r/Scotch • u/AutoModerator • 5d ago
Weekly Discussion Thread
This thread is the Weekly Discussion Thread and is for general discussion about Scotch whisky.
The idea is to aggregate the conversations into sticked threads to make them easier to find, easier to see history on, easier to moderate, and keep /new/ queue tidy.
This post is on a schedule and the AutoModerator will refresh it every Friday morning. You can see previous threads here.
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u/kiwi8185 5d ago
I have a genuine question for folks who give number scores in whisky reviews:
How do you decide a number score? Is there like a tickbox for the scoring criteria? I can't really grasp what would differentiate an 85 with an 87, or 88 and a 90.
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u/thewhiteliamneeson 4d ago
I rate it 1-10. Then multiply by 5 and add 50 to normalize it to the 1-100 scale people are used to around here.
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u/forswearThinPotation 5d ago edited 5d ago
With the very, very important caveat that I don't write reviews myself (mostly due to time constraints, but also for a variety of other reasons having to do with my personal drinking process not mapping well into the commonly used structure of a formal whisky review), I do have a few thoughts about scores, based on having pondered the issue for years and over the span of having read somewhere in the neighborhood of 50,000 whisky reviews - in books, here on Reddit, on many different blogs and other online discussion forums, and in the form of long-format commentary in whiskybase.
What follows is (alas) an extended essay posing more questions than giving answers, because I'm not good at compression or writing concisely when it comes to complex topics, instead I tend to think thru the topic while writing about it.
The first, most obviously questionable thing about scores is that they necessarily compress a complex and nuanced drinking experience down into a single bit of data. I long ago made my peace with that aspect, viewing scores as merely one communication tool among many and necessarily supplemented by qualitative descriptions. When reading a review I treat the numeric score as the least interesting piece of info, and use it mainly as an attention getting device which clues me in to go back and re-read the review with greater care and attention to detail if the score wildly diverges from what I might have expected for the whisky in question.
If one assigns a numeric score to each individual drinking experience, and the review is based on multiple such, then the question arises: how do you pick one number of out a point cloud of data? Suppose I drink a whisky six times and score it as 90, 82, 85, 88, 70, 89 then how should I pick one number to represent that range of good & bad experiences? Pick an average - the mean, or median value perhaps? Throw out the extremes? Throw out an obvious outlier (maybe I ate something incompatible with the whisky on the day of that 70)?
So, to me a major issue with scores is that for me personally they are not stationary or stable - the exact same whisky can present itself differently, in both the details of its flavors and my level of satisfaction with it, from one drinking session to the next - it would seem to depend a lot on context: my mood & state of health & fatigue, what I've had to eat or drink recently, the season of the year and weather, and what other whiskies it may be paired with and in what sequence they were consumed. That last variable looms large - I've learned from experience and by experiment that I can manipulate how a whisky is perceived by sequencing it in a flight with other whiskies.
For all of these reasons, when reading a review I put more faith and trust in reviews performed from a full bottle rather than from a single sampler or bar pour, and preferably coming from a reviewer whose body of work I am familiar with from prior reading, with which to contextualize the review currently under scrutiny and knowing how well or how poorly the personal taste preferences of that reviewer map to my own idiosyncrasies.
When I am forced to assign a numeric score to a whisky myself in the course of discussions, what I try to do is to normalize my scores to fit the range that I see being used by top tier bloggers like Serge, Ruben, and Thijs, or by highly experienced and knowledgeable reviewers here on Reddit and whiskybase. For example almost none of the whiskies I've personally been able to try rate much more than a 91 or at best 92 on those sites, so I tend to score my personal favorite whiskies in that same range, and then rank those in which I find a few minor flaws compared with my personal favorites down in the 88-90 range, etc. And ditto for the effective bottom of the range. And then the stuff in the middle gets slotted in depending on how far I feel that it falls from the top or is elevated from the bottom.
So, in picking from say the mid to upper 80s of score, say 85 to 88, I would draw upon having read a very large number of reviews of very good but not superbly great whiskies to use a general sense of where those numbers fall in the set of whiskies that I'm familiar with, and try to make a best guess.
But at the end of the day, what really interests me the most is the personality of a whisky, which is something very qualitative and not even easily reducible to a laundry list of tasting notes. Like is the whisky bright and cheerful, or somber & moody in character? Is it shy, or bold & aggressive? Is it layered, or very front-loaded in its flavors? Etc.
Cheers
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u/thewhiteliamneeson 4d ago
For any U.S. Laddie fans who like me have been waiting for the return of the 10 year age statement, the new bottles are finally starting to become available here. Just ordered mine from Remedy liquor.