Malt Madness in 2002

Anyway - in my efforts to stay on the cutting
edge of web technology I may have gotten
a little carried away, because it lead to...

Beginner’s Guide  - Freshly refurbished
Distillery Data  - Surfable but partly dated
Whisky Map of Scotland  - Surfable
Liquid Log  - On the back burner for now 
Whisky Lexicon  - Under (re)construction

The first ‘foreign correspondents’ started to
contribute to Malt Madness in the late 1990s.
By the early noughties there was a thriving
online whisky community on the web.

By 2002, Malt Madness had involved into the
1.2 version at the right, split into five parts.
Most names have changed, but MM is still
divided into 5 sections on Scotch whisky;

MALT MADNESS 1.0 - THE EARLY YEARS (1995-2001)

Malt Madness in 1999

Whenever I want to underline my wisdom and experience
in a “subtle” way, I casually try point out to people that I
actually discovered single malt whisky before I discovered
the internet. I like to think that it works sometimes - and it
definitely works for minimising the time I could have wasted
on talking to assholes. (Those are the ones pointing out
that American politician Al Gore discovered the internet.)

After a shaky start at Geocities in 1995, Malt Madness
became a proper website in 1996 and at the left you can
see how it looked until 1999. Many people still viewed the
world 800x600 pixels at a time, so I could still get away
with a design like that. Or at least I thought I did... ;-)
Beauty is in the eyes of beholders (and drunks).

For the younsters out there: in those primitive times mobile phones hadn’t achieved artificial intelligende yet, so
even though a Palm Pilot of Blackberry made you look cool in some eyes, you couldn’t browse websites yet. 
(Incidentally, people who thought Palm Pilots or Blackberries were cool were often wankers too... )

Around the year 2000 I was still struggling
towards my 1000th tasting note, but when
the group of whisky fanatics around the MM
website had grown to a dozen members we
actively started swapping samples through
the post. This helped my ‘malt mileage’ grow
much faster than before. .

Iichiro Chichibu whisky, 2011
Malt Madness in 2008

At the end of 2007 the maniacs got their own site.
The old mission statement that dealt with the guiding
principles of the Malt Madness website had evolved
into the Malt Maniacs Manifesto and some of our
‘community projects’ like the the MM Monitor and the
Malt Maniacs Awards went into overdrive.

By 2007, hundreds of e-mails were flying back and
forth on a daily basis and the group of malt maniacs
dipped their toes in the murky waters of social media.
We felt that this latest crash was as good a time as
any to launch a second, separate Malt Maniacs site as
a platform for all ‘malt whisky maniacs’ world-wide.

THE SECOND BIG CRASH (2007)

At the same time, Serge Valentin added his fantastic
Whiskyfun website to Malt Madness and Malt Maniacs
and our online whisky trilogy was born.

For a few years things moved along swimmingly and our membership gradually
grew towards three dozen members. However, as the group of whisky fanatics
grew larger, our whisky collective somehow started to feel less ‘collective’.

Just like Malt Madness, Malt Maniacs started as an independent initiative.
When a few team members started to develop their own ‘commercial’ whisky
projects, others became less inclined to spend a lot of their free time on MM.
The number of whisky articles that were submitted for public consumption
started to dwindle. As a result, my own motivation began to dwindle as well.

By the end of 2011, I had been ‘managing’ the MM collective for 15 years.
That felt like a good moment to retire - all the more so because I experienced
some health issues. Those issues may not have been caused directly by the
debauchery I’ve committed in the decades before, but it didn’t help either.

So, I decided to spend a little less time behind my PC and some more time
walking and cycling. Progress on Malt Madness was slow while I got rid of
more than 20 kilograms of excess body weight. However, but by the end of
2014 I felt revitalised and boldly picked up the Malt Madness site again.

Of course, this tempted fate in all the right places, so Malt Madness experienced...

