The Invisible Craft of the Whisky Tasting

The how-to guides tell you to prepare the paperwork. The people who host tastings for a living put their effort somewhere else.

Sit down for a tasting at Bimber Distillery and you'll find six drams already poured and waiting on a wooden slate. That's it. No list of what's in them, no tasting notes, nothing to write on. Each whisky is only revealed as you work your way through.

Search online for how to host a whisky tasting and you'll be told to do almost the opposite. Print a tasting sheet. Tell people the line-up. Give them space for notes. Start light and finish with the peat. The advice is sensible, and almost all of it is written for someone pouring for friends at the kitchen table.

I've been to a couple of tastings myself. The best was a Dalmore evening a couple of years ago: five drams, building up to the Luminary No. 2. I'll be honest, it was the headline dram that got me through the door. But by the end of the night, the best bit hadn't been in a glass at all. It was the host, who talked us through all five. It left me wondering what it is that makes a professional tasting so much better than anything I could put together for a few friends.

So I went and asked the people who actually do this for a living: people who run tastings in distilleries, shops, festivals and hired rooms up and down the country. What they described looked very little like the guides.

The slow death of the tasting sheet

Tasting sheets, it turns out, rarely survive contact with an actual tasting. Richard Foster of Exploring Whisky tried them early on, and they ended up "covered in alcohol", then binned or abandoned on the table. These days his guests photograph the bottles instead, and the only thing he hands out is a pipette for adding water.

Some hosts put nothing in front of guests but the whisky itself, and talk guests through where each one is from and how it was matured. At Cooper King Distillery in Yorkshire, it's Glencairn glasses, the bottles themselves, and flight holders made from old cask staves. They look and smell the part, and (a practical bonus) they make clearing the table quicker.

Paper hasn't vanished, but its job has changed. Mike Stuart of the Inverurie Whisky Shop makes his own tasting mat, line-up and all, for every event, and other hosts hand out a running order or a menu to take home. What's gone is the sheet you're meant to fill in.

The phone has quietly taken over. Everyone already carries a camera, and a photo of the label records exactly what was in the glass (distillery, age, cask, the lot) without anyone writing a word. It doesn't get soaked, it doesn't get left behind, and it's still there weeks later when you're trying to remember what that brilliant third dram was. The hosts have clearly noticed. At Bimber, each bottle comes out as its dram is revealed, ready for photos, and other hosts actively encourage guests to snap away. As Greg Dillon of GreatDrams puts it, phones are "increasingly part of the experience rather than necessarily a distraction".

Keep them guessing

The online guides assume guests should know the line-up in advance. Several hosts deliberately keep it back.

At Bimber, the reveal is part of the show, with each whisky getting its own small moment. Elsewhere it's partly practical (some line-ups aren't settled until close to the day), but there's also a sense that the evening is simply better when people don't know too much. It isn't a blind tasting, mind. Ask, and you'll be told.

A shop takes a more pragmatic view. If a theme sells itself, there's no need to name the whiskies. If ticket sales need a nudge, naming them works. A port cask evening in Inverurie was slow to sell until the bottles were announced, at which point a few recognisable names reassured people they weren't signing up for something entirely unknown.

The running order

"Light to heavy" is the one rule everyone knows. Peat last, job done. The hosts I spoke to treat it as a starting point rather than the whole plan.

The real risk within a theme is everything blurring into one. A flight of port casks can easily become one long sweet note, so the aim, in Mike's words, is "discovering something different in every glass": refill casks to first-fill, for example. Other hosts build a narrative instead, like an English whisky flight that starts somewhere familiar and ends on something properly experimental, or one whisky from each Six Nations country (rugby fans, take note).

At a distillery, the order can show off the casks. When I spoke to Luke at Bimber, he explained that every flight starts with new make spirit and builds up through different cask styles, finishing on the heavier, richer, fuller-bodied whiskies. Light to heavy, yes, but with a point: by the end, guests have tasted exactly what each cask does to the spirit.

Before anyone arrives

Plenty of hosts don't own the room they work in. A pub's spare room on a weeknight is a common venue, so the glasses often travel with the host. Preparation means knowing what you're walking into, and agreeing the setup and timings with the venue well before anyone turns up.

Size matters too. Richard caps numbers at around 25 to 30, which is roughly one bottle's worth (a neat bit of maths). Go above that and the logistics get hard and the evening suffers. Bimber's groups run from two to twelve, and the smaller ones feel far more intimate.

