Episode 256: American Whiskey Scholar with Colin Blake Show Notes
American Whiskey Scholar with Colin Blake: What Whiskey Education Looks Like Now
It’s been a while since I’ve had a guest on the podcast who wasn’t representing a distillery or a bottle, and this episode gave me a good reason to change that.
American Whiskey Scholar launched at the end of the summer as a new three-level certification program built around American whiskey in the broadest sense, not just bourbon. Level 1 is online now, with Levels 2 and 3 planned to go progressively deeper over the coming months. One of the three people behind it is Colin Blake, alongside Peggy Noe Stevens and Susan Reigler, and Colin joined me to talk about what they’re trying to build and why another whiskey credential might actually have room to exist.
If Colin’s name sounds familiar, there’s a good chance it’s from Moonshine University or the Stave & Thief Society. He spent more than a decade helping educate distillers, Bourbon Stewards, and people who eventually went on to open hundreds of distilleries around the world. His route there was not exactly traditional. Colin has degrees in photography and film, worked in entertainment, and entered spirits without the chemistry or engineering background you might expect from someone who would eventually spend years teaching distillation.
Colin learned by making engineers and distillers explain things until they made sense to someone without their technical background. Eventually, that became a large part of his role as an educator: take complicated information, understand it well enough to strip away the unnecessary fog, and rebuild it into something another person can actually use.
Beyond Memorizing the Definition of Bourbon
American Whiskey Scholar Level 1 is self-paced and online, with ten modules covering history, raw materials, production, maturation, sensory, cocktails, food pairing, bottling, and the other pieces that surround what eventually ends up in the glass.
It’s also modular. Someone who wants the full certification can take the entire program, complete the quizzes and final exam, and earn the credential. Someone who has no interest in another certificate but suddenly realizes they have spent three nights wondering about filtration can buy that module by itself.
I like that approach because whiskey education occupies a strange space between professional training and recreational obsession. There are people taking courses because they work behind a bar, in retail, distribution, production, or brand education. There are also people who have absolutely no professional need to understand maturation chemistry but would very much like to spend their Saturday doing so (guilty).
The program also gives itself more room by being American Whiskey Scholar rather than another bourbon-specific certification. Colin points out that there are more than 60 TTB-classified types within American whiskey. Bourbon is obviously a huge part of the conversation, but rye, wheat whiskey, corn whiskey, American single malt, and plenty of less familiar categories give the curriculum somewhere to go without constantly explaining why a bourbon class has wandered off into malt.
That broader scope fits where American whiskey sits now. Bourbon may still be the gravitational center, but the category around it has gotten much more interesting.
The Moonshine University Question
There was really no way to have this conversation without talking about Moonshine University.
Colin spent roughly a quarter of his life helping build it, including Stave & Thief, and its announced closure at the end of 2026 landed personally for him. The timing with American Whiskey Scholar is coincidental. AWS had already been in development for more than a year before the Moonshine University announcement, although Colin readily admits the news changed some of how they approached the launch.
The two programs also come from different starting points.
Moonshine University built its reputation on hands-on distilling education and sensory training, with students physically working through the realities of production. Stave & Thief grew far beyond what Colin initially expected, eventually credentialing more than 10,000 Bourbon Stewards.
AWS is designed to be accessible from anywhere. There’s no trip to Louisville required, no hotel, no airfare, and no need to organize several days away from work just to take the first level. Students have lifetime access to the material, and the online structure gives Colin, Peggy, and Susan the ability to keep adding office hours, company-specific training, and other pieces around the core curriculum.
It also arrives at a different moment in the industry. Moonshine University caught the enormous craft distilling wave when thousands of people were trying to figure out how to open a distillery. Colin always knew that phase couldn’t continue indefinitely. Education eventually had to move from helping people start businesses toward helping existing businesses train people, retain knowledge, and operate better.
American Whiskey Scholar is much closer to that second world.
Knowing Whiskey and Explaining Whiskey Are Different Skills
One of the questions I kept coming back to was the gap between knowing facts and being able to do something useful with them. Someone can memorize the legal definition of bourbon, tell you the maximum barrel-entry proof, and rattle off mash bill rules before you finish asking the question. That does not necessarily mean I want that person leading my distillery tour. And we have all been on those tours.
Sometimes the guide has memorized a script and delivers it like airport safety instructions. Sometimes things get a little more adventurous and you find yourself thinking, “That’s not completely wrong, but I’m also not sure we should let it roam freely.”
