2024 ROUNDUP
The Society uncorked
It’s been another busy year here at The Scotch Malt Whisky Society, with plenty of drams and memories shared among our members. But have you ever wondered exactly how many? The Society’s Duncan Gorman uncorks some of the Society’s most interesting statistics from 2024
At the heart of the Society is its members, and making sure there’s a great selection of events and experiences on offer is always a priority for us.
From distillery visits at our Members’ Rooms from the likes of Springbank and Blair Athol, to out-of-this-world tasting events at Dynamic Earth’s planetarium in Edinburgh, it’s been a jam-packed year with a huge range of events on offer.
There were over 640 member tastings in the UK in total, with 158 at Bath Street, 98 at Greville Street, 143 at The Vaults, and 284 at Queen Street. Overall, that totals out to be around 1.7 tastings per day of the year. With every tasting lasting around 70 minutes on average, our members have enjoyed a staggering 750 hours of whisky indulgence, which is around a whole month’s worth! Just for some extra context, you could watch the director’s cut of The Lord of the Rings trilogy approximately 65 times in 750 hours!
We also visited 24 different locations in the UK for festivals and tastings, covering over 5,500 miles to share whisky with our members (Frodo and Sam only travelled 1,300 miles from the Shire to Mount Doom, we made that distance four times over!)
The team in Europe have also enjoyed an action-packed year, including an epic road trip with German-born ambassador Olaf Meier, who returned to his home country to cover six cities in six days.
Over the year we have held over 350 events in Europe, including 42 different festivals, with 3,458 tickets sold and a staggering 20,748 drams served!
UK VENUE ENTERTAINMENT
750 HOURS
EUROPE-WIDE EVENTS
350
FESTIVALS
3,458 TICKETS
FESTIVAL DRAMS POURED
20,748
ACCOLADES
54 AWARDS
EU BOTTLE PURCHASES
21,000
BOTTLES
With eager members keen to comb through all of our 13 Outturns this year, each month’s First Friday is possibly the most anticipated time of the month. Although members have enjoyed bottles from all of our 12 flavour profiles, there were some distinct favourites.
In the UK, our most popular bottles were in the Deep, Rich & Dried Fruits profile, while the EU’s top pick was Spicy & Sweet.
Variety is of course a huge part of what we do here at The Scotch Malt Whisky Society, and we make sure to offer a great range of different flavours, regions and cask types.
We even bottled from four new distilleries in 2024. We’ve come a long way since our first international whisky from Japan in 1988 (if you don’t count our first Irish whiskey in 1988), with a whopping 19 whiskies coming from outside of Scotland in 2024.
Plenty of members in the UK have added whiskies to their shelves this year, buying an estimated 29,000 bottles. Europe also made the most of 2024’s offerings, having taken around 21,000 bottles home.
AWARDS
It’s not just our members who love our whiskies. The Society also picked up a staggering 54 awards commending our spirit this year (with possibly still more to come before 2024 is over).
That included a record haul of six Gold medals and one Silver in the International Spirits Challenge, eight medals including one Master award in the Scotch Whisky Masters and the accolade of 2024 Independent Bottler of the Year in the New York International Spirits Competition – among many other titles.
Here’s to a fantastic, flavour-packed 2024 – and a year of whisky-inspired adventures ahead in 2025!
