Canadian flavour maven Reece Sims has developed a system to help consumers identify which whiskies they would like, and inform brands about her findings.
Sims is a taste trainer and flavour coach who has done the heavy lifting of classifying whisky flavours, and now shares that knowledge with others. But there is a lot more to it than that. After sampling thousands of whiskies herself, her fine-tuned palate also harnesses the input of a large consumer tasting panel, giving her deep insights to predict what others will enjoy.
It began at the University of Victoria, where she enjoyed the odd rye and ginger as she was working her way through college, serving tables and tending bar in a Mexican restaurant.
In 2015, when she graduated with an honours degree in business entrepreneurship, Sims moved home to Vancouver. There, she took a job at the Blarney Stone Irish pub, and began thinking seriously about whisky. As the former site of the city’s first government liquor store, the building is home to many ghosts of whisky past. The place has a decent whisky collection that drew brand ambassadors to the pub, and they opened Sims’ eyes to the possibilities of a career in whisky.
It is an oft-repeated cliché that it takes time to become an overnight success. Some people call it paying your dues, suggesting that success is a matter of putting in time. However, Reece Sims plotted her course strategically, integrating informal lessons learned behind the bar with her business degree.
At university, time spent helping people with personal branding had Sims thinking about her own brand. An organised and methodical person, she listed her 10 top interests, and whisky interested her most. She set her entrepreneurial mind to finding a whisky opportunity that others had not addressed.
“I just figured there were not many people who looked and spoke like me in the industry who were experts, and the industry itself was evergreen, and constantly evolving. I thought it would withstand the test of time, even as we see priorities change with new generations,” she explains.
“I’ve always been academic, and wanted to make sure I knew what I was talking about. I started working at other types of bars and restaurants, doing certifications, competing in cocktail competitions to network, and going to industry events like Tales of the Cocktail on my own dime.”
Self-study travels took her to Spain to learn about sherry and wine, Central America for rum, and Kentucky, Ireland, Scotland, and at home in Canada, to learn about whisky. She began developing a structured approach to tasting and describing spirits while pursuing a level 3 Wine and Spirits Education Trust (WSET) certification and an Executive Bourbon Stewardship certification. Soon, she launched Whisky Muse, a blog about whisky and the new things she was learning.
Sims figured work as a brand ambassador would give her an opportunity to balance marketing and education in the spirits industry. However, after applying unsuccessfully for about half a dozen openings, feedback from the regional director of a large national distributor showed her a path to get her foot in the door in a sales role, and she accepted a position as a territory sales manager. Then, in March 2020 the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and Sims found herself unemployed.
Joining forces with a bartender friend, Chris Chuy, to develop and deliver cocktail ingredients and online training for corporate functions, Sims saw a new opportunity. Throughout the pandemic, she and Chuy had built his business, the Bar Cart, into a million-dollar operation. But sales dwindled as the pandemic ended and people returned to their everyday lives. Amicably, she and Chuy parted ways.
In July 2022, Sims incorporated SIP Spirits Consulting (Sensory Insights and Perceptions) and began developing what would become Flavor Camp, a tasting experience to benefit those learning about tasting spirits, and brands seeking focus-group-style feedback on their products and those of their competitors. “Think of it like having a front end and back end,” explains Sims. “The front end is Flavor Camp, which is consumer- and trade-facing, and the back end is SIP Spirits Consulting, which is brand-facing.”
Sims leads guided sessions, walking paying consumers through a range of eight products. “I feel like a matchmaker, where I’m trying to help consumers and bartenders figure out what they like and why they like it, and how to describe what they like, then giving that feedback to the brand,” says Sims. As a former bartender and sales rep, she had noticed a need for more data-driven decision-making by brands. With Flavor Camp she wanted a full-circle system with a structured tasting approach to support multi-sensory, integrative learning about spirits. For brands she provides a feedback component using market reports based on each event, tasting, or competition.
“The value for consumers lies in getting to try eight amazing products that they will potentially buy after the class, and they also learn our proprietary tasting system and vocabulary,” she says. The in-person tasting for Flavor Camp focuses on flavour first, then perception. But she has also built an online community from which she constantly receives feedback. Part of that is running three to four online challenges each month for the people who cannot attend the in-person sessions. Like a social mixer, the challenges start a two-way conversation through cocktail recipe and taste challenges where their palate could meet its true love, and even win a prize.
One extensive survey conducted recently with Sims’ panel led to a presentation at the American Distilling Institute about people’s perceptions of whisky based on label colour. Her survey found a strong alignment between ideas about flavour and label colour in demographics including ages, genders, and knowledge of whisky. “I like to compartmentalise or organise things,” she says. “The idea of our tasting system is that every whisky, regardless of its country, age, grain type, or how it’s distilled, will have a primary flavour camp and one to three secondary flavour camps making up its overall profile.”
In theory, you could remember and refer to different whiskies and make recommendations based on familiar flavour profiles or different ones. This concept has expanded to include other spirits, and incorporates colour, a logo, and language, similar to the WSET approach. “There are 13 camps for whisky, for example, so instead of having to memorise hundreds of tasting notes, people just have to remember those 13 camps and their overarching profile,” she says. This becomes an easy-to-remember way to classify whiskies by flavour. Sims provides stickers for each flavour camp so people can quickly organise their whisky collections.
Specific elements of the whisky-making process contribute to creating the flavour profile of each flavour camp. For instance, by focusing on a camp called golden fruits, participants learn about ester development throughout various whisky-production processes. Then they can dive deeper, discussing fermentation and the way esters change over time in different barrel types.
When they want to understand darker fruit flavours, Sims explains that they often come from sherry or port casks. Participants can infer how the distiller made it by knowing a whisky’s flavour camp. By tasting it and learning those camps, they train their palate into their own deck of tarot cards to predict what it is made from, how it is made, and the production processes used.
It is a complicated process that Sims has simplified over years of study, and through trial and error. Her heavy lifting in the flavour department has an analogy in real life. “I’ve been doing CrossFit and lifting weights since 2019. It doesn’t hurt to be able to carry a case of whisky without breaking a sweat,” she says.
Educating your palate is like weight training — developing muscle memory by working steadily to gain strength with good form and experience.
About half of the participants in each session have attended previous Flavor Camp sessions, and Sims also gives them guidance to practice at home. Approached systematically, once the attendees have learned the necessary skills, understanding flavour can be as easy as picking up a tasting glass.
