Book Review: The World Atlas Of Whisky

By Richard Thomas

Rating: A

When I established The Whiskey Reviewer in 2011, it was already inconceivable to stay on top of both the growing realm of world whiskey and the burgeoning American craft distilling scene. The American small distilling sector was already too large and growing too fast, although the new distilleries popping up in countries that had never done whisky-making before were just about manageable. In just a couple of years, both became impossible. I can say that because not only does this website do both things, but I’m also the author of American Whiskey. My book is still the most comprehensive work on its subject, but I know perfectly well it only covers 1/7 of the distillers in the US.

So, I understand just what it is that renowned expert Dave Broom attempted in his 2nd edition of The World Atlas of Whisky when it came out in 2014, just as I know how much more of a heavy lift it was a decade later to prepare 2024’s 3rd edition. The scope and depth of world whisky has grown enormously over that time, as new countries entered the lists and existing countries saw more distilleries open. In many ways, what happened with world whisky is reflected by what happened in American small distilling in the same period: all 50 states have at least one whiskey distillery now, and states that had zero distilleries of any description in 2014 could have as many as a dozen now.

The thing is, Broom covers this expansion without really expanding the size of the book. Instead of recycling the 2nd edition, he has basically started over from scratch. The new text has almost entirely new imagery and what is said to be all new tasting notes, matching the increase of distilleries covered from 200 in 2014 to 500 today. The statistics alone indicate what the trade off is: if an author more than doubles his scope in what is almost the same space, depth necessarily suffers.

Which is where I return to the beginning of this review: some other reviewer may, in an effort to find something negative to say about Broom’s book, dismiss its generality. I say you’ll learn as much about whiskey-making in Romania, South Africa or Spain from a glance at the digested lore in this book as you would from an hour of Googling. It is, as the title says, an atlas. It just happens to be an atlas that explains what the maps tell you. It’s gorgeous to thumb through, and even at the expert level can serve as a useful reference for fact-checking about the more obscure corners of whiskydom.