When Malt Madness crashed for the third time in 2015 it actually wasn’t too traumatising.
This time a major reconstruction of the website was in order anyway. Since 1995, technology
has advanced to a point where people wanted to read Malt Madness on their mobile phones.
Well, SOME people at least... But the old MM site isn’t really tailored for consumption on tiny
screens, so I should really start another website with another structure for mobile users.

THE THIRD BIG CRASH (2015)

Japanese whisky - Yoichi

The ongoing reconstruction of this old website is sponsored by WhiskyFun but so far
I haven’t been able to find a sponsor for a special MM website for smartphone users.
Until I do, I’ll spend my sparse free time on the reconstruction of this old “static” website.
Because I have to use ancient technology, this takes much more time than with modern
tools like WordPress, so the entire process will take me years rather than months.
Follow me on Twitter for updates on the process - or check out the sitemap for a full
overview of the pages that are (almost) finished.

Malt Madness on the Waybackmachine

Don’t let a few broken links break you!
The information on the refurbished pages
is fresh, but if you’re looking for a specific
article or blog post the Wayback Machine
is probably the easiest way to find stuff
in an older version of the site. You can
pick a specific year to jump back in time.
Or you could just try to be patient...

There’s a small chance that my PC breaks down before the Malt Madness site is fully reconstructed.
In that case I won’t be able to update the information on these pages, but if you keep an eye on Twitter and
Facebook I should be able to direct you to a new location where I will continue my efforts in some form or another.

After this lengthy introduction, you know how we got where we are today. So, now what?
You can find an overview of all pages on the sitemap of Malt Madness, but here are just a few suggestions:

Malt Madness Introduction - Some Suggestions

This site started without a real mission statement - I just was mad about malt whisky.
An overview of the Scotch whisky industry, divided by ownership of distilleries.
A list of the major Scotch whisky bottlers - independent and industry-owned.
There are far more malt whisky brands than there are malt whisky distilleries.
Some more information about yours truly - Johannes van den Heuvel.

A shortlist with some of the whisky words that novices might struggle with.
Scotch whisky needs at least 3 years in a cask - and sometimes decades.
Shopping for whisky can be a treacherous business with some pitfalls.
When it comes to tasting whisky things can seem intimidating.
I’ve started a page with some tips on how to decypher a whisky label.

An overview of all active and recently closed distilleries in Scotland.
The number of Scotch whisky regions is debatable - 3 or 5?
Grain whisky is Scotland’s dirty little secret: the main ingredient of blends.
Besides being home of many Scots & Scotches, Scotland is worth a visit.
One of roughly 150 old and refurbished distillery profiles on MM.

An alphabetical overview of the pages in the Whisky Lexicon.
Commentary on ‘A’ entries like ABV, age statement, aldehydes, analyser, etc.
Commentary on ‘B’ entries like barley, barrel, bespoke cask, BFYB, body, etc.
Commentary on ‘C’ entries like caramel, casks, centilitre, chill filtration, etc.
Commentary on ‘D’ entries like DCL, dram, dùn, dunnage warehouse, etc.
Commentary on ‘E’ entries like E150A, esters, ethanol, evaporation, etc.
Commentary on ‘F’ entries like fake whiskies, feints, fermentation, etc.
Commentary on ‘G’ entries like Gaelic, germination, glassware, etc.
Commentary on ‘H’ entries like H2H, heads, health, hogshead, hoop, etc.
Commentary on ‘I’ entries like IB, Imperial System of Units, isopropanol, etc.
Commentary on ‘J’ entries like J. & A. Mitchell & Co., Jock’s Well, Jura, etc.
Commentary on ‘K’ entries like kelpie, Kilkerran, kiln, Kingsbarns, etc.
Commentary on ‘L’ entries like label, Ladybank, lauter tun, Lomond still, etc.
Commentary on ‘M’ entries like malt, malted barley, maltings, mash tun, etc.
Commentary on ‘N’ entries like NAS, neck, nephelometer, new make spirit, etc.
Commentary on ‘O’ entries like oak, OB, octave, Optic, overproof, etc.
Commentary on ‘P’ entries like pagoda, palate, patant still, paxarette, etc.
Commentary on ‘Q’ entries like QPR, quadruple distillation, quaich, etc.
Commentary on ‘R’ entries like racked warehouse, rectifier, refill cask, rye, etc.
Commentary on ‘S’ entries like Saladin box, sample, seasoning, snifter, etc.
Commentary on ‘T’ entries like tails, teaspooning, terroir, toasting, etc.
Commentary on ‘U’ entries like uisge beatha, umami, unchillfiltered, etc.
Commentary on ‘V’ entries like vatted malt whisky, vatting, virgin oak, etc.

