This Week · Boobar Wire #214 · Reviews
Boobar is the independent tasting panel serious drinkers read before they buy. From Brooklyn's test kitchen, our eleven-person team puts every bottle through the same blind ritual: nosed against standards, diluted for the mid-palate, re-tasted a week later. No sponsorships, no shelf-talker fees — just the score printed on the tin.
The Index · Spirits Categories
Four shelves, four editors, one rubric. Every bottle in the database has been re-made by a Boobar staffer in the last eighteen months.
184 bottles reviewed · 41 published this year
Read the whiskey archive →107 bottles reviewed · 22 published this year
Read the gin archive →83 bottles reviewed · 19 published this year
Read the agave archive →68 bottles reviewed · 14 published this year
Read the rum archive →Latest from the tasting bench
We ran it through eight builds, from a Manhattan to a dry Sazerac, before the panel could agree. The verdict lands somewhere between reverence and relief: this is the bottle home bartenders will actually restock.
Read the full reviewMethod · The Boobar Score
Every bottle that comes through our doors starts the same way: a black-glass pour, a four-digit panel code, and a stack of glassware washed in the Brooklyn test kitchen at 247 Wythe Avenue. Two tasters nose it against a category reference shelf. Two more taste it diluted to fifteen percent ABV, because the mid-palate is where most spirits lie. Then the bottle sits for seven days while we write the blander notes down and forget which was which. On day eight, we re-taste blind.
If the panel still agrees on the descriptor words — mineral, candied, grassy, hot, drying — and the score hasn't moved more than two points, the bottle is scored. A final round against three reference bottles locks the number. Then someone else on staff remakes the recommended serve, on camera, so the recipe in our database pulls from someone who has actually measured the pour.
We do not score on a curve. We do not accept brand samples for a guaranteed review. We do not pad the panel with subscribers, friends, or anyone who makes their living selling the spirit. The number on the screen is the median of three blind sessions, and the recipe we publish is the recipe our editor would actually make on a Tuesday night. If a bottle earns an 87, it carries an 87 the next time you pour it in your kitchen.
Every recipe in our database of one thousand two hundred and forty-seven has been re-made by a Boobar staffer in the last eighteen months. Every published score refers to a bottle we still own on the shelf, so a re-review sits on file the moment the recipe changes. That is the deal we made with the reader in 2014, and we are not in a hurry to renegotiate.
By the numbers · 2024 in review
412
Spirits reviewed in 2024 — the largest independent testing panel in North America
1,247
Original cocktail recipes on file, every one re-made by staff in the last eighteen months
41.2%
Average open rate on the Boobar Wire newsletter, verified by Mailchimp's 2024 benchmark report
2
Tales of the Cocktail Spirited Awards for Best Cocktail Writing (2022 and 2024)
Built on data from Boobar Media LLC's 2024 internal audit and verified third-party press placements.
Awards & Recognitions
The reason a Boobar Score shows up in bar-group procurement sheets and brand-marketing decks is that third-party juries have checked the work since the beginning.
2024
Our second win in the category, recognizing a year of long-form reviews that built methodology as they built argument.
2022
First Spirited Award win, for our 72-hour rebuild of the historic cocktail canon with original recipes tested in our Brooklyn kitchen.
2019 — 2024
Recipes and reviews cited in the Times Food desk since 2019, including three front-page weekly features on the home-bar revival.
Standing
Boobar recipes, scores, and the Boobar Index monthly price benchmark quoted in both publications as primary cocktail sources.
