A tasting site dedicated to grain whisky.



After living in Edinburgh for over 10 years and jointly running a whisky club for 3 years and counting, you get access to some pretty tasty drams. A lot of these are much talked about, hyped and praised elsewhere. This blog focuses on 'grain whiskies', a less-hyped group that never-the-less holds some of my favourite whiskies within. Often heavily-aged and rich in body and colour, the end product belies the factory conditions of the industrial-scale Coffey stills that produce it.

'Grain whiskies' here refers to all those whose main constituent part isn't malted barley and whose production method isn't by pot still. In the most part, the focus will also be on long-aged (~20+ years) Scottish grain whiskies. It's not always immediately obvious what grain made them, but wheat, rye, corn and (unmalted) barley are the key options, with some malted barley thrown into the mix to help with fermentation.

The end product is virtually always used to make up a large part of big-selling blended whiskies, but a small proportion gets tucked away in a cask, not to be opened 'til decades later. It's these that I'm passionate about - a mixture of the industrial production, the mysterious composition and the fantastic, undervalued end product - and it's these that hopefully this tasting site will help open up to you.

Current Top 3s

Best Overall
9.2 / 10   irectors' Cut 50yo (Douglas Laing)
7.9 / 10   tter Indian Corn 24yo
7.9 / 10   rgordon 19yo

Best Value
6.4 / 10   tter Indian Corn 24yo
6.4 / 10   rgordon 19yo
6.4 / 10   gordon 18yo

Finally, one important aspect of this site is offering a 'value rating', showing how good a purchase each bottle would make. This isn't a simple thing to define, but on this site (through much trial-and-error), I've ended up using the following equation (normalised out of 10):

GRAINS value equation