{"id":768,"date":"2021-08-21T20:13:03","date_gmt":"2021-08-21T20:13:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/corygami.com\/?p=768"},"modified":"2021-08-22T00:29:37","modified_gmt":"2021-08-22T00:29:37","slug":"remote-blinded-tastings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/corygami.com\/?p=768","title":{"rendered":"Virtual (blinded) Tastings"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Remote tastings are one activity during the pandemic that has brought me a lot of joy. Love recreational PowerPoint presentations. I’ve created tastings for gin, fruit-forward IPAs, whiskey, sour beer, and session IPA, and attended ones for carrot cake, salt & vinegar chips, and canned rose. I have a format that works really well: the tastings move quickly and offer plenty of opportunity for social connection which can sometimes be difficult on virtual hangouts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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An attendee’s gin-tasting photo on social media. Participants were given soda and tonic mixers.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

These events have worked out so well, I thought it would be a shame to not share my ‘template’, slides, and the things I’ve learned doing these.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The first thing to know is that there is no legal way to ship alcohol here in Pennsylvania. If you live in PA, or a place with similar laws, any alcohol tastings have to be with friends who live close enough where you can hand-deliver supplies. Unless there is a global pandemic, you might choose to just do the tasting in person (which is ALSO fun!).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All my tastings follow a similar format:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

  1. Procuring three similar consumables to compare to each other, write down what they are, cover them somehow, keeping a key. The beer tasting had four participants, so I wrapped the 12 cans needed for the tasting with red, blue, or black construction paper. The whiskey tasting used airplane bottles, which I wrapped with duct tape and labeled A, B, or C. For the gin tasting, I used blank bottles from Uline and labeled them with shapes. I noticed that people seem to be biased when there is a ‘hierarchical’ coding on the tasteables<\/strong>. I would recommend sticking to something like colors or shapes, over letters and numbers.<\/strong><\/li>
  2. Find a slideshow template you love on canva.com. Click on presentations, and a searchable sidebar on the left appears. There you can set the template search parameters to show free presentations only. I don’t use any templates that have any animation for tastings, because I like to download the slides as pdfs.<\/strong> <\/li>
  3. Here are the basic slides you need:
    1. A nice title page<\/li>
    2. Instructions for setting up a scorecard (you can provide these, but that demonstrates a lack of faith in the intelligence of your friends.)<\/li>
    3. Amateur tasting notes. Sometimes these are really funny.<\/li>
    4. Professional tasting notes or notes from the maker (it can be really hard to find professional tasting notes from something like a seasonal beer).<\/li>
    5. People pick their favorite.<\/li>
    6. The reveal slide matches the things being tasted to the tasting notes. For tastings that involve things with different price points, I would put the items in order here so that people can compare their favorite vs. the most expensive.<\/li><\/ol><\/li>
    7. Optional slides to add-in (before the guessing slides) can let give people a little more information about what is being tasted. For example, I had to use a mix of whiskey and bourbon for one tastings, and for the fruity IPA tasting, I had a pretty wide range of ABVs. I did not ask people to guess which one was which in these slides. I think it’s best to keep the event to just two ‘guessing’ slides to avoid becoming tedious.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
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      Amateur notes from the gin tasting<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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      Professional notes from the fruity IPA tasting<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

      The tastings events themselves take less than an hour. You really don’t want to be doing a super long organized activity online, nobody has the stamina for that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      The best thing about these tastings is that you learn about your own preferences. I’m blessed with poor memory, so even though I set up each of these tastings, making the slideshows just 2 weeks ahead of time meant I was just as much in the dark as other participants. I was so surprised to learn about my own preference for the lowest-cost gin!<\/p>\n\n\n\n