And then there's the case against all this preparation. David Wood has spent nearly 35 years in the industry, including time as a distillery manager on the Hebridean islands, and that experience is the real showpiece of his tastings. At a masterclass he tends not to focus on each whisky; most of the time goes on the industry and what life is like at an island distillery. When he moved into running tastings, he used to over-plan and worry about the structure of the session. Eventually he gave it up, because you never really know your audience until you're in the room, and a tight plan only left less space for what he knows best. These days he barely prepares the whiskies at all, and his best sessions are the ones where a guest's question pulls out something he'd forgotten he knew.

Reading the room

Guests have more fun when they can see the host having fun. That's the rule Luke brought to Bimber from his days hosting in nightclubs, and it's hard to argue with. Through a talk of around 40 minutes he watches faces, and when attention starts to drift, in goes a joke. He's rewritten his script several times.

The bigger risk is talking too much. "They're not there to be lectured," as Richard puts it. So he introduces each dram for about five minutes, then stops and lets the tables talk while he wanders round asking what people think. A good question from one table gets shared with the whole room. Facts stay bite-sized and the stories do the heavy lifting, so people remember a whisky's story even if they didn't like the whisky. And all of it has to work for first-timers and people who might host their own tastings, in the same room, at the same time.

The seating plan

Seating is a quiet bit of craft. At the Inverurie Whisky Shop there are no set tables: guests are mixed onto bigger ones to get the conversation going. Plenty of people turn up on their own, and plenty leave having made friends, so a community of regulars has grown up around the shop. When lockdown pushed tastings online, Mike sent out tasting packs, and he's kept a small online group going ever since because he didn't want those regulars feeling forgotten. That's a nice touch.

Festivals take the same thinking and scale it up. Summerton, which runs festivals in St Albans and Lewes, designs each one around how it should feel and works the rest out from there. The decision that matters most is the ratio of stands to guests: small enough that people spend proper time at every stand, even though that's not the way to make the most money. Its founder, Dan Humphrey, describes Summerton as something close to a reunion that just happens to take place at a whisky event. Not a bad description of a good tasting, either.

What it's for

Ask what a tasting is for and the answer is rarely just the whisky. "I'm not selling whisky. I'm selling Scotland," says David, whose guests come for stories of island distilleries and life inside the industry. He can tell them candidly, too, because he isn't tied to any one brand.

At Cooper King, the tasting brings the founders' story to life, and it only really lands in the building. "People don't believe how small we are, and that our cask warehouse is three insulated shipping containers, until they see it for themselves!" says Zoe Rutherford. Like David, they aren't really selling the whisky so much as the people and the place behind it.

For a shop, it's about introducing people to whisky. For Luke, who came to it from behind a bar, it's explaining spirits the way he wishes someone had explained them to him, back when he knew how they tasted but not how they were made.

Coming back for the host

The online guides stop when the bottles are empty. For some hosts, so does the guests' interest: "Once they're out the door, they're out the door," as Luke puts it. Others hear about it for weeks afterwards, from guests trying to remember which whisky it was or where to buy it. Jonny Keirnan of Barrel & Bond has had guests get in touch a month later, about to buy their first bottle and asking what it was they tried. And plenty come back for the next one. Not for the notes, but for the host.

Sometimes from a long way off. David hosts in the United States every year, and one guest drove about 700 miles each way to an event because he owned a bottle with David's name on it. Seven hundred miles. Each way. The hard part with a loyal audience like that, David says, is finding new material, when the everyday details of his job are exactly what they find fascinating.

"The best sessions create a connection that lasts beyond the final dram," as Greg puts it. It's the same thing I found at that Dalmore tasting. The headline dram got me through the door, but the host was the best bit.

The craft nobody sees

None of this shows up on the night. A guest sees a slate and six glasses, or a host telling stories about the Hebrides, or a table of strangers who've somehow started chatting. What they don't see is the rewritten script, the five-minute rule, the seating plan, or the very deliberate decision not to plan at all.

The best tastings feel like a conversation that happened to have whisky in it. They feel that way because someone worked very hard to make it so. Next time you're at one, spare a thought for the host. And take a photo of the bottle.

With thanks to Luke Juranek (Bimber Distillery), Richard Foster (Exploring Whisky), Mike Stuart (Inverurie Whisky Shop), David Wood (Distilled Events), Dan Humphrey (Summerton Whisky Club), Zoe Rutherford (Cooper King Distillery), Greg Dillon (GreatDrams) and Jonny Keirnan (Barrel & Bond Whisky Tasting).