Master of Malt Scraper: $5.00 per 1,000 results (2026)

This Master of Malt Scraper has successfully processed 82 runs across 3 users since its release, delivering structured product data, pricing, and customer reviews. The tool queries ten major drink categories - including whisky, gin, rum, vodka, beer, wine, liqueurs, brandy, champagne, and sake - without requiring login credentials or an external API key. It retrieves real-time pricing in GBP, product characteristics, stock availability, and written reviews via four target extraction modes. This utility is designed for inventory managers, market researchers, and catalog compilers who need clean e-commerce data; it is not meant for real-time order placement or automated checkout flows.

What does a Master of Malt Scraper run cost?

Each result costs $0.005 on the free tier, which is $5.00 per 1,000 results. Starting a run is charged separately at $0.01 per GB of Actor memory.

Apify plan	Per result	Per 1,000 results
FREE	$0.005	$5.00
BRONZE	$0.00433	$4.33
SILVER	$0.00367	$3.67
GOLD	$0.003	$3.00
PLATINUM	$0.003	$3.00
DIAMOND	$0.003	$3.00

Data extraction costs $0.005 per result on the free tier. The maxItems parameter has the most direct impact on your final bill by capping the total items retrieved per run. The cheapest way to test the integration is to run a single lookup in search mode with maxItems set to 5 to check the data structure before launching full category runs.

How do you run Master of Malt Scraper from the API?

The schema marks 1 of its 15 controls as required: mode. Nothing in the payload below is illustrative. Those are the schema's prefilled defaults for Master of Malt Scraper, so the request works once your token is in place.

Call the synchronous endpoint to start a run and receive dataset items in one request:

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/crawlerbros~master-of-malt-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"mode":"search","searchQuery":"laphroaig","category":"","productUrls":[],"sortBy":"relevance","inStockOnly":false,"maxItems":20,"proxyConfiguration":{"useApifyProxy":true}}'

The same run from Python, using the official client:

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>")

run_input = {
  "mode": "search",
  "searchQuery": "laphroaig",
  "category": "",
  "productUrls": [],
  "sortBy": "relevance",
  "inStockOnly": False,
  "maxItems": 20,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": True
  }
}

run = client.actor("crawlerbros~master-of-malt-scraper").call(run_input=run_input)

for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item)

And from Node.js:

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client'

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: '<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>' })

const input = {
  "mode": "search",
  "searchQuery": "laphroaig",
  "category": "",
  "productUrls": [],
  "sortBy": "relevance",
  "inStockOnly": false,
  "maxItems": 20,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true
  }
}

const run = await client.actor('crawlerbros~master-of-malt-scraper').call(input)
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems()
console.log(items)

Because the call is synchronous, your client waits for the whole run. Keep it for exploration. For scheduled work, start the run without waiting and collect the dataset afterwards, so network trouble costs you a retry rather than the results.

Which Master of Malt Scraper inputs matter, and which can you skip?

The input schema features 15 controls, with only the mode parameter being strictly required. The category and productUrls inputs alter the result set most dramatically by switching the scraper from a broad category sweep to specific deep-dive pages. For standard keyword searches, auxiliary filters like country or minAbv should be left empty to avoid over-filtering results.

mode (string): What to fetch. Default: "search".
searchQuery (string): Free-text product/brand search (mode=search), e.g. laphroaig, hendricks gin, brewdog. Default: "laphroaig".
category (string): Drinks category. Required for mode=browseCategory and mode=topRated; optional extra filter for mode=search. Default: "".
productUrls (array): Full Master of Malt product page URLs, or paths (e.g. /whiskies/laphroaig/laphroaig-10-year-old-sherry-oak-whisky/). Default: [].
sortBy (string): Result ordering for search/browseCategory (topRated always sorts by rating). Default: "relevance".
minRating (number): Drop products with an average customer rating below this value.
minRatingCount (integer): Drop products with fewer customer ratings than this (avoids single-review outliers).
minPriceGBP (number): Drop products priced below this (GBP).
maxPriceGBP (number): Drop products priced above this (GBP).
minAbv (number): Drop products with alcohol-by-volume below this percentage.
maxAbv (number): Drop products with alcohol-by-volume above this percentage.
country (string): Filter to products from a specific country (e.g. Scotland, Japan, Ireland). Case-insensitive substring match.
inStockOnly (boolean): Only emit products currently in stock. Default: false.
maxItems (integer): Hard cap on emitted records. Default: 20.
proxyConfiguration (object): Apify proxy (free AUTO/datacenter group is sufficient). Default: {"useApifyProxy":true}.

Fixed-choice controls: mode accepts search, browseCategory, topRated, byProductUrls; category accepts ``, whisky, gin, rum, vodka, beer; sortBy accepts relevance, priceAsc, priceDesc, ratingDesc, abvDesc.

Move one control per run. Compare each new sample against the previous one and keep the accepted, uncertain, and excluded counts side by side. A control that increases volume without improving decision quality still bills at $0.005 per result.

What does Master of Malt Scraper return?

The generated records provide clean retail details, brand fields, and stock statuses, which are perfect for building comparison sites and pricing monitors. They conspicuously lack supplier-side shipment volumes, wholesale cost structures, and historical inventory level logs. Written consumer reviews and awards are only available when using the specialized product URL lookup mode.

The Actor does not publish a per-field output list, so treat the first run as the specification: collect a small sample and record which fields are present before anything downstream depends on them.

How do you build the workflow end to end?

Open Master of Malt Scraper and work through these in order. Each step ends with something to check, so a bad configuration surfaces on a small run rather than a scheduled one.

