It was his experience at blending tea that gave Scotland’s most famous name in whisky his skill at creating the world’s leading whisky.

With tea another area of focus for tasting.com (see our tea.tasting section) we look forward to exploring how these two forms of blending overlap, but first some history of the founders of two of the greatest names in Tea, and Whisky, both of whom did business in or near Glasgow at around the same time during the 19th Century.

Alexander Walker (1837 – 1889) was apprenticed with a tea merchant in Glasgow, using his skills developed from tea blending to create in 1865 a whisky blend, which was later renamed after his father as Johnnie Walker Black Label. This blend went on to make Johnnie Walker the most widely distributed brand of blended Scotch whisky in the world.

Alexander may have left tea for, in his view, greater things but just six years later, in 1871, a certain Thomas Lipton (1848 - 1931 and pictured above) opened his first grocery shop, also in Glasgow. Thomas bypassed the traditional tea distribution channels (tea-trading was focused in London’s Mincing Lane) by importing from his own Sri Lankan tea gardens and selling at unprecedented prices to the then untapped poorer working class market. The Lipton brand went on to become the first dominant name in the modern tea trade.

Today these two famous beverages have, in a somewhat unlikely and unexpected way, almost merged at the ancient home of tea; in China the most popular way to drink Scotch whisky is mixed with cold green tea.