Phillip Hills - known as Pip to his friends - was born and raised in central Scotland, in a culture for which drink meant only one thing: whisky. He didn't like the stuff much until at university - where he studied philosophy - he discovered malt, which he liked very well. At that time, thirty years ago, almost nobody in Scotland drank malt whisky or knew much about it.

Pip has two old friends who have a small farm in Aberdeenshire. In the seventies, when he visited, a neighbour would come over for the evening, bringing with him a bottle of his private stock of malt whisky, of which he bought a quarter cask each year from George Grant at Glenfarclas. Overcome by the brilliance of the whisky, Pip persuaded the Grants to sell him some and formed a syndicate of his friends in Edinburgh to buy it. The syndicate sampled the malt straight from the cask in the lobby of Pip's house, declared it wonderful, and gave drams to their friends.

Thus was born the revolution which has produced many of the single-cask bottlings which we see today. Pip's syndicate grew and grew, so in 1983 he devised a scheme to open it to the public. He called it the Scotch Malt Whisky Society, a company whose original subscribers were the members of his syndicate. The early Society invented the idea of comparative whisky tastings and as Chairman of the Society, Pip spent years travelling the world, introducing the finest of malts to an unsuspecting public. He and his friends invented the idea of writing tasting notes for whisky, as a way of describing the whiskies they bottled to prospective purchasers. Their success is attested by the number of their imitators. The entire Scotch whisky industry, which had pronounced Pip's venture an impossibility when he began, now recognises his creation of a new sector of Scotch, at the very top of the market.

Before he left the Scotch Malt Whisky Society in 1995, Pip had seen how difficult it is for people outside the Scotch whisky industry - or even within it - to gain any depth of understanding of malt whisky. He also saw inferior whisky being passed off as being of the quality which he had discovered, and he didn't like that much. He therefore (again!) got a few of his friends together to found The Malt Masterclass, to be an entirely independent and objective resource for those who care about reality and quality in the drams.

Pip now takes a back seat in the Masterclass and spends his time writing