What Happens When Your Memory Gets Outpaced by Your Collection
Forty bottles in, you can still remember your first Ardbeg and what you thought of it. Eighty bottles in, you start confusing the Glenlivet 12 you had in Edinburgh last spring with the duty-free one from the airport in November. A hundred and twenty bottles in, you're buying duplicates because you can't remember whether you've tried the Nikka From The Barrel or you're thinking of the Miyagikyo. The collection is growing faster than the memory that's supposed to make it meaningful.
This template is what brings it back under control.
NCF and Colour Added: The Two Fields That Reveal Production Philosophy
Non-Chill Filtered (NCF) and Colour Added. Three-option fields — Yes, No, Don't Know — for each. These two data points together tell you more about a distillery's production philosophy than the marketing copy on the box will ever admit.
NCF means the whisky wasn't stripped of the long-chain fatty acids and esters that chill filtration removes to prevent the spirit from going hazy when cold or diluted. Those compounds carry flavour. A whisky bottled at natural colour without chill filtration is making a statement: the distillery is prioritising sensory integrity over visual consistency. When you filter your database by NCF: Yes and Colour Added: No and look at how those whiskies cluster by your ratings, you'll find a pattern. Most serious collectors do.
Colour added (E150a caramel colouring) is legal in Scotch whisky production and doesn't have to be disclosed on the label in most markets. It affects perception of richness and depth — the visual cue biases the tasting before the liquid hits your tongue. Tracking it lets you separate what you're actually tasting from what the appearance is suggesting you should taste.
Appearance, Nose, Palate, Finish: The Four-Stage Discipline
Four free-text fields that force you to slow down. Most people who buy interesting whisky don't actually taste it — they drink it. The difference matters.
Appearance grounds you in the specific colour and viscosity of what's in the glass: pale gold, deep amber, the viscous legs running down a cask-strength pour. Nose is where you spend the time before the first sip — the dominant aromatics, the secondary notes that emerge after a minute of rest and the addition of a few drops of water. Palate is what happens on the tongue: the initial sweetness or peat hit, the mid-palate development, the spice. Finish is duration and character — does it end abruptly with a dry rasp or does it trail off over ninety seconds through dried fruit and oak?
Writing all four, even briefly, creates a sensory memory that outlasts the evening. Three months later, when you encounter a similar profile in a blind tasting at a friend's place and it nags at you, you open the database and search your Nose notes for "heather and green apple" and find the match in forty seconds.
"Wanted to Try": The Wishlist That Actually Works
One boolean field. The same template manages both your tasted collection and your acquisition list — toggle "Wanted to try" to true on a whisky you read about and set it false once you've tasted it. Filter by true and you have your shopping list. Filter by false and sort by rating and you have your personal ranked catalogue.
The 7-point rating scale, the Region dropdown covering Highland to Japanese, the purchase price and vendor — all of it feeds a retrospective analysis that tells you which regions consistently deliver value at a given price point for your palate. It's the kind of data that makes you a better buyer, not just a more prolific one.