Not many people do ....
More Whisky Trivia
Did You Know .......
Last time I gave you some whisky trivia. And now you are going to get some more! Here are some rapid fire facts about whisky.
Whisky has been around for centuries. In fact the earliest known written reference to whisky in Scotland goes back to 1494 at Lindores Abbey. So that is a good few years to have gathered some wonderful trivia and some amazing facts. Try dropping out some of these facts when sharing a dram with friends and family. Or create a whisky quiz for the your next party! Enjoy!
Let's Start With Some Numbers ....
- Scotch whisky exports accounted for over 20 per cent of all UK food and drink exports in 2019. With a value of £4.91 Billion equivalent to €5.7 Billion!
- 42 bottles of whisky are exported from Scotland every second.
- A 30-year-old cask of Macallan set a new world record in 2019 for the most expensive whisky cask ever sold at auction. It fetched a whopping $572,000.
- The Guinness World Record for the oldest bottle of whisky in the world belongs to the Glenavon Special Liqueur Whisky. Bottled between 1851 and 1858, it sold at auction for an astounding £14,850.
- In France, whisky accounts for the highest retail sales of any spirit at 47.2 per cent. Cognac represents only 0.7 per cent of sales.
- 43 per cent of German tourists visiting Scotland visit a distillery, making it the second most popular activity for the demographic. The first? Golf!
Brands and Facts
- The Glenfiddich bottle is triangular in shape to represent the three pillars of whisky making: air, water and barley.Glenfiddich means ‘valley of the deer’.
- Glenturret’s distillery famous cat, Towser the Mouser, is believed to have caught 28,899 mice in its 24-year lifetime, which begs the question: who was counting?
- The average measure of whisky contains just 64 calories – fewer than a banana.
- A cooper’s apprentice must work accompanied for four years before being allowed to tackle their own barrel.
- One large oak tree is said to yield enough wood for approximately three 60-gallon casks.
- At the time of writing, there are 133 distilleries licensed to produce Scotch whisky.
- Iceland is home to just two whisky distilleries, both of which use sheep manure in place of coal/peat as a fuel for kilning barley.
- The record for the largest bottle of whisky goes to Famous Grouse. The distillers created 1.7-metre bottle containing 228 litres of whisky.
Not Many People Know That …
- Frank Sinatra was buried with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.
- The co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson, demanded whisky on his deathbed but was refused it.
- While filming in the Congo, the majority of the cast of The African Queen became sick with dysentery from drinking the water. Director John Huston and actor Humphrey Bogart emerged unscathed, allegedly because they drank nothing but whisky throughout
- In some Latin American countries, people say ‘whisky’ instead of ‘cheese’ when posing for photographs.
- In 1956, Whisky replaced William in the NATO phonetic alphabet.
- World Whisky Day 2023 is on Saturday 20th May. The day takes place on the third Saturday in May each year.
People and Whisky
- John Jameson, the founder of Jameson’s Irish whisky was Scottish. And was the great grandson of the radio transmission pioneer, Guglielmo Marconi.
- John ‘Johnnie’ Walker was a grocer in Kilmarnock, Scotland in the mid-1800s who specialised in blending tea before he decided to start blending whisky. He also did not drink alcohol.
- Charles Joughin, the baker on-board the doomed Titanic, trod water for three hours before being rescued. He claimed he hadn’t succumbed to the cold due to the amount of whisky he had drunk prior to the accident, while the ship was sinking.
- Sir Nikola Tesla drank whisky every day because he thought that it would make him live for 150 years.
- Robert Burns once had the job of exciseman and wrote fondly of whisky in his poetry.
- In order to finish the screenplay for the Blue Dahlia, writer Raymond Chandler drank whisky for eight days while being supervised by six secretaries, a nurse and a doctor.
- After Prohibition ended, 69-year-old James B. Beam got his distillery up and running in just 120 days.
- An 1896 Scotch from Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition was found in 2006 and is being preserved in New Zealand. It didn’t freeze at -30 temperatures.
- When Norman Lamont was Chancellor in the early 1990s, the bag which was waved at photographers outside No 11 contained a bottle of Highland Park, while the speech itself was carried in a plastic bag by his then-aide, William Hague.
- George Washington was the only founding father to commercially operate a distillery. It was one of the biggest distilleries of its time, but was unfortunately destroyed by a fire a few years after opening.
Who Said What About Whisky?
- British Prime Minister Winston Churchill: “The water was not fit to drink. To make it palatable, we had to add whisky. By diligent effort, I learned to like it.”
- MLB pitcher Tug McGraw on his salary: “Ninety percent I’ll spend on good times, women, and Irish Whiskey. The other ten percent I’ll probably waste.”
- Late Night Show host Johnny Carson: “Happiness is having a rare steak, a bottle of whisky, and a dog to eat the rare steak.”
- Movie Star Errol Flynn: “I like my whisky old and my women young.”
- Comedian W.C. Fields: “Always carry a flagon of whiskey in case of snakebite and furthermore always carry a small snake.”