Taking notes

I like a 100% plain blank page. Sometimes, I have a little story to record about the bottle I'm capturing. Sometimes, I do the standard nose, palate, finish thing. Sometimes, I want to lay out comparison between bottles I'm trying head-to-head.

I need room to maneuver.

@cricklewood Personally, for any sort of formal tasting and scoring, Connosr is my "notebook". I have a blank template from which I write each review so I don't have to rewrite "taste", "with water", etc.... and then I add in the rest. But I don't keep them. I guess I'm relying on Connosr to be around forever... Maybe when I get a Mac desktop I'll do a pdf grab of each of my review pages (if that's ok with @jeanluc and @Pierre).

When I go to event or tastings (like meeting up with some connosrs, I just keep track of what I tried and any notes I can think to put down. As the event progresses there is less writing (and less easy to read....).

When I meet with my whisky club which seems to be about once a year now that many are out of town (or out to lunch) I record group nosing and tasting notes, and a score from each person, kindof like "minutes"

To get an idea of what I'm working with.

The left side is my old cut and paste notebook layout. The right is the new school one my daughter designed after criticising my work.

@MadSingleMalt I'm with you, I like a lot of room for note taking I rely less on the other stuff. A lot of the other members of our club mention how much they enjoy the ritual of the flavour wheel and meters and such, forces them to be consistent or to observe those things

@Nozinan ok so you don't conserve any of your written notes or journals avec entering them online? Do you use any templates or just blank notebook? I'm with you I find it hard to take lots of notes when at these events, more so after a few and we gab more than anything. I've tried taking notes with my phone but it ends up being a garbled mess of misspelling and autocorrect.

@cricklewood I type my notes onto this template, obviously modifying (as when I don't add water). Then I copy and paste to Connosr. The only time I saved it was when I was working on it for multiple days (my Canada 150 review). Once it's on Connosr I close and do not save.

For my whisky club here is a typical page of notes. We are all from a debating group so we take "minutes" but while we all enjoy Malts, the tastings are less about the product (though we do discuss) and more about getting together.

The book got wet once (probably whisky) and so you can see the words bleeding from opposite pages.

And this is a typical page from when I go to SOT or meet for Epric tastings with Connosr crew

My hand-written notes are in a cool leather-bound journal thing I got from a family member a few years ago. (In fact, he made himself—while in a 30-day inpatient rehab center. The irony is not lost on me.)

The big perk with that format is that I can easily leaf through it to skim my old notes and my silly little musings that I attached to each one, and I do that almost every time I crack it open to add a new one. I don't think I would do that nearly as often if Connosr or any other electronic medium was my "journal." The searchability would be nice, though.

@MadSingleMalt

Agreed. I prefer the notebook. Despite the doctor's handwriting and the illegibility that comes from consuming more and more, I find it the quickest way to find things.

My notebook didn't make it home from China right now I'm using Word until I get another whisk(e)y book.

I also have a spreadsheet for different whisky and correlation charts. I correlate scores with abv, distillery, style etc. For example, I'll have a bar graph with abv and score to see if I tend to score higher abv whisky higher than lower abv whisky or if I score peated whisky higher than sherried whisky etc.

@casualtorture , whisky stats? Fun!

So what's your average coefficient of drag forthwith standard-deviation peat relative to topwise cask-strength sherry?

@MadSingleMalt I'm not getting quite that into it. I rarely actually run a matrix because after I add everything after a review I have to run a new matrix. I'm not even sure which is higher right now but I would probably guess peated whisky is higher. I did notice a correlation between abv and scores. Generally higher abv is tied to higher scores. After enough samples of certain distilleries I even run averages on distillery scores kind of like on the website here.

I use my phone to take notes most of the time. I have three sections. Nose, Palate, finish. But I jump around a lot before feeling satisfied. I don't "finish" the nosing before moving on to Palate..