Why the rebrand to “Picks App”? Well to be honest, the app has evolved so much since its initial concept and has incorporated so much more, we felt it warranted some separation from Oak Bottle while still existing as a product within the personalization vein of the Oak Bottle company portfolio. 

As the product features grew and the underlying pain points, we were trying to solve for emerged, the barrel finishing aspect of the app became less and less of a core feature of the app and we felt “Picks” really incapsulates everything the app has to offer.

Picks essentially is the first truly crowd-reviewed tasting app for spirits and wine. A tasting app that maps your exact taste profile and gives you recommendations of spirits and wines to try. The Picks app matches your unique palate to over 10,000 spirits and wines (and growing) allowing you to consistently discover bottles you are bound to love. The more tastings you perform, the more accurate our “picks” for you become. 

Picks was created with powerful analytics built in, enabling the “crowd” (our app community) to shape not only what the overall score is of a bottle but also its aggregate taste profile as well, from ‘real user-generated tastings’ most selected taste notes, not cherrypicked from “expert reviewer” comments.

The best part of the app is that in our community, the collective voice finally matters. Regardless of how many followers you have, subscribers who watch your videos, how many visitors that come to your blog, and regardless how many distilleries or producers you can afford to visit each year. 

An extremely important goal of this app for us was that we created an environment where any spirit or wine can shine regardless of how much money is in their marketing budget. With Picks, if your juice tastes good, it moves up the ranks on the app, period. Democratizing and providing an even playing field for craft and small to medium size producers to compete. Finally.

We are slightly obsessed with the “Law of Large Numbers”. The Picks app was designed with the wisdom of crowds in mind. The principle states that large groups of people, when they pool together their opinions in an unbiased and quantitative way, will be able to make wiser decisions. That principle  could not  describe what Picks app is doing better, frankly. 

The strength of the app is YOU, the people. We just built the tool to crunch your quantitative user generated tastings into specific taste profiles. Not just for users, but even more importantly for all the bottles of spirits and wines as well. This enables us to then provide you recommendations of matches that statistically you are bound to love. Enabling you to make better purchasing decisions.

Crowdgenerated Taste Profile Descriptions

Picks automatically calculates the aggregate taste profile of each bottle and displays it in paragraph format for app users to refer to, as well as an “overall profile” for quick reference. It continues to be shaped by the community and evolves as more tastings are recorded in the app for that bottle.

It is essentially a living breathing thing – powered by you, the people. We hope that stores, and producers begin to rely on these crowdgenerated descriptions instead of on their in-house experts alone for their shelf-talkers and flavor descriptions. Tastes are subjective, and only with large numbers of tastings can you really pick up on the most detected taste notes and flavors in that bottle.

Taste Profile Mapping

Using advanced analytics on the backend of our app we can take all your tastings you create in the app and boil them down into what your precise taste preferences are and present them to you in real-time. The more tasting reviews you log, it will continue to evolve and fine tune itself over time. There is nothing out there that tells you what your favorite flavors are, not to mention your preferred sensations, oak intensity, mouthfeel and finish length.

This is such a fun feature of Picks and if you use it for no other reason, use it to find out your own taste profile – it’s eye opening, at least it was for me. If you want to see the granular details of your taste profile or any bottles profile, go to the “Examine” tool on our website and it will show you oodles of information about the specific taste attributes of any user or bottle you search. It is right there  in summary or diagram formats so you can really nerd out on the details of crowdgenerated taste profiles.

Instant Picks Matches

Because we have a really accurate view of the taste profile of each spirit and wine in our app, using matching algorithms we can easily cross-reference each of those aspects (aroma, finish length, mouthfeel, sensations, oak intensity, and the eight taste categories) against each user’s taste profile looking for matches of the same attributes. We were even able to build it so it shows you the precise match % for each pick we give you.

And if you open our “Compare” tool on our website it will show you your preferences mapped visually over top of that bottles taste profile to see exactly where your tastes overlap and where they don’t. Super cool stuff and again, there’s nothing out there as powerful as this at your fingertips. Use this tool at a store or a restaurant when deciding what to pick up, making your next purchase an easy win. Or just use it to see how similar your taste profile is to your tasting buddy.

Shoppable Tastings

One thing we have always wanted to find a way to do, is to incorporate an ability to shop and ship directly to your door bottles you found interesting on the community tasting feed or bottles you match with.

This was the single most difficult aspect of what we were able to deliver for you with this version of Picks. Navigating the three-tier system was difficult enough not to mention connecting our apps data automatically into our marketplace (picksshop.com/shop) in a real-time way so that it makes it possible for you to shop spirits and wines by filtering on specific notes from the crowdgenerated taste profiles of each bottle in our shop.

But we did it, and it’s glorious we must say. Now you can shop the top tasted bottles from our app instantly by clicking the Buy Now button on any tasting card, on a picks match notification, or a search result of a spirit that we sell.

For the first time ever, customers can filter down the marketplace by crowd-tasted taste notes for each bottle. This helps when you are looking for bottles with specific flavors in it for that buddy’s b-day or if for yourself, you selfish bugger (jk jk!). You can instantly narrow down those bottles that contain those exact taste notes according to the crowd.

Tags

We’ve added tags, this way you can easily mark a tasting with a tag and be able to refer to it anytime using the search function. Use tags to narrow down our tastings by particular details like #SingleBarrel, #NonchillFiltered, #JapaneseWhiskey, #SmallBatch, #StorePick, and so many more. Add your own if you are part of a club or group and reference tastings from your members easily within the community feed. These tags are also being fed automatically into our marketplace at picksshop.com so you can narrow down our bottle offerings by tag, which will help you find hopefully exactly what you are looking for according to the crowd’s knowledge. We will heavily moderate these tags and ensure their accuracy.

More Feed Filters

When we first built our beta prototype app we included some basic buttons that enabled you to filter any feed you were on by spirit category, showing you whiskey tastings only for example, or Whiskey and Rum for example. Well now, we have added nine more filters. These filters and sorts now include “Shoppable”, “Expert”, “Top Scored”, “Worst Scored”, “Most Liked”, “Most Chatter”, and “Most Complex”.

The best part is they can be combined in any way you like, making it easy to filter the feed to see tasting reviews that interest you. The same filters are also available on any user’s profile feed as well, which we think is an incredibly powerful way to research and discover what others are trying and loving (or hating) in the community.