How to Join

How can I participate?

Anybody can rate the whiskies that have an entry in the site and leave their tasting notes as a comment to the entry. Discussion of a whisky in the comments is encouraged as well. If you wish that a specific bottling should be listed, you can join the in-site forum and post you request there.

To rate an existing whisky, just klick on the desired amount of yellow stars. But be careful! Rating cannot be reverted. Each user can only vote once for each whisky. Please don’t abuse the voting system and only vote for the whiskies you actually have tasted. If I detect any spam votes, they will be deleted.

To register, just go to the forum section and klick on the register button. You will be mailed a random password that you can change after your first login. All your user data is saved encrypted on the site. Nobody, not even the system administrator, can see your password.

When you login to the site, you are taken to the forum section where you first should complete your user profile.

Should you have problems getting around, feel free to contact me at oliver@whisky-rating.com

Guidelines for contributors

Just a few points you should remember:

• Take scoring and tasting serisously. Think thoroughly about your ratings and tasting notes. If you have not scored a particular whisky before, take your time with your dram (reserve at least half an hour), make notes and think over and over if what you want to write really hits the point.
• Don’t hype or bash a whisky just because it is from distillery X.
• Dont let the rating of others influence your opinon. It is perfectly ok when you think a whisky with an average of 85 deserves only 6 stars.
• In your comments, please respect the makers of the whiskies, even if you don’t like the product.

Regarding tasting notes, this is an utterly subjective thing. Some try to hunt down the faintest traces of specific and sometimes quite exotic things (my all-time favorite being “baby vomit”) , others – like myself – prefer to stick to the main aromatic directions like “fruity” or “peat” and mention more specific aromas when they are really noticeable.

How the 100 point scoring system works

For rating whiskies, the 100 point system has been established for quite a while, so I wanted to use it as well on ths site. But as I found no straighforward way to implement such a rating system on a blog without heavy programming, I decided to go with a ten star system available as software plugin that can easily be mapped to conventional scores:

• 0 to 4: 0 stars
• 5 to 14: 1 star
• 15 to 24: 2 stars
• ….
• 85 to 95: 9 stars
• 95 to 100: 10 stars

Obviously this takes away some precision of the individual score. But when a sufficient number of people have cast their votes, the average calculated with one decimal digit will reflect better and better the true quality of a whisky. Think of it as a poll. You just have to ignore the decimal point to get the average score. When you add a tasting note you should always attach your proper score to it anyway.

As mentioned before, this scoring system has long been established, mainly for wine and whisky, but it can also be used for everyhing else like restaurants, cars or online stores.

The system has two calibration marks that you can use to build up your scores on: 50 points is the line between liking and disliking. 75 points is the thin line between “not bad” and “good”

My personal definitions:

0 to 5: Don’t swallow this stuff. Spit it out!
6 to 15: Be courageous, finish it!
16 to 25: Can there really be someone who actually likes this?
26 to 35: Slowly approaching whisky territory
36 to 50: Some might even like it, but there are too many flaws
51 to 65: Drinkable but soon forgotten
66 to 75: Has its good points but also weaknesses
76 to 85: A good dram but there is still room for improvement
86 to 95: Something not to just drink but to celebrate
96 to 99: Approaching perfection
100: Do we really want something that cannot be improved?

One last thing

If the current system of participation, which is quite liberal, is abused by posting spam or other rubbish, I will be forced to switch to a moderation-based system.