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The painter Bob Ross once coined the term “happy little accidents” whenever he would make a mistake that didn’t result in the whole painting being ruined. That’s what happened on today’s Advent reveal. Despite years of refinement to how we conduct our blind Advent Calendar, there is a human factor that sometimes creates an event nobody could have predicted.
So I’ll just cut straight to the chase with today’s Advent reveal because I think the bigger story is in the analysis. The reveal was Wild Turkey Master’s Keep Voyage. If you’ve been following along this past week, you might be asking yourself “didn’t they already do that bottle on December 4th?” and the answer is yes. But our method to ensure that no duplicates would be submitted hit a snag when we realized that we were only sending the Advent Organizer’s wife (an uninterested third party) a picture of the bottle we wanted to submit and not the exact designation.
What ended up happening is Adam sent a picture of his Wild Turkey Master’s Keep Voyage while it was still in the box. Later, Wes submitted a picture showing the actual bottle inside the box. To the untrained eye, these looked different. And since both were camera-phone pictures, the actual name on the label was hard to see due to its lower resolution. It was just one of those mistakes that led to the perfect storm – nobody’s to blame.
After the calamity of the reveal settled down, most participants realized this was a blessing in disguise. Now we could see how much deviation occurred in what we wrote for our experiences, bottle guesses and scores. And just for fun, I figured I’d also post up the side-by-side-by-side with all of our scores from our 2023 Advent to see which participant is most consistent.
So read on to see us all get exposed (or not)! Maybe some group members will lose a little bit of street cred, but I wouldn’t exactly soil their name with these results. Just remember that everyone might not have known what this bottle was, but we were all (except Wes) under the impression it wouldn’t be any of the 6 other bottles we had up to this point. That can have an impact on the guesses, after all.
The graphs tell two stories as far as I can tell. The first one is that when it comes to recognizing oak, caramel, honey, vanilla, baking spices and a dry/bitter taste, the numbers were remarkably consistent. The second is that beyond those notes, it appears like a completely different bottle was reviewed. The sheer number of baked goods, spices and fruit notes that the participants recorded for the December 9th bottle dwarfs what they found for the December 4th bottle.
A lot of the Slackers tried to decipher why that was. Was it because one of the bottles had been opened for a while? The answer between Adam and Wes was both “no” and that their bottles had been fresh cracks. I suggested we look at the laser codes to see if perhaps there were different fill dates. At the time of writing, I think they’re still looking for those codes, but others have chimed in that there probably was not two separate fill dates. And finally, the factor of time between sessions could have been at play. There were five days between the two bottles, so it wasn’t like the participants had too much change in their life, geography or climate. The bottom line is we don’t know why there was such a difference between the notes, but simply because we’re human could be enough of an explanation for me.
So what about the scores? Let’s see who remained consistent and who didn’t:
So there you have it! Read into the results what you may, but this was a fun experiment either way. Maybe we should build in a duplicate bottle in future Advents? It seems like the ultimate way to make sure everyone stays honest in their reviews.