This has been a very good year for my blog. I want to thank all of my followers for their support and readership. In April I published my one thousandth blog. I have continued to write three blogs a week even though it has been difficult at times. I had bypass surgery in June and Rosemary stepped in to write tasting blogs from the notes that Matt and I wrote. I am in debt to her for doing this. 

I have written some popular, if controversial, blogs this year. The most popular blog was the Maker’s Mark whiskey drop blog. I am not sure why it was so popular, but it has more views than any other blog written this year. The second most popular was “Has Jack Daniel’s Lost Its Pride”. I wrote that blog hoping to stir the pot a little because I believe that Tennessee whiskey is a separate style than Bourbon and the distillers in Tennessee need to continue to be proud of that fact. The other popular blogs were the “Counterfeit Whiskey Bottles”, “A Wheat Recipe Bourbon To Replace Weller Special  Reserve”, “Building A Bourbon Collection”, and “A Brief History Of Wheat Recipe Bourbon”. All of these blogs have been viewed several thousand times since I wrote them. 

I am looking to have a half a million views of the blog this year. I think that is pretty good considering that I don’t pay to promote the blog on any social media outlets. I am constantly getting requests from people who want to write for my blog, but I don’t use outside writers for content. I like the control I have on content. I only write about things that interest me. I do have Matt Kohorst, my nephew and fellow whiskey taster, write some blogs on subjects that interest him. I hope that he will do more writing in the future, but he is a busy man. 

We have been picking our whiskeys of the month now for two years. At the end of the year, we pick the whiskey from these whiskeys for our whiskey of the year. This does not mean that it is necessarily the best whiskey made that year, but it is the best that we tasted during the year. We taste about seventy or eighty whiskeys each year and publish at least one tasting a week on Wednesdays. I publish more than one tasting a week when I find myself short on ideas and when I need something to publish because I can’t write blogs such as when I was in the hospital. 

I have about 950 followers of the blog. That is a small amount compared to other blogs. However, I am proud of the fact that many of these followers are people in the industry. It is for them that I write a lot of my blogs. I have heard reports from some people that they find my writing a bit dry and too academic, but that is okay. I am probably not writing for them anyway. I am not going to change the way I write or what I write.

I am looking forward to the year 2024. I plan to continue the three blogs a week schedule for now. I plan on visiting a few more distilleries this year. This is something I have not done enough of since the pandemic. I have also considered making more time to finish a book I have been working on. I thank all of my readers for their support and look forward to the next year.

Photo Courtesy of Rosemary Miller