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About Whiskey Wednesday
Your friendly corner of the whisky universe
Hello, friend! Whiskey Wednesday is a little love letter to the world of whisky —
Scotch, Bourbon, Rye, Irish, Japanese, and everything in between. Whether you're hunting
for your next favorite bottle, learning how to mix a proper Old Fashioned, or just curious
which Islay distillery is older than the others, we've got you covered.
Every search, recommendation, and bartender conversation is grounded in real, curated data
from public sources — no hand-waving, no hallucinations. Pull up a stool. 🥂
✨ What You Can Do Here
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Natural Language Search
Type how you talk. "Smoky Islay under $75," "sweet bourbon vanilla,"
"bottles rated over 90" — semantic understanding plus price filters.
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Semantic Vector Search
Every review description is embedded with Jina v5, so "campfire by the sea"
finds the right bottle even if the words don't match.
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Personal Favorites
Save the bottles you love. Your list syncs between this website and the
Whiskey Wednesday iOS app.
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Browse by Name
Scroll the full alphabetized catalog of every bottle we know about and dive
into the review details for any of them.
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AI Bartender
A conversational whisky expert powered by Claude 4.6 Sonnet. Ask for recipes,
distillery history, pairings, or trivia — every answer is grounded in
our indexed sources with inline citations.
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Transparent Citations
The Bartender shows its work: every response links to the exact cocktail,
distillery, Wikipedia article, or review it used to form the answer.
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Query Debugger
Curious what's happening under the hood? Flip the debug panel to see the
actual Elasticsearch Query DSL for any search.
📊 Data Sources
Whiskey Wednesday is powered by four Elasticsearch indices, enriched with Jina v5
embeddings for semantic search and reranked by Jina Reranker v3.
Curated scotch and whisky tasting reviews with name, detailed tasting notes,
price, currency, and reviewer scores. Descriptions are semantically embedded
with Jina v5 so you can search by flavor, mood, or memory.
Source: Whisky Advocate reviews dataset
Classic and contemporary cocktails that use whisk(e)y, bourbon, scotch, rye,
or Irish/Japanese whisky. Each recipe includes measured ingredients, glassware,
and step-by-step instructions — plus IBA classification where it applies.
Whisky distilleries from around the world with founding dates, countries,
regions, owners, coordinates, and rich descriptions. Great for "tell me about
Lagavulin" or "which Speyside distilleries are owned by Diageo."
Source:
Wikidata
SPARQL (Q10373548 — whisky distillery) enriched with
Wikipedia summaries
Curated reference articles on whisky styles, regions, production techniques,
regulations, barrel types, glassware, famous brands, and classic cocktails.
This is how the Bartender knows why bourbon uses charred oak and what Bottled-in-Bond means.
Source:
Wikipedia
REST API summaries and full-text extracts
⚙ How It's Built
BackendFastAPI + uvicorn (Python)
SearchElasticsearch (Elastic Cloud)
EmbeddingsJina Embeddings v5 (1024-dim)
RerankerJina Reranker v3
AI BartenderClaude 4.6 Sonnet via Elastic Inference
iOS AppSwiftUI (same Elasticsearch backend)
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For Rusty & Eric
Whiskey Wednesday didn't start as a website. It started in the spring of 2020 as a
weekly Zoom call, organized by my dear friend Rusty, who had the
simple but brilliant idea that the best way to get through a pandemic was with good
whisky and good friends. Every Wednesday, a handful of us would pour a dram, compare
notes, trade recipes, and laugh our way through whatever the week had thrown at us.
Rusty and Eric — you were a lifeline during
those strange, isolating days. Thank you for the countless evenings of shared
cocktails, wild stories, terrible puns, and recipes that got a little more ambitious
every week. This whole site — the search, the reviews, the AI bartender I named
after Rusty — exists because of those Wednesday nights you made bright.
Cheers, gentlemen. This one's on me. 🥂