Recent Blog

Blackberry Whiskey: What's Really Going On? Not long ago, I was standing in my local liquor store — the kind of place where the guy behind the counter actually knows what he's talking about — scanning the whiskey aisle like I always do. And right there, wedged between the bourbons I've been buying

Fire, Smoke & Bourbon: The Perfect BBQ Pair Let me set the scene for you. It's a Saturday afternoon in July. The smoker's been running since seven in the morning. There's a brisket on that's been going low and slow for about twelve hours. The bark is near-perfect — jet black, cracked at the ed

Is Scotch Whisky Finally Ready to Change? Let's be honest — most of us who have been drinking Scotch for any length of time didn't think the category needed a shakeup. You find your bottle, you pour two fingers, maybe splash in a little water, and that's that. Scotch was Scotch. It was dependable,

Two Bottles, One Distillery, Entirely Different Experiences The Macallan Double Cask and Sherry Oak ranges are easy to confuse. Both are built around sherry-seasoned oak, sit near the center of The Macallan's entire lineup, and come in familiar age statements like 12 and 18 years. They are also us

India's Single Malt Revolution Is No Longer a Whisper For most of the twentieth century, the whisky world operated by a set of rules nobody had to write down. Scotch sat at the top. American bourbon and rye occupied a proud and separate throne. Japanese whisky, after decades of patient craftsmansh

The Real Shelf Life of Scotch: What Every Whisky Drinker Needs to Know There's a bottle of single malt sitting in the back of a cabinet somewhere in millions of American homes — a gift from a few Christmases ago, or a souvenir from a distillery tour in the Highlands, opened once and then forgotten

Tennessee Whiskey vs. Bourbon: Does It Really Matter? A few years back, I was at a backyard cookout in Nashville — the kind where there's a folding table with a half-dozen bottles lined up and somebody's already arguing about football before the burgers are even off the grill. I reached for what I

Why Bourbon Collecting Is Having a Genuine Moment There has never been a better time — or a more complicated time — to start a bourbon collection. The American whiskey industry has undergone a seismic shift over the past two decades, moving from a category that was largely ignored by the broader s

The Bourbon Old Fashioned: America's Most Perfect Cocktail There is no cocktail in the American canon that has earned more loyalty, sparked more arguments, or been more consistently misunderstood than the Old Fashioned. It sits at the center of bourbon culture the way a hearth sits at the center o

The World's First Single Barrel Bourbon: How Blanton's Rewrote the Rules of American Whiskey Every serious bourbon conversation eventually comes back to Blanton's. Whether someone's celebrating a find at retail price, grumbling about secondary market gouging, or proudly arranging eight horse-and-j