Malt Madness documents a personal voyage of discovery into the world of Scotch malt whisky.
Along the way, it aims to provide visitors with as much reliable whisky information as possible.
I will do my best to remain as unbiased and independent as possible as I spread the gospel.
However, over the years both the scope and audience of Malt Madness grew larger.
So, by the late 1990s (even before the Malt Maniacs community had properly formed)
I used a fairly rudimentary mission statement to give my efforts some form of legitimacy:
For the first few years, there was no fancy ‘Mission Statement’ on Malt Madness.
The scope of the website was still limited and my own focus was primarily on trying
as many different single malt whiskies as possible. There was no real purpose yet,
or it must have been “finding the best whisky in the world” - a genuine fool’s errand.
And especially after the group of foreign correspondents had evolved into the
Malt Maniacs collective, I learned that my focus on Scotland may have been
a little narrow-minded. Even when I discovered Scotch single malt whisky in
the early 1990s, they were already making fantastic whisky in Japan (I just
didn’t know about it at the time) and Ireland slowly woke from its slumber too.
By the 20th anniversary of Malt Madness in 2015, countries like Australia,
Canada, India, Taiwan and even Holland were making some great whisk(e)y.
Little did I know how much I would learn over the years...
Or how fast the whisky industry would evolve for that matter.
But the first big change w.r.t. Malt Madness was probably the
fact that more and more foreign correspondents started to
contribute their insights and opinions from across the world.
While this made MM a less personal site, it also made it better.
The inclusion of other perspectives simply paints a more complete picture.
In that sense, the whisky industry has grown and become much more globalised.
I’d like to include the scope of Malt Madness to include the rest of the world, so
there are more distilleries and bottlers to keep track of - and brands as well.
While I still have predilection for malt whisky, I now reluctantly acknowledge
that other types of whisky (or spirits for that matter) can offer some amazing
experiences as well. All the more so because the elements that attracted me
to Scotch malt whisky (variety & authenticity) are in short supply these days.
Anyway, it’s safe to say that I need to revise my mission statement.
However, I’ll get back to that once I’ve got the site up and running again.
At the site.
So, after a lengthy introduction to the introduction of the site, let’s look at the sections.
The first one is the ‘Beginner’s Guide to Single Malt Whisky’ - and it is one of the oldest.
It often takes just one ‘dram’ for people to realise that malt whisky has more to
offer than many other spirits like brandy, gin, tequila, vodka - or blended whisky.
If you are a curious novice in the world of single malts it might still be useful...
However, it usually takes a few other single malt whiskies before people start to
suspect how deep the rabbit hole really goes. And then they want to learn more.
Fortunately, the Beginner’s Guide to Malt Whisky can help - at least as long
as you are in the early stages of ‘malt mania’. It offers 10 chapters with loads of
whisky wit and wisdown. The Beginner’s Guide answers questions like ‘What are
the ingredients of whisky?’, ‘Why does my butt look larger than your hogshead?’
and ‘Is it actually possible to taste that difference between whisky and whiskey?’.
An ‘Advanced Beginner’s Guide’ has been in the works for a while now, but
progress has been slow. It’s much better now! Follow me on Twitter for news.
However, in the late 1990s several foreign correspondents has started to contribute
to the Malt Madness site and we even had a modest audience of people that seemed
interested in our opinions about whisky. xxx
Ook verwijzen naar Manifesto.
The technical foundation of MM was laid in the 1990s, when clouds hadn’t been invented yet and you had to store
a local version of your website on your own PC. Unfortunately, this meant that whenever your computer crashed,
so did all of the websites that you maintained...