All Things Whisky

All Things Whisky went live on August 13th of this year.  After much reservation and deliberation on the part of humble folk behind the scenes, the decision was made that, yes…we did have something to offer. 

Essentially an offshoot of a small Calgary whisky and book club called Liquorature (www.liquorature.com), All Things Whisky was sort of born out of necessity.  The members of Liquorature oversee a blog, which had initially been created as an outlet for club members to voice reviews, opinions and general inanities.  This blog suddenly found itself with a decent amount of web traffic and some industry folk taking note of the reviews therein.  The whisky side of things began to take precedent on the website, so a decision had to be reached.  Instead of reining it in…we decided to let it run. 
 
An initial reluctance to embrace a website/blog focused entirely on whisky, and actually aiming for readers, was overcome after a careful consideration of intent.

The first question we asked ourselves, of course, was whether or not we could do something that would stand out and be worth reading.  There are plenty of sites out there, run by folks with much more experience and more adeptness with pen and palate.  To answer this, we had to determine our goals.
 
First and foremost…we wanted to create a great jumping off point for people looking to the world of whisky for an enhancement to their lives.  There are now, and will always be, people out there just like you and I who are new to the intimidating world of malts.  We want to open that door for them through simple tutorials, advice columns, tips and reviews.  This will all be augmented with whisky news as it is sourced, feature articles and interviews with the folks in the industry who make it all happen for us.  Occasionally, we’ll simply post to chat about whisky.

The primary focus is, and will continue to be, whisky reviews.  We want ATW to become a place you visit to find a wide array of independent and unbiased reviews.  In this context, of course, ‘unbiased’ refers to a lack of sponsored involvement.  Our personal biases are bound to show in the reviews themselves.
 
We hope to build a library of reviews originating from a single source.  The logic behind this is consistency, of course.  Over time readers will pick up on the ATW bias and palate, and determine just how that stacks up against their own palate.  Even if they don’t agree, we hope they see why we reached the conclusions we did.

These reviews will be a continual focus, and new additions are being added regularly.

 
Second…we wanted to allow a Canadian voice to have a more resonating echo in the whisky spheres.  This will be something that in theory should transcend borders with our friends south of the 49th (the US) as well.  Our currencies are not all that far apart and product availability should be much more analogous.  What we see in the European forums, news and blogs is often a tease here, as many of these malts never make it to North American shores, or when they do, are extremely cost prohibitive. 
 
Third and finally…ATW will continue to be a source of shared knowledge and information.  We will be collecting news where and when we can get it and sharing it with our readers.  We link to the sites we enjoy reading so our readers can find the best of the best out there.  Let’s face it…we’re all in this together.  All of our individual experiences make for a pretty amazing whole when we share information. 

As long as we continue having fun, and our friends out there continue to drop in…we’ll be around.

Slainte!

Curt Robinson
http://www.allthingswhisky.com/