Whisky festivals are incredible. They are also built to destroy your palate by two in the afternoon. Here is how to walk out at five still tasting, still standing, and actually able to name the drams you loved.
Dramfly
3 mins read
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The usual story
You walk into a room with five hundred bottles of open whisky. Your eyes go wide. Excitement takes over. You hit every booth like it is the last day on earth. By two your tongue is numb. By four you are looking for a bench. By seven you cannot remember a single distillery.
Sound familiar. Whether you are at Spirit of Speyside, Fife Whisky Festival, or Feis Ile on Islay, the rules are the same.
Eat before you arrive
The mistake is turning up on an empty stomach or eating a piece of toast and calling it breakfast.
You need carbs and fats to slow alcohol absorption. A full Scottish breakfast. Pasta at lunch. A proper sandwich at a push. Anything substantial.
Alcohol on an empty stomach hits the bloodstream fast. Your palate goes numb, your judgement goes fuzzy, and by one in the afternoon you have wasted forty quid of samples.
Pro tip. Eat a heavy lunch before you walk in and once you are inside, you will be too busy tasting to stop.
Water between every dram
For every dram you taste, drink an equal amount of water.
Alcohol dehydrates your tongue and a dry tongue stops tasting flavour. By your fifth whisky you are tasting only booze instead of smoke and citrus.
Most festivals have water stations. Use them, aggressively, between every single tasting. A side benefits is that water slows you down, which is exactly what you want.
Spit, or at least dump
Wine tasters spit. Whisky tasters act like it is a war crime which is not.
Twenty samples at twenty five millilitres each is half a bottle. In two hours this is a drinking contest rather than a tasting session.
Taste the whisky and enjoy the palate and the finish. Then spit into the spittoon, or pour the rest into the dump jug if spitting isn't for you. You do not have to finish every glass because it was free.
Make a hit list before you go
I'll wander around and see what looks good.
In reality you might end up queueing twenty minutes for a distillery you don't even like while the rare cask strength release two booths over sells out.
Before you arrive, pick five must try distilleries from the exhibitor list. Hit them first while your palate is still fresh, roughly ten to twelve. Wander after that, when the stakes are lower.
Use Dramfly to log your drams and come back to them later. If you don't track it, you will forget half of them before lunch.
Reset your nose when it goes blind
After six peated whiskies in a row, your nose gives up. Everything starts tasting the same. That's olfactory fatigue, and the fix is simple.
Smell your own forearm or the back of your hand. Seriously. Your skin's natural scent acts as a neutral reset for your nose, the same way coffee beans work in perfume shops. Two or three sniffs, then back to the glass. You will smell it clearly again.
Log as you go, not at the end
You will forget eighty percent of what you taste within forty eight hours. That amazing smoky one from the corner booth, gone. That sherry bomb you loved, no idea what it was called.
Log on the spot. Snap a photo of the bottle. Tap a few flavour tags. Rate it. Dramfly is built for this exact moment, fifteen seconds of attention while you're three drams deep and your handwriting has already given up.
When you're shopping later, or telling friends what to try on the way home, you'll have the answer on your phone.
Pace, not race
Festivals aren't sprints. They are endurance events. Pace yourself. Hydrate. Spit. Plan. If you see us at the next one, we'll be the people holding Glencairns, sipping water, and logging in the app while everyone else queues for their fifteenth dram.
See you in the queue.
