Mist rising off a Scottish loch at dawn

Two family whisky enthusiasts

The Panel

Dram Good is run by two members of the same family, a generation apart and stubborn in equal measure. Every review starts the way it always has: at the kitchen table, bottle open, both of them convinced they’re right.

Alan portrait

Alan

The Old Wise One

The Old Wise One

Alan

Born in Haydock in the summer of 1950, Alan has been conducting what he calls “informal research” into whisky since before most distilleries had websites. A published author and artist by trade, he claims his palate was trained the honest way: decades of real ale in proper northern pubs, followed by a dram “to settle the argument.”

Legend has it Alan’s first proper whisky was poured for him in a working men’s club sometime in the late sixties, and he’s been chasing that feeling ever since — through Speyside honeytraps, Islay peat monsters, and at least one regrettable supermarket blend he refuses to name but describes only as “an ambush.” He doesn’t score whiskies out of a hundred. He scores them by how quietly he goes when the glass is in his hand. Silence is a ten.

His rules are simple: water is allowed, ice is a crime, and anyone who says “smooth” owes the table a round. When Alan and Steve disagree on a bottle, Alan is right. He has seniority, and he’ll tell you so.

Steve portrait

Steve

The New Blood

The New Blood

Steve

Mid-thirties, big beard, bigger opinions. Steve spends his working week as a food manufacturing manager, which means he’s the only member of the Dram Good panel who can legally use the phrase “flavour profile” without Alan rolling his eyes — although Alan rolls them anyway.

Where Alan worships at the altar of Scotland, Steve’s heart was stolen by Japan. It started innocently enough — a bottle of Nikka from a duty-free shop, opened “just to try” — and ended with a shelf that looks like a Tokyo department store and a deep, borderline spiritual belief that Yamazaki does things to oak that Speyside can only dream about. He’ll drink a Highland malt to be polite. He’ll drink a Hakushu to be happy.

Steve brings the process brain to the panel: he wants to know the cask, the mash bill, the water source, the why. Alan says whisky isn’t a spreadsheet. Steve says that’s exactly what someone with no spreadsheet would say. Between the two of them, every bottle gets a fair trial — Steve prosecuting with facts, Alan judging on feel.

When he’s not nosing a Glencairn, he’s watching Bolton Wanderers, which he describes as “excellent training for handling disappointment — very useful in whisky.”

Engraved above the drinks cabinet

House Rules

  1. Water is allowed. Ice is a crime.
  2. Anyone who says “smooth” owes the table a round.
  3. When they disagree, Alan is right. Ask Alan.

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