I’m Kaz, a chief bartender in Japan.
I’ve spent eight years behind the bar. Whisky isn’t something I picked up on the side — handling it and serving it is part of the job. For the last six years I’ve also been reviewing whisky in Japanese on my own site, Whisktender.
Dram Verdict is where I do that in English. It is not a translation of Whisktender. Some reviews here start from a tasting I first published in Japanese, but the article is rebuilt for readers buying in the US, the UK and elsewhere — different prices, different availability, different bottles worth comparing against, and different questions.
What I bring to it is that time behind the bar, and the habit of tasting a bottle properly before I say anything about it.
What this site is
Independent whisky reviews written to help you decide whether a bottle is worth buying.
Every Dram Verdict score, and every personal tasting note, comes from a whisky I have tasted myself. Not every bottle mentioned in a guide or a comparison has been tasted by me; where it hasn’t, it gets no score and no tasting notes from me, and I say so rather than writing as though I had.
I also try to answer more than what a bottle tastes like. Who is it for? Who is it not for? Is it worth what it costs? That last one is usually the real question.
How the articles are made
AI tools do a lot of the work here — research, synthesis, drafting, localisation, editing and SEO — and official information and other people’s reviews are read as research. That is how the articles get built.
What none of it does is replace my tasting or make the final Dram Verdict evaluation. The whisky in the glass is mine, the score is mine, and I read and approve everything before it is published.
Read more
The Review Policy covers how whisky is tasted and scored. The Editorial Policy covers how the articles are made and where commercial relationships stop. If something here is wrong, I want to know about it.