momentField Notes
The Spreadsheet Lasted Three Bottles
Jul 22, 2026
At the beginning of this year I sat down at the computer next to my tasting room, plugged in a little handheld barcode scanner, and opened an Excel spreadsheet. I was going to catalog my own collection. Do it myself, properly, finally.
I got three bottles in.
The scanning worked. Scanning was never the problem. The problem was that everything I actually wanted — the distiller, the mashbill, the story behind the brand, what I thought of the pour the last time I had it — none of that was going to land in that spreadsheet unless I typed it in by hand, one bottle at a time, forever. So I went looking for something that could pull those details in automatically, and that's when I found out there was nothing to pull them from. No database. Not a public one, not a paid one.
So there I sat, three bottles into a room full of whiskey, holding a barcode scanner, with a much better understanding of my problem and no way to solve it. The whole experiment lasted about an hour. I said that's it, I'm going to find a better way, and I started building an app.
I should be honest about what I thought I was doing at that point. I thought I'd build a basic app, more or less like the ones already out there, just a little better. That is not what happened. The distance between what I set out to build and what I found once I started is the whole story here, and it's the part nobody tells you before you begin.
There's a saying about building a better mousetrap. American whiskey has never been an industry that's especially good at catching mice. We've all just settled for what's on the shelf.
What changed for me wasn't that I finally learned how to build something. I'd been carrying the pieces for about thirty years. There was coding in a master's program. There was almost two decades as a logistician in the Army, which is fundamentally a job about moving complicated things through complicated systems without losing track of any of them. Whiskey collections, it turns out, are a logistics problem wearing a nicer jacket. What actually changed was that the time, the opportunity, the skill set, and the tools available today all showed up in the same room at once. That's rarer than it sounds. Most ideas die because two of those four are missing.
So I made a basic design. Nothing fancy — the shape of the thing, on a screen.
And that's where it got away from me, in the best way.
Because once I could see it, I realized I wasn't limited to what the market had trained me to expect. I could put in anything. Everything. Every level of detail I'd wanted for years and been told, implicitly, that I couldn't have. Nobody was standing there deciding on my behalf what a whiskey app was allowed to be. I had assumed that ceiling was real. It was just a habit.
That's when the actual problem finally showed itself, and it wasn't the one I'd been trying to solve.
Every app I'd tried was a recording device. The spreadsheet was a recording device. The barcode scanner was a recording device with a trigger. They were all built to store what I already knew, and storage was never my question. My question was how do I interact with this? How do I ask it something and get an answer that's about me? A record tells you what you had. It can't tell you what you'd like, or why the bottle in your hand on a Tuesday in a store might be worth forty dollars to you specifically. Those are different machines entirely, and I'd spent years frustrated that the first one wouldn't behave like the second.
The first person I told was my wife, Shauna. She's a bourbon enthusiast right alongside me, which meant I wasn't explaining the problem to her — she'd been living in it too. So it never became me presenting an idea and her nodding at it. We thought through the problems together, argued about the solutions, built them, and looked again. That give and take is most of why the thing is any good. An idea you can't hand to somebody who'll push back on it stays exactly as smart as the day you had it.
Since those three bottles, it's been about six and a half months. I've put in sixty to eighty hours a week, weekends included. I've gotten up at two in the morning and worked until seven at night. I've started and finished a day without the sun being involved on either end. I've been on trips where a solution arrived unannounced — what if we could do this, or, that's the answer to the thing I got stuck on in March — and those moments never once checked my calendar first. So I learned to capture them wherever they landed, and then get back to building.
I didn't start because I knew what I was building. I started because I'd finally run out of ways to avoid it, and three bottles took the last one away.
The real problem doesn't show itself from the outside. It waits until you've committed, and then it introduces itself.
John Schuster II designs and builds The Perfect Pour and Velrae Method at Drunken Unicorn Productions. He hosts the Chasing the Unicorn podcast and writes the American Whiskey Industry Brief. The work lives at momentfirst.com.