I’ve been thinking a lot about what a whiskey review site would look like if it didn’t have scores. Just the overall thoughts, feelings and opinions of the reviewer and the ultimate conclusion of quality was left to the reader. Thinking about this, and chatting about it with some other whiskey folks, brought to life some interesting conversations. But one thing that kept coming up is that it’s nearly impossible to not denote quality.
Just saying things like “it’s good”, “it tastes like rotten fruit”, “not my favorite smell”, etc. gives an idea of rank. This makes it nearly impossible to write a review without some underlying ranking, even if it’s as binary as “like it” or “don’t like it”, being unearthed or inferred in the writing. Even the tasting notes will denote quality when reading things like “buttery caramel” vs “artificial caramel”.
There are some blogs/sites without formalized ratings (ie no quantified quality scale) but, as stated above, the words they write will always give you, at the very least, a binary rating of “good” or “bad” – regardless if they actually score it a 1 or a 0. But more than it being nearly impossible to review and not at least indirectly score, scores are useful. They take the entire 400+ words of a review and boil it down to a quick and digestible number, letter, etc. Something solid to grasp on to.
This is why liquor stores and brands rarely post entire reviews of beer, wine or spirits and instead just print “92 Points by…”, “Double Gold at…”, “Top 10 Whiskey by…” and so on. It’s a quick easy way for someone to see a quality scale and make a decision on if they should spend their money or not. Scores are useful… they’re also annoying.
I can’t even begin telling you how many hours I’ve sipped away deciding if something is truly an 86 or an 87. “Does it fully hit that quality I’m looking for in a B+?” and “Could they have done better, because I’ve tasted better from them, so is it really even an 86?” bounce around in my head constantly. Ultimately this ping-ponging leads to “Does it really matter?”
On a cosmic scale, no, but on a cosmic scale nothing we do matters; the universe doesn’t know we exist. But on a daily-modern-life-on-earth-and-being-involved-in-the-whiskey-community type of scale… kinda.
If I boil down what the tiers (A-F) actually mean it would, roughly, look like this. A- & B+ means I love it; B & B- means I like it; C+ & C is “meh”, C- through D- means I didn’t like it and anything below D- means I hated it. Then you have the single-digit scores which are reserved for utter disgusting swill and the A and A+ scores reserved for the best-of-the-best.
Looking through all of this it seemed like switching to something like a 0-5 star scale with a “Superstar” and “Utter swill” denotation made more sense since that’s roughly what I’ve been doing albeit in a vastly more complicated way. However, before I made such a drastic switch I wanted some external feedback, so I posted the idea of simplifying the scoring to Patreon.
The Patreon folks are awesome. They help support the site and I look at them as the “Superfans”, so if anyone would have a strong opinion about this it was going to be them… and they did. Turns out I was on the right track because it was a unanimous agreement that they wanted a simpler scoring approach as well. Simpler is better.
So, starting next week I’m going to be switching to a simplified scoring system. I’ll put up some references on the right side and a note about the change and I’m also going to use the rest of this year to go through and update old reviews. I’ll be dropping the frequency of posting for a bit while I get everything updated, but I think this will be a good change for the long term of the site.
Cheers!
