2018 Awards Overview

Introduction

Hello and welcome to the first annual WhiskyRanker Awards!  It's been an exciting year - I've tried 109 different whiskies spanning 70 different tastings covering a range of whiskies - scotch to bourbon, South African to Japanese, and the Aldi special to a vintage Teacher's bottled in the 1970s.

And what does any good, self-respecting, whisky blogger do at the end of the year?  Give out awards!

Like most, I don't have an unlimited budget to spend on whisky.  This naturally leads to the need to make choices at a liquor store.  Should I spend my money trying something new and accept the risk or reward, or stick with a proven whisky that I know I'll like?  The likelihood that I'll try something new increases if it is similar to something I've enjoyed before.   If I've really liked one or more expressions from a given distillery/brand/owner I'm much more likely to take the step and try something new.  For this reason, I'm giving out awards for the distillery, brand, and owner of 2018.

Criteria and Methodology:

I'm a proponent of quantitative analysis and Keeping It Simple Stupid so my awards are based on only two steps:

Step 1: Create a numerical score for each distillery/brand/owner by adding the average normalized Colley rating to the average normalized Page rating. (See my Whisky Rankings for more info and background on the Colley and Page ratings.)  For example, the average Colley Rating of all of the Laphroaigs I've tried is 72 while the average normalized Page rating of that same set of whiskies is 41 giving the Laphroaig distillery (and in this case brand as well) a total score of 113.  I wanted the awards to be weighted towards quality (Colley) rather than popularity (Page) and that worked itself out nicely because the normalized Page scores are skewed towards lower numbers (i.e. the scale isn’t linear) so this naturally gave the Colley score a higher weight. 

Step 2: Remove the distilleries for which I've only tried one expression. There are many wonderful distilleries/brands/owners out there for which I've only had the pleasure of trying one expression. But it isn't right to give an award intended to represent an entire distillery/brand/owner based solely on my love of just one expression.

That’s it. Just those two simple steps. But follow the links below for the real fun!

Top Distillieries - 2018 Ed.
Top Brands - 2018 Ed.
Top Owners - 2018 Ed.