The Journal
Field notes from the rickhouse.
Dispatches from the hunt. Rare-bottle finds, honest tasting notes, and the occasional piece on what it is like to drink bourbon for a living.
21
Field dispatches
13
Bottles in the ledger
70
Tasting notes logged
Tracks
Bourbon & Rye
The home lane. Straight bourbon, straight rye, distillery profiles, label reading, history, the law. Everything below is in this track unless otherwise marked.
Blends & Whiskey →
American single malt, blended whiskey, finished bourbon, Scotch, Irish, Japanese, Canadian, world whisky. The wider notebook. The Hound is still learning here, and the entries say so.
Latest dispatch
Also worth a pour
The Hyperion, and the Bottle That Went Too Fast
Redwood Empire's Hyperion, the 2026 Release - a blend of straight whiskeys that prints its own recipe: 32 percent bourbon, 30 rye, 25 wheat, 13 single malt, bottled unfiltered at 110 proof. Steve held the allocation at The Brothers, ninety-one dollars a bottle. It did not last the week.
The Campus Series, Continued: Copper Dome 'Gum Tree' at The Brothers
The Campus Series the Hound has been watching. A two-barrel Copper Dome pull, 57.4 percent written by hand in the ABV box, poured twice at Steve's bar in Ballwin. Verified label facts here. The tasting writeup waits for a bottle of its own.
ReadThe archive
Tonight's Pour — Penelope Toasted Rye, After the Goal
Watched Messi tie the international scoring record at the bar. Came home, cracked the seal on a gift bottle of Penelope Toasted Rye to mark it. Now the Hound will always remember where it was when that goal went in.
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Tonight's Pour — Still Austin 'The Artist' Straight Rye
Food & Wine ran a bartender roundup of the best whiskeys for a Manhattan today. Still Austin's straight rye made the cut alongside Rittenhouse and Michter's. So the Hound came back to The Artist tonight — 100 proof, Texas grain-to-glass, around forty bucks.
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Lovely Pour, Amazing Manhattan — Peerless Toasted Rye at The Brothers
Steve poured Peerless Toasted Rye, Batch 2, 109 proof, at The Brothers on Sunday. The last pour from the bottle. The Hound had met this one the week before in a Perfect Manhattan — large rock, the way it should be built. Two pours, two formats, one empty decanter on the bar.
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Planters Single Barrel, and the Label That Means It
Planters Whiskey Ozark Highlands Single Barrel Reserve — produced by Nobleton's Distilling House in Union, Missouri. 57.66 percent. The back label reads like a country song. The whiskey inside backs it up.
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The Juice Box and The Brothers Picked This One
Sunday at The Brothers. Steve poured Rare Character Single Barrel rye — a joint pick by St. Louis Juice Box and the bar itself. Barrel R95-200. 115.44 proof. Eight years and two months old. The cartoon zebra on the label has a rifle and a thousand-yard stare. So did the Hound after the first sip.
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Meeting the Makers: Copper Dome Presidential Reserve at The Brothers
A SEMO Academic Hall on the label. A seven-year wheated whiskey in the bottle. The Nobleton's founders standing across the bar at Steve's place in Ballwin. The Hound does not usually get to meet the people who made the pour. The tasting writeup waits for a proper second sit-down — this one is the field report.
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A Mizunara at The Brothers
Walked into Steve's place — The Brothers in Ballwin — and there it sat. Starlight's Mizunara Reserve Batch 002, open, pouring, $150-on-paper and damn near unfindable on a shelf. World Whiskies Awards just named it best in the world. Missouri got one anyway.
ReadFallen Brothers, and a Night of Remembrance in Augusta
Fallen Brothers Crafted Spirits in Augusta marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11th and its own second year, and released '343,' two bottles named for the firefighters lost that day. The Hound made the drive.
ReadBreaking: The Canadian Bourbon Shockwave
Provincial liquor boards delisted American spirits and Jim Beam halted production at Clermont, and the shockwave is pushing allocated bourbon back onto U.S. shelves. The Hound maps what is surfacing, where to hunt it, and the one Canadian import play the rest of the coverage is missing.
ReadThe Large Rock — Why It Matters, and Why So Many Bars Don't Have One
A single large rock is the only ice a Manhattan should ever see. So why do bars charging twenty-two dollars a drink still pour over a fistful of cubes from the well? The Hound wants a map. Subscribers chime in.
ReadFrank August, Drank It Before I Wrote It
The Hound finished the Frank August Small Batch Rye before getting a single photo of it. This is what is left — a short note on a bottle that earned its keep and a confession about the order of operations.
ReadWhy Missouri Shelves Look the Way They Do
Three control states sit on Missouri's border. Missouri is not one of them. That single fact explains most of what you find on a St. Louis shelf — and most of what you don't.
ReadHow the Hound Reads a Label
The front label is marketing. The back label is the truth. The Hound walks through every line that matters — and the lines that are deliberately missing.
ReadTasting with a Quiet Nose
COVID took the top half of the nose and never gave it back. This is what bourbon tastes like when you cannot smell it the way the books say you should — and why you should still be drinking it.
ReadThe Short List
The Hound cannot be a master distiller — wrong nose. Neither, until recently, could most women. The title is held by an extraordinarily short list, and an even shorter list of those are women. Here is who they are, and why it took the industry this long.
ReadField Pour — The Resinous Finish
A single-barrel pick from a Kentucky shop, opened slow on a Thursday afternoon. Butterscotch on the rim, dry spice on the back. Tasted in low light, written up the next morning.
ReadWhat the Pre-Prohibition Ledgers Actually Said
A quiet wave of distillers is putting century-old mash bills back on the still. Most of them are not what the marketing would have you believe.
ReadThe Art of the Char
American White Oak gives up its secrets only under fire. A meditation on the alchemy of barrel char and why the cooper, not the distiller, often deserves the credit.
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