At Gillies Club tastings, each member has a form to fill in for each malt, and, as well as details of the malt, there are spaces for filling in such things as nose, malt, spirit, wood, peat, finish, and, finally, "Final opinion of this malt". This latter is the only note that we keep, and, as this note can often be libellous, they aren't all included in these tasting notes. We have seen the colour of malts being adjusted in the distilleries, so we don't reckon that colour has much relevance. On and off over the years we have included "balance", but we haven't done so for some years now, as members seem to think that it isn't very important. For instance, 105 proof Glenfarclas would score no points for balance because of the very high spirit content, yet what a very fine malt it is.
The various branches of the Club have different criteria regarding the points allotted to each malt. The Parent branch very rarely gives any malt anything over 8 points, whereas other branches regularly give a malt points in the high 9's. In these tasting notes, I have given the Parent branch points, unless the malt hasn't been tasted by us, in which case I have given the points allotted by another branch.. In many cases we don't know what either the age or strength of the malt was, and, in some cases we have had to give the year of distilling, as we didn't know the year of bottling. Equally, we frequently don't know who the bottler was, but the bottler may sometimes appear in the "Comments" section.