“I had always wanted to make whisky and ended up in Vietnam, and realised there wasn’t a whisky distillery here,” Dr Michael Rosen, co-founder of Hanoi-based distillery Về Để Đi, told Drinks International.

Ben Branson, founder of Diageo non-alcoholic spirit Seedlip, has launched Sylva, a non-alcoholic distillery and maturation lab at his home in Essex.

Kevin O’Gorman will take over as master distiller at Jameson producer Irish Distillers after Brian Nation decided to move to a startup in the US.