McCormack says that during her research she has never experienced sexism, from distillers, distributors or her male counterparts. “The really serious aficionados are the same. You like whisky, you want to know more, you want to share what you like drinking, they are thrilled you are at their whisky event, and don’t care if you are a woman or a man. This is something I found highly contrasts with the wine industry as I have felt deliberately excluded and even elbowed out the way by middle-aged men at a few industry tastings.”

But it was not always like this, even in whisky-obsessed Scotland. During the 1950s and 1960s, pubs in working-class areas were male-dominated. In those days women mainly drank sweet sherry while the men downed beer with whisky chasers.

“What changed in Scotland and elsewhere, was women going into pubs,” says McCormack. “When you start drinking you want something sweet, and entry-level whisky is quite smoky and fiery. If you look at most student bars they will sell more cheap bourbon than cheap whisky as it is sweeter. For young women, the image in their head is often still that that’s their grandad’s drink so they dismiss it.”

Billy Abbott runs Dramboree, a weekend summer camp about whisky. I ask him why, traditionally, whisky has been seen as a man’s drink. “It’s a hangover from the days when drinks were even more gender-divided than they are now,” he says. “Al Murray’s ‘glass of white wine’ or ‘fruit-based drink for the lady’ is funny because of how true it was for years.”

Outside casual drinking, the world of whisky fandom is male-dominated. “A few days of hanging out in Facebook whisky groups is enough to depress anyone with an inclusive attitude to whisky,” says Abbott, “but fortunately there are more people challenging those attitudes, and things are starting to change.” These days, he is seeing more women who are “geeky and knowledgeable” about whisky. He knows three master blenders, five prominent whisky writers, more than ten brand ambassadors and three whisky club organisers, all of whom are female. 

Do male whisky drinkers fear their female counterparts? “In the whisky world, it often seems to be the people who like to have a special ‘away from the wife’ place or interest,” says Abbott. “The number of dens and man caves in which I’ve seen pictures of walls clad in shelves of meticulously-sorted whisky is both impressive and depressing. They often seem threatened by the intrusion into their special manly world, and I see that continuing while people divide their private spaces by gender lines.”

Jason Standing is a founder of a London-based tasting club, Whisky Squad, which began as a group of friends meeting to hold tastings, and has grown substantially from its first meeting six years ago. Whisky Squad holds monthly meetings and currently has 500 people on its mailing list.