“The Best Way To Drink Whisky Is The Way You Want To” Johnnie Walker Global Ambassador Tim D Philips Shares His Scotch Secrets
How many ways are there to serve a whisky? That’s the question Tim D. Philips, Global Brand Ambassador for Johnnie Walker, answered in "Whisky Experiments," a curated event exploring whisky at Mumbai’s Slink & Bardot. The cocktail connoisseur, World Class Global Bartender of the Year 2012, and official Keeper of the Quaich brought his experiences and innovations to the night, leading an evening of cocktails and conversation.
But beyond the cocktail glass, The Bar India caught up with Philips to delve more into his passion for creating with Johnnie Walker Black Label and what he sees ahead for the world of whisky in India.
Where did your interest in working with whisky begin?
I guess it probably began when I first started falling in love with bartending back in 2001. The liquid that was probably my first fascination early in my bartending career was Scotch. I enjoyed working with it because, by far, it challenged me with its breadth of flavours. Even to this day, it’s all one spirit, but the production method and maturation separate them into vastly different-tasting spirits.
How have you seen the approach to whisky changing in India and beyond?
What India is doing brilliantly is ignoring global trends. When you ignore trends and concentrate on what is relevant to your customers, your market, your food culture, that's when you start to build a real cocktail culture.
If someone were new to Johnnie Walker Black Label, how would you explain it and serve it?
The best way to drink whisky is the way you want to drink it, but if I were introducing people to drinking whisky for the first time, I would always serve it with a mixer. Ginger Ale seems to be the natural bedfellow for Johnnie Walker, just mixing that with scotch whisky can highlight some of those characteristics like smoke or spice or malt character, which for a lot of them is quite new.
As a global ambassador, how do you approach mixing Johnnie Walker Black Label in different parts of the world?
I get really excited about mixing more exotic spices, or even more familiar local cuisine spices, with Johnnie Walker Black Label wherever I travel. If I'm in Puerto Rico, Johnnie Walker Black Label in a cold coconut water is an incredible product because you can play with that tropical fruit flavour within the whisky.
What makes Johnnie Walker Black Label particularly versatile for cocktails
We make our whisky from up to 30 to 40 different whiskies within Johnnie Walker Black Label, and each of those whiskies has an incredibly complex set of characteristics. So you can always work to highlight those, or as a bartender, you can work to contrast those things.
What’s your go-to serve at the moment?
So my favourite highball at the moment is a 15 mils of Johnnie Walker Black Label, a local ginger kombucha, which is no sugar but high in flavour, and then I'll just do like a sprig of Thai basil, or a really aromatic herb.
What is your favourite fun fact about Johnnie Walker Black Label?
I would say that we've never created the same recipe at Johnnie Walker Black Label since its inception in 1908. The flavour profile stays the same, yet no two batches share the same recipe. The challenge for blenders is recreating that exact taste with completely different ingredients each time - different whiskies, different casks - adapting to the times. It's like a chef perfectly recreating a 50-year-old dish using entirely different ingredients, which is the magic our blenders achieve with every batch.
If you could create one India-inspired Black Label cocktail, what flavours would you use?
For the Mumbai edition of Whisky Experiments, I did a banana lassi, and that lassi has been mixed with some cardamom, a pinch of salt, obviously fresh ripe banana, some yogurt and then a hint of coconut. So all of these flavours, I think, separately would work really well with Johnnie Walker Black Label, but brought together, they have this familiarity of being something that Indian consumers know very well.
*Drink Responsibly. This communication is for audiences above the age of 25.
