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I spent most of the last week interviewing for our Online Editor’s job (more on that soon folks). A reasonable part of the interview process is the effective management of people’s expectations with regard to the ‘glamour’ of the job. In fact, I’d even got a bit of patter I could do on autopilot memorised. It went “You know – for every fantastic, 60 year old whisky that you’ll get to taste, there are another 100 less exciting ones, and probably 50 vodkas too”.

The events of this morning have somewhat stepped on my point, as on arriving at the office I was greeted by a little package containing a sample of the most recent über-premium bottling from Gordon and Macphail – the somewhat tongue-twistingly named Glen Grant 60 Years old Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee (1952-2012).

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The buzz around Highland Park’s latest whisky, Thor, has been sensational. For all intents and purposes it sounds to be a fantastic whisky – a 16 year old, cask-strength Highland Park packaged in a handsome Viking long ship-inspired case. This morning, however, it all became a lot more mysterious…

We received a little box with a bow on top (see below): (nice to have a bow) More...

This morning I mentioned to Ben it was high time we posted something on the blog for this week, his suggestion:

“Something about whisky. We don’t do enough of that.”

To be fair, he has a point. We’ve been so caught up in the recent excitement of Christmas, making and launching new stuff, and my imminent emigration, that we’ve neglected that one little thing we’re here to write about first: Whisky!

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Good morning folks, it’s announcement time! If you can cast your minds back through the booze and turkey-induced haze of Christmas you may remember we ran a little competition on our site.

To enter all you had to do was purchase any bottle of Heaven Hill whiskey from us before Christmas day, and the prize was pretty staggering: three incredible “ultra-premium” American whiskeys including Rittenhouse 25, Evan Williams 23 and Elijah Craig 18, all signed by the bourbon legends Craig and Parker Beam! More...

Last Tuesday evening, I was invited to the salubrious surroundings of the Four Seasons hotel on Park Lane, to sample the re-invention of a classic Dalmore Dram. This whisky provoked more controversy through its ousting and subsequent reinvention a couple of years ago than perhaps any other spirit, save perhaps that which we do not mention:

I’m talking of course, about The Dalmore Cigar Malt.

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So, it would seem that the hype surrounding the release of Aldi’s 24 year old and 40 year old ‘single malts’ has now died down (with one notable bombshell yet to come courtesy of our chums at caskstrength.net. Keep an eye on their site. We won’t spoil the surprise), and the whisky world has returned to its former calm self. Well, I say calm… As calm as it can be whilst sending out enough Christmas booze per day to fill a small swimming pool.

There are tales aplenty in the feedback to our first blog post about the queuing, jostling, and general shenanigans surrounding the release, but we, being the ever inquisitive souls that we are, wanted to revisit the whiskies away from the initial tasting, and see just what we made of them in the cold light of day.

I’m going to relay to you two phrases that I’ve uttered over the last few weeks which have genuinely made me chuckle maniacally to myself for about 5 minutes.

The first is unrelated to this post, but I think very pleasing anyway – “Look – all I need is for someone to find me a consignment of Fresh Sloes - how bloody difficult can that be” (incidentally, if anyone knows where I can get hold of a consignment of Fresh Sloes, there’s a bottle of something nice in it for you).

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So, a couple of Tuesdays ago, I had possibly one of the most random evenings of my life. And I'm not talking about the end of the evening, where Myself, Joel Harrison (one half of caskstrength.net), Dr. Whisky, and Pierre from off of that there Connosr ended up in a basement Sherry bar late in the evening arguing the finer points of the various Port Ellen releases over Manzanilla and nibbles. No. I'm talking about the launch of Aldi's 40 year old whisky.

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“Hey! Wait just one second. People are incorrectly spelling November and are growing things on their faces that suggest they shouldn’t be within a 500 metre radius of a school. What the devil is going on?”

Maybe that reaction was entirely made up, but it does give me an excuse to fully explain Movember to all who will lend an ear, and so here goes…

At Master of Malt, we’ve been loyal Movember supporters for ages, but for the past few years we’ve actively participated by launching our own, incredibly special, More...

So – it’s that time of year again. Jim Murray waves his magic wand, and retailers and brand owners alike scrabble around frantically trying to fulfil orders of what, last week, was a very good, if slow-selling line (before you ask, the 90 bottles I managed to prise out of the distributor’s hands disappeared within an hour and a half. I’ll let you know when there’s more stock available).

For those of you who are interested, you can read all about my trip up to The Old Pulteney distillery here and Mike’s tasting notes of the full range (including an exclusive taste of the soon-to-be-released 40yo) here.

Now; I’m going to leave all the usual punditry around whether or not it deserves this title to others (and I’m sure there’ll be no shortage of discussion as ever). It’s a very good whisky, for sure, but what I really wanted to talk about was this screenshot: More...