Guide

How to catalog a whiskey collection: the fields that matter, and why a spreadsheet quietly falls apart.

To catalog a whiskey collection, record eleven core fields per bottle (distillery, expression name, mash bill, ABV and proof, age, batch or barrel number, retailer, store-pick status, bottle size, what you paid, and a label photo) plus four living fields a static list always forgets: open versus sealed status, current fill level, tasting notes, and a pour log. A spreadsheet handles the first eleven well. It is the last four, the ones that change every time you pour, where a flat sheet quietly falls apart, usually right around the time your shelf passes two dozen bottles and stops fitting in your memory.

This is a guide to building a catalog you will actually keep. It is about record-keeping, not appraisal: the goal is knowing what you own, what is open, and what each bottle tasted like, not pricing your shelf for the secondary market. Let us start with the fields, then make the honest case about where the spreadsheet wall is, and how to cross it without throwing away the work you have already done.

The eleven fields that earn their place

Every bottle deserves a record detailed enough that future-you, holding the empty glass, can find it again, replace it, or know why you loved it. These are the fields worth typing once.

• Distillery (and bottler). The single most useful sort key you own. Independent bottlings complicate this: the distillery made the spirit, but a separate bottler released it, so record both when they differ. This is what lets you answer "how much Buffalo Trace juice do I actually have" across labels.
• Expression name. The full release name, not just the brand. "Weller" is a family; Weller Special Reserve, Antique 107, and 12 Year are different objects. Be specific or your sort collapses.
• Mash bill. The grain recipe decides the category and a lot of the flavor. Logging it lets you slice the shelf by style instead of by label. If you are unsure what yours is, our explainer on what a mash bill is covers how the grain split decides bourbon versus rye versus wheated.
• ABV and proof. Record both numbers, because both appear on bottles and the two count the same strength differently. If proof and ABV have ever confused you, our piece on proof versus ABV explains the relationship in one line. Strength also matters for cataloging: cask-strength and batch-proof bottles vary release to release.
• Age statement. Note the stated age, and note when there is none (NAS). Age is a buying signal and, for some collectors, the thing that distinguishes two otherwise identical labels years apart.
• Batch or barrel number. The field most spreadsheets skip and most collectors regret skipping. Two bottles of the same expression from different batches are not the same liquid. This is the field that turns "I have Booker's" into "I have Booker's 2025-01."
• Retailer. Where you bought it. Trivial-sounding, quietly valuable: it tells you who to go back to, and it is half of what makes a store pick a store pick.
• Store pick (yes or no). A single-barrel selection chosen by one shop is a genuinely different bottle from the shelf standard, even with an identical front label. Flagging it is the difference between a catalog and a guess. If the term is new, our guide on what a store pick is explains why yours differs from the shelf bottle.
• Bottle size. 700ml, 750ml, 1L, a 50ml mini. Size matters for fill-level math and for the simple question of how much whiskey you are sitting on.
• Value (what you paid). Record your purchase price, or your honest replacement cost. This is a personal reference number for insurance estimates and buying discipline, not a market appraisal. Keeping that distinction clear is what keeps a catalog from drifting into resale speculation.
• Label photo. The field paper and most spreadsheets simply cannot hold. A photo of the front, the back, and the batch code resolves disputes no text field can, and it is the fastest way to identify a bottle you are about to buy again. Photographing the label is standard advice in nearly every serious whisky-journaling guide for exactly this reason.

The four living fields a list forgets

Everything above is static. You type it once and it never changes. But a collection is not a list of purchases frozen in time; it is a shelf that empties one pour at a time. These four fields move, and they are the whole reason a catalog beats a receipt drawer.

• Open versus sealed. The first question you actually ask the shelf is "what is open right now." A catalog needs an explicit status with two clear states. Without it, you reopen something you already have going, or you crack a sealed bottle you were saving.
• Fill level. For every open bottle, roughly how much is left. This is the field that tells you what to drink before it oxidizes, what to take to a tasting, and what you are nearly out of. It is also the field that makes a running cellar value mean something, because half a bottle is half the liquid.
• Tasting notes. Nose, palate, finish: the three-stage structure used across whisky writing and formalized in flavour-wheel traditions like the one maintained by the Scotch Malt Whisky Society. Three short fields beat a five-paragraph form you will never fill in. The value compounds: notes recorded the same way, bottle after bottle, become comparable, and your palate sharpens because you are forced to name what you taste. Practical journaling guidance, like this primer on taking whisky tasting notes, makes the same point: do not chase professional vocabulary, just record honestly and consistently.
• Pours. A timestamped log of when you opened a bottle and when you poured from it. This is the field no spreadsheet maintains gracefully, and it is what makes the other living fields trustworthy. Pours are how fill level stays honest, how you remember the night you finally opened the good stuff, and how a flat inventory becomes a record of a collection actually being enjoyed.

