Help that matches the app. Every help window was checked against its screen and brought up to date — new names, the Quick Pour, Settings, handshakes, Out & About and more. The right year, every time. A bottle that names its year — like a 2026 edition — no longer picks up last year’s proof, age or notes when it’s researched. Insurance schedule. Finished bottles stay off the schedule, and the ones you’ve finished since your last download are listed so you can tell your broker. Every tasting asks the same way. Festival pours, blind pours, a sample a friend sends, shared tastings and Tasting Night now use the Quick Pour: Nose, Palate, Finish, Mouthfeel and three glasses — Pass, Fine, Pour again. The full tasting and Easy Mode use the same three words. New labels onto your Chase. Tap the Chase icon beside a newly approved label on the Chasing the Unicorn website and it lands on your Chase. It says it was found in TTB’s approvals, not on a shelf. Easy Mode asks the finish and the feel. How it finished, and its body, heat and grip. Your palate hears every pour. A “Fine” with notes now counts, Slow Pour off-notes count as dislikes, notes from a sample you were sent count, and notes you edit on a bottle are kept. Mouthfeel in Quick Pour. A fourth pill beside Nose, Palate and Finish: thin to full, oily or creamy, gentle to hot. It feeds your palate’s body and heat. Every note now saves. Easy Mode’s “How did it smell / taste?” and the texture you picked on a full tasting were being lost at save. They are kept now. Your notes shape your palate more truly. How strongly you tasted a note, your finish length, your mouthfeel and your Slow Pour finish words all count now. Guests’ reactions at a Tasting Night no longer shape yours. Behind the scenes. A fix to how we count app use. Demo Mode no longer checks in.

• Tap a flavor note to learn it. Anywhere a bottle names a flavor, tap it: plain English, an everyday smell to compare, and a bottle to taste it in. • Mash bill says the recipe — Bourbon, Rye, Wheated, Single malt — by the federal rule. A finish is no longer filed as a mash bill. • Whiskey terms explained: straight, blended, single malt and the rest, in the law's own words. • The Cut Daily follows your theme: light, dark, or auto.

Your pour leads the read. Once you have tasted a bottle, its flavor map and score read from your own pour, not from a guess. Research notes still sit below when they exist. Flight rows, folded. A flight row is the name and its state. Tap it for the pour, your call and the bottle’s full page, and tap again to fold it. A finished flight reopens. An ended flight is never locked: add a pour, reopen it, and log the rest. Pours you logged outside the board land on their rows when the flight opens. On Home, Recently lists a flight or a festival as one entry above its bottles. A flight you can change, and come back to. Add a pour or remove one after the flight has started. A logged pour opens for a second look, on a finished flight too. Every door opens the same board, it stays live until you end it, a pour marks itself done from any of them, and back lands on the pour you were on. Flights are named by where they happened. Your pours write your notes. A pour you close fills the bottle’s My Notes: color, nose, palate, finish and your overall line, from the families and strengths you tapped. Past pours are picked up once on the next open. Notes you typed by hand are left alone. Check-in pins from the catalog. The check-in fence now reads the same pins the Trail shows, for every house, and accepts either the tasting room or the plant when a house has both. Wood Hat Spirits and thirty-odd others were off before.

