Whether you've had one or one thousand bottles, the purposes behind rating whiskey are the same. Whiskey is very much an experiential hobby, and conversations often center around which bottles are underrated or overrated. It is only natural to want to apply order to the world, and a numerical scale is a truly powerful thing if applied consistently. Many may also want to min-max their spending, finding the "best" bottle at each price point. Since few of us have unlimited funds, it only makes sense to keep track of what you liked or didn't like. Rating whiskey also helps reinforce a framework for acquiring knowledge and thoughtfully enjoying whiskey as assigning values may spur you to research and understand what may be elevating or penalizing a particular pour.
Guiding Principles
If we zoom out to the theory, there are two options for framing your rating scale. You can either rate based on:
1. Personal Preference - How much YOU like a particular bottle. This is the easiest as it is the most intuitive. Taste preferences vary greatly from person to person. Even the best rye in the world may fall low on your list if you hate ryes.
2. Representation of the Craft - Critics and Spirits Judges may choose to try and overcome the failings of any personal preferences and rate the whiskey based on its execution of the style or the distiller's artistic goal. This requires a great deal of practice in addition to detailed knowledge of production processes, potential impurities, and the delicate balance of proof, age, and mash.
For most people, who want just understand how much they like an individual bottle, #2 doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I would strongly recommend not overthinking your ratings. Take it as it comes and in accordance with your liking. This will be more consistent over time than trying to contort yourself mentally trying to maintain some artificial semblance of objectivity. Perception is reality and you are the #1 expert with respect to your personal experience. When looking at the reviews of others, savvy hobbyists find high-quality reviewers with similar preferences to their own or look at aggregate reviews across a variety of sources.
Flavors of the Week
Taste is influenced by many factors, both physical and mental. A bottle that is distinctive but potentially flawed may be the subject of your cravings one day and the object of ridicule on another. Good company makes any dram a touch better, and a glass poured after a day of frustration may not taste as bright. Because of the impacts of fleeting feeling on a whiskey experience, I would highly encourage you to taste a bottle multiple times before ascribing a rating to it. Similarly, if you've just done a hot wing eating contest, your palate is likely not up to the task; take the day off or drink something simple!
A Matter of Mindfulness
Rating a whiskey is not at passive process. If you've read our
Tasting Guide, you know how much conscious deliberation is involved in deciphering the tiny nuances of a pour. For this reason,
give yourself permission to drink and enjoy without the pressure of always having to rate what you're drinking every time. Enjoyment is first and foremost, so don't feel like you have to be on the 100% palate A-game all the time. Better to fully live in the moment or relax as intended and come back for an academic rating at some later date.
Scales
There are many scales with varying goals. When all is said and done, ultimately every scale must be presented with some sort of rubric or guide otherwise it is almost impossible to understand the degree of difference between one bottle and another. It is also quite difficult to compare ratings across scales which makes meta-analysis between reviewers somewhat difficult. In this section, we will explore some of the more common rating scales and their noted differences, advantages, and shortcomings.
100 Point - Nose, Taste, Finish, and Body
Used by Jim Murray of
Whiskey Bible fame as well as many others bloggers and some apps, this scale allocates 25 points each to Nose, Taste, Finish, and Body. A score out of 100 is somewhat intuitive and provides ample room for distinguishing between different bottles without having to use decimal points. As a composite score, it does a great job of stepping you through rating the various components. On the other hand, it values each of those four components evenly. In my experience, the majority of bottles out there score somewhat similarly across multiple dimensions which does tend to reduce the outcome set somewhat substantially. Anecdotally, I have not seen very many bottles on a 100 point scale score below the 70s which results in a somewhat packed upper end of the scale, somewhat reduced to 5 point bands which is really only 6 tiers. You'll commonly see most bottles packed into the 86-93 range. Being overly generous with grading for one attribute may shift the bottle a whole tier easily, and without good points of reference it may be tough to figure out what is a 15 vs an 18. For this reason, I would highly recommend doing new tastings blinded against something you have already rated in a similar style or against a panel of comparable whiskies (check out the full
Guide to Blind Tastings for more information).
