For me Alchemy is one of the best aspects of Skyrim just as it was with Oblivion. I am an awful one for gathering tonnes of ingredients and watching my Alchemy perks. I keep everything in the Apothecary satchel on my table in Breezehome so every now and then I stop to take stock and have a good session.

Today I noticed something. At the beginning when I got ingredients that I didn't have yet I would taste one to see its effects but after a while I forgot about doing that. When I go to the Alchemy table I just take everything out of the satchel and start mixing and I seen that many of the ingredients only had one effect uncovered. I subsequently found that when I was eating them I would uncover sometimes three effects on ones I had not yet tasted and one or two on others. I think that as your skill level goes up you gain the ability to uncover more effects from tasting. Has anyone had similar or other experiences of an Alchemical nature?

One of the perks in the Alchemy tree (Experimenter or something, I believe) allows you to uncover more properties (2 props for tier 1 of the perk, 3 props for tier 2, all props for tier 3). Maybe that's it?

That would be it. Guess you should have watched your Alchemy perks a bit harder eh?

I guess you're right.

I just use a website that tells me what to mix, one of the very few shortcuts I take. Amazing site though.

@stormSWA, please post a link, and could you also message it to me?

Here is a list of every effect and what ingredients have it:
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Alchemy_Effects

Here is a Potion/Poison Builder that you can try:
http://skyrim.warlore.org/

I did not go for the Experimenter perk yet, but took my time to truly experiment with ingredients. It is not difficult, but takes just some time. Great for moments when you think you have OCD.

Anyways, after I had up to a hundred of some of the ingredients did I use those and combined them with a second ingredient. It does not take all that long to go through all possible combinations and one can uncover all 4 effects of many of the ingredients. One gets the most common effects uncovered this way. Once I did that did I start a second series of experiments where I only combined those that had less than 4 effects uncovered. This lead to the more rare effects, which can only be found on 2 or 3 ingredients without having to waste too many ingredients along the way.

I still have a few with less than 4 uncovered effects and maybe I will go for the experimenter perks, but I have no real need for it at the moment as I have uncovered likely 95% of all effects, which is more than I need.