Another Malt of the Year.

Ok I have been critical of the winners in Malts of the year category in my past posts. Saying that most of the malts of the year by retailers are purely to move stocks, promote bottles that have higher margins or to reach contracted volumes. Thankfully in this post I am wrong; yes Malties "I am wrong".

TWE or The Whisky Exchange has announced fascinating Malt for their Whisky of the year 2013, here is how they came up with it..........

Initially we went with the rather general brief of ‘Best Whisky’ but the prospective list of 50ish that we came up with seemed to be overkill, especially as every whisky had only one vote. A few discussions later and we came up with our criteria for inclusion. The Whisky Must Be: Single Malt from Scotland Under £50 Not Cask Strength Not a Special Edition Another round of asking for suggestions later and we ended up with another list of 50 whiskies. Some arguing occurred. I may have used the phrase “I am best and so is this whisky”. A chair may have been thrown. Well, rolled towards someone in a menacing fashion. Rather than just let Sukhinder decide (the way most arguments are solved at TWE HQ) we decided to throw open the decision to the people who should choose – our customers. A whisky tasting would be held at our shop, a vote taken and a winner announced. [In no way should this be interpreted as making our customers do our work for us. That's not what happened at all] we wrangled the list down to a mere eight whiskies and set up the tasting: 60 people, 8 whiskies – all tasted blind.

 

Our marketing manager and, for the night at least, Brand Ambassador Nick Tether took to the podium as MC, but the focus of the evening was discussion – we wanted each table to talk about the whiskies and give everyone some fodder to help choose their favourite dram of the night. After much discussion a vote was taken and, as the geekiest member of the TWE office team, I counted up the ballot papers. After an afternoon of voting system research I had settled on a simple AV approach, similar to the London mayoral elections. Unfortunately, all of my efforts were for naught and the results in the end were the same as if we’d just counted who had the most votes. The perils of being an election geek. So, without further ado the results for The Whisky Exchange Whisky of the Year (with some constraints) 2013, in reverse order, are as follows:

 

Last Place: Glenmorangie 10yo

Joint 5th Place: Glencadam 15yo, Benromach 10yo, Balvenie 12yo DoubleWood

4th Place: Tamdhu 10yo

3rd Place: Kilchoman Machir Bay

2nd Place: Lagavulin 16yo

 

…and in first place                

                                                     Glenfarclas 15year old                     

 

 

 

 

I have to say not only was this a great way of picking the Malt of the year but also a great Malt from a fantastic distillery. I would add here one of my favourite distilleries, family owned, sterling quality, no compromise and very charitable.

 

So I take my hat off to John Grant and his team and also to Sukhinder Singh and his team.

I urge any Malt heads out there who have not tried Glenfarclas to give it a try. I assure you there’s no disappointment and all the bottles I tried have been very very good.

 

I will blog about more malts of the year, in future bletherings so let’s see if the others follow suit and pick in a similar manner as TWE have done.

Ralfy were looking forward to yours.