The story behind My Whisky Pal

Every whisky lover knows the feeling. You're at a tasting, dram in hand, and something clicks — the smoke, the orchard-fruit sweetness, that unexpected hit of cocoa on the finish. You love it. And then the next pour arrives, and the one after that, and by the time you get home, all that's left is a hunch. Good? Great? You're not even sure which one it was.

That happened to me one too many times. So, I built My Whisky Pal — not as a company, but as a five-day passion project, because I wanted the tool to exist and nobody had built it yet.

The idea is simple: wherever you are — a tasting event, a whisky show, a friend's bar cart, a shelf at the shop — snap the label and My Whisky Pal tells you what you're looking at, and what people who've tasted it before you thought. But raw opinions from a hundred different reviewers, in a hundred different vocabularies, aren't much use on their own. So, I built the My Whisky Pal Whisky Tasting Framework: a standardized way of breaking down nose, taste, finish, aroma, and mouthfeel, so that "smoky" means the same thing whether it's describing an Islay malt or a bottle from Japan. With a little help from AI, every dram gets mapped onto that same structure — instantly.

Here's the part I care about most: it's your palate, not the internet's. Nobody tastes a whisky exactly the same way twice, let alone the same way as everyone else. So, every note the app suggests is just a starting point — you tune it to what you actually tasted, sip by sip, bottle by bottle. Over time, My Whisky Pal quietly learns your palate. It figures out not just what you rate highly, but the flavor profile hiding just beneath your obvious favorites — and it'll nudge you to take the leap on something new you're likely to love, even if you'd never have picked it off the shelf yourself.

And because whisky has always been a shared pleasure, My Whisky Pal isn't just about your own journal. Add your Pals, see what they're pouring, swap notes, and discover bottles through the people whose taste you trust.

The whisky world never sits still — new expressions arrive constantly, and no app could ever hope to keep pace one release at a time. That's why My Whisky Pal's Tasting Framework already covers roughly 1,000 of the world's best-known and best-loved expressions, drawn from distilleries and bottlers everywhere. But if what's in your glass is something rarer, that's no problem either: snap the label, and our AI works its magic, analyzing what's known about that dram and building you the same familiar tasting card on the spot.

Last, but certainly not least, I have to give credit where it's very much due.

As much as I love tasting and talking whisky with my Pals, one of them shaped this app more than anyone: Ozer Feyzioglu. He's the mind behind the deeper research into tasting frameworks, the language we use to describe whisky, its flavor families, and the very idea of separating mouthfeel from taste with real precision. My Whisky Pal simply wouldn't exist without him.

All in all, this journey started as a way to stop forgetting the drams I loved. It's grown into something bigger — I hope it helps you enjoy, remember, and discover a lot more of them too.

Slainte!

Sinan