The Short List

We promised you a tease and we are here to pay it off.

The Hound, with a nose that has been at half power since 2021, will not be a master distiller. Fine. That title sits at the top of a craft that demands an instrument the Hound no longer owns at full volume. But neither, until very recently, could most women hold that title — and that is not about instruments. That is about a hundred and fifty years of who was allowed in the room.

This is a piece about the short list. The shorter list. And why both are finally getting longer.

The title and what it means

Master distiller is not a degree. There is no exam. It is a working title given by a distillery to the person who owns the recipe, the cuts, the proof, the barrel selection, and ultimately the bottle. It is one part chemistry, one part palate, one part institutional memory, and one part whose name goes on the front of the room. The last part has historically mattered most.

For most of the modern bourbon era — call it post-Prohibition through about 2015 — the title was passed father to son, mentor to mentee, and the room was almost entirely male and almost entirely Kentuckian. There were women in distilleries the whole time. They were running labs, running lines, running blending sessions. They were not running the title.

Who broke the seal

The break came in 2016, when Pam Heilmann took the master distiller title at Michter’s, becoming the first woman since Prohibition to hold that title at a Kentucky Distillers Association member distillery. Heilmann had spent fifteen years at Beam before that — Baker’s, Basil Hayden’s, Booker’s, Knob Creek. She had been doing the work for a very long time. The title finally caught up. She is now Master Distiller Emerita.

Then Marianne Eaves, who left a senior role at Brown-Forman to become Kentucky’s first female master distiller of bourbon at Castle & Key. She put Castle & Key on the map, then left in 2019 to build her own thing. That thing is now Forbidden Bourbon — her recipe, her cuts, her name on the front. The Hound has poured Forbidden more than once. It is the work of someone who waited a long time and is no longer waiting.

Then Elizabeth McCall at Woodford Reserve — the first woman to hold that title at Woodford. McCall grew up inside the industry and earned the seat the old-fashioned way: by being measurably better at the work than the people next to her.

There are others moving up. Andrea Wilson, Master of Maturation at Michter’s. Lisa Wicker, now Director of Distilling at Whiskey Thief. Marlene Holmes in Texas. Marlene Dant at Log Still. Wendy Peveich, who built Archer Eland after years as a brand ambassador and decided she would rather be the brand. The list is no longer a list of one. It is a short list, but a list.

The structural piece

You cannot tell this story without saying the words that bourbon writers usually skip. The reason the list was short is not because women cannot taste, blend, distill, or run a still. The reason is that for most of bourbon’s modern life, the people deciding who got mentored were men, and the people they tended to mentor looked like them. Add a hundred years of explicit barriers to women in any executive seat in the spirits industry and the math becomes obvious.

The thing that finally moved the needle was not goodwill. It was three things in roughly this order. One, a generation of women who got their training in the 2000s and 2010s in operations, chemistry, and brand work, and stayed long enough that promoting them became cheaper than losing them. Two, the rise of consumer associations — Bourbon Women Association, founded by Peggy Noe Stevens in 2011 — that quietly built a market the industry could no longer pretend was niche. Three, the founders who skipped the heritage distilleries entirely and built their own — Fawn Weaver at Uncle Nearest being the most visible, even after her 2025 loss of board control reminded everyone that founding a brand and keeping it are two different sports.

What changes when the room changes

The Hound has a working hypothesis, which is what a journal is for. When the people deciding the recipe stop all looking the same, the recipe stops looking the same. Mizunara finishes. Wheated mash bills. Lower-proof bottlings that prioritize integration over heat. Single-barrel programs that get pickier about what counts as a good barrel. These were not invented by women. But they are arriving in a market where the people choosing what to make are more varied than they were ten years ago, and the bottles on the shelf are, quietly, getting more interesting because of it.

Fawn Weaver said the loud part out loud: most American whiskey, for most of American history, was distilled by people who never got their names on a bottle. She built a brand on that fact. Whether or not Uncle Nearest survives its current ownership fight, the underlying point is permanent. The history of bourbon is not what the marketing department of a heritage distillery told you it was. And the present is not, either.

What the Hound recommends

The Hound does not give out endorsements lightly. But if you have been drinking bourbon for ten years and you have never poured a glass of Forbidden, you have a hole in your education. Same goes for whatever McCall is putting out at Woodford right now. Same goes for finding Bourbon Women’s annual SIPosium and going at least once — do not let the name on the door talk you out of it.

The short list is getting longer. The Hound is paying attention. The Lodge will hear when one of these bottles lands inside driving distance of Missouri.

Read who made it before you read what the label says. The room behind a bottle is older than the bottle.

— The Hound