What Do You Look For In A Whiskey Review?

In four months, Bourbon & Banter will celebrate our 5th anniversary. Since launching in February 2011, we’ve drunk a lot of bourbon, made a ton of new friends and learned more than a few things about what makes a blog something people want to read day-after-day. But we’re not close to being done.

There’s a ton of whiskey out there that needs to be drunk, friends yet to be discovered and more ways to make our blog even more enjoyable and valuable to our readers. It’s this last point, improving the blog, that we’re writing about today. More specifically, we’re looking to improve how we conduct whiskey reviews and present our opinion on the blog. And we’re hoping you’ll be willing to help us out.

It should come as no surprise that opinions regarding the value of whiskey reviews, and what they should include, vary widely based on who you talk to. Recently, Mike Veach wrote a blog post on the topic, calling out bourbon rating systems as “bull crap.” Even Sku got in on the action with his tongue in cheek post on how tasting notes change through the years.

Since opinions regarding the value, and preferred format, of whiskey reviews, vary widely, we’ve decided to do an official survey to help identify what whiskey drinkers want from websites that post reviews.

UPDATE 11/15/16: The survey has closed and we’re not accepting any new submissions. Once we review the results we’ll share a new post with a few of our findings and we will work to incorporate your feedback into our reviews in 2017. Thank you.