Malt Madness in 2005

THE FIRST BIG CRASH (2002)

Most of our interactions were digital
though - via e-mail, but via MM features
like the Matrix (a spreadsheet with our
scores for hundreds of whiskies) and
our very own Malt Maniacs Awards.

Perhaps the first crash of MM wasn’t so bad after all, because it forced me
to stop with the web gadgets and focus on expanding the content instead.
So, when I was finished with the construction of Malt Madness 1.5 it did
contain many more pages - with much more madness. Meanwhile, the old
‘web’ section started to evolve into the Malt Maniacs whisky community,

In those primitive times, ‘dynamic HTML’ seemed to promise a brave new
world of interactivity. The 1.2 version of the site offered a few nifty tricks, but
getting everything to work on all browsers and platforms was a chore.

An imminent crash...

By 2005 I had bravely re-designed
this old website and our ‘Malt Maniacs’
group had grown to almost two dozen
maniacal members. We made several
trips to Scotland and other European
countries, sharing our ‘malt mania’.

At the same time, the brief ‘E-Reports’
from the 1990s evolved into far heftier
E-pistles that covered many topics.

Unfortunately, MM was still a ‘static’ website.
In the summer of 2007 my crappy old ‘Windows ME’ PC crashed - and so did the Malt Madness website. It was...

A drink at the Beach
Lagavulin 16 years old Scotch whisky

But I digress... The good news is that Malt Madness is now (as far as I know)
one of the oldest surviving whisky websites on the web. As for the bad news...

And as it turned out, there were! But it was also a more
primitive time. Stuff like social media hadn’t been invented
yet - and your mobile phone was waaaaaay too big to hide
under your swimsuit. If you HAD a mobile phone, that is.

(I mean different whiskies, mind you - not just Lagavulin.)

That first ‘dram’ lured me into the wonderful world of whisky with its character and complexity.
It wasn’t long before I started sampling more and more malt whiskies.

Or a swimsuit for that matter... 

MM was kept together by virtual spit and elbow grease for over 2 decades,
but when 2015 was just around the corner the steady progress of technology
finally caught up with me. A crash of my PC caused the site to crash as well.

(This is an introduction to Malt Madness - visit www.johannesvandenheuvel.net for more about your’s truly.)

And then I became aware of the world wide web in 1995.
Nobody I knew (at the time) was as crazy about malt whisky
as I was (at the time). So, to find out if there were any other
people that were mad about malts, I launched this website.

As I’m writing this introduction, I’m not sure yet
how long the latest MM reconstruction will take.
So, I suggest you check out the sitemap if you
want to know about the most recent status.

Malt Madness crashed like it had never crashed before...
By that time the old ‘static’ site had well over a thousand pages,
many of them dozens of ‘scrolls’ deep. So, I SHOULD really be
building a completely new ‘mobile’ and responsive website with
a database and other modern bells and whistles. I decided to
try and finish one last ‘rebuild’ before going mobile instead.

Meanwhile, I’ll use the rest of this introduction for a little trip down memory lane, looking at the history of MM.

My own ‘malt madness’ began in 1991, after I tasted my first glass of Lagavulin 16 years old.
It was well past midnight in a small café in Amsterdam, and I was slightly intoxicated. Nevertheless,
I immediately realised that this thing called ‘malt whisky’ was very different from a blended whisky.

AN INTRODUCTION TO MALT MADNESS (3.0)

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