I’ve been waiting a while to say this: the DRAM1 Whisky Award is back for 2026! And if you’ve taken part in one of our panels before, I really hope you’ll join us again. Last year I watched tasting sets disappear into homes across the Netherlands and far beyond, followed by scores, tasting notes, discussions and plenty of messages from people trying desperately to figure out what was hiding in their samples. Some guesses were impressively close, others spectacularly wrong, and I loved every bit of it.
That, for me, is what makes these awards special. DRAM1 can organise the award, brands can send in their whiskies and I can spend far too many hours getting everything ready, but ultimately we don’t decide the winner. You do. For 2026, we’re doing it all again, this time turning our attention to something I think deserves a lot more love: the bottles that form the backbone of whisky.
Already got yourself a set? Cast your vote here: Scoresheet DRAM1 Whisky Award 2026
Back to the Core
There is always another limited edition, single cask or special finish to get excited about. I love those whiskies too, and DRAM1 certainly isn’t going to stop writing about them, but most of the whisky actually being opened and shared around the world isn’t a once-in-a-lifetime release. It’s the bottle you can walk into a shop and buy, enjoy, recommend to someone and hopefully still find again six months later.
That’s what the DRAM1 Whisky Award 2026 is about. We invited whisky brands to submit bottles from their core range, with a maximum retail price of €100, and they need to remain available into 2027. If our panel discovers something brilliant, I want you to actually have a chance of buying a bottle afterwards. We’re not looking for the rarest whisky, the oldest whisky or the one with the fanciest packaging. We simply want to discover which whiskies impress when all of that is taken away.
Twelve Whiskies, Completely Blind
Every panel member receives a tasting set containing 12 different whiskies. They’re numbered, and that’s all you get. You won’t know the brand, distillery, country, age, price or what the bottle looks like. For a little while, the marketing department has effectively been kicked out of the room and all that remains is you and the whisky in your glass.
I find blind tasting endlessly fascinating for exactly that reason. I’ve had whiskies I was absolutely convinced I loved fall apart when tasted blind, while bottles I’d barely given a second look suddenly became the glass I kept returning to. Whisky is wonderfully good at making fools of us when the label disappears, and I fully expect this panel to produce a few surprises as well.
There could be a whisky in your set that you’ve walked past dozens of times without ever considering buying it. There might be an old favourite you completely fail to recognise. A €40 bottle could end up beating something twice its price, while a whisky with an enormous reputation might suddenly seem surprisingly ordinary. We genuinely don’t know what will happen, and that’s exactly why we’re doing this.
You Really Are the Jury
This isn’t a public tasting where your scores are collected before a separate panel of experts ultimately decides what wins. Your scores determine the result. Everyone receives the same twelve whiskies, everyone tastes them blind, and those scores come together to determine which bottle becomes the DRAM1 Whisky Award Winner 2026.
That idea has always been important to me with DRAM1. There are brilliant professional tasters in whisky and I’ve learned an enormous amount from many of them, but enjoying whisky shouldn’t become an exclusive club. The person who has been exploring whisky for twenty years has a valid opinion, and so does someone who discovered single malt last Christmas. They might taste completely different things in exactly the same glass, and that’s not a problem. That’s what makes whisky interesting.
Put enough of those different palates together, remove the labels and expectations, and you get something much more interesting than one person telling everybody else what the best whisky is. You get a result created by whisky drinkers themselves.
How the Scoring Works
We’ve kept scoring deliberately straightforward this year. You’ll taste each of the twelve whiskies and give it one overall score out of 100, based on the nose, palate and finish. There’s no separate value score and no complicated calculation to make. Take your time with the whisky, decide how much you actually enjoy it and give it the number you think it deserves.
To keep everyone roughly speaking the same scoring language, we use a simple guide. Below 50 is Poor, 50–75 is Fair, 76–82 is Good, 83–89 is Very Good and 90+ is Exceptional. That final category is supposed to mean something, so don’t feel that you need to find a 90-point whisky somewhere in your set. At the same time, if one of those anonymous samples makes you stop, go back for another nose and wonder what on earth we’ve put in that little tube, don’t be afraid to reward it.
There will also be room for tasting notes and some additional questions. Those aren’t mandatory, but I really hope you’ll answer them. A score can tell us which whisky people preferred, but your comments tell us why. Once we reveal the bottles, comparing those notes with what was actually in the glass is going to be one of the most interesting parts of the whole experiment.
Can a Whisky Under €50 Beat Them All?
There’s another question I’m particularly curious about this year: how much do we actually need to spend to drink really good whisky? With every entry priced below €100, there’s plenty of opportunity for cheaper bottles to cause some trouble. Alongside the overall results, we’ll therefore also recognise the best-performing whisky under €50.
I’d absolutely love to see one of those bottles fighting near the top of the overall ranking. Whisky has become expensive enough that I think it’s worth occasionally putting the relationship between price and what’s actually in the glass to the test. There aren’t many fairer ways of doing that than putting the bottles away and tasting everything blind.
To Everyone Who Has Joined Us Before
This part genuinely means a lot to me. The previous DRAM1 panels became much bigger than I imagined when I first started organising them. The DRAM1 Indie Award 2025 brought together 160 panel members for a total of 1,920 individual tasting scores, and seeing that many people willing to sit down, taste seriously and contribute their opinion was pretty special.
If you were one of those people, thank you, and please come back. I hope to see plenty of familiar names appearing in the scores again. I want the messages telling me you’re absolutely certain you’ve identified sample number seven, the debates about favourites and the inevitable moment after the reveal when half of us discover that we weren’t nearly as clever as we thought we were.
And if you’ve never participated before, you’re every bit as welcome. There is no experience requirement and there certainly isn’t a secret DRAM1-approved palate. If you enjoy whisky, are curious about what happens when the labels disappear and are willing to give us your genuine opinion, I want you on the panel.
Then Comes the Best Part
You’ll have until Monday, 23 November 2026 at 24:00 to submit your scores, so there’s absolutely no reason to race through all twelve samples in one evening. Split them across several nights, go back to something you weren’t sure about, add water if you want to and change your score if a whisky grows on you. This is supposed to be something you enjoy doing, not an exam you need to finish.
Then, on Sunday, 29 November 2026, we finally take the blindfold off. We’ll reveal what has been hiding inside those twelve tubes, publish the results and crown the DRAM1 Whisky Award Winner 2026. I’m already ridiculously curious about that moment, because right now I know the bottles going into this competition, their names, their stories and their prices. For the panel, though, none of that matters until the judging is over.
For a few weeks, there will simply be twelve glasses of whisky waiting to be judged on what they actually taste like. Whether you tasted with us before or this will be your first DRAM1 panel, I’d genuinely love to have you along for it.
The DRAM1 Whisky Award is back. Become a panel member, grab your twelve samples and help us find the whisky that deserves to win in 2026. I can’t wait to see what you choose.
