Frank August, Drank It Before I Wrote It

The Hound is still learning. One of the things the Hound is still learning is to take the photo before the last pour, not after.

The Frank August Small Batch Rye is gone. The bottle is empty. There is no Glencairn shot, no back-label hero, no slow-light photograph of an amber pour catching the kitchen window. The Hound drank it. The Hound enjoyed it. The Hound forgot to document it. This is the journal entry that confesses that.

What the bottle was

Frank August is a sourced whiskey brand out of Bardstown, Kentucky, founded by Jonathan Crocker. The Small Batch Rye is bottled at 100 proof — 50% ABV — with an undisclosed mashbill widely understood to lean high-rye. The juice is sourced from an undisclosed Kentucky distillery. No age statement, which means at least four years by TTB rule. Non-chill-filtered. Batches of roughly ten to fifteen barrels. The brand has been clear from launch that the sourcing is sourcing, the blending is theirs, and the bottle on the shelf is what it is.

Per Breaking Bourbon the rye launched as an ongoing release in May 2025. Shelf price has been running $70 to $75 in Missouri.

What the Hound remembers

This is the part that does not get to be a structured tasting note, because the Hound did not write one down at the time. What is left is impression.

Brown sugar was the first thing every pour. Then a rye pepper that landed in the middle of the palate rather than the front — softer than a Kentucky 95-rye, more grounded than a younger sourced rye. There was a baking-spice quality that the Hound came to look forward to. Cinnamon. A faint leather on the long end.

Was it the best rye the Hound has poured this year? The Hound is not making that call. The Hound is still learning the rye category and does not have a shelf of comparisons deep enough to rank a hundred-proof sourced rye against the rest of the field with any honesty. What the Hound can say is that the bottle did not last. The Hound kept reaching for it. That is a kind of data.

The lesson

There is a discipline to writing about bourbon. Part of that discipline is taking the photograph before the bottle goes empty, so the next person reading the entry has something to look at. The Hound did not do that here. The Hound is publishing the entry anyway, because the alternative — writing a polished tasting note from memory, with invented detail — is the thing the editorial standard is built to prevent.

A pour the Hound actually had, honestly remembered, written without a photograph, is better than a pretty entry that pretends to more precision than the Hound earned.

Next bottle gets the photo first. The shelf at home now has a sticky note on the door.

Drink slowly.

— The Hound