Paul Pacult

“Always Telling it Straight”

Called “America’s foremost spirits authority” by forbes.com, F. Paul Pacult was born in 1949 in Chicago, Illinois. He attended the University of California, Berkeley, in the late 1960s, where he studied journalism. But before bourbon became his daily subject, Pacult’s first decade or so in spirits gravitated toward wine. After college he went to Northern California to work for Sonoma pioneer Rodney Strong, spending roughly ten years there and writing the winery newsletter in his final years in California. Ultimately, it was assignments from the New York Times Magazine in the late 1980s, first on Scotch, then Cognac, that nudged him decisively from wine into distilled drinks.

By 1989 Pacult was formally writing mostly about hard liquor, and in 1991 he launched the publication that would make his name resound with both bourbon makers and bourbon drinkers: F. Paul Pacult’s Spirit Journal. It was subscription-only and ad-free, designed to evaluate spirits, especially whiskeys, on their merits. Spirit Journal became the place bourbon brands highlighted when they earned five stars; bourbon readers learned the cadence of his structured tasting notes and consistent scoring. The bourbon thread tightened as Pacult began to take on more book projects, and in 1997, he published Kindred Spirits, a wide survey of spirits that contained extensive whiskey coverage.

In 2003 Pacult turned squarely to bourbon history with American Still Life: The Jim Beam Story and the Making of the World’s #1 Bourbon, an industrial and family narrative that helped connect new readers to Kentucky’s signature whiskey during the category’s early revival years. Later that year, the Kentucky Distillers’ Association recognized Pacult’s contribution from the consumer and historical side by inducting him into the Kentucky Bourbon Hall of Fame as a life member.

In 2005, Pacult co-founded the educational course “Beverage Alcohol Resource” (BAR) with Dale DeGroff, David Wondrich, Steve Olson, and Doug Frost. The five-day advanced program and the Pernod Ricard–supported BarSmarts initiative trained tens of thousands, largely whiskey bartenders and brand ambassadors; that is, people who pour and explain bourbon to the public.

In 2009, he and his partners launched “Ultimate Beverage Challenge” and the annual “Ultimate Spirits Challenge” in 2010, where bourbons would be blind-tasted and benchmarked in rigorous panels. The aim, Pacult has said in interviews, was standards, an ethos familiar to distillers. By that point, his personal site estimated that during his three decades with spirits, he had reviewed more than 31,000 formal tastings across categories, American whiskeys being a constant presence.

Through the 2010s he doubled down on direct bourbon education. His “The Whiskey Authority” seminar series continued from 2012 to 2018, training mostly on better understanding of grain bills, yeast, fermentation, new-charred oak, entry proofs, and warehouse effects; the nuts-and-bolts that make a Kentucky straight bourbon taste like bourbon.

Meanwhile, two recent books kept bourbon at center stage for a general audience. 2021s Buffalo, Barrels, & Bourbon: How Buffalo Trace Became the World’s Most Awarded Distillery, was a cradle-to-present history of the Frankfort, Kentucky, plant that threads early frontier whiskey through Prohibition and into modern brand building. That same year of 2021, Pacult released The New Kindred Spirits, adding thousands of fresh reviews across spirits, with substantial bourbon coverage that captured the category’s packed landscape of heritage brands, limited editions, and craft upstarts.

If much of Pacult’s bourbon life is as critic and historian, there is also a chapter on direct production. In 2019 he became Master Blender for Jacob’s Pardon, an American whiskey brand developed by Palm Bay International. For Jacob’s Pardon, Pacult married barrels sourced from MGP and George Dickel into an inaugural blend and selected older single-cask “light whiskey” for limited releases, moving seamlessly from evaluator to maker.

Left to right: Jacob’s Pardon Small Batch, 15-year, and 18-year

Along the way, bourbon’s exclusive institutions have wholeheartedly adopted him. He is the only journalist worldwide to be a life member and Master of Keepers of the Quaich whisky society of Edinburgh, Scotland, a life member of the Bourbon Hall of Fame, a life member of the Order of the Writ whiskey society, and a life member of France’s Compagnie des Mouquetaires d’Armagnac of Gascony, all at the same time.

Pacult’s professional partner and wife is Sue Woodley, who, along with Paul, co-founded Spirit Journal, Ultimate Beverage Challenge, and the iWhiskey app. Sue still collaborates with him on tastings, books, and logistics. The couple has long lived in the small Hudson Valley, New York town of Wallkill, where Paul’s early morning tasting routine of six glasses, 30 minutes each has become trusted folklore among distillers with samples in the queue.

Set end-to-end, Pacult’s bourbon story reads like a bridge between the rickhouse and the reader. Bourbon was never just a beat; it became the backbone of a high-profile career in which tasting notes, interviews, and histories have formed a record of the category’s rise from the 80s doldrums to the mid-2020s world stage. Along the way, Pacult’s honors underscore what distillers often say privately: that the feedback loop from disciplined tasters to whiskey-makers matters, particularly when the subject is bourbon, where miniscule differences in fermentation management, barrel policy, or mingling can show up vividly in the glass. And with a respected near-legend like Paul Pacult at the head of that loop, drinkers can always be assured that distillers are listening closely and reacting accordingly.

Sources:

  1. Oxford Companion to Spirits & Cocktails, “Pacult, F. Paul…”, spiritsanddistilling.com

  2. Imbibe Magazine, “Profile of Paul Pacult”,  imbibemagazine.com/f-paul-pacult

  3. F. Paul Pacult/official website, “Biography”, fpaulpacult.com

  4. Kentucky Bourbon Hall of Fame official roster 2003 inductees, kybourbon.com/industry/hall-of-fame

  5. Beverage Alcohol Resource, “Who We Are/F. Paul Pacult”, beveragealcoholresource.com

  6. Wiley, “Buffalo, Barrels, & Bourbon Set to Publish”, August 31, 2021, newsroom.wiley.com

  7. Paul Pacult/official website, fpaulpacult.com

Contributed by Tracy McLemore, Fairview, Tennessee