The Art of Blind Tasting It’s Champs month, so we take a closer look at using your senses and the art of tasting whisky blind.
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s soon as you mention tasting whisky blind, without any prior knowledge of what’s in your glass, there are generally only three responses you get: (a) I love doing that, (b) I’ve never done that, or (c) I hate doing it because I like to know what I’m tasting and/or I feel intimidated by getting it wrong. That third response is the one I hear the most. People afraid / fearful of tasting whisky blind out of a misplaced perception that they will be judged as having a poor palate, or that their senses aren’t as sharp as they could be. Let’s talk about flavour and sensory analysis for a moment here.
Tom Rofe, TAS Manager
One of the reasons people are sometimes fearful of blind tasting whisky is because they’ve read about or have been personally burned too many times by tricks and tactics played by those serving the whisky. First comes the trust you place in someone putting a foreign spirit in your glass and expecting you to taste it. What could it be? I hope it’s whisky? What if I say the “wrong” tasting note? What if I say nothing at all? The second reason people fear these experiments sometimes is because nobody likes to be fooled, unless they’re sitting at a Penn & Teller show.
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