I Built a Thing

If you've spent any time exploring whisky seriously, you'll know the feeling. You're standing in a bottle shop, or browsing online, and you see a name that rings a bell. Did I try that? Did I like it? Was it the one with the smoky finish or the sherry bomb? You can't quite remember, and you wish you'd written it down somewhere.

I've been keeping notes on the whiskies I try for a while now — it's basically the whole premise of this site. But Whisky Centurion has always been about sharing those notes publicly, in the form of proper reviews. What it doesn't do is give me a quick, personal log of everything I've tried and everything I want to try. So I built one.

Whisky Diaries (whiskydiaries.com) launched in March, and it's been a quiet labour of love over the last few months. The idea is simple: a clean, personal space to track your whisky journey. You can log whiskies you've tried, give them a rating out of ten, add your own tasting notes, and build a wishlist of bottles you'd like to explore. There's a searchable database of whiskies to pull from, so you're not typing everything in from scratch.

There are already a few sites out there that do something similar, and I've tried most of them. The problem I kept running into was that they felt more like database software than something you'd actually enjoy using. Endless fields, cluttered interfaces, the aesthetic charm of a tax return. I don't want to stare at a spreadsheet when I'm thinking about whisky. The whole point of this hobby is to slow down and appreciate something — your tracking tool should feel the same way.

So that was the brief I set for myself: build something that actually looks good. Something that feels personal and unhurried. I'm genuinely proud of how it's turned out, and I hope that comes across when you use it.

One thing I was keen to do from the start was connect the two sites where possible. Any bottle that appears on both Whisky Diaries and Whisky Centurion will be linked, so if you log something in your diary and I've reviewed it here, you'll be able to jump straight across to the full write-up. It's a small touch, but it feels like the two sides of the same coin — the personal log and the deeper review sitting alongside each other.

Whisky Diaries is free to use and open to anyone. Whether you're just starting out and want somewhere to keep track of what you've tried, or you've been at this for years and need a wishlist you can actually trust yourself to check before buying another bottle you already own — it might be worth a look.

Head over to whiskydiaries.com and give it a try. I'd love to know what you think.