About me

I’m a whiskey enthusiast with an adventurous palate who blends and barrel-ages spirits for fun.  

My name is Michael Bloom. I’m a native Northern Californian from a family of foodies. I attended University of Colorado, Boulder,  and spent a year abroad in England before moving to Chicago for Grad School in the early 90’s, where I’ve lived ever since.  I’m a happily married father of two teenage daughters, and a full time Project Manager for a large Federal Agency.  I love cooking, travel, cycling, jazz and gardening… and blending whiskey.

While I’ve worked in restaurants from age fifteen, the service industry has never been my full time gig.   Rather, preparing food, hosting events and curating taste experiences  is something I do to center myself and connect with others.

I’m also a world whiskey enthusiast with an adventurous palate who blends and barrel-ages spirits at home for fun.  I became a whiskey fan when I sipped my first dram in a subterranean Glasgow pub in 1990 on a four day jaunt to Scotland with the woman who is now my wife.  It tasted good. It felt good. And each new dram tasted different.  I was amazed at how the different whiskeys were as diverse as Cabernet from Chardonnay or a stout from lager.  What an extraordinary range of flavors and textures from a spirit derived from grain, yeast, water and wood!

I’ve always preferred quality over quantity in beverages and I habitually seek new and different flavors in both food and drink. Sharing my discoveries with others is a significant part of the fun. I prefer to drink whiskey neat, or I might have gravitated to cocktail making rather than blending.  I discovered delicious and inventive young whiskey from outside Kentucky and Tennessee when Chicago’s own Koval Distillery opened in our Northside neighborhood in 2008.  I buy standard whiskey bottlings too, and certainly have my favorites, but tend to choose distinctive and drinkable over collectible every time.  I began picking up bottles on vacation and on business trips and attending to the smaller, lesser known distilleries at Whiskey Festivals and tastings.  My collection really took off after a few years of hosting multi-course, whiskey pairing fundraising dinners that featured eighteen new whiskeys each year. 

Those open bottles remained, many of them from places that were emotionally significant to me. 

So I began to play.  

Rather than blend for flavor alone, I seek out combinations that taste great and tell unique stories. Why not tell personal stories through blending whiskey?  Over the years I’ve honored birthdays and weddings by incorporating whiskey from where the celebrants were born, lived, attended school, met, and traveled. I generally fill one to three liter barrels for 3-5 weeks to allow the custom liquid to marry for a while before bottling and sharing.   I’ve fashioned blends that mimic existing products, such as heavily sherried Islay Scotch.  I’ve played with white dog and wheat, rye and rum, scotch and sherry.  I marked my younger daughter’s Bat Mitzvah by mixing whiskey and rum from the fourteen states and seven countries she visited in her first thirteen years.  

I’ve created more than two dozen blends over the last 6 years.  In the Fall of 2018 I had a crazy idea, one that no one had yet attempted, “Could I create a 50 State Blend?”

Welcome to the answer to that question.