Single
Malt Scotch Tasters of
About Us Home
In January of 2000, Bruce Douglas and Paul Lenz established the founding chapter of the "Single Malt Scotch Tasters Of Reno" (SMSToR) club with 6 members, which has now grown to 10 members due to popular demand. The club meets once a month to taste a fine single malt scotch whisky and develop the tasting notes for the whisky of the month. We taste a single whisky per evening as we both want to assess and drink the whisky. We are, of course, amateurs and the way we produce the tasting notes for a whisky is to get everyone's impression of the color, nose, flavor, finish, and summary comment for the whisky. These individual impressions are them summarized into a single "Tasting Notes". Repeated individual impressions of the group are given the most prominence in the summary, and while we know that we are amateurs, we feel that the collectively produced "Tasting Notes" representing the 10 palates of the group give a good result. We feel that our collective palate is more discriminating than any individual's within our group.
For the last meeting of the year in December, we create a special meeting with a bottle of a rare old single malt whisky and great food. Our regular monthly meetings shift around to different members homes. The host member provides the venue and the snacks for the evening. On some evenings a volunteer club member provides a "Mystery Dram". This mystery dram is tasted blind with the members present trying to guess its identity.