With fifty articles on the blog now I wanted to explain why I made the conscious decision to not end each review with a score. Rather, I end each review with a paragraph or two which relatively concisely rounds up my thoughts.
The first thing to get out the way is what is a score? A score in blog posts is a mark out of 5 or out of 100 that a reviewer feels the whisky has earned. Generally this mark will be in the range 2-4.5 and 70-95 respectively. This means of course than an awful lot of reviews will have the same marks while being completely different ages,styles and types.
None of this is bad of course. My concern is I know what my bad habits are and one of them is scanning articles rather than reading. I am a member of TL;DR (To Long; Didnt Read) club and I tend to jump to the bottom of the article, read the score and then decide if I want to read it. That is the thing I want to avoid happening on my own articles.
A scoring system is an ultra compact way of providing a verdict but in being so compact it leaves a lot of room for the reader to make incorrect inferences. I would much rather provide a closing paragraph where I round up my thoughts and in doing so the reader can make an inference on what the score would be based on an explanation.
An idea I am considering doing, however, is end of quarter and end of year roundups. This would be a post to highlight the top 3 whiskies I have tried (and hopefully posted about) in the previous three months. I will also have special prizes for the poorest and biggest disappointment. That is of course assuming I have been disappointed or felt a whisky wasn’t good enough.
Malted 