Everything in the library.

The Chronicle is the newsroom layer above the tasting library — a public spirits-journalism site at chronicle.myliquorlibrary.com. Sections cover News, New Releases, Regulatory Affairs, Awards & Honors, Educational, Opinion, and Press Releases. Each section has its own RSS feed; per-author and per-topic feeds work the same way.

The Chronicle is contributor-driven. Apply at /profile/journalist with two writing samples and a short pitch; an editor reviews and assigns you a tier (Contributor, Senior, or Editor). Senior+ journalists self-publish; Contributors submit for review.

Signed-in readers get a personalized Chronicle feed in-app driven by the authors and topics they follow.

Study Groups are live, hosted tasting sessions. A host (admin for v1) creates an event with a 3–6 spirit lineup, optional per-pour blind flag, and an optional participant cap. Participants join via a single URL or QR; once the host clicks Start, the response form unlocks.

The host display polls every five seconds — average rating per pour, top three flavor notes, vote count, anonymized participant names. Designed to project on a TV across a dim room.

Every response auto-saves a parallel tasting in each participant's Journal so the event counts toward Connoisseur, Globe Trotter, Cellar Master, and the Study Group Scholar badge ladder. Read more at /study-groups.

Browse /distilleries and tap Follow on the producers you care about. Each profile carries their bottles in our catalog, recent reviews, a static map, and a follower count. The 10pm EST cron sweeps every follower nightly and emails a digest of new releases + new reviews on followed-producer bottles — Resend-delivered, mute-per-category from the profile page.

The Cellar Master badge tracks distinct distilleries followed: 5 / 15 / 50 / 150 / 500 / 1500 — Bronze through Obsidian.

Quiet recognition for depth, breadth, contribution, and consistency — every badge ties to spirits education, not consumption. See the full library at /badges — Connoisseur (tasting reflections written), Globe Trotter (countries explored), Flavor Wheel (distinct flavors tagged), Cellar Master (producers followed), Journalist (Chronicle posts published), Study Group Scholar (sessions attended), and a dozen more.

Monthly leaderboards freeze the standings so January's Dean's List stays January's Dean's List even as the live numbers move. Opt out at any time from your profile.

The Research Center is the editorial spine of the product — twelve disciplines covering distillation science, maturation and wood, fermentation, sensory science, history, regulation, industry economics, mixology, the global taxonomy of spirits, collecting, agriculture, and sustainability. Every article is structured the same way: an executive summary for the busy reader, a plain-language version for the curious beginner, a technical deep dive for the working professional, a consumer takeaway, a key-terms glossary, related reading inside the knowledgebase, suggested bottles where relevant, and a transparent sources-and-verification block.

Editorial standard: every claim is logged for verification. Where a claim hasn't been validated against a primary source yet, we mark it explicitly with a TODO and indicate where the answer should come from. We don't paraphrase Wikipedia.

Visit the public preview at /research for the discipline list, or open the full center at app.myliquorlibrary.com/research (free with a free account).

The catalog is the spine of the product. More than 5,000 approved spirits, each with a Dewey-style code, a slug for shareable URLs, and structured fields for category, subcategory, distillery, region, country, age, ABV, proof, MSRP, and mashbill. Thousands of bottles are tagged with full grain breakdowns so you can filter for "wheated bourbons" or "high-rye mashbills."

New bottles are community-submitted: anyone can add what they’re drinking, an admin reviews, and once approved it joins the public catalog with its permanent Dewey code.

Filter the public list at /library by category, US state, and flavor — every filtered URL is shareable and indexable.

When you log a tasting, the flavor chip grid scales to your tier. Beginners see a curated starter set (sweet, oak, vanilla, smoke). Sommeliers see the full library, including specialist terms.

Move up when the chips feel limiting; move down if it ever feels overwhelming. Old notes preserve the tier they were written at — your history is honest about where you were, even if you've since progressed.

The Sommelier tier is verification-gated: upload your certification, an admin reviews, and on approval you unlock tier-5 vocabulary and your notes carry additional weight in our shared flavor knowledge.

As you log tastings, your palate profile fills in automatically. We weigh your likes and dislikes against each other and let patterns rise out of the noise — the flavors that show up again and again when you rate things highly, and the ones that quietly hold you back.

It's not a count. Recent pours pull harder than ancient ones, confident notes pull harder than guesses, and your tier shapes how much each entry weighs in. The result is a fingerprint of your taste that updates with you.

