Blind tastings are a lot of fun – people get to try whisky without the intrusive knowledge of where it came from. No labels or history to colour our expectations. The main problem with hosting a blind tasting is that I can’t play along too – I know all of the information, I just don’t share it upfront, so my preconceptions are still involved when I’m tasting. To get around this, I can organise a double blind tasting, where I also don’t know what we’re drinking. In Cambridge at Thirsty, we’ve done this twice in flight form: I provided the team with a shortlist per slot in the flight, and they make the ultimate decisions. The plan for bringing a double blind tasting to Ely is a little different.

The Thompson Bros. know good whisky, and know how to get good whisky; we’ve had a few of their bottles at the events I’ve hosted so far at The Yard, and they’ve been well received. Aside from their independent releases and gold-dust rare Dornoch Distillery releases, they have also got a range of blind bottlings. Now into its 6th edition, their Mystery Malt series presents buyers with a bottle of whisky (or in our case, 6) entirely devoid of markers or indicators as to what is inside, save for a small label optionally revealed when opening. They publish a shortlist of the whiskies making up the release, this time 38 bottles long, ranging from 6 to 29 years old, from all over Scotland, in a variety of cask types, all single malts, and all bottled at 46.3%, so we aren’t totally clueless.

Whether you want to challenge yourself or your friends to see if you can work out which bottles we got sent, or if you just want to take the opportunity to sample whisky with all the pressures and external factors removed, it should be a really fun experience. And I’ll be living it alongside you all, with some comments to make following each bottle reveal about what the whisky is and why we might have felt the way we did about it.