It's been an exciting year - I've tried nearly 140 different whiskies, 80 of which were new - from scotch to bourbon, Irish to Japanese, $10/750 ml in a plastic bottle to over $150/750 ml. And what does any good, self-respecting, whisky blogger do at the end of the year? Give out awards of course!
Like most, I don't have an unlimited budget to spend on whisky. Therefore, I need to make good 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 my favorite distillery, brand, and owners of 2019. This year, I'll also give out an award for best whisky of the year.
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.) Here's an 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. Therefore the Laphroaig Distillery (and in this case brand as well) has 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/brand/owners 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. There's no criteria for cost or availability because everything I drink can be found without dipping into college savings, winning a lottery, or standing in line for hours. But follow the links below for the real fun!
My Whisky of the Year
My Top Distillieries and Brands of 2019
My Top Owners of 2019
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