Welcome to Whisky Saga
Hi, and welcome! Whisky Saga is a new whisky blog, and at the same time it's not a new whisky blog. This might take a bit of explaining, so please let me elaborate just a little bit.
Who are we?
Whisky Saga is my wife, Tone Øhrbom, and me, Thomas Øhrbom. I have written the Norwegian language STOW whiskyblogg since January 2012, and I have a corresponding Facebook page for this blog. So far I have posted about 500 whisky reviews, and quite a few articles in addition to that. Tone has her own Facebook page for her whisky club, The Ladies' Share. She has also been posting whisky reviews on the STOW whiskyblogg almost every single Wednesday.
I have enjoyed whisky since 1997, but got more serious about it when I started my first whisky club back in 2001. Then I joined STOW in 2009, starting going to more and more festivals in 2010, and started blogging in 2012. Tone started her whisky journey in 2011, and broke through the wall of peat smoke in the spring of 2012. We will get back to our whisky background in more detail in a later article.
Why Whisky Saga?
So why Whisky Saga, why not stick with the relatively popular blogs we already have? Well, for one STOW is a whisky club I am a member of (Sandefjord Taste Of Whisky), so STOW is not a domain or a name that I own. As the blog has grown I have come to realize that it would be better to keep the club and my personal blog separate. This way we can more easily avoid conflicts of interest, and I am more free to take the blog in any direction I personally choose.
Another reason to set up Whisky Saga is that Facebook does not really work well for historic data. Tone has so far posted all her Ladies' Share reviews on her Facebook page, but it's really only ever the last few reviews that are accessible. Linking to older reviews is near impossible, and you can't really bring old reviews to the attention of new readers. So Tone needed a blog, outside of Facebook, for her Ladies' Share reviews.
A third reason to set up Whisky Saga, is that we wanted to own this together, my wife and me. Having a blog that we fully own and control is a better basis for that.
A fourth reason is that our network of contacts in the wonderful world of whisky is ever-growing, and it expands more and more outside of Norway (the icy domain in which we live). We would therefore like to be able to more freely publish articles also in English - though some might call it Norwenglish, but we are not offended by that.
Why now?
Well why not? The reason we're doing this now, is that we feel the time is right. The number of reviews already posted by us on STOW and on Facebook is still manageable, and we will be able to slowly migrate it to this new site.
What are our plans?
We want to learn more about whisky, explore more whisky, be challenged more by whisky, and get to know more whisky loving people (fellow whisky nerds and whisky newbies alike). It would be an honour for us if you want to follow us on this whisky saga.
As mentioned above, the reviews (Norwegian) from STOW and The Ladies' Share will be migrated here to Whisky Saga. We will also bring The Nordic Whisky Map here, and our Whisky Calendar.
We will try to publish articles in both English and Norwegian, and then we'll see what the response is. For a start I intend to publish a series of reviews of Nordic whiskies, in English. I do not find a lot of reviews like that online, and suspect that some of you might find this interesting. After all, Nordic whisky is really growing, and there are some fantastic distilleries popping up, and wonderous whiskies being put on the market in Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway (soon also to be joined by Iceland).
Hope to see you here again on a regular basis! And please contact us if you have comments, ideas for articles or reviews, or simply want to get in touch. You can of course also find us on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/WhiskySaga) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/the_whiskysaga - @the_whiskysaga).
Sláinte! - Thomas & Tone
