Guides– category –

"Non-chill filtered" means the whisky was bottled without chill filtration — a step in which whisky is cooled and passed through a fine filter to remove compounds that can make it look cloudy when it gets cold or when water or ice is add...

Japanese whisky has gone from a niche curiosity to one of the most talked-about whisky categories in the world, but "Japanese whisky" covers a genuinely wide range of styles, producers and price points — not one single flavor. This guide...

Islay is Scotland's most famous whisky island, and its reputation is built almost entirely on peat smoke. That reputation is earned, but it's incomplete: the island's brands differ enormously in how much smoke they use, what kind of smok...

In everyday whisky conversation, "barrel proof" and "cask strength" mean the same basic thing: whisky bottled at or very close to the strength it reached during maturation, rather than being reduced to a conventional bottling strength. "...

The number on a whisky label — "12 Years Old," "18 Years Old" — tells you one specific thing: the youngest whisky used to make that bottle spent at least that long maturing in an oak cask. It says nothing about time spent in the bottle a...

Bourbon and Scotch are both whisk(e)y, but they're built on almost entirely different rulebooks. Bourbon is an American whiskey category, legally defined by the U.S. government: a corn-heavy mash, distilled and aged inside the country, m...

Single pot still whiskey is an Irish whiskey style made from both malted and unmalted barley, mashed, fermented and distilled at a single distillery. It's not the same thing as single malt (which uses only malted barley), and "single" he...

Single-barrel bourbon conventionally comes from one individual barrel rather than a blend of many. Small batch generally refers to a producer-selected batch of barrels blended together — but there's no federal standard defining how many ...