Episode 285

Letters from Flavor Camp with Reece Sims

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Letters from Flavor Camp with Reece Sims

Episode 285

What’s shakin, cocktail fans? Welcome to Episode 285 of The Modern Bar Cart Podcast! I’m your host, Eric Kozlik.

This time around, I’m joined by my friend, Reece Sims. She’s the founder and head taste and smell counselor at Flavor Camp, a community where people come together online and in-person to learn how to taste spirits and to train their palates using her proprietary flavor camp system.

In this campy conversation with Reece Sims, creator of Flavor Camp, some of the topics we discuss include:

How camps – like bars – act as intense and intimate “third places,” where people with shared interests or commonalities can gather and thrive.
What Reece does to shake up the traditional ruts we fall into when tasting spirits–from the way she sets up the layout of the room, to the way she goes about selecting spirits for any given flight.
And did you know: Flavor Camp isn’t just the name of the program; it’s an organizing paradigm that Reece deploys that both SIMPLIFIES the typical flavor wheels we often see used in spirits tastings, and also EXPLODES the restrictions implied by traditional spirits categories.
We also talk about how to navigate the “personal” and the “public” when generating tasting notes. How do you take something that tastes like a certain thing to YOU–like grandma’s kitchen, or the woods after a rain–and figure out how to communicate that very unique flavor to other people who may not share your experiences.
Finally, we talk about the notion of the “Head-Fake” in the spirits and cocktail world: which is when you overtly focus on one thing, but that ONE THING teaches you so much more about other components of leading a meaningful life.
Along the way, we discuss the one booze billboard that triggered me in a major way, how to pair donuts with whiskey, why simple cocktails made with high quality spirits are waaaay better than molecular mixology, and much, much more.

You can learn more about Flavor Camp by heading over to FlavourCamp.ca. You can also find her on Instagram by hitting up the @flavorcampclub handle, and I’d highly recommend joining the Flavor Camp community on Facebook and signing up for her newsletter as well.

Featured Cocktail: The Flower of Normandy

This Episode’s featured cocktail is: the Flower of Normandy. To make it, you’ll need:

2 oz Calvados (which is a French style of apple brandy)
1 oz Elderflower Liqueur
Several Dashes of orange bitters

Combine your ingredients in a mixing glass with ice, stir until the contents are all well chilled and properly diluted, then strain into a stemmed cocktail glass, garnish with an expressed orange twist, and enjoy.

The Flower of Normandy was created by…actually, yours truly. And it makes an appearance later in my interview with Reece, but I thought I’d give it a little more attention here for a few reasons.

First, I think it’s a great example of when the Mr. Potato Head method of creating a cocktail – where you swap out base spirits and modifiers for other, similar products – can lead you to generate a cocktail that’s almost unrecognizable. In this case, we’re working within the Manhattan format, with 2 oz of booze to one oz of a sweetened and/or aromatized modifier. But when you TASTE the Flower of Normandy, it’s got a distinctly bright character, and it straddles that line between fruity and floral — not descriptors you normally hear when referring to a Manhattan.

When I think of a Manhattan, I think of a dark, sweet, serious fall and winter drink. But this leads to the next awesome thing. When you play around in this way with Mr. Potato Head, you can often discover new affordances, like the fact that Elderflower liqueur and apple brandy can really lighten a flavor profile when swapped out for whiskey and vermouth – lighten it, perhaps, to the point where it might even be enjoyable in a context completely foreign to the original.

In the end, we have a summery Manhattan riff, which isn’t something you come across often. And since we’re heading into that sultry season right now, I hope you’ll have the opportunity to give this simple, but oh-so-refreshing cocktail a try.

So, now that you’ve got an excellent excuse to go pick up a bottle of Calvados, let’s turn our attention back to the interview.

Letters from Flavor Camp with Reece Sims

This episode was made possible with editing and sound design by Samantha Reed, spirits tasting insights courtesy of Reece Sims, and a little bit of interview magic by yours truly. This has been a Direct Fire Studios production, copyright 2024.

Letters from Flavor Camp with Reece Sims

Featured Cocktail: The Flower of Normandy

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