As many of you will remember, a Master of Malt contingent attended last year’s Maltstock event, and had an absolute whale of a time – read all about it here...

The Maltstock Sharing Table

Maltstock is coming again, and in under 2 weeks’ time, I’ll be making my way over there with the irrepressible Neil Ridley (from off of that there www.caskstrength.net), a car full of Master of Malt goodies, my responsible drinking boots, and my iPhone charger. Must take the iPhone charger (I figure if I keep writing it, there’s at least a 50% chance I’ll actually remember this time). More...

New product announcements! Hurrah!

Yes, today we are announcing a terrific addition to the Handmade Cocktail Company’s sterling range of ready-made bottled cocktails. Many of you cocktail enthusiasts have already been asking us for one particular cocktail - a classic that was left out of the original range. It’s the ultimate zesty, spicy bourbon cocktail, and the favourite tipple of none other than Don Draper, Harry S Truman and Cole Porter. That’s right… The Old Fashioned. More...

Yes, Day two of the Make it 2 Bushmills competition started early. Very early indeed.

As we prepared to roll out to the first event of the day (barrel rolling. See. Told you the jokes would get better) I had a chance to reflect on the competitors, all of whom I had a proper chat to last night, and am once again amazed at how all whisk(e)y competition winners seem to turn out to be the kind of people you'd be delighted to go out for a drink with socially. More...

So after a slightly shaky start this morning (you may have guessed that the pristine looking cup of coffee posted on the blog this morning was put there merely to taunt me by Mike, our online editor) I arrived in Ireland to be greeted by a charming young PR lady and a driver to make the short hop over from Belfast to Bushmills.

On arriving at the (absolutely beautiful and highly recommended) Bushmills Inn hotel, we had a light lunch and were whisked away to the distillery for a tour. More...

Wouldn't usually write a blog post before I've been on a trip - sort of defeats the point really, but as I'm sat here in the departure lounge having legged it all the way to the gate (for reference, most people would probably interpret 'gate closing' as 'gate closing', and not 'nothing at all happening at gate except angry people sitting around wishing they'd had time to get a decent coffee from Costa'), I thought I'd pen a few lines on what the next dew days is all about. More...

The two most popular choices for whisky ageing - sherry casks and bourbon barrels - offer a totally different style of single malt and here at Master of Malt, we love both in equal measure. Just like with children, it’s wrong to have a favourite (unless one child is a maths-whiz-head-boy-sports-star-type, and the other is one of those miserable kids that dyes his hair black and combs it over his face, whilst complaining constantly about how “unfair it all is”). More...

We’ve long since been firm advocates of the Meantime Brewing Company, and it’s largely because they’ve had such great success in fighting against the rather dull mainstream of mass-produced lager that our nation is sadly awash with. Meantime focus heavily on quality and authenticity, shunning methods like pasteurisation, whilst making use of a minimum 28 day maturation period for all their beers. But despite all this attention to detail, one of the truly great things about the brewery is how prevalent their beer is; you can walk into Sainsbury’s and buy a bottle of their London Porter or IPA, and we love that. More...

We've just received this press release from the Number One Drinks Company. This is literally the biggest thing to happen to Japanese whisky in decades!

The entire remaining inventory of Mercian’s Karuizawa Distillery has been acquired on behalf of Number One Drinks by an Asian-based company. International importer and distributor of Japanese malt whisky, Number One Drinks Company, has handled worldwide sales of Karuizawa single casks since 2006 and has helped raise the profile of Japanese single malts internationally, especially with the help of distributors in the key markets of Taiwan, France, UK and Sweden.

Of the 12 Gold Medals awarded by the Malt Maniacs in 2010, four were for whiskies sourced by Number One Drinks (including three Karuizawas) and the Best Japanese Whisky in Jim Murray’s Whisky Bible 2011 was a 1967 single cask from Karuizawa. More...

It must be said, we’ve been on a bit of a bottling frenzy recently; in the last few of months alone we’ve put our name to four new casks, including an incredibly bourbon-rich North British, a big, complex Cragganmore, a rich and spicy Dalmore, and an impressively malty Inchgower!

Today we have another new addition to the Master of Malt range, in the form of an utterly delicious number from Dailuaine (pronounced Dall-YEWan). More...