So, how did we come up with each distillery’s flavour profile? Well, first we did put all our tasting notes into a text file, sometimes hundreds of notes, sometimes only a few (rare distilleries etc.) Then we automatically cleaned the text, withdrawing all common words such as ‘palate’, ‘nose’, ‘and’, ‘more’, ‘bottle’... You see what I mean. The macro we built for that purpose allowed us to keep only what we could call ‘the descriptors’ for each whisky. In other word, err, keywords. The last part was even easier to do: using a smart little software called ‘Word Counter’ for Mac, we simply sorted all descriptors by frequency and presto, we had our ‘distillery flavour profile’. But Warning: so-called ‘expressions’ of any distillery may vary a lot, even the most idiosyncratic ones. For instance, all Ardbegs aren’t very peaty/smoky, so it’s always better to check detailed tasting notes by experts or pure amateurs like ourselves before making up your mind regarding this or that bottle that makes sheep’s eyes at you. Even better, try to taste it yourself. Checking a whisky’s SGP (wazzat?) may also be of help. Oh, and we also hired a new Super-Taster! He just tried a whole bunch of new young hyper-finished triple-cask matured malts for us, here are his first impressions. ----> (and thanks, Mike) Back to previous page