Sixteen characters, grouped by where they come from.
Not by style, not by region, and not by how a whisky is marketed — by the stage of production that produces the compound. A guest sets points on this compass; every bottle in the catalogue is described on the same sixteen.
The four quadrants
Field, still, cask, shore
The quadrant is a grouping for people reading the compass. It carries no weight in the matching — the geometry treats all sixteen characters alike.
A point says what a flavour is. Distance from the centre alone says how much.
Field
The raw material
What the grain brings before anything is done to it. Barley, its malting, and the cereal and green notes that survive fermentation — the character of the raw material rather than of any process applied to it.
- Cereal & BiscuitMalt Loaf · Biscuit · Porridge · Rye Bread · Cornmaltol, furfural, Maillard products of kilning and mashing
- Green & GrassyCut Grass · Hay · Green Apple Skin · Leafygreen-leaf aldehydes (hexanal family)
Still
The house character
What fermentation and distillation make. Esters and higher alcohols formed in the washback and shaped by the cut, the still’s geometry and the speed it is run at. This is where a distillery’s house character is decided.
- Orchard FruitApple · Pear · Plum · Apricotethyl esters of fermentation (ethyl hexanoate and kin)
- Tropical & CitrusBanana · Pineapple · Mango · Lemon Zestisoamyl acetate, shorter-chain esters, citrus terpenes
- Floral & HoneyedHeather Honey · Rose · Elderflower · Beeswax2-phenylethanol, beta-damascenone; wax esters
- Buttery & CreamyButter · Cream · Custard · Fudgediacetyl and related vicinal diketones
- Meaty & SulphuryStruck Match · Broth · Cooked Meat · Gunpowdersulphur volatiles (DMS/DMTS family)
Cask
The years in wood
What the wood gives and takes over years. Compounds drawn out of oak, out of whatever the cask held before, and out of the char — plus the harsher notes the wood removes. The longest-acting influence, and the most declarable.
- Vanilla & CoconutVanilla · Coconut · Toasted-Oak Sweetnessvanillin and cis-oak lactone from American oak
- Baking SpiceCinnamon · Clove · Nutmeg · Gingereugenol and spice phenolics from toasted oak
- Pepper & TanninBlack Pepper · Oak Tannin · Black Tea · Rye Pepperellagitannins and dry oak extractives
- Dried Fruit & WalnutRaisin · Fig · Date · Walnutoxidative wine-cask residues; sotolon-type oxidation notes
- Treacle & RoastToffee · Treacle · Coffee · Dark Chocolate · Charcaramelisation and heavy-char Maillard products
- Leather & Polished OakOld Leather · Tobacco · Waxed Wood · Dried Herbslong-maturation oxidation and wood-extractive complexity
Shore
The place it sat
Smoke and the sea. Peat phenols carried through malting, and the maritime character of coastal maturation. Set apart from the other three because its compounds are distinct and it is the most immediately recognisable of the four origins.
- WoodsmokeBonfire · Ash · Smoked Meat · Embersguaiacol and syringol — aromatic-smoke phenolics
- Tar & IodineTar · Iodine · Antiseptic · Creosote · Kippersphenol and cresols — medicinal phenolics
- Brine & ShorelineSea Salt · Seaweed · Oyster Shell · Wet Stonemaritime maturation character and saline perception
Where this came from
Original work
The compass is our own, built from the sensory-science literature on what whisky is actually made of — which compounds arise at which stage of production, and which of them a person can reliably tell apart. The grouping into four origins follows that chemistry rather than any convention of how whisky is usually described.
The taxonomy on this page is published in full. The calibration that turns evidence into a score is Lactone Labs’ intellectual property: the band thresholds and the percentage transform, the penalty weights, the source-quality weights that decide how far any one piece of evidence carries, the matchability threshold, the phenol bands and cask fingerprints, the merge constants governing corroboration, consensus and drift, the confidence ceilings, and the descriptor lexicon beneath the sixteen.
How the matching works →