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Help Information

The up-arrow "eject" symbol or Home takes you to the whisky home page, Help takes you here, Scotland, Speyside, and W. Isles take you to the active maps for Scotland, Speyside and the Western Isles respectively. Search is a forms-based search tool. If you don't have forms you can use the Quick Index from the home page or from the icon below.

The left and right arrows (Next and Previous) let you chase round the Island and Speyside tours (or anywhere where "Next" and "Previous" seem appropriate).

The photo buttons lead to photos and you'll see links to sound clips for the pronounciations. You can also find all the sound clips listed in a table of pronunciations.
Most of them were kindly dictated by Philip Hills, Chairman of SMWS. A few others were supplied by me (I'm the one with a sort-of English accent)

Explanation of terms

Each distillery entry is laid out as follows:

The distillery name. Some distilleries have changed name or produce a malt or malts with different names. If so several names will appear.

Reference No: Arbitrary reference number. The first 107 of these correspond to the bottling numbers used by the Scotch Malt Whisky Society.

Producer: Parent company

Region: Region in which the distillery is located. There are actually quite clear distinctions made by some sources and the taste from the different regions is quite characteristic.

District: District. Same applies

Operating status: An indication of whether the distillery is still operating or not. Many malts are still available though the producing distillery has long since closed.

A description of the distillery, its location, history and so on. Comments on the whisky itself are deliberately kept out of this text as far as possible.

Acknowledgements are given for the major sources as hypertext links, e.g. smws/mj.

Here are the remaining icons:

The Help leads to this help information.

Pictures of the distilleries can be accessed via the buttons.

"Next" and "Back" arrows lead to the next and previous distilleries on one of the browsing tours.


The next section is "tourist" information

Distillery rating: This requires some explanation and is straight out of Michael Jackson. He rates the aspirations of the distilleries in producing and presenting a fine whisky from one to 5 stars. I have added brackets round the rating if the distillery has been demolished or is otherwise no longer in production.

The full postal address, phone and fax numbers are given where known. Different sources differ on phone numbers slightly, usually in the presence or absence of a digit after the area code (British Telecom is gradually rationalising these). The longer number will usually be the correct one but I have noted a few other anomalies. They have generally NOT been corrected for the leading "1" inserted in April 1995 and the Excel spreadsheet is a better source for this information.


tastings

These give independant tasting reviews, usually attributed as a hyperlink as above. There's no rhyme or reason to these - contributions are planted verbatim. All tastings are purely 'amateur' and subjective. No tastings or descriptions from known interested bodies appear here and the tasting notes should never be taken as being authoritative statements on the relative worth of particular manufacturers' products.