It's been almost a month since my last blog entry, sorry ! I have been busy with work and family. I was working in Barcelona at a pharma conference at the end of March for eight days. As I was working for a company based in the south of England I was the only Scottish person on the crew ! This leads to a lot of ribbing about my accent but its great working with these guys. The picture below was taken in the "Berlin bar", which was half way between our hotel and the place we were working at. As you can imagine we did like to have a pint on the way home from work and this was the best place. The bar itself had a limited selection of drinks but the beer was cold and not too expensive, the old bar maid was pretty grumpy with us until she saw how much money we were spending, then she started to look out for us coming in - she even gave us some tapas one night !
I got back from Barcelona on the first of April and was working in Gleneagles Golf Resort on the third. I was there for three days with one other technician working at a conference. We stayed in Auchterarder and managed to drink in every pub in the town ! there are reviews of two of the pubs, The Glendevon Hotel Bar and The Niblick. The other two bars in town, I can't remember their names, weren't that good. If you are in Auchterarder I would recommend The Niblick as I think its the best bar in town. Check out the reviews by clicking on the names above.
As many of you may already know, I work as an Audio Visual project manager / technician at events, conferences, road shows, etc - Check out my other web site www.BigRedResources.weebly.com if you wold like to know more about this. Most conferences are pretty dull but every now and again I work at one I really enjoy. This happened in mid April when I worked at "The World Whiskies Conference" in Glasgow. This is run by a whisky writer called Ian Buxton. I met and talked to Ian and many other influential people in the drinks industry from companies like Diageo, all the way to to companies based in Taiwan, namely the King Car Distillery which produces Kavalan whisky. I had the pleasure of speaking to Mr Ian Y.L. Chang, head blender of Kavalan, a very nice man who is passionate about his work. I didn't take any photo's at the conference but the image below is of the King Car Distillery - which gets about a million visitors a year and you can blend a bottle of your own whisky when you are there !
The main reason that the blog has been on hold is that my father passed away a couple of weeks ago. There has been a lot of family time and arrangements that had to be made over the last couple of weeks. My father has now been laid to rest and life goes on. The picture below was taken by my eldest daughter on her mobile phone about a month ago.
There is lots to look forward to in the next blog. I have managed to get hold of some great beers from some of the more remote breweries in Scotland and will be tasting them with a few friends. We will of course film this and put the results on the blog and appropriate brewery pages. Its also coming into the season for beer festivals and I will be going to as many as I can, starting with the Paisley beer festival which is this weekend coming, i.e. Saturday the 30th of April. If you can make it then I'll see you there, if not, then I'll take a few photo's and tell you all about it. See you soon, Alastair.