You can see your own profile any time at app.myliquorlibrary.com/profile — top flavors, disliked flavors, and a flavor wheel that makes the shape of your taste click visually.

Once your profile has shape, the library points forward. We rank the bottles you haven't tasted against what you actually like and surface the ones that fit you best — with the reasoning right there on the card. Which of your favorite flavors it hits, which distilleries you've loved share family resemblance.

Multi-lens recommendations let you slice the pool by region, spirit category, distillery, or price band. "Sub-$60 bourbons that match my palate." "Local-to-Kentucky distilleries that look like things I've loved." Public lens routes (no sign-in required) are coming.

The "rank a bar's menu" tool takes a list of bottle names you can see in front of you and ranks them against your palate in real time — type, paste, or scan; we'll resolve them to our catalog and score them for you.

Heart any bottle. The wishlist lives on its own page in the app, and card surfaces across the site (recommendations, library cards, public profiles) show whether you've already wishlisted that bottle so you don't double-bookmark.

The radius search asks "which of my wishlisted bottles can I find within 50 miles" and answers with a distance-sorted list, drawing on our distillery geocoding. Useful for trip planning, not just at-home inventory.

Start a blind tasting and the bottle's identity is hidden during entry — no name, no distillery, no clues. You write your nose / palate / finish and tag flavors against the spirit you're actually tasting, but the UI gives nothing away.

On reveal, the app shows you how your notes lined up with the bottle's official profile, how this score compares to your history, and whether you nailed the structured guesses you made (region, age, proof). A satisfying party trick — and a real training tool. You'll learn where your palate is sharp and where it's bluffing.

Pair it with our 3D-printed Glen Cairn spinner for the four-bottle flight — pour A through D, spin to randomize the order, taste each blind, then match each pour to a bottle.

Keep a single bottle whose contents you top up from other pours over time. My Liquor Library tracks every contribution — source bottle, volume, contributor, date — and the bottle's flavor character evolves as you add to it.

Two scopes: private (your shelf, your contributions) and bar (a hosted bottle at a venue, contributors are anonymous and lightly rate-limited). Bars get a public landing page for their infinity bottle that patrons can scan from a coaster.

For bottles you actually own, log the price you paid (retail, secondary, gift, duty-free, bar, other). Across our community, those entries quietly become a fair-market signal — so the collection page can show you what your shelf is worth today, not just what it cost you.

Your collection page shows total paid, total estimated value, and how the two compare. Per-bottle and by category. Useful for insurance, and for the quiet pleasure of seeing your shelf appreciate.

Custom releases — store picks, single barrels, private barrels — live in a personal library only you can see. Edit the details later from My bottles when you have time to fill them in.

A community leaderboard surfaces the bottles people have written the most reflections on, learners who consistently log over time, and the educational badge collections people have built. Badges are unlocked by learning milestones — first reflection, ten distilleries explored, every state documented, every category tasted, blind-tasting accuracy, submission contributions to the catalog.

Every metric counts written reflections, exploration, and contribution to the shared knowledge base. None of them measure how much you drink — "Most Tastings" means most tasting reflections, not most drinks.

One toggle on your profile controls two things: whether you appear on the leaderboard AND whether your badges show on your public QR profile. Off keeps both private; on lets the world see. Badges are still earned and tracked either way.

The Sommelier tier exists for credentialed professionals — Court of Master Sommeliers, Wine & Spirit Education Trust, similar bodies. Submit your certification (PDF, image), an admin reviews, and on approval your tier is locked at Sommelier and your tasting notes carry additional weight in our shared flavor knowledge.

Verification gates the tier-5 vocabulary (creosote, brettanomyces, medicinal terms) and prevents accidental downgrades — once verified, you can't pick a different tier without contacting support.

Every account has a profile code — a short URL like myliquorlibrary.com/p/abcd1234 — that resolves to a public snapshot of your palate: top flavors, recent tastings, earned badges, member-since. No email, no last name.

The page is QR-friendly so you can save the QR to your phone's wallet or print it on a card. Toggle visibility from your profile any time; off means a 404 for strangers.

The app supports two palettes — Deep Speakeasy (near-black with brass accents) and Warm Library (cream parchment with deep walnut and copper) — plus an Auto mode that follows your operating system's dark / light setting.

Pick during onboarding, change anytime from Profile → Theme. The marketing site you're on now is permanently set to Library; the dashboard at app.myliquorlibrary.com is yours to choose.