Modern Thirst Scale
Modern Thirst improve upon this scoring system by breaking down the allocation of points to allocate more weight to palate/taste:
- Appearance: 15 points
- Nose: 25 Points
- Palate/Taste: 35 Points
- Finish: 25 points
But now there is 15 points for appearance? Sight definitely does have an impact on taste, but I'm not sure how to grade it other than opacity or cloudiness which may or may not have any impact on flavor. Bottles with caramel coloring added or off-tasting but high proof editions may have heroic legs but be drain pour quality on the nose or in your mouth. Similarly, chill-filtered whiskies may not be cloudy but may lose some flavor in the process. Perhaps this is just cope because my vision is not the best when it comes to color.
Five Point Scale
There are a number of five point scales going around. The implication is that three is average, but it may be difficult to fit nuanced differences into such a concentrated band. You may see this broken into a school grade (A,B,C, etc.) or some number of themed items.
The t8ke Scale
Jay West, known for the review site t8ke.review and
r/Bourbon's Single Barrel Program, is the Chief Spirits Critic for
bottleraiders.com. West is known for creating a simple 10 point scale that is designed to force the use of a broader spectrum of scores balanced around 5 being the average with a qualitative value of "Good". Intuitively, we know most products have something of a normal distribution with few products being truly terrible and few being extraordinary. Due to Jay's influence in the whiskey Reddit community, this scale has become fairly common across the whiskey redditverse as well as YouTube. The advantage of assigning a single number is that it provides a clear ranking across all dimensions of where you rate the whiskey in relation to its peers. From a comparison standpoint, it is easier to say "this is better than that" regardless of the underlying reasons. The only real disadvantage is that it is somewhat tough to ground yourself in what is really just good vs what is great until you have tried a good number of bottles, though calibrating the range is a challenge with all scales.
The scale is as follows:
- Disgusting | So bad I poured it out.
- Poor | I wouldn’t consume by choice.
- Bad | Multiple flaws.
- Sub-par | Not bad, but many things I’d rather have.
- Good | Good, just fine.
- Very Good | A cut above.
- Great | Well above average
- Excellent | Really quite exceptional.
- Incredible | An all time favorite
- Perfect | Perfect
Our Choice
At Castle & Cairn, we use a modified version of the t8ke scale due to it's implied normal distribution, reasonable range for differentiation, and ordinal simplicity. I have further refined the scale to include behaviors to help better differentiate or add an objective criteria differentiation between levels.
The Castle & Cairn scale is as below:
1 | Disgusting | So bad I poured it out
2 | Poor | I wouldn’t consume it by choice.
3 | Bad | Multiple flaws | Struggle to get through the bottle
4 | Serviceable | Mixing or ice recommended.
5 | Good | Drinkable neat | An agreeable dram indeed.
6 | Very Good | Any flaws offset by interesting flavors | A cut above | Clean
7 | Great | You find yourself reaching for this one often | Well above average.
8 | Excellent | Serve to impress guests | Really quite exceptional.
9 | Incredible | An all time favorite | You guard this bottle jealously.
10 | Perfect | You didn't think anything could be this good | A clear champion.
As I have progressed along my whiskey journey, I have noted being overly reluctant to hand out 8-10 ratings as it takes quite a bit to really stand out from other pours, but this is an advantage. An eight is something that would not be further improved by additional time in the wood or proof, while a nine is a lifetime favorite and a ten is an empirical masterpiece. To compare our scale vs a 100 point scale, I would subtract 50 points from the 100 point basis and divide by five (since the bottom 50 points is pretty much never used). Note that price is not a consideration. Reviews will separately note if we feel the value is good and if we would buy it again.
There are many many drinkable whiskies on the market today at all price points, but very few are exceptional. Truly abhorrent bottles tend to see themselves run out of business as well due to marketplace factors. Whatever your choice of scale, consistency will be more of a key than the rating itself. Happy tasting!
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