Yet Another Whisky Magazine BY LEW BRYSON
Here we are with a new whisky magazine, wobbling on its new legs, standing for the first time. The team is assembled, the words are arranged, the images have been carefully chosen to enhance the stories, and we’re pushing the baby out to meet the world. A fair question, and one I echo whenever I consider writing another book. Why? What can we possibly hope to add to the body of whisky knowledge when there are already magazines, websites, blogs, Instagram accounts, podcasts, video series, whisky club newsletters...a steaming jungle of information about whisky! Do we really need another dead tree? Of course, it wasn’t always this way. Would you believe, back when I crawled out onto the shore and first breathed the damp, whisky-scented air, there were no whisky magazines. There were a few ancient texts, some mutterings around the fire on primitive online chats, and a shaman: Michael Jackson. Other hatchlings crawled with me, but in the way that evolution happens – cruel, heartless chance – I found a lucky patch of clover: Whisky Advocate magazine (née Malt Advocate), the first true whisky magazine. For the next 20 years, it was my
home. I learned about whisky, and did my best to share that knowledge with the people of the world. Well, the ones who paid for a subscription, anyway. There were other whisky writers, and we gathered them in. Other magazines found their way into the vein we were mining, and whisky journalism prospered. Magazines and websites focused on specific segments of the whisky world came into being: bourbon magazines, Japanese whisky websites, Scotch specialists. Bloggers, Indie explorers, thrived in short-lived profusion, and a few grew to permanence. The ecology of whisky words matured and broadened in complexity, imitating its subject. Because whisky was growing, in symbiosis with whisky enthusiasm; a relationship that changes with the years. Whisky gets boring (or whisky drinkers – your parents – do), and people leave it; too much of one kind of whisky leads to other whiskies looking for somewhere to thrive. Folks come back, and find new flavors to celebrate; more whiskies appear, in places they’ve never been before. Rare and ancient giants are found in distant, forgotten warehouses and liquor stores, and are hunted to extinction.
If the drinkers are hunters, lone wolves or Facebook-linked packs, then whisky writers, both professional and amateur, independent and organized, are the scouts, the explorers, out on the borderlands or deep in the forgotten haunts of territory deemed to be settled years ago.
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the whisky explorer magazine
FALL 2023
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