World Whisky Day Is Saturday May 19th: Here’s How To Celebrate

There are a number of whisky holidays providing you great excuses to knock back a few drams, but the one truly celebrated around the world is on Saturday.

World Whisky Day (WWD), set every year for the third Saturday in May, started innocently enough: A student was  researching a hashtag. While looking up World Gin Day in 2011, University of Aberdeen undergraduate Blair Bowmandecided to look up World Whisky Day, and made the decision that would shape his life.

“When I couldn’t find any results I typed in www.WorldWhiskyDay.com and saw that the domain was available,” he said. “I bought it immediately and I guess you can say the rest is history. For me it has grown in an excellent way – it has been a totally organic growth over the years. It is essentially my baby, and I am immensely proud of the way it has grown and evolved. It is now eight years old and still has a massive potential for growth in the future.“

Now a globetrotting whisky writer and consultant, Blair is still the public face of this healthy and growing baby, which is now owned by White Light Media and last year included more than 25,000 guests across 300 registered events in 47 different countries.

WWD’s recipe for success is simple: Anyone who wants to host an official whisky event is allowed to do so, as long as he or she registers it on WWD’s website.

The holiday’s organic, grassroots growth is a perfect fit for social media, and platforms such as Twitter have enabled it to go viral around the world. It’s possibly the largest-ever whisky-related social media project, and in 2017 achieved a reach of 54 million people on Twitter and Instagram.


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