On april 14th we had our traditional whisky nosing and tasting, this time we added an extra, rather new flavour: people could participate live using Twitter. For us this was a small experiment, to show our relations and customers the possible impact of modern communication technologies, especially social media like Twitter (an application for microblogging). However, we did not expect it would become such a big success. And that is the main reason why this posting is in English, during our experiment we had visitors from abroad - thank you all for your online presence, highly appreciated!

This is what we did. We invited relations for our nosing and tasting and offered them a choice: to come over to our cosy church and enjoy a well catered event. Or, if you could not be present, you could receive in advance a nice bottle of Highland Park 12 years old and participate our event live via Twitter. For this occasion we created a special landing page on our website with a streaming webcast, live from Rheden. So we had our own little broadcast channel. At 19h30 sharp our anchorman Ronald Wuijster - the whisky connaisseur - opened the bottle Highland Park 12YO and simultaneously the bottles were opened elsewhere, wherever our audience was. We all nosed and tasted the same whisky, but we were not all present live at Rheden. Very funny, Ronald had to react immediately on questions and comments posted on Twitter, which was sometimes really hilarious. Of course one of the best drams ever helped everybody to keep the spirit high, even for a participant in his lonely hotel room in Hong Kong. Thank you Caspar! We had a great evening and an unexpected but in every aspect memorable whisky nosing & tasting.

The award 'virtual hero' however goes to Gerry Tosh, chief distiller at Highland Park in Orkney, Scotland. His online presence made our tiny and tasty experiment definitely to a big success. 

Some facts and figures: we continually had at least 12 viewers online, during the live tasting at 19h30 we had 34 viewers, of which 6 of them with a bottle of Highland Park next to the webcam ;-) In our office in Rheden we had up to 40 nosers and tasters. The whiskies were provided by the very famous Dutch Wijnhandel Appeldoorn and the fabulous catering was done by Olde Dubbelink Partycatering.