It’s much easier to taste a bottle when the label is staring back at you with its proof, mashbill, age statement, and a $90 price tag — your brain has already done half the work before the glass even hits your lips. Take all of that away, though, and suddenly you’re left with just your nose, your palate, and whatever vocabulary you’ve picked up along the way. I’ve been writing reviews here at Thirty-One Whiskey for a while now, and I still catch myself being influenced by what I already know before I take the first sip. But one surefire way to fight that instinct is to taste blind.
This is the bet that the folks at Blind Barrels are making, and recently they reached out to us about it. They told us they were fans of what we do here at Thirty-One Whiskey, thought our readers would be a good fit for their product, and asked if we’d be willing to take a look at one of their tasting kits. And we were intrigued by their product: a subscription service focused on small American craft distilleries that you can’t easily find at your local liquor store, with the format being a fully blind tasting designed around discovery and education. They sent over a complimentary box and asked for an honest review, which is exactly what we’re going to do.
History
Blind Barrels was founded in January 2021 out of Westlake Village, California, and the founder’s backstory is worth knowing because it’s not the usual whiskey-industry résumé. Bobby DeMars played football at USC from 1997 to 2001 before pivoting into filmmaking. His documentary The Business of Amateurs (2016) took on the NCAA’s treatment of college athletes — which is to say, this is a guy who went from playing Division I football to making a film challenging the system that profited from his labor. From there, he ended up building a whiskey subscription company. That’s a narrative arc you don’t see every day.
The origin story itself is the familiar kind: a group of friends with different palates but a shared love of exploration started doing blind tastings around the kitchen table. Friends brought friends, friends of friends started showing up, and eventually somebody had the bright idea to turn the experience into a business. DeMars, along with Davis Armstrong (who handles much of the outreach and marketing side), turned that kitchen-table energy into a real operation. They’re now fourteen quarterly releases deep, with themed names that lean on movie titles: “A League of Their Own” (Release IX), “Heat” (Release XIII), and this one, “The Prestige” (Release XIV). Three-plus years of consistent quarterly shipments — this isn’t a fly-by-night operation.
What sets Blind Barrels apart from the now-crowded “whiskey of the month” subscription space is the structure. Rather than dropping a single bottle on your doorstep with a glossy info card, they ship you four 50mL samples at a time, each anonymously labeled A, B, C, and D. You taste them blind, write your notes, and only at the end do you scan a QR code to find out what was in each bottle.
Product
I first thought this was a service selling you whiskey, but I quickly realized that the learning experience is the real product. What you’re paying for here isn’t the whiskey — it’s the education. And that’s an important distinction to make up front, because if you go into Blind Barrels expecting to get a bargain on 200mL of bourbon, you’re going to walk away disappointed.
The value lives in everything that surrounds the whiskey: the structured blind-tasting format, the flavor reference card that helps you put words to what you’re nosing, the companion quiz site that tests your guesses on proof and mashbill before revealing the answer, and the deep-dive distillery profiles that tell you who made the whiskey, where, and why. Most subscription services in this space — Flaviar, Taster’s Club, SpiritSipper — are essentially a delivery mechanism for whiskey. Blind Barrels is the opposite: it’s a curriculum that happens to come with whiskey attached. In a market where Flaviar ships you three samples for about $55 a quarter and Taster’s Club sends a full bottle for $70–80 a month, Blind Barrels isn’t competing on volume or price. It’s competing on format. And in that specific lane, they don’t really have a competitor.
Blind Barrels offers three ways to subscribe, and the pricing is structured to reward commitment. The flagship is the annual subscription at $299.99, which comes out to $59.99 per kit — four tasting bottles every three months, four custom tasting glasses (advertised as an $80 value), and right now there’s also a bonus 5th kit thrown in for new annual members. The quarterly option is $79.99 per kit, billed every three months, with shipping included and one custom tasting glass. And if you don’t want a subscription at all, the one-time purchase is $89.99 for a single kit. (One thing I do want to note is that these prices seem to have crept up over time — earlier reviews from other sites reference lower price points — so if you’re reading this a year from now, double-check their site.)