Quick Pour everywhere. Every place you start a pour asks the same question first: Quick, Standard or Slow. Quick always opens Quick Pour, on the flight board, after a scan, from a bottle’s page and when you are out. Compare keeps the depth you chose from one bottle to the next. A read says where its words came from. On a distillery’s lineup, a bottle’s notes are labeled as the distillery’s own, compiled from published reviews, Franklin’s quick pass, or the community’s, so a read never looks like a guess when it isn’t one. Your standing, on My Palate. Share my tasting notes moved from Settings to My Palate, with a meter toward the pours you need. The add-by-name field on a lineup gives the typing room and keeps the button to one word. Quick Pour, the fast tasting. Nose, Palate and Finish are three pills you open in any order or not at all. Tap a family once to pick it and see its exact notes; tap up to three times for strength; pick as many as you find. The Finish carries Short, Medium and Long. The verdict is three fills of one glass: Pass, Fine, Pour again. A glass alone or a family alone is a full pour, and Franklin says one line back about you. The brief reads from the website. Today’s read, the Library and the reader now show the newest American Whiskey Industry Brief the website has published, with the bundled copy standing in offline. A missed hand-off no longer holds the app on an old issue. A house has one lineup. Every bottle a distillery makes now lives in one shared list, with the reads behind it. The match card counts that same list, a bottle with no profile says so, a normal release borrows an estimate from the house’s closest line, and a web read is labeled research, not an estimate. Matches are about flavor, not your shelf. Owning a bottle no longer makes it a match. Notes count for being present, not for being repeated, a house scores as its best bottle, and the pick tells you what it set aside because you already own it or are chasing it. Rickhouse chips know the world. Other opens into Scotch, Irish, Japanese, Canadian and the rest; a bottle’s kind is read from its catalog row and its name, so known bottles stop landing in Other. Share your tasting notes. In Settings, a taster with the pours behind them can send the notes from each pour they close to that bottle’s community notes, always labeled as the community’s, never the distillery’s. Community notes show on a bottle when three or more tasters agree. Trail visits, tightened. The Passport no longer crashes on a canon-only house, a distillery flight adds real pours, check-in offers what the house has and what is worth grabbing, and a founder can see where check-ins landed off the pin and fix the pin.

Sign-in keeps your place. Leave for your email app to fetch the code and the sign-in comes back to the code entry, not the start. On iPhone, Franklin asks once before any label or bottle name is sent to our AI for research; you can change the answer any time in Settings. Every row opens its bottle, everywhere. Compare and Worth the chase now open their rows too: a bottle you own opens in the Rickhouse, any other opens the quick look, and back lands where you left. The quick look can say “This isn’t the bottle” or read the label again from every screen that shows it — Compare, Worth the chase, the scan’s look-first and the aroma card — and the fix lands on the row you came from. A scan trusts the label over the barcode. When a scanned code points at a bottle already on your shelf but nothing else confirms it, Franklin reads the label before naming the capture. The label wins when they disagree, and a shared-library answer for that code is held to the same test. Captures land named. Tap a door while Franklin is still reading and the bottle saves at once; the name and notes land on it a moment later. A photo that saved without a name climbs the research ladder on its own. Each capture is its own row. A To Sort bottle given a place is in the Rickhouse. The brand leads a read name, the barcode is a hint and the label is the truth, and a close spelling is offered as “did you mean” before research. Every row opens its bottle. In What should I drink?, a row you own opens in the Rickhouse; any other row opens the quick look, which can now say “This isn’t the bottle” or read the label again. Back lands where you left. The shelf search shows one row per bottle. Out & About: What should I drink? at a distillery, one cell to say which distillery, the bar's full menu, no fork before the store camera. Canon review. The shared library is reviewed every week. New entries resting on one guess, duplicates, close spellings and shared barcodes are flagged where they sit, with the facts behind each, and settled in a tap: confirm, rename, merge, retire, or accept a code that several releases share. A Monday digest says what came in.

Festival pours without an account. Tap Taste this at a booth before you have an account and the pour is held with its session. Make the account and it finishes the way it would for a member: saved, counted on the board, and open on its verdict with Franklin reading the bottle behind it. A handshake lands as a Sample. Open a friend's handshake link, write your three notes, and keep the pour on your shelf as a Sample — you have it, you don't own it — with your notes attached. The same door sits on every received handshake in the inbox. A search never sits forever. Every catalog download, Trail list, research step and label read now runs on a clock. A stalled request on weak signal used to hold every catalog search open until the app was closed — and "Franklin is still reading" could survive a relaunch. Now a slow step gives up, the next source runs, and a catalog that failed to load says so and offers a retry. “In your Rickhouse” means on the shelf. A scan writes a To Sort draft the instant a barcode reads. Scanning the same bottle again was matching that draft as "already in your Rickhouse." Now only a sealed, open or empty bottle on your shelf counts — never a draft, a Just Looking row, a festival pour or a flight pick. The store read gets its screen back. The pinned doors took half the phone. Now one row: the door for where you began, and Choose a list for the rest. Open this bottle sits under the name as a live button, and the verdict leads the flavor section. When a name is not in the catalog, the research offer is the headline, the Research button is the hero, and what it costs you reads right under it.