Open the dashboard on your phone, tap "Scan barcode," and point at the back of the bottle. We read UPC-A, UPC-E, EAN-13, and EAN-8 right in the browser — no app install, no native download. A hit pre-fills the bottle on the log or collection form; one tap to save.

UPC coverage is growing — Sommelier-verified contributors and our team are filling the catalog in. If your scan misses, you'll be prompted to pick or add the right bottle, and the code gets attached so the next person who scans that bottle gets a hit.

For one-offs that don't belong in our public catalog — store picks, single barrels, private barrels — your add-bottle flow drops them into a personal library only you see (next entry).

When the bottle in your hand is a Total Wine pick, a single-barrel program selection, or a friend's private barrel, it doesn't belong in the public catalog. Add it from the collection flow and it lands in My bottles — visible only to you, with a kind tag (store pick, single barrel, limited edition, duty-free, distillery-only) and full edit access whenever you have time to fill in the details.

Your custom releases never feed the public library or other users' recommendations — they're proprietary to you, the way your shelf is. If a bottle later turns out to be widely available, you can flag it for promotion to the catalog.

Pair the app with our 3D-printed Glen Cairn spinner kit. Pick four bottles, assign them letters A through D, pour into chip-marked glasses, and spin to randomize the tasting order. After your fourth review, the app prompts you to match each pour back to a bottle — no spoilers until you submit.

The reveal puts your notes side-by-side with each bottle's official flavor profile so you can see where your palate landed and where it drifted. A great party format and a serious palate-training drill rolled into one.

A spirit isn't just a thing you sip neat. The cocktails page collects producer-supplied recipes, our curated "Library Picks," and user-submitted recipes — all linked back to the spirits they call for, so a bourbon's detail page lists the cocktails it's the right fit for.

Submit your own. The community upvotes the best ones to the top. Filter by occasion, primary spirit, or by what you already have on your shelf.

Your bar is more than a list. Each entry carries a quantity — three sealed Buffalo Trace lives as one row, qty=3 — so duplicates don’t clutter the view. When you mark one of those three opened (or finish it), the row splits cleanly: source decrements, a new row is born in the new state. The split happens server-side so your data stays consistent.

Tag bottles as collector pieces — bottles you keep sealed for value, not for drinking — and filter the list down to just those when you want to see your investment shelf at a glance.

Once you crack a seal, the headline estimated value drops to zero for that bottle. The secondary market won’t take an opened bottle, so the rollup is honest about it. Paid totals stay historical — your spend doesn’t unwind because you opened something.

When you finish a bottle, the app tells you which finish it is in the lifetime sequence — "your 5th Jack Daniels 10 Year," your 12th rye, your 1st Yamazaki — and offers to open the next sealed bottle of the same spirit if you have one. The empties archive at /collection?condition=empty is a chronological log of every bottle you’ve put down for good — your drinking history, kept honest.

Filter and sort: condition (Sealed, Opened, Empty), Collectors only, spirit category, plus sort by shelf life remaining, A→Z, value, or category. The full toolset for keeping a real bar real.

One-click Export to CSV — take everything in the current view (filters carry through) as a spreadsheet for backups, insurance schedules, or pasting into your own tracker. Fifteen columns covering identity (name, distillery, category), state (condition, quantity, collector flag), dates (acquired, opened, emptied), money (paid, estimated value), and provenance (source, release year, notes). Your data, yours to take out any time you want it.

When something matters, your browser tells you. Web Push runs natively in the app — sign in, click Turn on in Settings, and the device registers with our gateway. We send pushes for five categories:

• Badge unlocks — bronze through obsidian, the second you cross a threshold.
• Producer digest — daily 10pm roll-up of new releases and reviews from distilleries you follow.
• Chronicle posts — when an author or topic you follow publishes something new.
• Study Group reminders — about 15 minutes before a session you’ve joined goes live.
• Admin feedback alerts — for site admins only; real-time pings when users submit feedback.

Each category is independently opt-out at /settings/notifications. No third-party tracking — pushes go straight from us to your device.

The web app works on every phone, but a native pocket experience is the right home for "I just took a sip — let me jot the nose before I forget" tastings. The mobile app is in beta now, App Store and Play Store launches post-alpha.

What ships in the MVP: the full tasting flow (with the same tier-aware vocabulary as web), barcode scan to look up a bottle, your journal, your collection, native push notifications, and the QR profile that lets a bartender pour for you intelligently on the first visit.

Want to try it before launch? Join the iOS beta at apple.myliquorlibrary.com or the Android beta at google.myliquorlibrary.com.