The 2021 Malt Whisky Yearbook was released this month, garnering due and appropriate attention around the world. It’s worth looking into this remarkable publication….
Tag: Dave Broom
40% ABV whiskies – friend or foe?
I recently read an online review of a whisky that was written by a blogger. There were a number of comments and references in the review where it was evident the writer was criticising the whisky for being 40% ABV. Having such a mindset is a slippery slope – reviewers & commentators need to be careful to distinguish between “I would have preferred to have seen this whisky bottled at a higher strength; I believe it would benefit from being at a higher proof” and criticising or faulting the whisky merely for being 40% ABV, as though it were a flaw or fault in production.
It raises a few interesting points. There is no doubt that many of us prefer whiskies at higher strengths. Cask-strength whiskies – which only as recently as 20 years ago were still relatively scarce and harder to come by – are now as common as nude shots of Britney Spears, and once you become accustomed to the higher ABV whiskies, I certainly acknowledge and agree that 40% malts have to work a little harder to keep our tastebuds entertained.
What whisky bloggers are doing wrong…
(or why Whisky Bloggers are annoying a lot of people right now)
So who was the first whisky blogger? Was it before or after WordPress made this caper so easy? Well, it was before. A long time before. Back in 1887, in fact. For that is when an ambitious chap by the name of Alfred Barnard first approached a distillery and cheekily asked for a free sample so he could write about it. One hundred and thirty years later, and it turns out several thousand wannabes are following suit.
Yes, I’m aware of the irony. But bear with me…
Scoring whisky – does it really add up?
If you’re roughly my age and vintage (or older), it’s possible one of the earliest information resources you used to start your whisky journey was Michael Jackson’s “Malt Whisky Companion”. First published in 1989, it was a book that took whisky writing to new heights for many reasons, but one of the more far-reaching elements it introduced was the concept of scoring whisky. Each entry in the book would be given a score out of 100 and, suddenly, whisky readers had a point of reference and a measuring stick to judge one whisky over another. So how do you score whisky ?