A scan is never lost. The moment you take a photo or read a barcode, the bottle is kept. Walk away, switch tabs, close the app — it waits for you in Needs research, one list inside My Rickhouse, with a card on Home when something is waiting. Every door now leads with the right answer: a scan from the Rickhouse leads to your shelf, a store leads to Just Looking, a bar leads to Tasted. Festival booths in three taps. Tap Add a pour and the camera opens. Front, barcode, done — the verdict is on screen while Franklin reads the bottle behind it. If the read is thin, Check for more goes one source deeper each time instead of repeating the same read. At a festival, everyone gets five free AI reads a day for bottles the catalog does not know. Research never makes you wait. Scanning a bottle no longer holds you on “A moment…” while the community and the label are checked. The bottle saves with what is known, you move on, and the details fill in as they land.

The Trail now covers every state. Every state list was researched house by house: 1,761 whiskey distilleries across all fifty states and D.C., up from 668, each with an address, a showroom and hours where the house has them, and its bottles. Houses that closed, moved, or turned out to be a label with no door are marked instead of leading you to an empty lot. Find a distillery. Type the name you know — a distillery, a brand, or a bottle — and the Trail finds the house that makes it, wherever it is. One list, ranked as you type, with a mark on the houses that are on the Trail. The catalog arrives as changes. Your phone keeps the catalog it has and downloads only what changed since, so opening the app takes a blink instead of a full download. New distilleries and bottles reach your phone from the web without waiting on an app update.

Every detail screen keeps a proper margin instead of running its text to the edge of the glass — the Trail family, Aroma, Add a distillery and Export among them. The allocation calendar and the Trailmaker bar no longer widen the page, so the fixed bars stay where they belong. Ten "nothing here" screens now carry a Go back button. Everything from 1.62 — the phone's text size on every screen, Household Rickhouse, sign out any device, the simpler Radar, Pour Something Good and Settings — is unchanged.

The text size you set on your phone now reaches every screen. Including the two that never listened: the date-of-birth check and the house rules. If you run large type, those held their shape and everything else adjusted around you. Now the whole app follows the size you chose. Share a Rickhouse with your household. Two people, one collection — both can add and edit bottles. Tastings and notes stay personal to whoever wrote them, and a vaulted bottle stays with its own account. Sign out a device you no longer have. Settings shows every device signed into your account, and any of them can be signed out from here. Simpler where it was busy. Radar, Pour Something Good, the capture chooser and Settings have all been cut back to what you actually reach for. Share actions sit on one row. The Brief and the Cut refresh when you come back instead of showing you yesterday. Plus: distillery pages on the Trail now tell you what going there is actually like — booking, cost, food, kids, dogs, parking, and the bottles you can only buy on site.

The Perfect Pour Trail is yours, free. All of it. Find a distillery, plan the whole trip in Trailmaker, save it, put it on your calendar, check in when you get there, earn the stamp, fill your Passport and share the recap — none of it costs anything. What each house pours that suits YOUR palate is in there too. You can see what you have left. Deep bottle reads, your Chase and your Radar now each show a running count, so you know where you stand before you hit the end rather than after. Your photo always wins. Match a bottle to the catalog and your own shot stays the picture of it. The official label is only offered when you have none of your own. Capture that tells you what happened. If Franklin can't finish reading a bottle — weak signal in a shop, a hiccup on our end — the app says so and offers to try again or find it in the database, instead of handing you an empty card. Settings, reorganised. The two things you actually come back for — your plan and your display — now lead, instead of the one-time setup steps. Plus: if someone handed you an App Store code for The Perfect Pour, you can now redeem it right here in the app.