We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful John Henderson. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with John below.

John, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear the story of how you went from this being just an idea to making it into something real.

This is a fun question to dive into, because my original idea wound up being so impractical that I threw it out the window and rebuilt my entire platform. I had this thought when I began the process of entering the creator space in the whiskey world, that I would develop a website for bourbon fans from all walks of life could get together and virtually share bottles; meaning, a user would essentially report-in an approximate location of where they found a bottle they liked. I dubbed the project “The Bourbon Finder”. It sounded great on paper, but it just didn’t seem to pan out in practice. I had a hard time finding enough public data to seed the database so it wasn’t a barren landscape for users that first joined, which ultimately killed the project about a month into initial development.

I wasn’t satisfied, though, and wanted to find a way to open the doors to the American whiskey world to new fans as well as folks who had been involved with bourbon for decades. Since I had already done the back-end work for the website, built the social media handles, and opened a Discord server for TheBourbonFinder, I decided I’d run with it, but in a creative sense, and start a blog and whiskey review website. This instantly provided me with a platform to share whiskey knowledge, thoughts on different bottles, and really allow me an outlet for the constant analysis and comparison between products that goes on in my brain. Crazy as it sounds, being able to focus energy into a direct outlet, like writing my thoughts on bourbon (and other whiskeys), really helped keep me grounded and sharpened my focus on America’s native spirit.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m from Maine, which is not what most folks think of when they picture bourbon. Most of the time people think Kentucky–and rightfully so–but the flavors of bourbon have always spoken to me. It was the flavor that brought me into the world of American whiskey to begin with.

I’m nearly 40, but it was in my early 20’s when I really became an enthusiastic home cook. In those days I was always writing my own recipes and trying to evolve them into their best form through various ingredient changes and by practicing cooking for friends and family. In the search for a great barbeque sauce recipe to make my own sauce I crossed paths with a recipe that involved bourbon in the sauce, but also recommended serving a small glass of bourbon with the dish. That was a bit of a struck-by-lightning moment for me, and it irreversibly changed my thinking moving forward. I began adding not just bourbon, but other liquors to various recipes and found out quickly that I could elevate an entire dish by adding a few ounces of bourbon, or rum, or an agave spirit to my process.

This was all happening in a time where bourbon wasn’t offered very widely in Maine. This won’t come as a huge surprise to many folks, but Maine is a bit slow on the uptake when it comes to trends. Bourbon has been exploding in popularity over the last decade (and the past five years in particular). Maine has finally caught on now, and our selection has grown exponentially–but in the middle and late 2000’s if you were looking for an available bottle of premium bourbon it was basically Booker’s Bourbon. I always kept a bottle or two of Booker’s on hand, and I’d grab bottles from lower shelves to try and experience what each brand had to offer. I became interested in trying them all as the nuanced flavors really started to speak to me, which excited the flavor-focused home cook in me.

That desire to try everything available in Maine also inspired me to venture into other markets when traveling, or when friends and family were out of state. I’d ask them to bring back a bottle of bourbon I hadn’t tried before, and this eventually helped turn me into a full blown bourbon geek. I built a mental rolodex of bourbon flavors, brands, and their respective backstories. The more I absorbed the better! I would have friends or acquaintances ask about bourbon and sometimes I’d scare them off with the deluge of information that came as a reply, but every now and then someone would become truly interested. That inspired me to share bourbon knowledge and information with anyone who may be looking for it. It makes me happy to share thoughts, information, and history about bourbon–especially when a total stranger is able to find the answer they were looking for about bourbon–or when a whiskey drinker thinks they like a particular style of whiskey more than bourbon and after a blind tasting we are able to determine they just hadn’t spent time analyzing what they truly enjoyed enough to realize that bourbon is their new favorite.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

For me, I feel like it has become increasingly important to remember that everything we do matters. This can be as deep or superficial as you’d like, but the end result feels the same to me. Everything we do matters. I didn’t have this in mind when I began creating whiskey-focused content. In all honesty I was doing it for myself when I began. I wanted an outlet for an increasingly crowded headspace where I had thoughts, opinions, and knowledge stored in my head that seemed to create clutter and confusion due to the lack of an outlet. I started pouring this into my blog and review website, then into social media, and finally into building a community focused on a welcoming environment in the whiskey space via Discord.

