Edit: For the 2012 tasting tracker, try here: www.wf2012.co.uk

I’ve always found keeping track of which drams I’d tried at the Whisky Fringe troublesome, juggling the pen, paper and tasting glass proving too much for my booze-addled senses come hour four. In a spare evening I threw together a quick site to track what I and a couple of friends had tasted over the course of the day.

The requirements were pretty simple:

• List the whiskies available alphabetically (rather than by distillery as they are presented in the on-the-day guide booklet)
• Let me track which ones I’ve tasted, particularly liked and particularly disliked
• Work from my phone
• After the event let me list only those whiskies that I liked or disliked

On a Linux host and with little time to learn anything new for the cause, the solution is a very simple PHP site backed by a MySql database and a flat list of whiskies to be tried. On the day it worked great, albeit with only a few people using it, and we came up with a few ideas to make it an actual thing for next year.

Given that the time that an opinion was expressed was also recorded, it even allowed some rudimentary statistics to be calculated, which largely showed that we got a bit excited near the start and a bit desperate near the end.