How Hidden Cask scores
Five clear choices. More meaning behind them.
Hidden Cask replaces the conventional 100-point whisky input with an anchored 1–5 choice, then preserves nuance through tasting notes, blind conditions, palate-led weighting and results gathered across players and games.
Why not 100 points?
A social tasting needs a decision, not a decimal debate.
During product development, the Hidden Cask team tried a 100-point input approach. In that setting it felt too granular and demanding for the average social blind-tasting player: deciding whether a sample was, say, an 82 or an 84 created false precision, took longer and interrupted the flow of the game.
Five named choices ask a clearer question. An anchored label gives each number a shared starting point, so players can decide more quickly and use the scale more consistently from bottle to bottle. That makes it well suited to comparative blind tasting without making the judgement simplistic.
Simple input, nuanced record
The number is only one part of the tasting.
Blind conditions
Labels, reputation and price stay out of view until the reveal, helping the liquid lead the judgement.
Nose and palate
Players score aroma first and taste separately, rather than compressing the whole experience into one loosely defined number.
Descriptors and notes
Tasting descriptors, optional observations and guesses preserve detail that no numerical scale can carry on its own.
More than one opinion
Group results combine every player’s choices, and repeat bottle appearances can build a broader community view over time.
The specialist weighting
Palate leads. Nose still matters.
Hidden Cask totals the group’s nose scores and palate scores separately. The final game score gives 70% of the weight to palate and 30% to nose:
final score=(nose total × 0.30)+(palate total × 0.70)
This is the calculation used to order bottles in a game. It deliberately gives the tasting experience more influence while keeping aroma as a meaningful part of the result. If final scores are equal, bottles share the same competition rank; palate and then nose totals provide a stable display order.
From one table to the community
A bottle earns its place across games.
Complete a valid game
Only finished, non-voided games enter the community ranking calculation.
Create one bottle appearance
The players’ average palate and nose scores are combined with the same 70/30 weighting. Historic higher-scale games are normalised to the 1–5 scale.
Average repeat appearances
When the same bottle appears in multiple games, each appearance contributes to its displayed community score.
Temper early rankings
Ranking position adjusts a small sample towards the relevant overall or whisky-category average. As appearances accumulate, the bottle’s own results carry more of the position.
The displayed community score is the bottle’s cross-game average. Ranking position also considers how much game evidence sits behind it, so one exceptional night does not immediately carry the same weight as a result repeated across many games.
A fairer community reading
Consistency first, certainty never claimed.
A shared set of anchors, separate nose and palate judgements, blind conditions and equal treatment of completed bottle appearances can produce a more representative community reading than simply averaging 100-point scores that different people may interpret very differently.
That does not turn taste into laboratory fact. Palates, settings and bottles vary, and every score remains a human opinion. Aggregation helps individual preferences and unusual nights sit within a wider record; it does not erase subjectivity or claim scientific proof.
Different questions, different scales
A Hidden Cask score is not a critic’s score divided by twenty.
Professional critics and competitions use their own criteria, calibration and conditions. Hidden Cask records how social players respond comparatively in a particular blind game, then brings those game appearances together. A 4 out of 5 here is not directly interchangeable with 80 out of 100 elsewhere—and neither is presented as a correction of the other.