Blending at home

Keeping a blending journal, and where paper breaks

2 minute read · The Blending School

The journal is the craft. Every famous blending house is, underneath, a library of recipes and tasting notes. Yours can be a notebook until it cannot, and this guide is about both halves.

What to record, every time

• Date. Non-negotiable. Blends change with rest, and a note without a date is a note about nothing.
• Each component: name, volume, proof. Proof is on the label; write it down, because you will need it for the math later.
• Resulting proof and volume. Compute it; do not guess. One formula.
• A tasting note after resting, not the night you made it. Include the rest time.
• A score. Crude and consistent beats detailed and abandoned.

A structure that works on paper

One page per blend. Top: name and date started. A table of components with volume and proof. Below: a running log of changes with dates. Bottom: tasting notes with dates and scores. Leave room; good blends get revisited.

Where paper breaks

For one-off blends, a notebook is perfect. For an ongoing blend, an infinity bottle, it fails in three specific ways:

• Every pour changes every number. Add two ounces and the proof, composition, and every component's share all move. On paper you recompute by hand, or you stop recording, and everyone stops recording.
• Errors compound. Mistype one pour on page two and every total after it is wrong, with no way to recompute except from scratch.
• Some numbers are impossible by hand. How much of the very first pour is still in the bottle after four years and sixty events? That is a chain of sixty multiplications that nobody will do in a notebook. It is also the single most interesting fact about the bottle.

What the app does differently

Thief & Blend stores the pours, not the totals, and recomputes everything from the ledger. Edit any entry and everything downstream updates. The Ship of Theseus figure is free. Tasting notes are stamped with the proof at the moment you wrote them, and ratings chart against proof over time. It is the blending journal with the arithmetic removed, which is the part that was making people quit.