The Impact of Pregnancy and Parenthood on a Professional Whiskey Taster’s Career

• I joke that I drink whiskey for a living, but it’s more like tasting it before spitting it out.
• Working from home has allowed me to keep my pregnancy under wraps.
• I’m worried about how having a baby will affect my job.

Most people’s typical workday drinks include a few cups of coffee or tea, water, and maybe a Red Bull if they’re feeling sluggish. Mine are a little different: On any given day, you can find Jack Daniel’s, Glenlivet’s, and many other whiskies on my desk.

I often joke that I drink for a living, but the truth is more nuanced.

I’m a spirits critic

As a freelance writer and critic focused on spirits, in particular whiskey, I do pour alcohol in the middle of the day quite often, but it’s not to drink. A large part of my job is tasting — a rigorous process of evaluation that starts with nosing (smelling) the whiskey before sipping and, usually, spitting it into a cup. Often, I meet with master distillers and blenders who guide me through their latest releases, and sometimes, I even conduct business meetings at a bar.

That doesn’t mean I’m getting wasted on the job — I wouldn’t have a job if that were the case — but drinking is an unavoidable facet of my work. And that made my decision to have a baby kind of complicated.

I wondered how I could get pregnant and keep my job

I spent years debating how it would be possible to balance my work with pregnancy. Pre-pandemic, I worked in an office and tasted regularly with colleagues: There’s no way I could have kept a pregnancy under wraps without everyone finding out, and that wasn’t how I wanted it to go.

Like many women, I feared the impact it would have on my career — a well-founded worry, as one in five mothers has experienced pregnancy discrimination in the workplace, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.

The fact that my work centers on whiskey heightened my anxieties. Plenty of folks feel entitled to comment on women’s reproductive choices; add alcohol into that, and it feels like an open door to nosy questions and judgmental remarks. I worried that simply being in regular proximity to alcohol would cause people to criticize me, regardless of whether I was imbibing.

I stopped drinking when I started trying to get pregnant

To be clear, I am not. When I began trying to conceive, I stopped drinking. I work from home exclusively these days, so I could take a break without anyone being the wiser. As cover, when I was in public, I used excuses like Dry January, or I kept a drink in my hand without actually sipping it. (No one gets suspicious as long as you’re holding a drink.)

And when I did get back to tasting regularly, as a critic for The New Wine Review, I spat everything — something I already did most of the time. It hasn’t impacted my ability to evaluate a whiskey’s quality and characteristics; if anything, my newly enhanced sense of smell has been a boon to the whole tasting process. And frankly, I haven’t really missed drinking, other than the occasional urge for a martini. Although there are lots of great alcohol-free cocktails, there’s no substitute for that one.

Now, I’m a few weeks away from my due date. I’ve shared my news privately with a lot of people but avoided making a public announcement. I’m still afraid that my professional reputation will take a hit, that I’ll lose access to sources and opportunities because people assume I can no longer fully do my job, and that this decision will hold back my career.

But I can’t put it off any longer. This baby is going to be born whether I talk about it or not — and once it is, I’m definitely going to celebrate with a pour of the good stuff.