Like a true drinks obsessive whenever I travel, I make time to research the budding distilling and brewing scenes wherever I happen to be visiting. What seems like a lifetime ago now, I was regularly travelling around Colorado – at the time, micro-breweries were starting to pop up across the Rocky Mountains – an early signal of the craft beer explosion which about to occur across the USA. But, there was to the best of my knowledge, no active whiskey distilleries around the turn of the millennium. Fast-forward to 2019 and not only are there now over 60 producing sites, there’s even a helpful ‘Colorado Spirits Trail’ map to guide tourists around a rapidly growing array of vibrant distilling communities. That’s an amazing whiskey-based holiday right there.