Cintain 昆遊龍’s Reviews > Everything You Need to Know About Whisky: > Status Update

A couple of spelling mistakes, a missing word… really would’ve benefitted from another editing pass, this little gem. Also, now everything in this book feels slightly suspect, with its overly-authoritative tone…

Reads more like a rambling speech from an industry old-timer than a primer on the subject. The tidbits and little stories are fascinating; the sanctimonious tone and the egregious mistakes are not.

Here we have a flagrant error: the book describes what happens in the mash tun and then states: “During this process, the starches in the malt are converted to fermentable sugars”. This is incorrect: germinating the grain (the first part of malting) is what converts starch into sugar; the mash tun dissolves the sugars in hot water to make them available to the yeast.

Ok, chapter 1 and this book is already a bit of a challenge. “Although all malt whiskies possess a cereal or malty character, individual varieties of barley actually play little part in delivering specific flavour characteristics to the final matured whisky.” This statement is given as a fact w/o any supporting information. I know this is the prevailing view, but I want more info to document this.