There’s a moment, somewhere around your fifteenth dram of the afternoon, when you realise you’ve been standing in the same spot for forty minutes because the person behind the table just opened a 30 year old you’ve never heard of. That’s The Whisky Event in the sense.
The Whisky Event, hosted at The Royal Lancaster Hotel in London, is one of the more serious whisky gatherings you’ll find in the UK. Over a thousand guests. More than sixty exhibitors. Six hundred-plus whiskies poured across a single afternoon. And unlike many whisky festivals that lean heavily on their core range lineup, this one goes deep 20-, 30-, and 40-year-old expressions that you simply won’t encounter at a tasting bar or a retail shop.
We went. We sipped. Here’s what happened.
The floor where you could spend the whole day and still not finish
The main hall is the centrepiece a sprawling space with tables lined end to end with bottles. Some you’ll recognise immediately. Others will make you stop and pull out your phone to look them up.
With more than fifty stands on the floor, the only real constraints on the evening are time and your own priorities. You could spend the whole session at five tables and still walk away having tasted more interesting whisky than most people see in a year. Or you could try to cover the room which, fair warning, is a noble but probably impossible ambition.
A few highlights from our walk through:
Living Souls was one of the most memorable stops. Their approach to whisky is unconventional, and the pours reflected that complex, textured, not easily categorised.
Goalong from China turned heads. Chinese whisky still surprises people, and it probably shouldn’t anymore Goalong’s expressions are genuinely well-made and worth paying attention to as the category keeps growing.
Port Askaig had two brand new bottlings on the table. If you know Port Askaig, you know it tends to punch well above its price point for Islay-style whisky, and these releases didn’t disappoint.
Glen Moray was pouring across their range a distillery that tends to get underrated, and their table reminded you why they’ve been around since 1897.
Tamdhu 21 Year Old stopped us in our tracks. Tamdhu is known for its sherry maturation, and at 21 years the depth of that influence is something else entirely.
Decadent Drinks brought some of their characterful independent bottlings. Worth seeking out if you haven’t come across them before.
Claxtons our friends were on the floor as always, doing what they do best: pouring cracking drams with genuine enthusiasm and knowledge. If you ever want a conversation about whisky that actually goes somewhere, find a Claxtons bottle.
And then there was the unexpected one: a handful of whiskies that stopped us cold, aged well into the 30- and 40-year whisky, from distilleries that don’t appear on shop shelves. That’s the real draw of an event like this. The bottles you can’t buy.
The Masterclasses: Where it gets serious
Three masterclasses ran during the event. We made it to two.
Rosebank
This one was worth the trip to London on its own. Want to know more details of the masterclass read it here
Rosebank is a distillery that spent thirty years as a ghost. Closed in 1993 by its then owners, it sat dormant for three decades while its remaining bottles became increasingly mythologised and increasingly expensive. In 2017, Ian Macleod Distillers acquired the site and trademarks and began the long work of bringing it back. Production restarted in 2023. The distillery opened to visitors in June 2024.
What made the masterclass special was the structure of the lineup. They didn’t just pour old stock and call it a day they built a full arc from the living distillery to the legacy and back again:
- Ian Macleod Rosebank new make spirit the starting point. The raw, unaged triple-distilled spirit coming off the new stills, giving you a sense of the distillery character before wood gets involved.
- Ian Macleod Rosebank 2 year old spirit two years in cask, already showing what the spirit is becoming.
- Single cask distillery exclusive, Cask No. 433 1993 the bridge. The last vintage before closure, now a single cask exclusive. A piece of history in a glass.
- Rosebank 30 Year Old
- Rosebank 31 Year Old
- Rosebank 32 Year Old
Six pours. Three decades of the distillery laid out in sequence, bookended by new make at one end and a 32-year-old at the other. The triple-distilled Lowland style that writers like Michael Jackson once called the finest example of a Lowland malt floral, delicate, achingly precise came through clearly in the older expressions. Comparing those against the new make and the 2 year old showed exactly where the revived Rosebank is headed, and gave a sense of how long the wait for its new releases will be worth.
If you’ve been curious about the Rosebank revival, this was the clearest possible picture of what the distillery was and what it’s becoming.
Sukhinder Singh
Take a deep look on the tasting here
Sukhinder Singh is the co-founder of The Whisky Exchange, one of the world’s leading specialist whisky retailers, and someone who has been sourcing and collecting rare whisky since the 1980s. His personal collection runs to around 10,000 bottles. Some of what he has, nobody else does.
The masterclass he ran was not a brand presentation it was more like being let into someone’s cellar and having them explain why each bottle matters. The lineup moved from core Speyside expressions up through two extraordinary “Directors Special” releases that you simply cannot buy:
- Aultmore 12 Year Old, Refill bourbon ask fresh, grassy, light. A good entry point that showed the style before the heavier maturation influences came in.
- Benrinnes 18 Year Old, bourbon cask Benrinnes is an underappreciated distillery, partly triple-distilled in its process, with a meatier, more robust character that the bourbon cask here kept in check nicely.
- Dailuaine 18 Year Old, sherry cask a contrast to the Benrinnes. Rich, dark fruit, the sherry doing a lot of the talking at 18 years.
- Benriach 34 Year Old (Directors Special) this is where the session shifted gear. These Directors Specials are private selections, not available for purchase. Four decades of development in a Speyside malt.
- Imperial 32 Year Old (Directors Special) Imperial is a closed distillery, which makes expressions like this finite by definition. Every bottle that gets opened is one fewer that exists.
- Caol Ila 40 Year Old (Directors Special) the finale. Forty years on Islay peat, and a reminder that heavily peated whisky at great age becomes something almost unrecognisable from its youth smoother, more integrated, the smoke transformed into something deeper and more complex.
Watching Sukhinder talk through these the way a musician might annotate a record the year, the cask, the circumstances, why this one and not another was one of the more educational hours of the day. This is the kind of session that reminds you how much there is still to learn.
The Food: Not an afterthought
Let’s talk about the buffet, because it deserves a paragraph.
The snack bar area runs throughout the event popcorn, cured meats, smoked fish and it exists for a very practical reason: lining your stomach so you can keep tasting. It works.
But the main buffet is a different story. Fresh sushi. Carved meats. A dessert section that made several people in our group genuinely consider abandoning the whisky floor early and there’s a reason it keeps getting mentioned it’s the kind of spread that would hold its own at a standalone dinner event. At a whisky festival, it feels like a gift.
Is it worth going?
If you’re a serious whisky drinker, yes without much qualification. The combination of the floor, the masterclasses, and the food makes for a genuinely full day. The access to old and rare expressions that you can’t find elsewhere is the real differentiator from other tasting events.
If you’re newer to whisky, it can feel like a lot six hundred whiskies is genuinely overwhelming but the exhibitors are knowledgeable and happy to guide you. Start with a region or a style you already know and let the conversations take you somewhere unexpected. That’s the point.
We’ll be back.
Keep an eye on thewhiskyevent.com for dates and ticket releases. Masterclass spots fill up fast book early if there’s a specific session you want.
/Invited to the show
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