Bootleg Brew’s Ultimate Whisky Tasting Guide
We have consolidated the essence of our whisky wisdom page and created a video as the ultimate how-to guide to whisky tasting
Some key takeaways:
1. The Whisky Glass is AwesomeSauce for the Nose
The wine glass is ubiquitous with drinking wine but we are still relegating our favorite dram to the tumbler. It’s such a tragedy for a beverage that has such a fanatic following.
The whisky glass has a distinctive tulip shape that concentrates the nose, which is a large part of the whisky tasting experience. Nose is said to be up to 50% of the whole taste so large wide rimmed glasses would lose the whole flavor. Because of the high alcohol content of the whiskies, we can’t even stuff our nose in to compensate for the wide rim, as we do with wine. Try that once, and I’m quite sure you’ll never do that again (as I learnt the hard way).
2. Color provides important hints to what you are going to ingest
The whisky glass has a wide base that allows you to see the color with greater clarity. For convenience, we have included the color bar from Whisky Magazine so you have a clearer idea as to how to match the colors that we have described. However, this is a flat design so it will be a little hard to match directly to your drink in hand as it will have a spectrum/gradient of colors.
3. For the full experience, don’t dilute the whisky too much
In our younger days, we would immediately associate whisky with coke to get a highball as that was what we drank when we were out. Then, our world changed when we realised that whisky went well with green tea as a mixer. So, when we first started our single malt journey, our tendency was to dilute it down (especially for the peaty ones) to kill the burn.
However, with the whisky glass, there is limited real estate so we automatically dialed it down by quite a bit and found that the whole tasting changed. For us, the most distinctive change was in the finish. With a mixer, we never really could tell the difference in the finish — long, short, spicy, fruity etc — because the finish was whatever the mixer was!
