Mike Gerrard

I'm an award-winning travel and drinks writer, contributing to newspapers, magazines and websites in the UK, USA, and worldwide. My specialities are the USA, Greece, and the UK, and for drinks I specialise in spirits. I publish my own website combining travel and spirits, Travel Distiled: https://www.traveldistilled.com My first book about the drinks business is not, in fact, about spirits, but the wonderful objects in which they're matured: barrels. Cask Strength: The Story of the Barrel, the Secret Ingredient in Your Drink is published in July 2023 by Matt Holt. "Cask Strength is a must read for all bartenders! If you think you know all there is about barrel ageing and casks, guess again. Mike Gerrard delves deep into the history of barrels and casks with an incredible amount of detail. I feel like I've really upped my knowledge with this fantastic book!" Paula Lukas, Mixologist/Beverage Consultant I also write about food and drink for the travel pages, having covered vineyards in Greece and New Zealand, breweries in Belgium and Britain, restaurants in Paris, a chocolate shop in Lyon, the biggest wine cellar in the world (in Florida), interviewing an English sommelier in Paris, and sipping my way through the Champagne region of France, the distilleries of Cognac, Kentucky, Scotland and Jalisco, and the sherry bodegas of Jerez. Combining music and travel is another love: I have written pieces about Bob Marley, the Beatles, Elvis Presley and Hank Williams. More exotic travels have taken me camel-trekking in the Sinai Desert (right), walking in the Great Rift Valley, learning to jive in Barcelona, looking for orang-utans in Sumatra, staying with a farming family in China and working as a waiter in a restaurant on Zakynthos in Greece. As a result I now leave bigger tips. I have also written or contributed to over 30 guidebooks, especially on Greece, France and the USA. In addition, I've written three radio plays for the BBC, presented a half-hour radio travel programme about Egypt, written fiction and humour for men's magazines, written a crime novel (Strip till Dead) and even written an erotic novel. I may be the only writer to have contributed both to Mayfair (I was in the same issue as Bill Bryson) and to The Baptist Times. Not to mention writing a few minutes of the UK's favourite TV soap, Coronation Street, when my father was a scriptwriter on the programme and he gave me three scenes to write. My wife Donna Dailey and I publish and write our own travel websites about America's Pacific Coast Highway (https://www.Pacific-Coast-Highway-Travel.com), about Arizona, where we live half the year (https://www.arizona-travel-guide.com), about Greece (https://www.Greece-Travel-Secrets.com), and a general travel website, The Travel Pages (https://thetravelpages.net). You can find out more about me and my current activities on my personal website: https://www.mikegerrard.com You can also find me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Mike_Gerrard https://twitter.com/TravelDistilled