What on earth is a twitter tasting? We asked ourselves the same question when we opened the invitation to this event at Eighty One. Macallan promised a sampling of their fine Scotch, and chef Ed Brown devised a complimentary menu that paired with the drams. Sounds just like a regular tasting. But no! This is Web 2.0 (or maybe 3.32, we’ve lost track). There were two main differences:
1. Instead of turning to our neighbor and discussing the flavors, we were to Tweet the thoughts for all to see. This resulted in a room full of silent, progressively-tipsier journalists trying to out wit each other in 140 characters or less. Good thing we had Scotch. Otherwise, our thumbs would have been immobilized Twitter performance anxiety.
2. We were in a private room at Eighty One, but people around the country were able to participate in the tasting and tweet from home. These folks got to share their scotch related musings with the group. And, they got to be really jealous when we tweeted about our steak course. No word on how their microwave hot pocket paired with Macallan 15 year.
You can take a look at our “conversation” about Macallan here! Thanks to @lushlife, @lizeats, @DBTH, @halw and @cocktailspirit for sharing a glass with us.
When sipping the 20 year old spirit, we had an interesting thought. This scotch was bottled before the Internet even existed, and now a room full of ruddy faced journalists were pounding away into their PDAs about it. What will the Macallan tasting events be like 20 years from now? Maybe they could teleport samples of the scotch around. Maybe the waiters would be friendly robots. Or, maybe, there would be no tasting at all because the friendly robot waiters developed intelligence and killed everyone. Guess we should start tipping better, just in case.
Thanks to @ekeyNYC for the photo!
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