Highlights online this month include:

  • Gifting and SMWS Dram-cierge: This year we’re celebrating the spirit of the season with gifts that are all about spending time together and sharing the magic of feel-good flavours. Mads Schmoll wraps up 10 fantastic gift ideas to inspire and delight.
  • Toddy Time: As nights draw in and autumn winds chill, it’s finally the season for comforting hot toddies to return. Hot water, honey and lemon, mixed with a good measure of whisky, complete the rejuvenating winter warmer, as Inka Larissa explains.
  • Where flavour comes alive – Heavily Peated: Julien Willems shares the last chapter of our story on the Society’s trio of peated flavour profiles. It’s time to get Heavily Peated.
  • SMWS Australia at 20: The Scotch Malt Whisky Society’s Australian branch is celebrating two decades of changing the local whisky landscape, developing an exceptional community and, of course, full-flavoured single cask, cask-strength whisky, as Adam Ioannidis writes.
  • Distillery profile – Cotswolds: Since Cotswolds distillery opened its doors in 2014, it has been part of a burgeoning whisky scene across England. But even with expansion on the cards, founder Daniel Szor says there’s no need for Scotland’s distillers to start worrying about this developing market. Tom Bruce-Gardyne reports.
  • Industry insider – David Robertson: From distilling to marketing, providing investment advice to setting up new distilleries, there isn’t much that David Robertson hasn’t achieved in the whisky world. But what’s next for this restless spirit? SMWS ambassador Lee ‘Connas’ Connor caught up with him to find out.
  • Cask of the month – Rum-believable! Continuing his quest to explore the finer points of maturation, SMWS ambassador Lee ‘Connas’ Connor delves into the effects that previous cask fills have on maturing whisky, specifically rum.
  • Whisky History – Peat, from fuel to flavour: Scotch whisky and peat are as linked as smoke and fire, especially in areas where peat has been the most abundant and cheapest source of fuel. As Gavin D Smith reports, tastes can come and go, but with peated whisky more popular than ever, the industry faces fresh challenges to ensure its use of this fossil fuel is sustainable.
  • From the vaults – For Peat’s Sake: Peat is peat, right? Wrong. Where it’s cut from will bring different flavours to your dram. Richard Goslan put it to the test with four willing peated whisky enthusiasts in this feature from Unfiltered issue 41 in November 2018.
  • Member story – Whisky pilgrimage of a lifetime: The Whiskey Library is a whisky education and events company founded in Washington DC by SMWS member Tim Moll and his friend Brian Thompson in 2014. This summer, Tim, Brian and their pals Michael Perez, Robert Floyd and Dennis Dulanto took the whisky tour of a lifetime across to Scotland, as Tim recounts.
  • Partner Bar – Beneath Driver Lane, Melbourne: Adam Ioannidis from the SMWS Australia team catches up in Melbourne with Beneath Driver Lane partner bar owner Hamish Goonetilleke and bar manager Kealán Brady to learn how they shaped the venue into what it is today.
  • Share a dram with… Joao Pedro ‘JP’ Medeiros, SMWS ambassador and assistant venue manager, 19 Greville Street, London