Alternatively, you might be interested in the Malt Maniacs Monitor (a database
with details, scores
and tasting notes on more than 15,000 different whiskies), the Malt Maniacs & Friends group on
Facebook (a place for questions & discussions about single malt whisky), the Malt Maniacs Awards
(our annual whisky competition
by and for whisky lovers), a Maniacs Calendar of Whisky Events
(maintained by Konstantin Grigoriadis) or Serge Valentin's Whiskyfun website (updated every day).
Our apologies for the fragmented nature of our presence on the world wide web; after 15 years and
several website crashes the amount of work to keep everything together just became overwhelming.
Welcome to the old site of 'Malt Maniacs' - the international collective of malt whisky lovers that
has evolved around the
Malt Madness whisky website since 1997. The material on this website
is not aimed at the (relative) novices in malt whisky land. If you have just experienced your first
few 'drams'
of single malt whisky and you want to learn more, the 'Beginner's Guide' on Malt
Madness might better suit your needs. Malt Maniacs was made by and for
the real 'anoraks'.
As I mentioned earlier, the ADHD section contains most of the old pages of the site; everything we've written from 1997 to 2006.
In this particular case 'we' means not only the
circa 30 certified malt maniacs listed in the 'locals' section, but quite a few so-called 'foreign
correspondents' as well.
If you're looking for tasting notes for Scotch whisky, Facebook and Twitter are probably not your best bets.
The largest collection of whisky tasting notes is arguably the archive which contains the results of more than a decade worth of dramming by
circa two dozen maniacs. However, although
the old ADHD section and the archive contain the largest number of tasting notes, they were
written by many different authors. Everybody is unique, so it can be difficult to compare one person's tasting notes to another one's. If you're
looking for
the largest number of whisky tasting notes by a single author, I'd like to point you to Serge Valentin's Whiskyfun site, which
offers fresh tasting notes almost every day. By the end of 2009, Serge had already sampled
almost 6,000 different single malt whiskies.
Around the same time, my own 'malt mileage' was just 3,000 Scotches - but on the other hand the Distillery Data
section of Malt Madness
also provides additional details about the distillery, if you'd like to dig a little deeper into the anorak stuff.
Last but not least: if you haven't clicked on any of the hyperlinks by now, you must be wondering what's so special about malt whisky.
That means that you were probably never
properly introduced to the wonders of single malt whisky. In that case, I'd like to heartily invite you to check out the
Beginner's Guide to Scotch malt whisky on the Malt Madness web site to learn a little more about this "aqua vitae".
Sweet drams,
Johannes van den Heuvel
Founder Malt Madness / Malt Maniacs
Whenever the whisky monitor is working properly, you can find a
selection of the latest recommendable whiskies at the left. All these
whiskies earned an average score of
85 points or more. This would
mean that we felt that a hearty recommendation was in order.
Clicking on the name of a whisky will take you to the MMMonitor,
where you can check if that whisky was sampled my other maniacs
as well - and if they did, how they felt about it. What's more, there
is a good chance that you can find some additional details
or
tasting notes about a certain bottling in the MMMonitor.
If you have any questions
about our database, I'd like to suggest
that you post it on the forum of the Malt Maniacs & Friends group
ob Facebook. Our technical wizards Rich Howard and Rob Karlsson
(or one of our readers) may be able to help you out.
Do you want to know what we thought of a certain dram?
We're all maniacs and we all have our own individual scoring quirks - but a score
of 85 points or more means a lot, even from the more generous scorers among the
certified maniacs who rarely seem to use the area between 1 and 75 points. That
means that, should you encounter any of these whiskies on your travels, you can
safely assume that it will be good whisky; in other words a worthy investment...
Use the search box at the left to find out how we felt about a particular whisky.
You can find just two MMMonitor
'extracts' at the left and at right.
Of course, these are still rough
conclusions drawn from raw data,
but they give a nice impression of
our preferences.
You can find much more details on
the special Monitor page on this
website, but if you would like to
delve into the raw data instead,
we now also have...
... the Malt Maniacs Monitor site
on www.whisky-monitor.com.
You can't get closer to the raw
data than
that - and it offers lots
of details and tasting notes.
Rich Howard is constantly busy
upgrading and expanding our
world wide whisky database.
There currently
are over 15,000
different whiskies on the Monitor.
>>> More >>>
This website contains all the whisky writings that we've published between 1997 and 2009.
Check out the new Malt Maniacs website
on www.maltmaniacs.net for recent publications.
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19/01/2012 - Hurray! After the latest website crash, our new editor Oliver Klimek from Germany managed to get our brand new Malt Maniacs website up and running within three weeks. From now on, you can find all our fresh material on the new website. Enjoy! 01/01/2012 - Oops... Just when we started the year of our 15th jubilee, we had a minor website crash. It looks like things can be repaired within a few weeks, but we've decided to use this opportunity to think about how we'd like our community to evolve in the next 15 years. Check out our Facebook Group for news. 29/12/2011 - The E-pistles are dropping in like 23/12/2011 - The membership of MM is made upof smokers, ex-smokers and non-smokers. So Nabil Mailloux' article about The Smokeheads will probably make some tongues wag and some frowns frown... ;-) 13/12/2011 - Life is returning to normal for many of the maniacs after the hardships of the MM Awards. One of the jurors even found the time to write an E-pistle. Ralfy Mitchell talked to Stuart Nickerson about Glenglassaugh's Revival - and the fact that they will be producing their first real whisky shortly. 01/12/2011 - The Malt Maniacs Awards results have just been published a few hours ahead of schedule. We like to think that we've found the most effective way of presentation so far; both a full score card with all the individual and average scores and a jury report (14 pages, 800 Kb) with awards winners. |
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We're trying to use modern
inventions like Twitter as well.
So, if you're interested in our
updates & observations, it's
now easier than ever to track
us on-line. You can follow our
'collective' twitter account, but
many maniacs are twittering too;
Roughly half of all malt maniacs are active on Twitter. The 'tweet feed'
at the right
only contains tweets from a few moderate twitter users among the maniacs at the
moment; Serge Valentin, Rich Howard, Konstantin Grigoriadis & yours truly: Johannes.
Meanwhile, the members page shows
basic information on each member of
our international whisky collective.
Clicking on the name of one of the
maniacs will take you to his or her
'Facebook Profile'. This should give
you some idea about his or her
background and other interests.
You
may be able to observe the
unnatural behaviour of some of the
malt maniacs in their natural habitat
at one of the whisky festivals
at the
right. Well, the larger events and
festivals at least; it seems like there's
a whisky festival in the area almost
every weekend nowadays...
The 'Google Calendar' of noteworthy whisky events
below shows the
upcoming whisky events from all over the world. The list is maintained by
our very own "bar crier"
Konstantin Grigoriadis. A bar crier is a bit like
a town crier, but he does most of his crying in bars, rather than in town
squares. The calendar shows whisky festivals & events around the world.
Don't
hesitate to drop Konstantin a message if a major whisky or whiskey event in your area is not included...