Here are our wine, spirits, and beer deadline calendars. Please submit your wine, beer or spirits samples by the deadline dates to be included. We can review your wine or beer “out-of-schedule” through our On-Demand service.
All entries must be registered by the 1st of each month and samples received by the 15th of each month.
The Beverage Testing Institute reviews alcohol beverages and related product that are commercially available from any country. It is open to all producers, distributors, retailers, agents, importers, ad agencies or public relations offices.
Beer: Ship (6) 12oz, 330ml (or equivalent volume) in bottles, cans, growlers, or crowlers
Wine: Ship (2) 750ml (or equivalent) bottles
Spirits: Ship (2) 750ml (or equivalent) bottles
You can refer to our review schedules as a guideline. If you need more guidance, please email us.
We accept Visa, MasterCard, American Express, wire transfer (additional fees may apply), and U.S.-bank-checks. Please remember that payment is required for all entry and shipping fees before results will be released or published.
Each scored entry receives:
– A blind tasting in dedicated sensory laboratory with expert judges
– A 100-point score based on our proprietary methodology
– A Professional tasting note
– Free digital shelf-talker image
– Use of our standard BTI award logo artwork
– A 3-year published review with your bottle image and your company information on Tastings.com for 3 years
– A Buy-It-Now button on your product’s review page to help boost your e-commerce sales
Yes, please contact us for more information.
Submission are due by the 1st of each month and samples are due by the 15th.
Yes, our offices are open Monday thru Friday, 9am -5pm:
Beverage Testing Institute
4849 N. Milwaukee Avenue
Suite 304
Chicago, IL 60630
If you’re not able to drop off during those times please email us or call the office at 773-930-4080 to make other arrangements.
We have a full-service consulting division available to help. We offer a range of confidential services: Quality control checks, pre-release/pre-launch reviews, developmental tastings, or comparative tastings and analyses with competitive brands. For more details, please email us.
You can find more information about our methodology here.
Upon reviewing your product, we offer a unique solution for making connections with Illinois distributors. Contact us to learn more.
Clients who submit before or on a deadline, and cancel their submission within two weeks after that deadline, can opt for a full refund or a credit on their account. Clients who submit after a deadline and cancel their submission will only receive a credit on their account, they will not have the option for a refund. Please email us and we will process this change in our system.
Wine and Beer category results are released and published 45 days from their deadline, and Spirit category results are released and published 60 days from their deadline. All paid products that have been entered and reviewed will be published on Tastings.com, no exceptions.
For non-published review options, please contact our consulting division.
Upon release, you will receive a private link for your eyes only to see the tasting note describing the issue. NR reviews are not searchable on our site or by search engines.
Your full reviews are published on Tastings.com for 3 years. After that they will be moved to our results archive. We offer the ability to renew your review, please contact us for more information
You can download your digital logo and certificate free of charge on the portal.
Soon, you will be able to order stickers, trophies, medals and other POSM from the portal as well.
Presently, please email our POSM Department to learn more and to place an order.
You can reach out to one of our Directors for more information.
The Beverage Testing Institute published review program reviews alcohol beverages and related products that are commercially available in any country. It is open to all producers, distributors, retailers, agents, importers, ad agencies or public relations offices. Samples submitted must be the commercial, government label-approved package and MUST be available for purchase, either in the US or in their country of origin, at the time of submission. Liquid must be the same as that which is currently in-market. Entries that do not meet these criteria will be disqualified from the competition without refund. Do not place any stickers or obstruct front labels, your bottle will be photographed for online publication.
All participants agree to our usage policy. Entrants pay all shipping, customs and duty fees, no results will be released or published without full payment on account. Clients who submit before or on a deadline, and cancel their submission within two weeks after that deadline, can opt for a full refund or a credit on their account. Clients who submit after a deadline and cancel their submission will only receive a credit on their account, they will not have the option for a refund. You may replace your submission with a different product at no additional cost. If you fail to ship samples by the sample receipt deadline, your submission may be cancelled. If you fail to pay by the publication date, your results will not be published. We reserve the right to refuse service for any reason and refund your submission fee(s). Any samples shipped to BTI become BTI property 14 days after a given category deadline date and will be disposed of at our discretion.
All paid submissions that have been recommended by the panel will be published on Tastings.com, no exceptions. Wine and Beer category results are released 45 days from their submission deadline, Spirits category results are released 60 days from their submission deadline.
We reserve the right to modify these rules at our discretion.
Beverage Testing Institute (BTI)is an independent, privately-owned corporation that conducts professional, blind tastings and reviews of beverage products for marketing and educational purposes. We do not accept sponsorship or advertising from any alcoholic beverage brand. Participation in BTI’s open-forum tastings and competitions is completely voluntary. The producers, brand owners, or marketers of the relevant brands enter the products that we taste into our competitive tastings. Each producer pays the standardized, per-product registration fee to enter their products into these tasting sessions or competitions. The registration fees cover the cost of administering the tastings and overhead associated with the distribution of the tasting results through various media.
We conduct monthly tasting sessions by product category according to our annual wine, beer, and spirits tasting schedules, see our review schedules for more information. Participants are entitled to use only their individual product’s tasting note and score for marketing purposes. BTI’s logos can be licensed for the purpose of supplementing the promotion of an individual product’s review. Use of unauthorized copies or approximations of BTI’s logos for any purpose is not allowed. All uses of BTI’s name and content in press releases must be approved by Tastings/BTI prior to dissemination. You may submit a press release featuring our name, reviews, and awards, or any print ads featuring our results and logo, by sending it to us at support@bevtest.com. Because wines have the potential to beneficially change in flavor and structure over time, if we have reviewed a wine more than once, we will publish multiple reviews for the same wine (exact brand and vintage) and always note the date of tasting. We do this to track the evolution of a wine for our readers. Since spirits, and the majority of beers, are based on a fixed recipe and do not beneficially change over time once bottled, we only publish the most current review for a given spirit or beer, so that our readership knows the quality level of the brand currently in the market.
It is our policy to allow licensed, approved reprints of the total results of any specific, individual tasting session for advertising purposes for a specified period of time. Because subsequent or prior sessions may be conducted by different panels, feature different groupings of products, and the possibility of product recipe re-formulations, we do not allow compiled listings of products from different sessions for advertising purposes. Results of various tastings are published on Tastings.com in the format of a searchable guide that is updated with the most current review for a given product, as we taste it. If you wish to license our category results or review content, contact us at consulting@bevtest.com.
Our tasting panels include senior staff members of Tastings/BTI, all of whom have had a minimum of three years experience as Tastings/BTI panelists and are recognized as world-class sensory evaluation experts in the field of alcoholic beverages. We also draw on a large pool of qualified members of the wholesale, retail, and on-premise sectors that have been trained in the use of our proprietary evaluation methodology and software. All products are tasted in flights by category, in random order. Samples are tasted blind and neat in Riedel stemware. No more than fifteen-to-thirty products are tasted in a two-to-three hour morning tasting session. Our tasting room has been designed to minimize outside factors and optimize the critical perception of our panelists through a combination of natural and synthetic lighting and a standardized color and descriptive template.
