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The Bourbon Fox & Hound

The Rules of the Pour

How we source the pour.

Every Spotted entry on this site carries a small badge — Purchased, Gift, Sample, or Tasted at venue. This page explains exactly what each one means and how the Fox and the Hound conduct themselves around the industry.

Purchased

The Fox or the Hound paid retail.

Money out of the household budget. Retail shelf, store pick, secondary market, lottery win — all counted as purchased. The receipt exists. The bottle sits on the home shelf. The opinion is unconstrained.

Gift

A friend or family member handed it over.

Bottles given by people with no commercial interest in coverage. Birthday pours, holiday hauls, a friend who happened to win a lottery and shared. The Fox writes it up as honestly as a purchased bottle — and says so up front.

Sample

Sent by a distillery, brand, or retailer.

Industry samples are accepted only when the brand sends them unsolicited and asks for nothing in return. Acceptance is never a promise of coverage. Negative notes get written when the pour earns them. Samples are tasted blind alongside at least one purchased reference bottle of the same style.

Tasted at venue

Poured at a bar, event, or someone's home.

The Fox paid for the pour at a bar, or attended an event where pours were comped to attendees, or sat in a friend's living room. Venue is named. Pour size is noted when it materially affects the write-up. The Fox returns to taste the bottle again whenever the budget allows.

What we decline

The list of no.

  • — No paid placements. Ever. No sponsored posts. No comped trips in exchange for coverage. No affiliate links inside tasting write-ups.
  • — No off-record tastings turned into copy. If the Fox is invited to a private tasting under embargo or off the record, the embargo holds. Period.
  • — No drafts shared with brands before publication. The Fox does not run write-ups by distilleries for approval.
  • — No secondary-market sales. The Fox does not flip bottles. The Hound does not broker. Bottles are bought to drink, share, or hold — never to resell.
  • — No anonymous sources without context. When a tip comes in from a retailer or industry source who must stay anonymous, the relationship is described in the write-up even when the name is not.

Who is writing

The Hound and the Fox are bylines.

The Hound and the Fox are the journal's characters, not two separate people with two separate résumés. Behind them is a real operator in Missouri who buys the bottles, walks the shops, pours the whiskey, and signs off on every word before it publishes. The characters exist because the journal is built to outlive whoever is holding the pen, and because the intel is more useful when the source is not a personality.

The anonymity stops at the tasting glass. Every first-person tasting note on this site comes from a real pour by a real person. Where nobody has poured the bottle, the entry says so plainly and carries no tasting note at all — that is the whole point of the sighting, consensus, and open-verdict labels used throughout the site. Reader notes and other reviewers' notes are always attributed to them and are never rewritten into the Fox's voice.

Software helps with the work. Automated trackers watch calendars, shelves, and state filings, and the drafting and editing of copy is AI-assisted. No software has a palate, so no software originates a tasting impression here. Every published sentence, every email, and every alert is released by the operator rather than by a machine acting on its own.

Material connections

Everything that could tilt the coverage.

"No paid placements" means exactly that: no one has ever paid money, in any form, to appear on this site or to be written about favorably. It does not mean the journal operates in a vacuum. Where a relationship exists that a reader would want to know about, it is listed here and named in the entry it touches.

  • — A local bar carries the journal's card. One bar in the St. Louis metro displays the journal's signup card on its bar-top dispensers at no charge to either side. In exchange the journal covers that bar's new pours ahead of other regional venues. No money moves in either direction, coverage order is the only thing affected, and a bad pour there gets written up as a bad pour. Entries touching that venue say so on the entry.
  • — Affiliate links, if they ever appear. There are none inside tasting write-ups and there never will be. If the journal ever earns a commission anywhere else on the site — gear, a where-to-buy link, a labeled sponsor in the dispatch — the link is marked as an affiliate link where it sits, and this page is updated before it goes live.
  • — The Inner Circle is the business model. Member subscriptions are the only revenue the journal takes, which is the reason it can decline everything above.
  • — The publisher. The Bourbon Fox & Hound is published by Jenatech, LLC, which also builds and maintains the site as a piece of its own portfolio. No client of that firm has ever received coverage here, and if one ever does the connection will be disclosed on the entry.

Corrections

If we get it wrong.

Facts that are wrong get corrected in the post itself, with a dated note at the bottom. Tasting opinions are not corrected — they are revisited. If a second pour from a different bottle of the same release reads differently, the Fox writes a follow-up rather than rewriting history. Send corrections to intel@bourbonfoxhound.com.