Glasgow Comes to Cali

If I can't bring you all whisky fans to Glasgow with me, in the hopes of showing you the city that's captured my heart since our last visit, I figured we could at least bring a little bit of Glasgow to some of you. People ask me all the time to make plans—to grab lunch, have a drink, or watch the game after work. As much as I want to see my friends and family, I'm almost always doing some kind of liquor-related event post-K&L. I don't always advertise them or sell tickets, some of them are secret, and others might be thrown together last minute, but I'm simply addicted to doing events with great consumers and I've got all kinds of networks moving 24/7—like a series of underground rivers. I love bringing good people to good booze. So when our long-time partner Andrew Laing, from Hunter Laing—the folks behind our exclusive Hepburn's Choice and Sovereign labels—said he was going to be in town last night, I wanted to show him how wonderful a private K&L dinner event could be.

Big tastings are fun, but you can never have an intimate conversation when there are hundreds of other drunken whisky fans clammering for the attention of a few producers. In the privacy of a secret dining location, Andrew was able to talk about some of the 2015 K&L selections, as well as go into detail about how the independent game works for those interested in what's behind the curtain.

And so we drank, and dined, and got a little heady on the delicious bottle of soon-to-be-a-K&L-exclusive-single-cask Springbank 18 that Andrew smuggled into the country. People flipped out for the whisky, Andrew got a taste of the Cali lifestyle, and a few loyal K&L customers got to drink ridiculously good Scotch with one of Glasgow's most-entrenched independent bottlers.

"If those people are your actual customers, then you've got an easy gig," Andrew said to me as I drove him back to San Francisco late last night. "They were very charming."

Indeed.

-David Driscoll