Memory is unreliable. You tasted something extraordinary three months ago at a friend's house — full ABV, non-chill filtered, deep Speyside profile with a finish that ran past a minute — and you can't recall the distillery. You know you liked it more than the Islay you brought. You wrote nothing down.
The whisky journal solves the documentation problem that every serious taster eventually hits: the collection grows, the tastings accumulate, and the comparative data you needed exists only in progressively unreliable recollection.
The Fields That Actually Separate Whiskies
%ABV and NCF together define the production decision that affects everything downstream. A cask-strength Speyside and a diluted supermarket blend occupy completely different sensory space — but without ABV on record, your notes about "heat on the palate" lose their reference point. NCF status (Yes / No / Don't know) captures whether what you're experiencing as mouthfeel is the spirit itself or the intervention of chill filtration. Over time, sorting your journal by NCF = Yes and rating ≥ 5 tells you whether you consistently prefer unfiltered expressions. Most people do. Most people discover this after the fact.
Colour added runs parallel. E150a addition narrows the appearance range artificially and can mask actual cask character. The three-state field — Yes, No, Don't know — is honest about the limits of publicly available distillery information. When you pull up every bottle with Colour added = No and Region = Islay, you're looking at your honest Islay experience without interference.
The Region list covers the full Scottish taxonomy plus Bourbon, Japanese, Irish, and International — which reflects how modern whisky collections actually look. A serious journal that only handles Scottish single malts misrepresents the current landscape. Filtering by Region = Japanese over a year of entries shows you whether you're actually building knowledge in that area or just buying the same three bottles repeatedly.
Nose, Palate, Finish — Structure Over Impressionism
The sensory fields — Appearance, Nose, Palate, Finish — are free text. That's correct. Structured checkboxes for flavor notes create false precision and push you toward the evaluator's vocabulary rather than your own. What matters is that each sensory phase gets its own field.
The Finish field specifically earns its separation. A whisky with a 45-second dry oak finish is a completely different animal from one with a 15-second sweet fade, even if the nose and palate are similar. Writing that distinction in a single Notes field means it disappears into narrative. A dedicated Finish field means you can read across twenty Speyside entries and identify which distilleries consistently deliver the lingering finish you actually prefer.
Notes is where context lives: the evening, the comparison dram, whether you were tasting blind.
The Wishlist Layer
Wanted to try is a boolean that converts the journal into a prospecting tool. When you're in a specialist retailer and you have thirty seconds to decide, filtering your database for Wanted to try = Yes gives you the short list immediately. Combined with Purchased from and Cost (which captures bottle size alongside price), the acquisition record over two years shows exactly what you've spent, where you've been buying, and whether your current stock matches your actual preferences or just reflects whatever was on sale.
A 7-point rating scale gives enough resolution to separate good from great without forcing false distinctions at the margins.