OUR STORY
The origin.
December 2022 marks the origin of my Whiskey advent calendar. Although it was the first year I curated a calendar, the vision started a year prior when a good friend of mine participated in another local Chicagoland calendar.
I fell in love with the idea of being able to try so many different pours with such little investment per experience. In general, I like my dollar to go as far as possible (you could argue I’m cheap, but I’ve been known to spend significant money on expensive things that I believe are worth it). Bars are a great place to try things you haven’t tasted before without the investment of a full bottle. But at costs of a third to quarter cost of the bottles, I often take the route of buying a retail bottle and taking my chances.
Advent calendars offered a unique alternative. I didn’t have to pay secondary or bar prices nor did I need to buy the entire bottle in order to give new things a shot. Effectively, it's splitting the cost of the bottle 12 ways, trying a generous 2oz pour, and learning from the experience. The 2022 experience resulted in multiple instances of me running to the store to purchase the single barrels we tried, caused me to seek out 2 brands I had previously been uninterested in, and thankfully kept me from buying a couple of bottles that had previously been on my to-be-acquired list.
I put a good bit of thinking into the 2022 calendar. Ultimately, I knew it needed some guardrails in order to get people on board and keep me excited for the work ahead. The format would be 12 people participating, contributing 2 bottles each. Then I would arrange them in an order of my choosing, pour them, and return a box full of labeled (1-24) 2oz pours before Dec 1. To give them direction, here are the participant purchase rules that I landed on:
It had to be American Whiskey; Bourbon, Ryes, and Canadian were in. Scotch, Irish, Japanese, and elsewhere were out.
Each bottle had a $40 minimum. Didn’t put a ceiling on it, but wanted to ensure a somewhat consistent floor price.
The participants had to check with me at the time of purchase to ensure they weren’t buying a duplicate.
They couldn’t tell anyone else what they got. Effectively this would be a double-blind daily tasting.
The 2022 calendar was so much fun. With a group of 12, we had a text thread that started to get active around 5 p.m. daily. No matter your background or palette, you could share if you liked it or not. Well-aged or younger? High proof or water added? Bourbon or Rye? The prominent best parts were the social connection and whiskey itself. A lesser unexpected bonus, however, was learning about your own palette and preferences (Read about some of those comments in past years).
If it wasn’t obvious, this tradition is continuing. And growing. Before the calendars were even distributed in 2022, I had friends expressing their frustration I didn’t include them. I needed to find a way to simultaneously expand the participants and associated workload while also keeping it fun and manageable.
The evolution.
Putting on my user research hat, I started analysis right away in January 2023. I took the pulse of the year one participants to learn what they liked about the calendar and what they wanted to change. Ultimately, 10 of the 12 original participants returned, so there was clearly a lot that worked well [The only 2 original participants skipping year two are doing so for complicated health reasons and hope to return in 2024].
Things they liked about the year one format:
Trying a good variety of unique new things they haven’t had before.
The blind tastings (although some requested to know the list of bottles to guess from)
Tasting with others so that they could exchange tasting notes and thoughts
I spent the summer months racking my brain on how 2023 could be different and better, while also cognizant that some parts of the process were not that fun and about to double or triple in scale. I decided in collaboration with the OG participants that we would keep the 2oz pours (I considered trying 1.5oz for various reasons). With the decision made, and knowing that the bottles would again split 12 ways, I was looking at expanding to either 24 or 36 participants.
Given those potential participant numbers, I considered the following:
My strong preference would be for everyone to be drinking the same thing. That meant that every bottle sourced for the calendar needed to have either 2 or 3 copies purchased (depending on the undetermined total number of calendars).
Having to coordinate with 24 or 36 people was daunting and complicated. The old way had lots involved that was challenging when it was only 11 other people: collaborating on their purchase (sometimes I’d get a 2 pm call on Wednesday workday because that’s when they could make it to the store), ensuring drop off early enough in November to have time to fill the bottles, and then coordinating the handing off of their calendars prior to Dec 1.
Bottling time was going to increase. In 2022, it took me 1 night to sticker 288 bottles and 2 nights to pour the 24 bottles across. In order to not stress out over the Thanksgiving week, I needed to lengthen the window of time between when I was in possession of the bottles and the end of November when I was handing them off.
Lastly, the distribution of financial contributions across participants was fairly skewed. Most people contributed bottles that were in the ballpark of the floor value set. Others, however, were quite generous and shared bottles in excess of double and triple those values. There had to be another way to keep the variation of bottle values without putting the burden on a couple of generous individuals to do so.
The result.
To avert financial and operational risk, I opted to expand to 24 participants instead of going for 36. It meant there needed to be 48 bottles purchased, 576 mini bottles filled, and 23 handoffs done (I obviously keep one for myself). It also meant I needed 2 copies of each bottle and ideally have them in my possession by October.
With those constraints ahead of me, I made the decision I was going to procure all of the bottles and have participants reimburse me a flat fee for their calendar, rather than contribute bottles. Some people really loved picking their bottles and expressed the potential fear of losing some level of buy-in to what they were drinking (people loved trying to guess their own bottles). To mitigate that, I allowed those individuals to share ideas they had and I took those into consideration as I was filling it out. Ultimately, the only way I was going to stay sane and build a diverse and unique calendar I dreamed of, I needed to take more control.
There were some unanticipated benefits that came alongside this approach. I could start buying bottles much earlier because I knew they would be used for this (so we weren’t drinking just what was on the shelf in November, now we could sample things that were available throughout the year). Fall drives with the Wrangler top down while antiquing were so relaxing and the polar opposite of the year before’s phone calls from someone at the liquor store with their wife and kids trying to find something fast. Lastly, every bottle is a surprise to everyone. I hypothesize the decision to keep it all a surprise will pay off well.
The 2023 calendar isn’t going to suck. I hope you follow along and learn from our tasting notes and feedback. If you are interested in participating in future years, let me know here.
-Jere
Written while listening to DBM Live Trax Vol. 38: Saratoga Performing Arts Center
Read more about the 2023 Calendar
2022 Advent Calendar:
