Hello there, I’m Susanne, aka Whisky Queen.
I have this nickname not because I’m a whisky connoisseur, but because I’m passionate about whisky and whiskey.
During a Zoom meeting in 2020, a judge for a photography competition in my camera club gave me this nickname after he admired the whisky shelf behind me. And how could I resist using that name?
I’m Swedish but since 2019 I live in the beautiful West Cork, Ireland, on a beautiful peninsula, surrounded by farmlands, the sea, and cows.
I never drank alcohol in my youth but was introduced to it by my husband. I started out with hot Powers, then Midleton and Jameson, and around 2012 I ended up in a tasting with the local whisky club where we lived in Sweden.
During my second tasting there, I started becoming fascinated by all the different flavours and aromas in the different whiskies. Where did they come from? What made one whisky different from another whisky?
I started learning more and absorbed every bit of whisky knowledge I could get. And I’m continuing to do that!
Whisky Queen was launched in August 2020, as a fun project alongside my earlier whiskey blog (Irish drams, now closed down). On the old blog I had too high ambitions of sounding like I knew what I was doing, and it was difficult to get away from that. I wanted to create a place where I could allow myself to be an amateur and just have a bit of fun around whisky, but the main reason for the name change was that I also wanted a place to brag about Swedish whisky. I’m Swedish after all, and I’m highly proud of Mackmyra, Smögen, High Coast and more. On this blog, I also wanted to bring in my other passion in life, which is music. Whisky is an art form – and so is music. Whisky and music have lots of similarities that I’m going to talk about eventually.
As you may have noticed, I use the spellings whisky and whiskey a bit interchangeably. Since I write about both whisky and whiskey, it’s hard to decide what to use in articles that talk about both whisky and whiskey. But in review-type posts, I will use the spelling that is used by that particular whisk(e)y company.