Irish whiskey tasting at BCAE: A+++
For my birthday, Linsday got us both tickets to an Irish whiskey tasting class at the Boston Center for Adult Education down on Arlington St. We went last night.
The instructor, Randall Bird, was pretty damn great. As I told him in the email below, he would have fit in perfectly at any hackin’-the-breeze conversation at MIT:
Dear Randall,
Lindsay and I just wanted to thank you for the great class last night (it was her birthday present to me in fact!).
The depth of your knowledge — particularly your interest in doing your own metalworking to go with your own distilling — reminded me of some colleagues at MIT…which is why I ended up asking about the source of [whiskey ingredient] supplies last night.
Guys at MIT created this tool called Sourcemap, which maps supply chains of consumer goods, and one of the first things they did with it was to go to brewers in the Scottish highlands and islands to show how setting up a local bottling cooperative was a better use of their money than shipping everything to England. Check out this video around the 5:00 mark to see what they mean:
It’s also interesting how open supply chains cut both ways…Diageo may want to obscure the fact that their grain comes from Argentina, but Office Depot just signed up to use Sourcemap to prove to buyers that their recycled paper really is 100% recycled.
Best, and thanks again for holding the class,
Andrew
Bird also just started announced whiskey/food pairing events at the Artistan’s Asylum, a studio/hackerspace in Somerville, with Monday 7-9pm being the first time I think. Lindsay and I definitely recommend it if you can make it Monday or sometime in the future.