In the first months of operating my blog I tried to regularly release high-value content, you know, things that a reader could sink their teeth into. Something more than a social media post, or a single paragraph that either oversimplified a complex whiskey or elaborated too greatly on a negative point that distracts readers from whiskey in general. I put together one article that I was particularly wild about, and from a totally self-serving perspective. I had always wondered which cocktail cherry was the best one out there, and what made it better than the two dollar maraschino cherries in the ice cream aisle of every grocery store. Ridiculous as that topic sounds, it became a project I spent a lot of time on during the first few weeks of the pandemic. I shot a ton of photos, tasted tons of cherries, and really analyzed the differences between them. While I did this to satisfy a question that I had (for some crazy reason) asked myself dozens of times, I wasn’t keeping in mind the fact that everything we do matters.

Some months later, the Vice President of a food company reached out to me asking if I’d consider back-linking to their website from my article. Back linking, in simple terms, just means I would put a link to their website where I mentioned their brand. Often times this can increase traffic to the brand’s website which can be valuable (and free) marketing. This opened the door for an affiliation opportunity I hadn’t realized existed before. It reminded me that everything we do matters. Creating a post on a topic I was genuinely interested in had created a bridge across a gap I hadn’t known existed for me and my website, and it became apparent to me that content can be more than it seems at first glance.

Another interesting story down the winding lane that is my journey in the whiskey world stems from the YouTube channel I co-host, dubbed Weekly Whiskey. My co-host and I create videos that encompass everything from reviewing hot new limited edition whiskeys, to explaining how to taste whiskey, right down to which bottles to buy when you can’t find your favorite. We take a lot of pride in creating the highest quality videos on YouTube, but also in covering topics that anyone with an interest in whiskey can appreciate. I constantly wonder if we are being inclusive enough, and opening doors for new whiskey drinkers as well as still appealing to folks who have been collecting bottles for ages, and one day I received an answer to my curiosity in the strangest of places.

I can’t stress enough how important community-building can be to a content creator. From YouTube video makers and Twitch streamers, to bloggers and/or social media experts. We all benefit from having a strong community backing us. One afternoon I was chatting with some whiskey-drinking folks on Twitch.tv of all places and a few of us were congratulating and celebrating a community member who bought their first home. I offered to have a bottle of bourbon sent to them via their local liquor delivery service to celebrate–when the bottle arrived a few days later and the person’s family came over to visit, their mother asked about the bottle of bourbon. She was excited to open and try it for the housewarming because she had seen that bottle reviewed on YouTube by none other than myself and my co-host. It was a surprise to both of them that not only was I the one who had the bottle delivered, but that she had been watching YouTube videos on bourbon tastings and reviews with her friends. This connected their family in a new way–over whiskey–and once again reminded me that everything we do matters.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

I love this question, because so much of what I do in whiskey ties directly to my co-host Jay “t8ke” West. Jay, for those who don’t know him, is a moderator on the Reddit community of r/bourbon (among many other things). Perhaps the more notable side of what Jay does with Reddit is the single barrel program. He built the program from scratch into the largest single barrel whiskey club in the world (as far as I know) and together we create content on YouTube under the channel named Weekly Whiskey.

Jay and I both work in the tech field, and while we didn’t realize it at first, we have nearly the same stance on so many things that we may as well be related. We met virtually on Discord. For those not familiar with Discord it’s a web-based application that works like Slack or Teams, and was designed to connect gamers and grow gaming communities. We both frequent a number of Discord server focused on spirits, and I heard Jay on an episode of a popular bourbon podcast and realized “Hey, I know that guy! He’s in a Discord server I’m in.” so I shot him a message and we talked whiskey. Fast-forward many months and a global pandemic later, we decided we should create a YouTube channel together to review whiskey and interview folks who are part of the industry. We have since pivoted from doing livestreams once a week to releasing pre-recorded and beautifully-edited content to (hopefully) release the highest quality whiskey content on YouTube.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://thebourbonfinder.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/thebourbonfinder
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/finderbourbon
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@weeklywhiskey
• Other: Discord: https://discord.gg/URnbP5Z