Why not spend Halloween traveling deep into West Wales? Winding west form Shrewsbury on the train, I retraced steps I last took in 2019, heading to Aberystwyth. From there, a TrawsCymru bus took me along the wet coast of Ceredigion to In the Welsh Wind. You may remember that I posted a blog about them back in 2024 , when they kindly sent me a sample of their first whisky. 

At the end of September last year, I went to the Basque Country for the first time. Besides giving a tasting at Edari in Bilbao, I used the opportunity to see a distillery. What else do you think I would get up to?!

Everything I say here is intended for the world of European whisky (Scotch and Irish included), but the same principles could be applied to whiskies made anywhere in the world with some adaptation of the details to local conditions, e.g., which types of grain can be grown locally

From some of Czechia’s most historic distilling sites to one of its newest. Radlík is only 40 minutes outside Prague, and it's a lovely journey on a late August day. Before hosting a tasting at the Whiskeria in the evening, I got to sample some of Czechia’s great public transport. A fast metro to Budějovická, where city buses fire you right out into the countryside. 

As soon as I finished visiting R. Jelinek in the morning, it was off to Olomouc on the train. Leaving the edge of the Carpathians, I headed for this historic Moravian city to see a much smaller Czech distillery: TOSH. A few trains, trams, and buses later, I was standing in Těšetice, the true genesis / ground zero of Czech whisky. 

As soon as I finished my last distillery visit in Austria, I headed straight off to Czechia on the train. By 10pm, I managed to make it to the small town of Vizovice in eastern Moravia. A town of only 5,000 inhabitants, it’s also home to one whisky distillery, and it might be the single most important one in Czechia: Rudolf Jelínek.  

I’d had a very disrupted start to my Czechia trip… which started with a brief interlude in Austria. Missing my planned night train, I had to take a series of buses and trains overnight, which did have the silver lining of letting me watch the sunrise between Munich and the Danube. All that left me standing at Linz Hauptbahnhof, where I was met by Jasmin Haider pulling up in her Tesla. 

You’ve likely seen me talk a lot about Teerenpeli, and plenty of their bottles go through EuroWhisky tastings / the webshop. Back in July of this year, I finally got to visit as the last point on my summer trip through the Nordics. Here’s what it was like to visit one of the first modern European whisky distilleries…

I had been tempted to incorporate a visit to Basque Moonshiners into my visit to the Basque Country. For context, I had a limited time between when I could travel from the Netherlands, and when I had to go to Barcelona for a long-planned whisky tasting at the Whiskeria. I had already planned to visit Destilerias Acha and Siderit, and I sadly didn’t have time for this distillery in Vitoria-Gasteiz.

After coming back to Stockholm from High Coast, I took the MS Cinderella ferry over to Helsinki. Even though my visit to Helsinki Distilling Company wasn’t happening for another day yet, I got a little preview in the tax-free shop onboard…

In late June, just after Midsummer, I took the train from Lund up to Kramfors/Nyland for the High Coast distillery festival. Running for a weekend every year, the event parallels my trip last year to Kyrö Distillery in Finland for much the same thing! There were lupins blooming everywhere as I took the bus and then a taxi en route to the event. There are buses running from larger towns, for future reference, just like they were at Kyrö.

Back in June, I was lucky enough to get a day en route to a distillery - in fact, to my second distillery of the day. Having just visited Thornaes in the morning, I then got a series of trains, ferries, and even a trolleybus to Ven (‘veen’), a small island in the Øresund. This was my first time visiting a Swedish distillery - in fact, my first time visiting Sweden at all! It was encouraging to see ads for the distillery even on the ferry over from Landskrona…