What Honestly Constitutes Quality

I look for craft presentation. I now rarely buy anything under 46%, though occasionally a 43 might be ok. Cask strength is my preferred strength.

It's simple, but most people ( including Ralfy, in my opinion) either get it wrong or explain it wrong. The idea that " more alcohol, more flavour " does NOT imply that the alcohol itself adds to the flavour. Although the alcohol does have an effect on taste to some extent, it is more a matter of dilution.

At cask strength you get the full flavour. Add water and you dilute on the flavour.

So in fact a cask strength 40 year scotch at 43.3% (for example) might taste river than a 10 year old diluted to 46% from a cask strength of 60%.

some whiskies can taste good at a reduced alcohol volume. But I have found the lower you go the lower the intrinsic quality.

I do believe non- chill filtered whiskies have a nicer mouth feel. I can't say I can notice if caramel colouring has a negative effect on taste but why bother?

I also must admit that while I do like sherry and port matured spirits, I am not at a point where I can tell a first fill from a refill cask...

Thank you for your reply! very helpful. I have thought about the actual Alc. % being a factor in quality. What scotch and/or bourbon do you keep on the shelf brother? @Nozinan

@scotchguy74 I don't drink enough to get into ryes or bourbons. Because of that I tend to focus on quality rather than " every day" drams. I have 1-2 (20 cc) drams every week or so. The cabinet contains a number of bottles opened with the Whisky club, but the ones. Like best and will drink from are:

A'Bunadh , Bladnoch (10 and 11 year 55% from Raymond Armstrong's ownership, Amrut Fusion, Portonova and ( my favourite) intermediate sherry, Bruichladdich ( laddie classic and " peat " ), Peat Monster

I have also enjoyed Ardbeg 10, lagavulin 16, highland park 12.

I really enjoyed. Octomore 4.1, and I am still surprised that the guy at CSN wines in Calgary offered (unasked) me a sample of it for free...

Hope this helps

Beauty or Power,...most preferred is both together.

Great question @scotchguy74. Personally I have never put a great deal of importance on the ABV% when making purchases. I have had some wonderful whiskies at 60% and wonderful whiskies at 40% ABV.

I will say that I automatically assume a whisky to be higher in quality if it is non-chill filtered and especially natural colour. If there is no colorant added it tells me the distillery is confident in the quality of the whisky. I also equate quality with unique or distinct flavor profiles. I think this is one reason why I'm such a big fan of Bunnahabhain. Their whiskies really have a profile that is unlike anything else out there. I may not always like a particular whisky's uniqueness but I appreciate the inherent quality it has.

Mostly, I look for what I want to add to my long term cabinet - A large selection of favorite whiskies, new candidates for the shelf, and special purchases.

My whisky cabinet is 8 - 12 open bottles, replacements, and about a half dozen display bottles - special check it out stuff.

When purchasing a whisky, I generally look for:

A favorite whisky with a better than usual price.

An older bottle of a favored whisky.

An untried whisky with lots of favorable reviews.

A "legendary" whisky that I can afford.

Kudos for NOT asking an easy question!

Is Rolls Royce quality? Or is Cadillac? BMW? Benz? Is quality in the "eye of the beholder" based on ability to pay for the perceived "quality."?

If you wouldn't buy the latest Macallan in its Lalique bottle, does that necessarily mean the whisky is "quality" to you?

The best example I can offer regards Glen Grant 60 year old Queen's Diamond Jubilee ( bottled by Gordon & MacPhail) and a Kilchoman 5 yo single cask offered by Anthony Wills at a Master Class at the Victoria Whisky Festival. The Glen Grant earned equal ranking with the second best whiskies I've ever tasted. The 5-year-old Kilchoman is the best whisky I've ever tasted. So what constitutes quality?

Gee, I'm absolutely stumped. I'm sure it's a personal thing.

Great question. I think it'd be too easy to look at this purely from a qualitative angle, as that lives in the personal experience and is always going to differ. As a community then, if we wanted to AGREE on what makes a quality whisk(e)y, it'd have to be specified in objective, quantitative (measurable) terms.

In the IT / Engineering disciplines we have ISO / IEEE standards (and others) around quality - essentially where by industry agreement, over many iterations, draft proposals (RFCs) become "standards" by which the industry adheres (whether by choice, or mandated by a term of contract etc).

This sort of thing appears in pretty much any engineering or manufacturing discipline.

Of course the quality requirements in engineering disciplines are great (we don't just build a skyscraper on a whim, or a passenger plane) - every minute detail must be accounted for so we know the end product will fulfill its designed intention.

