Reviews will generally be short and to the point - I’ll avoid writing long essays on each, but rather give an indication of the aromas and style of the whisky.

Behind each review

Where possible, each whisky is reviewed at least twice with some time between, and preferrably in a different setting or at a different point in the line-up if multiple whiskies are reviewed. Some times the whisky might get “favourable treatment”, like an extra 30 minute rest in a glass before review for this second round.

All individual reviews are then taken into consideration before publishing the final score.

Full scores

The scoring system used here is simple: 100 points total, divided evenly between four categories.

  • Nose: The initial impression - how does it smell?
  • Taste: The whole point.
  • Finish: What you’re left with after the whisky has been drunk.
  • Style: Bonus points, the “essence” of the whisky - how well does it what it sets out to do?

Each category can get a score from -25 to 25, where a theoretical 0 is given if the whisky has no real redeeming qualities, but no negative aspects either. Negative scores are rare, but possible - and there’s a certain overflow possibility: scores can go above 25 if the situation calls for it (generally whiskies that would call for a score below -25 will be avoided on principle and as such not reviewed).

The motivation for this: After trying to hit “traditional” scores (see below), where basically only the 50-100 range is used, it was found that this gave too little range to fully review. For the new system, a “plain average” score in a category is 0 (used to be 12-15ish); this makes it clearer where the strengths of each whisky lies within each category, but makes the scores very hard to compare with other reviews — as an example, anything that scores 40+ is a really good whisky.

Traditional score

Also called Parker scores.

The subjective weighting of the points here used to mean that fairly good whisky would get around 20 points in each category - and most get 15+ points unless they’re actively bad. Typically any whisky I’d be willing to buy would score in the 70+ range, with most landing in the 80-85 range.

A simulated traditional score, derived from the regular full score, is still shown to have some way to compare the score with other reviewers. The formula used is (score/2)+12.5 where score is a category score.

This score is also what I provide to search engines and other crawlers that understand Microdata, with a range of 50-100.