[UPDATED] Ratings and Scales

UPDATE: I've decided to catch up with the rest of the world and start using a 100 point scale. We probably will never rate anything below 30 points (because we're not planning on rating anything that doubles as an industrial floor cleaner) but the conversions to the old ratings will be easy enough.

• Bushmills Original - 50
• Jameson Original - 50
• Crown Royal - 50
• Crown Royal Special Reserve - 55
• Midleton 2007 - 85
• Bushmills 21 - 87

I think this works, considering I also placed Bushmills 1608 at an 88

Original Story:

The other night, Mike, Travis and I got together to do some serious tasting. Before we began we had four new bottles to open. We tasted Bushmills 10, Bushmills 21, Midleton 2007, The Balvenie Doublewood, and Scapa 14.

This is hard work. There are so many great flavors there to try and quantify, codify and categorize them is very difficult. But that is what we do and we try to do it well.

The main issue that we stumbled across was the issue of ratings. I initially thought that on a ten scale middle of the road hooch would warrant a 5. This is what you'd find in the well at most bars and what the "average" drinker would think of as whiskey. to me a 5 would be pedestrian and common.

The dilema that this creates is that everything we buy for ourselves and we want to talk about on this site will be above a 5 and we're going to run out of headroom there. I rated the Bushmills Original at a 7 with my original scale in mind because it's has to be 2 points better than pedestrian and common... right?

Well, after some heated debate we settled on a better foundation. By placing some benchmarks on the table, we worked through some scenarios and formulated a scale.

We put Jameson Whiskey (Baby James) at 5. This pulls down Crown Reserve and Bushmills Original to 5 and 5.25 respectively.

It also allows me to give Midleton 2007 an 8.5 and Bushmills 21 an 8.75 and not feel bad that they're not getting nines or better.

If plastic bottled, store branded, only available in a 1.75 liter bottle paint thinner can never get beyond a 1 or 2 and the pedestrian stuff stays around a 3 then I can pull down some of my common favorites.

Everyday "good" whiskey is in the four to five range and I can live with that.