The Slow Pour

1. Ask the better question

Don't ask what it tastes like. Ask: Where have you smelled this before?

Smell reaches memory faster than it reaches language. You get the room before you get the word. Most of us then throw the room away and reach for a word somebody else handed us.

2. Go first

Offer your own note before you ask for theirs, and make it a real one. Mine, on a wheated bourbon, is a barn on a hot afternoon. Hay, warm wood, and the door propped open.

Not caramel. A barn. Going first gives everyone else permission to be specific instead of correct.

3. Let the silence sit

They will pause. Good — that pause is the entire point. Do not rescue it, do not fill it, and do not offer them a list to choose from. The honest answer is on its way.

4. Play the table game

Once the table is warm and the second pour is coming, ban three words: caramel, vanilla, and oak. From then on you may only use a place, a person, or a memory.

It goes sideways inside a minute. Somebody says a tackle box. Somebody says their grandmother's church basement. Everybody laughs, and then everybody leans in, because those are the most accurate things anyone has said all night.

Why it works

You already have the vocabulary. It is filed under places you have been, not under flavors you have read. Go get it.

Shauna Hann · historian, educator, and Certified Executive Bourbon Steward · shaunaonthego.com