Colin agrees that communication is its own skill. Level 1 is still largely testing knowledge and recall, although the curriculum is deliberately built around putting that knowledge into use through things like sensory, cocktails, menus, and food pairing. Level 2 is expected to introduce more written responses, while Level 3 gives them more room to think about whether someone can actually express what they know.
There is only so much an online platform can test, though, and Colin has spent enough time teaching to know that being comfortable in front of people comes from repetition. He hated public speaking when he started. Then the owner of Moonshine University essentially told him that if he worked at a school, he was going to teach.
Whiskey knowledge is useful. Being able to explain it accurately, clearly, and without making the person across from you regret asking is another discipline entirely.
Sensory Training Gets Complicated Online
Sensory is where the limits of virtual education become much more obvious. Level 1 is designed to give students a structured way to taste and enough guidance to begin training themselves. Colin and the team have tried to make the process deliberate, with video and step-by-step instruction rather than simply handing someone a flavor wheel and wishing them luck. But there’s eventually a ceiling.
Level 3 is expected to include an in-person sensory examination because there are too many variables once you start trying to evaluate someone’s actual sensory ability from a distance. The room, glassware, samples, ventilation, outside smells, and even how long someone has acclimated to the space can interfere.
Colin’s dream version sounds slightly less glamorous than most whiskey events: a quiet, boring, controlled room with good ventilation and basically nothing else happening. As he points out, hotel conference rooms may finally have found their highest purpose.
The sensory discussion also got into something Peggy Noe Stevens has spoken about for years: people being afraid to say the wrong thing in a tasting, particularly women in rooms that have traditionally been male dominated. On the consumer side, what you smell and taste is what you smell and taste. Nobody can tell you that the memory your brain connects to an aroma is somehow invalid. Professional sensory is different. If you’re being trained to identify a specific compound and you call it something else, there eventually has to be a way to correct that and explain why the confusion happened.
The goal is not to create a hidden answer key for enjoying whiskey. It’s to give someone enough vocabulary and process to become more confident and more precise without turning tasting into a standardized test every time they pour an ounce.
How Deep Does This Go?
Level 1 is only the starting point.
Level 2 was already substantially written when we recorded, with a target around the holidays, and Level 3 is planned for spring 2027. Colin describes the structure less as introducing unrelated subjects at each stage and more as revisiting the same areas at increasing depth.
Sometimes they discovered the opposite problem. Bottling, for example, is covered thoroughly enough in Level 1 that they weren’t convinced anyone was clamoring for a Level 2 discussion comparing volumetric and gravity fillers. I’m sure that person exists; I’m equally sure Colin does not want their email address.
The deeper levels give the program somewhere to go with fermentation, distillation, maturation, sensory, mash bill and still design, and other subjects where the first answer inevitably produces three more questions. Level 3 is also where the in-person component starts becoming part of the credential rather than everything living behind a screen.
AWS is also being designed as something that can grow vertically and laterally. The three American whiskey levels form one column, but Colin, Peggy, and Susan have already thought about applying the model to other spirits and building custom modules for companies that want internal training. Gin may require Peggy to leave the room. Apparently there are limits to educational inclusivity.
Less Bad Information Would Be a Pretty Good Start
I closed by asking Colin what he hopes American Whiskey Scholar looks like years from now.
He wants it to stick around, earn industry support, and become part of the way people learn about American whiskey rather than simply another certificate someone adds to a LinkedIn profile.
His phrasing was even simpler: he would like to see less wrong and inconsistent information floating around. We live in a whiskey world where far more information is available than when Colin started teaching. That’s generally a very good thing. It also means bad information can reproduce at impressive speed, particularly when the person repeating it sounds completely confident.
A structured education program does not eliminate that problem, and a credential does not automatically make someone a great educator. What it can do is give people a common foundation, a place to check what they think they know, and enough depth to start asking better questions. For enthusiasts, that may simply make the hobby more interesting. For people who work in whiskey, it gives them another way to get better at the job.
And if American Whiskey Scholar eventually prevents me from being asked in a liquor store whether Maker’s Mark is bourbon, I will personally consider the experiment a success.
American Whiskey Scholar
Instagram: @americanwhiskeyscholar
Colin Blake
Peggy Noe Stevens & Associates
Peggy Noe Stevens
Susan Reigler
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