A whisky adventure

I love whisky, and I like the fact that every variety is different. Don’t get me wrong, I like it in moderation. Drink more than a few drams then I’m out for the count. Each has its own story and unique flavour, and that makes it special.

I became involved with a Whisky business in 2017/18 and helped develop the brand identity over the years. What I came to realise, by talking to the business’s main owner, was that whisky is all about the story. You can really tell each one is very different and complex depending on the distillery and the manufacturing processes it goes through. Maybe ‘manufacturing’ is a bit of an industrial term, I’d call it an art or a craft maybe. From cobwebs in the warehouse, the water source or peatland, each cask matures in different ways which are released in the many resulting flavours.

People love stories and particularly when sat around a fire with whisky in the hand and that became the focus behind the brand identity. Each bottling is very limited, we are talking only a couple of hundred bottles for every release. This makes each Sipping Shed whisky very unique and special. It seemed only right to take time to create individual illustrations that tell the story of each whisky. Some stories are historical some metaphorical and some even mythical. We’ve recently started pushing this more creatively to help differentiate from other brands in the same space. For me, it’s a nice escapism and a challenge – illustrating for an exceptional beverage and trying not to drink too much of it at the same time.