Whisk(e)y of course has no stringent quality requirements. Of course, we all would prefer to drink a quality whisk(e)y, whatever that is.. but along the same lines, there would need to be an objective baseline by which we can actually put the whisk(e)y to scrutiny and assess its level of quality.

Usually a set of intrinsic properties and quality "levels" would be formulated and iteratively refined until a useful set of measures were created. I don't know what these things might be, but for argument's sake, they could be things like - wood provenance, whisky production record (for a distillery), average whisky score (a contentious one for sure, if it's even possible to come up with a reliable industry standard rating scheme), chill filtration technique, percent of E150 added, specific gravity (I don't know - maybe some scientific measure of "mouthfeel").. you get the picture. All of these things would be written in such a way as to be quantifiable and unambiguous. You would ultimately end up with a "score" e.g. "Very Good" a whisk(e)y which rates 70% or better in X of Y quality categories or "Excellent" which rates over 90% in all quality categories.

Would any of this be useful? I don't know. Probably not. Could it be? Yeah sure, some of it might. Would such a quality rating have any bearing on whether the whisk(e)y tastes any good? Of course not!

I personally tend to look for whiskies that I've never had before when purchasing a whisky. For me variety is the spice of life and other then a few old favorites I rarely purchase the same bottle twice and I often, to a degree, buy blind.

However I tend to judge upcoming whisky purchases against other whiskies that I've tried from the distillery before, what's the track record for quality? Buffalo Trace or Talisker for me tend to be very easy choices for me to make, Glenlivet or Glenfiddich, not so much.

I will be honest though and state that I am a snob. I do look at abv. I want cask strength, it can be a lower cask strength say due to age, but I WANT cask strength. Not that I haven't enjoyed many a whisky that's been watered down, but since I'll oftentimes throw down a couple hundred bucks on a bottle, I want to be sure I'm getting maximum bang for buck. I also won't usually pick up chill filtered whiskies, I again tend to rate distilleries that don't chill filter higher then those that do. And last is caramel coloring, E150. If it's added I tend to shy away.

All that being said I am a huge Talisker fan which is amusing considering that they rarely bottle as cask strength, they chill filter and they add E150 :D

@systemdown That's the engineering/scientific point of view. I would guess you are an engineer. Me too. And I quite often read online postings which are similar. This might be due to the fact that there are lots of engineers out there. Not a bad thing at all.

But for whisky I tend to have a different understanding/approach. I try not to analyse everything, for me whisky is rather 'feeling' and 'emotions' than pure statistics. In a big German whisky-forum I have seen ridiculous 'exact' analyses but I guess this is a German phenomenon too.

I like to listen to the experienced guys but ofc not only to one person. Every taste is different, we all know. Besides that the history and the true craftsmanship, old distillery stories, small family businesses or rare/unique independent bottlers are quite attractive. And I am with @SquidgyAsh that I like to explore the 'whole' range of whisky (I like the term World Whisky) and very different flavors. There are no standards in my cabinet but that may change in the future.

@SquidgyAsh The last sentence made your whole post really good :)

You can't measure quality for whisky. Old bottles are best? Maybe too oaky, lets say medium old? 20 years? 25? And Blends are inferior? Some decades ago they weren't at all. You get what I am saying :D

For me - it rends to boil down to what ya like...

For example...Most here think the Ardbeg Uigeadail is 1 of the best - most complex - single malts out there...I went, and bought 3 bottles based on reviews.....Honestly - I find the "Uigie" to be "ok", but that's just me...Maybe I had 1 "off" bottle?

@Wills Yes, guilty - I'm an engineer. Posted the engineering idea of quality to shine some light on the idea of quantification of quality. I don't usually try to over-analyse whisk(e)y. At the end of the day, I either like something, or I don't (or I'm on the fence).

I know that my idea of quality whisk(e)y is personal and wholly subjective because my senses (different to everyone else's) are involved.

The last statement in my post RE: taking an engineering approach to defining whisk(e)y quality was "Would any of this be useful? I don't know. Probably not."

However, some common themes DO come up in discussion around quantifiable things we all seem to agree that might make up a "quality" whisk(e)y - e.g. non chill filtration, cask strength, no added colour (although as @SquidgyAsh rightly points out, some distilleries use less e150 than others and/or their whisk(e)y is not easily affected by it so this probably isn't as cut and dry) - in other words, measurable attributes that constitute "craft presentation". This alone could, in theory, form the start of some kind of whisk(e)y quality checklist if one were taking an engineering approach.

Disclaimer (as posted previously): "Would such a quality rating have any bearing on whether the whisk(e)y tastes any good? Of course not!"

I'm trying to simplify it while risking oversimplification. Whiskey that one personally finds the quality to exceed the expected quality based on the price is the ratio of quality to price. On the other hand regardless of price the quality of whiskey is based solely on how much enjoyment one can obtain from the specific dram.

