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Tasting and rating your own blend honestly

2 minute read · The Blending School

The hardest whiskey to taste honestly is your own. You made it, you love the story, and the story leaks into the glass. A little method keeps the palate honest.

Taste on a schedule, not just on additions

Tasting only when you add something means always tasting an unmarried blend, the bottle at its most disjointed. Add a standing tasting, monthly or so, independent of pours. The scheduled glass is where you meet the blend as it actually is.

The side-by-side trick

Your palate has no memory worth trusting across weeks. Pour the blend next to one of its own components, or next to a benchmark bottle you know cold, and the blend's character snaps into focus by contrast. Half an ounce each is plenty. This is also the honest way to answer the recurring question "did that last addition help": blend versus your memory is a coin flip, blend versus a reference is data.

Rate it, crudely and always

A simple 1 to 5, recorded every tasting with the date and current proof, beats elaborate notes you stop writing after a month. Over a year those crude ratings become the most valuable data the bottle has: chart them against proof and composition and patterns appear. Maybe your scores peak in a proof band. Maybe they dip whenever wheated pours dominate. That is your palate, measured, and it will quietly improve your buying, not just your blending.

Words that earn their place

When you do write notes, note changes rather than everything: "rounder than last month," "the rye is finally showing," "hot, wants water." Deltas are useful; full tasting-wheel essays are homework. And stamp every note with the proof at the time, because a note about a 112 proof bottle describes a different drink than the 104 proof version of the same bottle six months later. Thief & Blend does that stamping automatically, which is the point: the app keeps the books so the tasting stays fun.