Category: Bourbon

The clink of a dozen glasses finding each other over a table, and the low, warm noise of women who are glad to be there.

That is the sound I did not know I was looking for. I walked into bourbon the way a lot of women do, a little sideways, half-expecting someone to tell me I was in the wrong room. The whiskey world can feel like a men’s club with the door only partway open. You learn to take your pour neat and to keep your opinions ready, just in case.

Then I found Bourbon Women, and the door was already open.

A woman named Peggy Noe Stevens started it back in 2011 — the first female Master Bourbon Taster in the world, tired of being told that women wanted their whiskey sweet and weak. About a hundred women came to that first gathering. It was not a club, she said. It was a movement. Fifteen years later it is a whole community of us, branch by branch, who like our bourbon bold and spicy and high-proof, thank you, and who savor the moments we share far more than the bottles themselves.

This year they gave me something I am still a little stunned by. I was named a 2026 SIP Scholar (Scholarship, Inclusion, Progress), one of twenty women handed a seat at the table: a ticket to the gathering in Louisville, a place to stay, and a mentor to walk me in.

When they asked why I wanted it, I told them the truth. I want to find a community that accepts me and gives me a way to serve, in new and fulfilling ways, and to leave the world a little better than I found it.

That is the whole thing, isn’t it. We do not really want the rare bottle. We want the table. We want to walk in a stranger and walk out part of a family — mothers and sisters and daughters and the friend you met ten minutes ago, all leaning over the same glass, all glad you came.

So if you have ever stood at the edge of a room you were not sure would have you, hear me: your people are out there. Sometimes they are holding a pour, waiting for you to pull up a chair.

I pulled up mine. Come find yours.

The first sip almost always makes them wince. A little heat, a little burn, eyes watering, and then the look I know so well: I don’t get it. What am I even supposed to be tasting.

I love that moment. Because it is the exact spot where the teaching begins.

People think bourbon is something you either like or you don’t. It is not. Tasting is a skill, the same as reading music or reading a room, and almost anyone can learn it. That is what I do now — I am a Certified Executive Bourbon Steward, the top rung of the certification the Kentucky distillers made their official one, and what that fancy title really means is that I help people get past the burn.

So let me hand you the frame the way I hand it to them. Bourbon is not mysterious; it is mostly rules. To be called bourbon it has to be at least fifty-one percent corn, and it has to age in a brand-new barrel, charred black on the inside. That is the whole secret, sitting right there in the wood. The corn brings the sweetness. The fresh char brings the vanilla, the caramel, and the color; every bit of that amber came out of a tree, not a bottle of dye.

Then Kentucky does the slow part. Hot summers, cold winters, the whiskey breathing in and out of the wood all year long, a little of it lost to the air each season — the distillers call that the angel’s share, and they say it with a straight face. Years of that, and the burn quiets down into something you can actually taste.

Here is the trick I teach first. Do not sip it like water. Open your mouth a little after you swallow and breathe out slow through your nose, and the whole thing blooms — vanilla, brown sugar, a little oak, a little spice, where a second ago there was only fire. Then add a few drops of water and it opens again, like a window cracked in a warm room. People gasp. Every single time.

And then comes the part I named for myself a long time ago: the finish. That slow warmth that walks down your chest and settles in, long after the glass is back on the table. I call it the Kentucky hug. Because that is exactly what it feels like — something strong holding on a beat longer than you expected.

That is the whole craft, and it is the same craft as everything else I have ever taught. Take the thing that looks like it belongs only to experts. Slow it all the way down. Give people the frame, then get out of the way while they discover they could do it the whole time.

Nobody remembers the definition of a mash bill. They remember the night they finally tasted the vanilla. So that is where I start — not with the burn, but with the moment just past it, where the good stuff has been waiting all along.