Tea Fougner works as a VODKA TASTER which seems like one of those joke careers that you dream up some night in college when you’re all hanging around the dorm drinking cans of Huber and talking about what you want to do with your lives. Only Tea actually does it, because she’s awesome and extraordinarily lucky.
Check out Tea’s comics here! and you can take a look at her employer’s site here, because her job is absolutely real, and now I feel awfully jealous.
My absolutely real job also does tours of our distillery on Sunday afternoons! So folks in the NYC area, please come on down and visit us!!!
Do you …. spit the alcohol out or are you totally hammered at the end of work… in a job like that….
I spit out most of it. You have to swallow some of it because the flavors at the back of your mouth and throat are important to the final product.
But I take very tiny, tiny tastes. I’ve never felt even remotely tipsy at the end of tasting.
Tea, do you do anything to cleanse your palate after tasting? Niles did a whiskey tasting once, and he said the flavors were so overwhelming that by the fourth or fifth taste he couldn’t tell the difference between any of them. Vodka’s a little more subtle, probably?
Whiskey is definitely more overwhelming than vodka– I just did a whiskey tasting for a couple of my distillery co-workers last night. But what I do is rinse my mouth out with water between each cut, and then break for at least ten minutes every 6-8 cuts to let my mouth rest. If I do too many, it definitely gets muddled. I also don’t eat anything for a half-hour before and while I’m tasting, except once in a while some very bland foods to help reset my palate– like pretzels or plain bread, for example.
Tea, I just checked out the ICD website and those are some dreamy distillers! I think I need to take a tour!
I could definitely be a whiskey-taster for a living. Or just for fun.