Your Tasting Notes are Bullshit

What’s shakin, cocktail fans?

Welcome to Episode 288 of The Modern Bar Cart Podcast! I’m your host, Eric Kozlik

Thanks for joining me for this audio essay deep dive episode, where I select one very specific topic in the wide world of spirits and cocktails and examine it under the microscope. This time around, I take a look at tasting notes and why they so often come off as utter bullshit when we encounter them in online reviews, or shelf talkers, or magazine articles.

Now, there’s a couple things that make this audio essay a little bit special. First, it’s a recording of an actual LIVE seminar I presented in collaboration with the recent Bevfluence Baltimore Bartender Lab that took place on the front end of the American Distilling Institute’s Annual Conference and Trade Show. So instead of just reading something to you off a page like I normally do, this will have more of a live and interactive flavor to it. And second, as a consequence of the “seminar” format, I have a set of slides that accompany the audio, and those will go live at the same time as the podcast episode. So if you’re listening to this and you’d prefer to be able to see the slides that the actual seminar attendees were looking at, simply head over to the Modern Bar Cart YouTube Channel (also embedded below) and enjoy the presentation from there.

Lastly, there is a survey (download here!) that accompanies this presentation, and it’s designed to help you understand some of your own underlying preferences and assumptions about flavor. So if you’d like to fill out that survey – like our seminar attendees did – before you tune in and follow along, just shoot me an email at podcast@modernbarcart.com and I’ll be happy to send a copy your way. It’s very simple, and I’ll walk you through how to score it in real time.

Thank you to Justin, Todd, and Chandler from Bevfluence for setting this all up, to Max and Eli from Baltimore Spirits Company for hosting this event at their beautiful cocktail gallery that’s housed in the same complex as their awesome distillery, and to the amazing Tracie Franklin, who also presented a wonderful tasting course on world whiskeys.

With that, I hope you enjoy this first-of-its-kind seminar dedicated to identifying and eliminating the bullshit in your tasting notes by identifying what I lovingly refer to as the “heart” of a spirit.