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Week in pictures: 29 July – 4 August

04 August 2023 By James Evison

This week in pictures features a new wine brand aimed at a younger adult audience, The Kraken taking down a riverboat, and Douglas Blyde visiting a distillery in Derbyshire.

JOY

Wednesday night saw the launch of JOY, a brand new wine brand aimed at a younger adult audience. The Came Here For Love singer Ella Eyre starred at the launch event at Menagerie in Manchester. (Image: DaveBenett/Getty)

The Kraken

On Thursday, July 27, New Orleans was invited to witness a “savage attack by The Kraken” in which the brand “shipwrecked” the classic Creole Queen Riverboat in celebration of Tales of the Cocktail 2023.

Guests entered the ship amidst a tangle of giant tentacles and were greeted by porthole offering sips of The Kraken Gold Spiced Rum served by live Kraken tentacle hands. They were then tested with a prompt to “pledge their souls to The Kraken” in ink on a graffiti wall before choosing one of three bars for a delicious Kraken Rum libation.

Attendees could also wrestle The Kraken with an interactive arcade game and “release their inner Kraken” in a smash room. A tarot reader, palmistry, voodoo doctor, an authentic NOLA brass band and local favourite DJ Kelly Green were also in attendance.

White Peak

Douglas Blyde visited Derbyshire’s White Peak Distillery, home to Never Say Die Bourbon. Bucolically located beside the River Derwent, the 25-acre site was once home to Johnson & Nephew, a wire works which supplied the first sub-sea cross channel telegraph as well as barbed wire.

Never Say Die was distilled at Wilderness Trail Distillery, Kentucky where it was matured for four years and ten months. It was subsequently shipped the day after the Trump era 25% tariff on Bourbon imports was removed (1 June 2022), thanks to the ‘Bourbon Alliance’ co-founded by Never Say Die MD, Martha Dalton. Loaded in casks into a shipping container, the spirit received six weeks of pitching, rolling and temperature fluctuations until it reached Liverpool, resulting “in a wholly unique profile”, according to Dalton. Once Never Say Die is bottled at White Peak Distillery, and casks remain in-situ to be re-filled with homegrown spirit.

Never Say Die Bourbon was founded on the story of a Kentucky-born champion racehorse which, following a traumatic birth, was revived with a shot of Bourbon. It went on to win The Epsom Derby in front of Queen Elizabeth II and Winston Churchill. Both Cask Strength and the new Small Batch are deemed to be High Rye, with a mash bill of 75% corn, 21% rye and 4% malted barley, which means it has a higher percentage of rye than a conventional Bourbon.

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