Stacy Kyle has spent a good portion of her summer sorting, cleaning, cataloguing and showcasing bottles of whisky.
She's the whisky curator at Skye Avenue Kitchen & Lounge, a Surrey bar that boasts Canada's largest whisky collection with close to 1,300 different kinds, or "expressions," as Kyle calls them, with most of the focus on Scotch and American varieties.
"We have more bottles than that, because we have backups of some of them," she explained.
"The total number of bottles is closer to 2,000. I haven't counted them but I've touched them all now," Kyle added with a laugh. "We alphabetized it, and sometimes we'd spend half an hour looking for a bottle that doesn't exist, you know."
Since June, it's been Kyle's job to sort them all for display in the Skye Avenue lounge.
"There's so many bottles we had to reinforce the shelves, and I don't even know how many trips I made from the storage room downstairs, because a lot of the inventory wasn't actually up here yet, only some of it was. There were a lot of bottles that were previously opened, load after load after load. We had the floor filled with bottles."
The collection was bought from the owners of Fets Whisky Kitchen, a landmark restaurant/bar in Vancouver. The establishment closed in 2022 after 36 years of business on Commercial Drive.
Kyle had a connection to the whisky collection before she started at Skye Avenue.
"When I look on the shelves here, a lot of the bottles I imported and sold to Fets, so I'm tied to it that way," she said. "I just feel like probably more than anything that I'm kind of like this guardian of this whisky collection, which is a really amazing collection. I think people who know whisky and know Fets know how amazing it is. Someone should be telling the story and being the guardian, and I feel really lucky to come to work and talk about whisky."
Now that sorting of bottles is pretty much done, Kyle has shifted attention to hosting whisky events at Skye Avenue, opened last fall at the Central City tower. Up first, on Sept. 26, is Up in Smoke, a $65-per-person event to showcase five limited and rare Scotch whiskies, with food pairings, in the restaurant's private dining room. Visit skyeavenue.com for info, or call 604-590-0900. Also happening are Whiskey Wednesdays, with flights and special cocktails.
Kyle has been importing whisky for around 15 years, and is one of few women in the business.
"I started drinking whisky when I was growing up in Calgary – rye and ginger was my drink," she noted.
"Over the past decade and a bit I took a lot of classes, went to a ton of events, just sort of threw myself out there before I probably was ready, but I really love doing the tastings and the events. That's what I love most.
"Being a woman in this field is more common now, for sure, but it's still not where I think it should be," Kyle added. "I was fortunate enough to be part of OurWhiskey Foundation, co-founded by a woman named Becky Paskin, a journalist (who) created this foundation for bringing women in the whisky world together, which is really cool. But yeah, I did a tasting a few weeks ago and I was the only woman there, and I was the one presenting it, in a room of around 25 people. So we still have a ways to go."
At Skye Avenue, word is slowly spreading about their amazing whisky collection.
"Some people still don't know that we have Fets' collection, and we have their book of whiskies here. So we're growing that awareness, and I'm here to help people who are looking for a specific bottle, for example. Collecting whisky can be expensive, but I say just drink it — you know, use the good china. Some bottles, OK, sure, you want to hold on to special ones, and I have a couple that I hope appreciate in value, as an investment, but that's another side of things. We're a place people can try something that they otherwise couldn't afford to buy a whole bottle."
The most expensive "expression" there is Vintage 1970, a 32-year-old from Bruichladdich, Islay, sold for $527 an ounce.
Kyle's favourite is a bottle of The Sovereign.
"It's on the shelf behind us," she said. "It's a single-cask, single-grain (whisky) from a closed distillery, actually. That's a bottle that I brought in. Aged single-grain whisky is like candy," she raved. "It's so good because grain whisky is distilled different than malt or single malt. It comes out more refined a higher alcohol strength. Single-grain whisky tastes really great after a couple of decades in a bourbon barrel, and this one is 26 years, distilled in 1988 and bottled in 2015, in Scotland. The distillery (Port Dundas) is closed now, doesn't exist."