@systemdown Yes and I haven't seen this over-analyse here.

For the caramel e.g. I do think the same, color-adding isn't a good thing and is inferior to drams which are excluding E150. But the reason for this isn't the taste because I think I (and many, maybe even all others) won't notice if there is no E150 added, just some or a good potion of that color. The point for the worse quality is that I don't like it on an emotional rank: Why are they adding this? It isn't useful for the aroma, maybe just for the marketing. It is just unnatural...

@Wills, I think that some of the use of E150 is to achieve a standardized coloring. Most spirits companies are selling to a mass market rather than a relatively small group of aficionados. Consumers like consistency. If they see the same expression from a distillery, but the colors are a bit off, they are less confident in the consistency of the taste because they think that there's a mistake or a "problem" behind the color difference rather than subtle variation due to mixing organic components. It also helps to set expectations. For instance, a family member who doesn't drink spirits much/often recently told me that he knew that one cognac would be lighter and "easier" than another because it was lighter colored. He was referring to different very young blends from a single cognac house, and both probably had the same amount of wood (in terms of age), but the color of the spirit set the expectations. I mean, heck, even of the whisky geeks, people still debate whether the Springbank 12/100 US release has two releases or one: the single-dark and the double-dark. Some people swear that there's no difference, others say that the double-dark has slightly more age and sherry influence.

@numen Springbank claims to not use caramel, so if there are bottles with different colors they are likely different batches. However, the blenders would probably try to match the flavours of the batches by using various casks so it makes sense that many people would taste no difference and others might notice subtle differences, just as some people notice differences in flavour between A'Bunadh batches more than others.

@Nozinan, I wasn't saying or trying to suggest that Springbank does use additives for color. I mean that -- whisky geeks are big into the Springbank 12/100 (as an example), but there's debate among aficionados about whether there were multiple batches do to variance in color. Had Springbank used additives for coloring, that is far less likely to be the case.

Whisky geeks have this debate over a well-known release. The average consumer, who doesn't spend hours reading blogs and reading about various bottles and releases, may be put off by that sort of batch variation or differences in color between bottles. It's similar to why some distilleries chill-filter their whiskies, so that when it's cold, there's no clouding such that people worry about bad whisky. The use of a coloring additive allows the distillery to exert greater control on the consistency of the color, which I'd bet improves confidence in the average consumer that they know what they're getting, the bottle will meet their expectations.

It's getting to the point where I can make my own vattings that are better than most scotches I buy in Oregon for half again more money.

The way to make a good smokey peaty vatting is simple: pick a baseline scotch you like that is neutral. It should be no more than $45 at the most. (my favorite at the moment is a mere $30) Make this one over half of the quarters of the mix, or even three quarters depending upon your own personal taste and how peaty/smokey you want the blend. Then put in high quality peaty scotch that already has a mixture of peat and sweet (sherry). If you would like some edge to your vatting, then put in a bit of something rougher with even more peaty character. Keep this last admixture to a minimum. I suggest the last two scotches in the mix be as close to cask strength as possible. Add a splash of water if necessary. This method is fool proof in my estimation. Quality is fairly subjective. I will say this: producing a high quality vatting is easier than most people think.

Either that, or I have a talent for it. It's hard for me to say. Several of my friends have raved about my vattings and some have asked me to make them some bottles at their cost. I have made quite a few for them. It's starting to get tiresome. I think I'm done doing that. When I have made a friend a vatting, I gauge what I blend upon their own unique taste preferences and not my own. This, together my with fool proof formula, has proved successful.

As for mixing sweet scotches with each other, well, that's much harder and requires a very fine touch and palette. Sweets tend to fight each other more. My formula in a nutshell: one fairly inexpensive sweet; one peaty smokey that already has a sweet mixed into it from the distiller and is not a "blend" but is being sold as a single malt (even though it's really not); and a dash of a really strong extra peaty smokey with a lot of character.

Well, as for the vattings I've made for others, I've always used the same inexpensive base rate scotch: a nine year Glenfarclas. The rest has varied by my friends' tastes and not my own. The 9 year Farc is quite well suited as a baseline scotch for a smoky peating vatting that can be strong or milder depending upon the way it is blended and what is blended and how much of the extra character wild card is added.

@CanadianNinja Very nice! Makes a lot of sense to me. I have become partial to the W.L. Weller Bourbon and the MacPhail Select Scotch. I have only been able to try the 10 year MacPhail because it is only sold in the UK and one damn store somewhere in Connecticut? You Englishmen need to stop being so stingy with the scotch!..ahahaha!