Beginning this week, I will be starting something new. I will be reviewing whiskies “real time” on Twitter. Now you can get my impressions (and rating) of a whisky the very moment I taste it.
Nothing will change in the way I review whiskies. I will still review them in my “tasting room”, using the same glassware, at the same time, etc. The only difference is, instead of typing my review into my Word document, I’ll be typing it on Twitter.
Each review will begin with a photo of what I’m about to review, followed by additional tweets as I nose and taste the whisky. The review will end with my formal rating of the whisky, which will eventually appear on my blog and in Malt Advocate. Other than the possibility of minor formatting to convert my tweets into the structure of my magazine reviews, the tasting notes, and ratings will be identical.
At the beginning of each week, I will announce a schedule of the whiskies I’m going to review that week, along with the dates and times of the review. If you want to follow along, all you need to do is get a Twitter account and sign up to follow me. It’s really very easy. Several hundred of you are already following me. The other nice thing is that you can also chime in after my review and exchange comments with other people following me and reading my review.
This idea came to me over the weekend, while I was at the Buffalo Trace distillery. I tweeted during a media lunch with CEO Mark Brown, while tasting new Buffalo Trace whiskeys later that afternoon, and also during Elmer T. Lee’s 90th Birthday Party that evening. For those of you who didn’t have the good fortune of being invited to these events, my tweets were the next best thing. And judging by your comments on Twitter, you really enjoyed this. I’m now going to apply this same concept to other things that I do, like when I review whiskies.
There’s also another benefit to this besides “being there with me” when I review whiskies real-time. These days, the really “hot” whiskies often sell out on-line or at retailers very quickly. The sooner you can be informed, the better. And there’s no faster way to get my reviews than real-time.
So, here’s my schedule for this week. All reviews this week will begin promptly at 4pm, Eastern Standard Time. This week, I will focus on three new American whiskeys of great interest to bourbon and rye enthusiasts:
Wednesday, August 19th: Jefferson’s Presidential Select 17 yr.
Thursday, August 20th: Four Roses Mariage Collection, 2009 release
Friday, August 21st: Rittenhouse Rye, 25 year old, single barrel
Give it a try. Get a Twitter account if you don’t already have one, include me as one of the people you are following (@JohnHansell), catch my reviews and join in on the discussion aftewards if you want to.
P.S. If you don’t want to follow me on Twitter, you can still see my most recent tweets on the right sidebar of this blog. I’m not sure how fast the link works, but it shouldn’t take too long.
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