost interest in drinking whisky or even in reviewing whisky. It’s because the needs of reviewing three whiskies a week are at odds with a long expressed but barely realized desire to drink down my own whisky collection. The bulk of this collection, or more accurately, hoard, was acquired around the time that I started the blog, in what was with hindsight the waning years of the golden age of the so-called whisky loch. In the late 2000s a lot of whisky produced in earlier glut periods was still available. Independent bottlers and even the producers were still making a lot of this available at prices that were very affordable for the middle class whisky geek. You could still buy 20+ yo whiskies for less than $100; hell, you could even buy single casks of Port Ellen for less than $150. Like a lot of whisky geeks, I bought a lot of whisky in that period. The plan was always to drink it. What got in the way?

Well, the blog did. Unless I wanted to have a hundred odd bottles open at a time, I couldn’t exclusively review my own bottles. I would have to be opening at least three each week—and keep in mind that for most of the first year of the blog I was posting a review every day! What made reviewing possible was samples. In the early years these were acquired through swaps with other whisky geeks, mostly friends. Later that was replaced by bottle splits. This was good for variety and experimentation but it meant that the needs of the blog trumped the goals of drinking my own collection. Keep in mind, that in all the years of reviewing whisky my consumption has not changed: I rarely have more than two drinks a night; on most nights, only one.

But now I am in my mid-50s and facing up to the very real likelihood of my palate and nose diminishing over the next decade. And so it’s time to finally drink up the bottles I’ve stashed on my shelves. It’s time to drink up the good stuff when I can still enjoy it fully, and it’s time to find out how many of the indie bottles I purchased because they were very good deals actually contain very good whisky. At my rate of consumption—three ounces a night on average—that’s a bottle every eight days, or roughly four bottles a month. If I can keep it up, in about eight years the collection will have dwindled to almost nothing. After all, I have barely been buying whisky for the last few years—prices have shot up, quality has plummeted and I’ve found better value in brandy and more recently, mezcal. Which is not to say that I’m at any risk of now amassing a large collection of brandy or mezcal either.

What does this mean for whisky reviewing on the blog? It means that you can expect that for at least the next couple of years I will rarely post more than one whisky review a week. I will open four bottles at the start of each month and review one each week. As I drink the bottles down over the course of the month I will try my best to add comments to the reviews that track their development. Given my newfound love of mezcal you can expect to see more mezcal reviews as well. I suspect that most of what little new purchases I will make going forward will be mezcal for at least the next year or so.

All of the above is the plan anyway. Those who read the blog regularly know how bad I am at keeping to plans I announce. But I do hope to keep to this one. All those Laphroaigs, Ben Nevises, Caol Ilas, Littlemills, Taliskers etc. etc. on my shelves aren’t going to drink themselves.

What about the food content? Regular recipes won’t be coming back for at least a few months. Until then you’ll have to look to my Instagram Reels for new recipes. Restaurant reviews will continue at their usual pace. Right now that pace is quite torrid as I need to finish posting my reports from Seoul and Delhi before I lose interest in them. Once I’ve caught up with the backlog there will likely be one whisky/booze review and one restaurant report per week. Who knows, this may lead to my doing more food writing of other kinds again—I’ve not done much of that in the last couple of years either. And perhaps I’ll even get around to finishing that series I began a few years ago on Bombay cinema.

If you’ve stuck with me all these years, I thank you very much. I do hope you’ll stick around longer even as my output drops and the emphasis shifts once more.