Members also get access to a separate Bottle Shop where you can buy full-size bottles from any of the distilleries you’ve been introduced to, often at a member discount. In my opinion, this is a smart addition to the core business model: Blind Barrels introduces you to whiskey you’ve never tried, then makes it easy to buy a full bottle if something lands. It’s a discovery-to-purchase funnel, but it works because the discovery part is genuinely good.
I would also add that shipping rules can vary by state — so please refer to the details at BlindBarrels.com.
Packaging
The kit arrives in a sturdy black box that looks more like a high-end gift package than a subscription product, with what feels like a magnetic closure and the Blind Barrels logo embossed in gold foil on the lid. Open it up and you get the full logo treatment on the inside of the lid: a chimp wearing sunglasses and a steampunk top hat, rendered in deep red and gold and set against an ornate frame. It’s striking and a little theatrical, and it immediately tells you this was designed by someone who cares about presentation.
The four sample bottles are nestled into form-fitting black foam, each one stamped with the chimp logo and labeled simply A, B, C, and D. There is nothing special about each tasting bottle — it’s basic, utilitarian, and is perfect for its purpose. On the back of each bottle is a QR code that takes you to the quiz companion site, which is where the experience really opens up. You open the quiz page, work through each sample one at a time, take a guess at things like proof, mashbill, and age, and only then reveal what you drank. (I scored the “Cask Commander” rank, and while that sounds impressive, I genuinely have no idea where it falls on their scale — possibly somewhere between “Whiskey Padawan” and “actual psychic”.) After the reveal, you get the official Blind Barrels tasting notes, the distillery’s backstory, and a direct link to buy the full bottle if you fell in love with it.
Also tucked into the box is a well-designed flavor reference card. It’s basically a tasting wheel laid out in card form, with descriptors organized by category: fruit, spice, oak, grain, sweet, and so on. For someone newer to whiskey who’s struggling to put words to what they’re smelling, this card is very helpful. For experienced tasters, it’s a nice reference to keep us honest.
This particular kit also came with Blind Barrels branded tasting glasses, which are part of the annual subscription package. We used those alongside my 31 Whiskey Glencairn glasses for the tasting.
The Tasting Experience
Here’s where this review has to take a different shape than usual. We can’t actually break down the four whiskies we tasted, because doing so would ruin the experience for any reader about to crack open the same kit. So instead, let me tell you about how the tasting went — because the experience is the real product here.
(A note on spoilers: I’ve deliberately jumbled the order, obscured some specifics, and rounded or adjusted certain details below. If you’re the type to cross-reference everything I say against the distillery list at the bottom of this review, you might be able to make some educated guesses… but I’ve done my best to make that harder than it needs to be. Trust the process and open the box yourself.)
For this one, I drafted my buddy, James, to help me out. James is not a whiskey guy. He’ll have a glass occasionally, but he’s more of a Chicago handshake kind of guy (that’s a shot of Malört and an Old Style, for the uninitiated, and yes, it tells you everything you need to know about his starting palate). What he is, though, is curious. He wants to learn more, and I figured this format was the perfect way to scratch two itches at once: get a real-world test of whether Blind Barrels delivers on the educational promise, and bring a friend along for the ride. We split each sample into 25mL pours, using our tasting glasses, and worked through them one at a time.
The first one we tackled was a bourbon that had been finished in rum barrels. Great choice as an opener for James, who enjoys a rum drink on the beach. Right away he picked up on the sweeter notes the rum cask finish was layering in, and his early tasting notes were what you’d expect from someone newer to the hobby: “smooth,” “sweet,” “not a lot of burn”. We each wrote out our impressions before sharing what we found, which I think is the right way to do this: commit to your own notes first, then compare. Once he heard some of the more specific flavors I was picking up, the tasting notes card and our conversation gave him a vocabulary to attach to what he was already sensing, and the next round got noticeably more nuanced.
The second pour was a big rye. This one surprised both of us. James went in saying he preferred sweeter spirits, and yet this bold, spice-forward rye ended up being his favorite of the four. He started reaching past “smooth” and “sweet” into descriptors like “clove and orange peel”, and he was honest about the bigger swallow (“this has some burn”). That was the moment I knew this format was working. He wasn’t just drinking the whiskey; he was actually tasting it.
