Four Roses 10 Recipes: Jim Rutledge's 2×5 Grid
— Four Roses ships 10 bourbons: 2 mashbills × 5 yeasts. Jim Rutledge kept the grid alive as Seagram closed four distilleries around him.
Whisky, told through
the people who made it.
LegacyDram reads whisky the way an engineer reads legacy code — by the decisions, trade-offs, and people behind the bottle. People-first biographies, craft chemistry, and tasting picks with reasoning.
Three columns
People
Distillers, blenders, owners, and the engineers behind the bottles. Decisions they shipped, trade-offs the bottle still carries.
Craft
Distillation chemistry, cask science, blending math, fermentation engineering. Whisky-making seen through the engineer's lens.
Tasting
Curated bottle picks paired with the human story and the technical detail. No marketing copy, no "best of" listicles.
Latest articles
Bunnahabhain 12 Review: Ian MacMillan's Unpeated Islay at 46.3%
— Bunnahabhain 12 (46.3% ABV, non-chill filtered, ~2 ppm phenol) is Islay's unpeated flagship. Ian MacMillan's 2010 decision to stop chill-filtering and adding E150a, in one bottle.
Masataka Taketsuru: The Scotland Notebooks That Built Yoichi
— Nikka founder Masataka Taketsuru trained in Scotland 1918–1920 and returned with three notebooks — Longmorn, Bo'ness, Hazelburn. It took sixteen years to open Yoichi.
John Glaser at Compass Box: The Transparency Fight He Lost Twice
— John Glaser founded Compass Box in 2000, disclosed full cask breakdowns in 2015, was flagged by the SWA, and lost the 2017 transparency vote.
Glenlivet 12 vs Glenfiddich 12: Speyside's Two Founding Families
— Glenlivet 12 vs Glenfiddich 12 review: George Smith's 1824 Speyside licence vs William Grant's 1886 second-hand stills. Same region, different fruit.