Introduction
Over the last few years I’ve gotten more into Scotch (whiskey) thanks to my dad. He would have me believe he’s been drinking it since he was a teenager, although I don’t know if that was true or if the Scotch he drank as a teenager was any good. While I don’t know when he started drinking, but I do remember when I first started going to scotch tassting events with him.
For the last few years, he and I have attended one event called the Scottish Craftsmen’s Association Whiskey Experience. Hosted in the Port Dalhousie Lion’s Club, it’s held each year in April. One of the more interesting parts of the night (beyond the drinking and socialization) is the scoring of the whiskey.
Each year the event includes 5 whiskeys that everyne in attendence tastes. At the end of the night everyone gives each whiskey a score from 1 to 10. The whiskies are then ordered by average score and given a ranking of 5 to 1 thistles. The rankings are shared at next year’s event in the form of a placemat. The placemat from this year is shown below.
Two days after the event, I’m inspired to see if there any patterns in how the whiskies have been ranked over the years. This is what this blog post is about, exploring data on whiskey.
Extract
For anyone interested in the data extraction and cleaning, check out the notebook link on the right side of the page.
Analysis
First, the highest ranked regiion was found to be Speyside. From my understanding Speyside whiskey is characterized as being more fruity, and likely an easier starting point for anyone getting into Scotch. Interestingly, a Campbeltown whiskey only appeared once at the event at last place in its year. Islay also appears low in the rankings, where unlike Campeltown it has appeared in many years of the event.
Next point of interest to look at is which distillery has the highest ranking. For this context I’ll say the highest ranking is the distillery with the most stars in total. I think this makes more sense as there are many distilleries that have only appeared once at the event. The highest ranking distillery is Macallan, which appeared in 7 years of the event. I was happy to see Highland Park at number 2 in the top 5 distilleries.
Conclusion
And that’s it. Maybe I’ll come back to this data each year as we get new rankings for the event. Maybe there are other things we can learn this as we go.