Our cask sample surveys consist of 4 parts:
- the suggestion question for what to do with the cask
- rating the key elements to know how you experience the sample
- the colour (optional)
- the flavours profile (optional)
The suggestion question
This is in essence the most important question and it comes in several flavours depending on where we are with the cask.
- One for young(er) casks (mostly up to 5 years of maturation) which still have some years to go, this way we can become familiar with them.
- One for first time (that we taste them) casks which still have some years to go, this way we can become familiar with them. These casks can already be maturing for some years.
The basic idea for these two flavours is to see if these casks start to develop into a direction we want them to develop, or not and thus that we need to do something with them. - One for older casks which we already know and for which an suggestion / advice is needed. The answer categories may vary here with regards to the suggested time frames for additional maturation.
- And, one for casks we consider ready for bottling and for which we seek the consent of the participants.
We intend to use this type only in rare cases.
The other option
Most of the flavours come with an other option. The other option is intended to suggest an alternative option (e.g. time or cask wise) to those available in the survey.
So hereby also a request: do not use the other option to share your tasting notes with us, those can be posted as comment in the cask topic on the casQ forum.
Besides – by adding your (more detailed) tasting notes to the relevant cask topic you can make an actual selection in the survey and it also helps us to process the survey data more swiftly.
Rating the elements
The ratings for the elements nose, taste, finish, and balance are a scaled rating (poor – fair – good – very good – excellent).
These ratings are mandatory as this feedback provides us with a basic understanding of the perceived experience of the different elements and therefore helps to (further) understand your answer and tasting notes. You can also select a value in between the labels to make your feedback more subtle.
The colour (optional)
Although colour doesn’t have a relation with the quality of a whisky, quite a few like to register the colour as well.
For us it will be interesting to see how the colour is rated every time we taste a cask sample, compared to the bottled end product.
To make it a bit more practical we’ve reduced the number of colours on the colour bar from Whisky Magazine so there is bit more difference between the colour in the bar as most home printers aren’t able to print the small changes in colour anyway.
The flavour profile (optional)
The flavours someone picks up are influenced by the recollection of flavours one has experienced throughout his / her life. That results in sometimes really surprising and fun to read tasting notes but it also makes it sometimes harder to compare tasting notes.
So we decided that it profiling flavours of the cask sample can be helpful, especially in combination with tasting notes, as it introduces a more or less universal language with regards to flavours.
We’ve decided to go for the Flavour Wheel of the Scotch Whisky Research Institute since it’s pretty much the Scotch whisky industry standard.
We ask for the tags of the inner circle and to make it comparable we introduced the following scale: not detactable – very faint – mild – moderate – strong – very strong / dominant. From very faint onwards, you can also select a value in between the labels to make your feedback more subtle.
casQueteers tasting toolkit
For the colour and flavour profile we’ve created a tasting toolkit which you can download. It also comes with a template so you can do your tastings relaxed offline after which you can submit your feedback to us through the online survey and the cask topic on the casQ forum.