Run a quick initial pass with mode set to search, searchQuery configured to a single test term like laphroaig, and maxItems set to 5 to verify your target fields populate correctly.
Inspect the resulting dataset to confirm that primary identifiers such as productId, name, and sourceUrl are populated and contain valid data.
Switch the mode control to browseCategory and specify category as whisky or another target drinks group to inspect the categorization tags in categoryTags.
Apply narrow filters such as minPriceGBP, maxPriceGBP, minAbv, and maxAbv to partition large categories and prevent hitting pagination caps.
Run mode as byProductUrls and paste a few valid Master of Malt product paths into the productUrls array to test deep metadata retrieval.
Verify that the nested reviews array returns the author, date, and reviewText fields before scheduling bulk lookups.
Enable the inStockOnly boolean flag if your pipeline only needs active, purchasable inventory records.

How do you apply it? Three worked playbooks

These are Master of Malt Scraper's own documented use cases, each worked through as an operating pattern rather than a description.

Use case 1: Price monitoring

Outcome: track bottle prices and sale status across whisky, gin, rum and more

Configure: Set mode to browseCategory, category to whisky, and inStockOnly to true.

Working method: Execute an initial run to establish a baseline of current prices and sale statuses using the priceGBP and isOnSale fields. Save these raw results, then schedule the Actor to run daily, comparing each new output against the previous run's dataset by matching on the unique productId.

Deliverable: A structured JSON or CSV dataset of active retail listings containing current prices, sale indicators, and stock statuses.

Stop condition: Stop the process if more than 10% of the returned items lack a valid priceGBP value.

Use case 2: Market research

Outcome: analyze rating distribution and review sentiment by category or country

Configure: Set mode to byProductUrls and add target bottle URLs to the productUrls array.

Working method: Start with a curated list of product URLs representing different spirit categories. Feed these into the Actor to retrieve detailed profiles, then analyze the distribution of star ratings in the nested reviews array alongside the text of customer reviews.

Deliverable: An enriched dataset of product profiles containing deep text reviews, rating counts, and official awards lists.

Stop condition: Stop if the nested reviews array is empty across five consecutive product URLs known to have reviews on the live site.

Use case 3: Recommendation engines

Outcome: feed real customer ratings into a drinks recommender

Configure: Set mode to topRated, category to rum, and minRatingCount to 10.

Working method: Run the Actor with a strict minRatingCount to filter out single-review outliers. Extract the top-rated items and feed their avgRating, style, and abv values directly into your collaborative filtering model.

Deliverable: A ranked list of high-affinity spirits metadata optimized for ingestion by a recommendation algorithm.

Stop condition: Stop if the output returns items with an average rating below your defined minRating threshold.

What breaks, and how do you design around it?

Test a small, representative input against your acceptance criteria before increasing scope.

To handle catalog pagination limits, you must partition large categories into smaller batches using the minPriceGBP and maxPriceGBP controls. If a run hits a hard cap of 500 items, divide your search queries by country or region to extract the remaining catalog depth. This structured approach prevents missed items on highly populated search terms.

When should you not use Master of Malt Scraper?

Do not use this Actor if your application requires real-time, minute-by-minute inventory updates to sync with a live POS system, as web scraping introduces natural latency. If you require official transactional data or wholesale API access, you should seek a direct business partnership with Master of Malt instead. Furthermore, if you only need to monitor one or two specific bottles, manually checking the website or setting up a simple page-change detector is far more efficient than maintaining an automated scraping task on an external platform.

What should you check before trusting the output?

Check that priceGBP is a positive number; alert if the field is null or 0 while inStock is true.
Verify that avgRating is omitted entirely rather than set to 0 when ratingCount is 0 to protect rating aggregations from skew.
Confirm that the reviews array is populated with non-empty reviewText when running in byProductUrls mode.
Assert that productId is a unique string across all retrieved items to detect duplication errors during high-volume runs.

None of this proves a record is correct. It gives a scheduled Master of Malt Scraper run defined points where it should stop instead of quietly passing bad data downstream.

Frequently asked questions

What is the cost per result on the free tier?

Each scraped result is priced at $0.005, which calculates to exactly $5.00 per 1,000 results when utilizing the free tier of the platform. Volume discounts apply on higher subscription tiers.

Why are some price and rating fields missing in my output?

Master of Malt Scraper omits empty fields entirely rather than returning empty strings or zero values. If a bottle has no customer reviews, the average rating field is excluded from the output to prevent skewing your downstream calculations.

What currency does the scraper use for price tracking?

All prices, such as priceGBP and originalPriceGBP, are returned in British Pounds (GBP). If your application requires other currencies, you must integrate an external currency converter into your data pipeline.

How does topRated mode compare to sorting browseCategory by rating?

The topRated mode applies an extra filtering step that gathers a broader candidate pool within a category and removes low-review-count outliers. This provides a true list of popular, highly-rated items rather than highlighting products with only a single five-star rating.

Do I need to configure residential proxies to avoid blocks?

No, standard proxy settings are sufficient. The default Apify proxy configuration with the free AUTO or datacenter group works reliably and does not require expensive residential IP pools.

Where to go next

Start with the Master of Malt Scraper Actor page for the current input schema, pricing tier, and run history.

If you are comparing approaches rather than committing to one Actor, these category pages list every option we publish:

Product and price scrapers covers 378 Actors in this family.
Search results scrapers covers 11 Actors in this family.
Review scrapers covers 193 Actors in this family.

Readers running Master of Malt Scraper commonly pair it with:

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Related guides:

Resources

Actor documentation, input schema, and pricing: verified against the published Actor on 2026-09-23.
Actor last updated by its maintainers on 2026-07-04.
Run outcome figures cover the 30 day public window ending 2026-09-23.
Master of Malt Scraper on Apify