Anthony Gladman

Whisky legend the late Dr Jim Swan once described organic barley as an expensive waste of time. That was almost a decade ago and he was talking mainly about distillery economics. But did he have a point?
We know organic farming increases biodiversity and improves soil health. ‘If you’ve ever visited an organic farm and a non-organic farm, you can see the difference in those fields,’ says Liam Hirt, co-founder of the Circumstance Distillery in Bristol. ‘One is very much more alive.’

There’s a pecking order among barrels. Mizunara casks sit at the top, unassailable on their lofty peak. After those come the pipes and puncheons that once held fortified wines: Pineau, Port and Pedro Ximenéz. Then there are the massed ranks of lowly ex-Bourbon casks, a staple of the barrel-ageing starter pack.
I rank them like this based on their rarity and the effects they can have on the spirits they contain. A barrel’s former contents can give a spirit a boost. So too can the type of wood ...

It is June 2024. Six months ago we thought we’d lost the Burton Unions for ever. But now, in the Peak District, six silent and silky streams of yeast foam pour from gleaming swan neck pipes into a trough of krausen. A Union set is fermenting again.

Meet the distillers putting a gallic spin on gin

Whisky and other spirits aged in mizunara casks command high prices and are adored by collectors. But what exactly is mizunara oak and is it worth paying more? Anthony Gladman finds out.

Picture Sandy Hyslop, a jovial chap in comfortable middle age, bent over to thrust his nose into an empty wooden cask. He has travelled 32km just t...

The distinctive flavours of Japanese gin are driving its popularity around the world. Anthony Gladman heads to Kyoto to hear more about the botanicals that give the country's premium gins a sense of place and selects five of the best gins to try
11 April 2024
Uji, a city to the south of Kyoto, is the birthplace of Japan’s tea culture. At its height, during the Ashikaga shogunate, it had seven tea plantations. Of these, only the Okunoyama plantation remains. Growers have cultivated tea here fo...

How distillers can make a smaller carbon footprint by working with alternative raw materials.

I want you to picture a drinker. We’ll call her Georgie. She’s in her early 20s and has clubbed together with her friends to buy a bottle of spirits to share at their ‘pres’ in the evening.

She’s only vaguely familiar with the bottles on the shelf in front of her. How can you make sure yours is the one that makes it into her hand?

“A lot of my favourite beers have massive contradictions when you start trying to describe them,” says Michael Wiper, co-founder and managing director of Bristol’s Wiper and True. “I feel the same about this beer.”

Technically speaking, Orchard Ale is a graf: a beer-cider hybrid that sees both wort and apple juice blended and fermented together. (The name ‘graf’ actually comes from a fictional beverage invented by author Stephen King in The Dark Tower series of novels.) Wild yeasts do their work with as little intervention as possible from the brewers.

If you’ve any tartan in your wardrobe, now’s the time to dig it out and fire up that cèilidh playlist. The 25th of January has rolled round once again and it’s time for Burns Night, the annual celebration of the poet Robert Burns.
This usually involves a Burns Supper of haggis, neeps and tatties, accompanied by poetry addressing said ‘great chieftain o’ the puddin’-race’ and a recital of the Selkirk Grace. If you’re enjoying the traditional meal, you may also want a dram or two of whisky to a...

Richard Lock, who runs Retribution Distillery in Somerset makes three times as much whisky as he does rum. It costs him more to lay down a cask of rum than one of whisky, but it sells for less. “I guess that’s what you get for using raw material from the other side of the world,” he says. “The numbers don’t stack up.”

Gin has enjoyed its boom time for a good few years now. For almost as long distillers have wondered how long it would last. Rum has been touted before as gin’s heir apparent. So far, so thwarted. Could it be gearing up for another go?

Calvados is one of the ‘big three’ French brandies along with Cognac and Armagnac. Like its southern cousins, it matures in oak barrels and comes out bearing VS, VSOP and XO labels at two, four and six years, respectively. But where Cognac and Armagnac are based on grapes, Calvados begins life in the orchards of Normandy as apples and pears.
Its 300 producers make about 6 million bottles each year, half of which head overseas. Given this, it might seem odd that the UK doesn’t see more of it. ...

I had a few hours to kill in Prague recently before my flight back to the UK. What to do? A museum perhaps?
As if.
No, I went to the pub. Three, in fact, all very different, and I found myself wondering what it was they had in common — and whether there were any lessons for British pubs to be found in Czech beer culture.
The first I visited was Lokál: it’s a pretty obvious stop for anyone after the Czech beer experience. Expect pints of Pilsner Urquell served up alongside beef broth and goula...

Poor Calvados. Such a pleasure and yet so forgotten, so left behind. How did this come to pass?
For the past few decades its story was one of neglect. After a long, slow decline, le calva finally sank into the tar pit during the 1990s when the multinationals sold up and siphoned their money over to Cognac. Two French conglomerates were left to dominate production, both content to flog on the cheap to French and German supermarkets. The remaining producers — mostly tiny and traditional — didn’...