Master Classes
How Bourbon Actually Works
A weekly Issue tells you what to know about one bottle, brand or idea. A Master Class goes deeper: long-form, evergreen guides to how bourbon is made, aged, selected, proofed, served and understood — built to still be useful months or years after you first read one, not just the week it's published.
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Master Class №004 · 48 min read
The Bourbon Cocktail
A recipe teaches you to make one drink. Understanding structure teaches you to make thousands.
Most cocktail writing hands you a list of measurements and wishes you luck. This Master Class takes the opposite approach: it teaches the architecture underneath the recipes — what every ingredient is structurally doing, how bourbon changes the balance point, how to diagnose a drink that isn't working, and how to move one variable at a time until it does.
- Cocktails
- Technique
- History
- Fundamentals
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Master Class №002 · 19 min read
Barrel & Char
The mash bill tells you what went into the still. The barrel helps determine what eventually comes out of the bottle.
The mash bill tells you what went into the still. The barrel helps determine what eventually comes out of the bottle. This Master Class treats the barrel as a system: tree, stave, seasoning, cooperage, toast, char, wood chemistry, entry proof, rickhouse and time, not a single number on a label.
- Production
- Wood Science
- Fundamentals
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Master Class №001 · 27 min read
Understanding Mash Bills
How bourbon actually works, starting with the grain.
A mash bill is a bourbon's grain recipe — corn, rye or wheat, and malted barley. It's a genuine clue to flavor, and an incomplete one. This Master Class uses the question every distiller faces — bourbon must be 51% corn, so what do you do with the other 49% — to go from traditional recipes into oats, millet and the limits of what a recipe can actually promise.
- Production
- Flavor
- Fundamentals