The last two were a cask strength bourbon and a wheated bourbon, and by the time we got to those, James was confident enough to lead with his own tasting notes before listening to mine. On the cask strength pour, he said something like, “there’s a lot of brown sugar but also something almost like black pepper at the back,” and I just looked at him like… dude, you walked in here ordering Malört and Old Style an hour ago. That progression — from “this is smooth” to actively picking apart specific notes in a high-proof bourbon — happened over the course of about 90 minutes. That’s the magic of this format right there. The combination of the structured A-B-C-D setup, the flavor card, and the post-tasting reveal creates a learning arc that’s hard to get any other way.
The Distilleries
Without giving away which whiskey was which (you’ll have to do the work yourself), the four producers featured in The Prestige release are:
- Ranger Creek Brewing and Distilling (San Antonio, TX)
(See our reviews of their stuff here) - West Fork Whiskey Co. (Westfield, IN)
- The Prideful Goat (Houston, TX)
- Ironroot Republic Distilling (Denison, TX)
(See our reviews of their stuff here)
Three of the four are Texas distilleries, which says something interesting about both the current state of the Texas craft whiskey scene and Blind Barrels’ curation philosophy — they clearly have relationships with producers in that market and aren’t afraid to lean into a regional theme. The lone outlier, West Fork out of Westfield, Indiana, is worth noting: Indiana is MGP country, but West Fork is an actual craft distillery doing their own distilling. That’s a meaningful distinction in a state where “distilled in Indiana” can mean a lot of different things.
Now here’s a fun little wrinkle: two of these four distilleries have previously landed on the radar of Thirty-One Whiskey. We’ve reviewed Ranger Creek twice over the years, including their .36 Texas Bourbon Whiskey and their .36 White Dog Whiskey. We also dug into Ironroot Republic before, with our review of their Promethean bourbon. Neither of the specific bottles in this Blind Barrels kit are ones we’ve reviewed previously — so even for distilleries we know, this was new territory.
That leaves West Fork and The Prideful Goat as new additions to our radar. Both produced very enjoyable whiskey in this kit, and if I happen to come across a full bottle from either of them in the wild, you can bet I’ll give it the full write-up. Until then, consider this a teaser.
Overall Rating
The educational mission is clearly being achieved. If I had cracked this kit open by myself, I probably would have approached it more clinically and treated each sample as an evaluation rather than an experience. But sharing it with a curious friend who wanted to learn? That’s where Blind Barrels really shines. The product is built to be shared, and the format does most of the heavy lifting for whoever’s playing host.
Now, the real-talk pricing observation. You’re paying about $60 a kit for 200mL of whiskey. That is roughly a quarter of a standard bottle. If you’re an avid whiskey fan who already knows what you like, has a deep cabinet, and can confidently call out a wheated versus a high-rye on the first sip, this probably isn’t going to teach you much you don’t already know. If all you want is whiskey delivered to your door, Flaviar or Taster’s Club will get you more liquid for less money.
But that framing misses the point. The educational experience is the product and the whiskey is the medium. If you’re trying to expand your knowledge and sharpen your ability to break down flavors, or if you’ve got a buddy like James who wants to learn the hobby in an approachable, structured way, it’s hard to beat what Blind Barrels has put together. The packaging is gift-grade, the curation is genuinely thoughtful, and the access to small craft distilleries you’d otherwise never come across is a real value-add. The quiz format and reveal structure add a layer of engagement that no other subscription I’ve seen offers.
Big thanks to Davis Armstrong and Bobby DeMars over at Blind Barrels for reaching out and sending this our way. Solid product, well executed, and I’m looking forward to seeing what they put in the next box.
Overall Rating: 5/5
Website: https://blindbarrels.com/
If you’ve ever told someone you can taste blindfolded, this is the kit that’s going to either prove you right or quietly humble you. Either way, you win.
Blind Barrels provided this kit to Thirty-One Whiskey at no cost for the purpose of this review. No editorial input was requested or given.