Where the spreadsheet quietly falls apart

A spreadsheet is a genuinely good tool, and for a long time it is the right one. Twenty rows, a column per static field, sorted by distillery: that is a real catalog and there is no shame in it. The trouble is not that a spreadsheet is too simple. The trouble is that it is the wrong shape for the four living fields.

A flat sheet records bottles you bought. It is much worse at telling you what is on the shelf now. Three structural cracks show up, and they widen as the collection grows:

• Pours have nowhere to live. A bottle is one row, but you pour from it dozens of times. There is no clean way to attach a growing list of dated pours to a single row without a second sheet and a lookup formula, at which point you are building a database by hand.
• Fill level goes stale. You can add a "fill" column, but nothing forces you to update it, and nothing connects it to the pours that should be driving it. A month later the number is a guess, which is the same as having no number.
• Photos do not fit. A cell holds text. It does not hold the photo of the back label and the batch code, which is exactly the artifact you reach for when two bottles look identical or when you are standing in a shop deciding whether you already own this.

Under roughly two dozen bottles, you paper over all three gaps with memory. You just know the Lagavulin is half gone and the Eagle Rare is sealed. Past that point, memory stops scaling before the spreadsheet does, and you find yourself opening the sheet to learn something the sheet was never built to hold.

The migration path: keep your CSV, just stop relying on it alone

The honest case for an app is not that your spreadsheet is bad. It is that the spreadsheet is the right shape for half the job and the wrong shape for the other half. The good news is you do not have to choose, and you do not have to retype anything.

Drambook is a private whiskey and bourbon catalog for iPhone built around exactly this list. Every static field has a home (distillery, mash bill, ABV and proof, age, batch, retailer, store-pick flag, bottle size, value, label photos), and so do the four living ones: an explicit open-versus-sealed status, a fill level, structured nose/palate/finish notes with a rating, and a pour log that keeps the fill level honest over time. The dashboard rolls all of it into shelf stats and a running cellar value, so the answer to "what is open and how full" is one glance, not a forensic read of a sheet.

Migration is the part people expect to be painful and is not. You map your existing CSV columns to Drambook's fields once, import the whole collection, and your spreadsheet's static work carries straight over. From there you add the living fields the sheet could never hold. And because you can export back to CSV or PDF at any time, your spreadsheet does not die; it becomes a portable backup you can regenerate on demand. The record stays yours, in both directions.

One more field that does not appear in any column but matters to a lot of collectors: where the catalog lives. Drambook keeps your collection, photos, notes and pours on the device, with no account and no collection cloud. On an iPhone that means the record is encrypted at rest by the system, the same on-device protection Apple applies to built-in apps, described in Apple's Data Protection overview. For a record of what you own and what it is worth to you, "stored locally, nothing uploaded" is not a marketing line; it is the correct default.

A field checklist you can copy today

If you do nothing else, set up these fields, whether in a sheet you are about to outgrow or an app built to hold them:

1. Distillery and bottler
2. Expression name (the full release, not the brand)
3. Mash bill
4. ABV and proof (both numbers)
5. Age statement (or NAS)
6. Batch or barrel number
7. Retailer
8. Store pick (yes or no)
9. Bottle size
10. Value (what you paid, as a personal reference)
11. Label photos (front, back, batch code)
12. Open versus sealed
13. Fill level
14. Tasting notes (nose, palate, finish, rating)
15. Pour log (dated)

The first eleven you type once. The last four you maintain. The first eleven are why people start a catalog; the last four are why they keep one. A spreadsheet does the first beautifully and the second badly, and that asymmetry is the whole story of why, somewhere past two dozen bottles, the sheet quietly stops being enough.