Meet Jordan Moskal of Breaking Bourbon

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jordan Moskal.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
My love for America’s Native Spirit started well over 17 years ago while living in Louisville, Kentucky. At the time, bourbon and American whiskey weren’t experiencing the tremendous growth that they are today. They were spirits that people enjoyed more for their affordable price point and accessibility.

Living in the heartland of bourbon, I quickly became engrossed in the rich history of America’s Native Spirit. Visiting distilleries, learning about production methods, and tasting as many different bourbons as possible quickly became my passion.

Over the years, simple tasting notes on scraps of paper turned into more in-depth full-length reviews, and in 2014 Breaking Bourbon was launched and has since become the leading authority in bourbon and American whiskey. As a co-founder, I love sharing my knowledge with others.

I currently reside in western Pennsylvania, where the Whiskey Rebellion took place and where the ghosts of the Rebellion continue to influence me and fuel my excitement for the spirit!

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It’s been an interesting journey. Prior to Breaking Bourbon, the biggest source of whiskey reviews were magazines and blogs that forced people to really seek out the information they were looking for.

When we launched our business, our goal wasn’t to become the #1 leading authority in bourbon & American whiskey, it was to make whiskey reviews easy to understand and accessible to everyone.

Fortunately, the journey has been a smoother road than not. Every day, we strive to offer our unpretentious, honest views to our readers. Our mantra was never to become the biggest source. Rather, we believed that slow, but steady growth was and still is the key to success.

This mindset has paid off, as we now attract millions of unique visitors to our website every year and continue to see high double-digit annual growth.

We’ve been impressed with Breaking Bourbon, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
During my time in Louisville, I shared my love for bourbon and American whiskey with my lifelong friends – now my current business partners – Nick Beiter and Eric Hasman. As the three of us became more engrossed, we decided that the best way to share our passion for bourbon and American whiskey with others was through a dedicated platform.

With that in mind, we set out to create a platform with zero pretension in how we conveyed information to our readers. Initially, the goal of Breaking Bourbon was simple – to use it as a forum for the three of us to get together to have a good time, grab a drink, and break down what we were tasting and what we thought of it.

We are best known for our reviews, ratings, and tasting notes, which together have turned us into the leading authority for bourbon and American whiskey.

Why did we decide to do reviews? Sometimes we review products because we want to learn more about a particular whiskey. Other times we want to figure out if it’s worth buying, trying, or worth the hunt. We even created a rating system with the idea of helping readers to understand more about a whiskey before spending their money to buy it and try it themselves.

Having three different critics – me, Nick, and Eric – helps to provide a wider range of opinions on the ever-growing world of whiskey. We hope this promotes more interesting discussions about whiskey, as we might not always agree with each other’s reviews and you might not either. At the end of each review is a field for readers to voice their opinions on the bottle in review, and we actively encourage healthy discussion on our website.

As for ratings, we break out key categories and rate them separately. This allows for a deeper examination of each specific element of a whiskey and allows easier comparisons with others. Besides the obvious elements, including nose, palate, and finish, we also rate uniqueness and value separately.

Uniqueness and value are two elements that aren’t always easy to find in other publications’ reviews. Finally, we sum everything up in the overall rating. You may see overall ratings that don’t completely line up with the individual ratings from time to time, but they intend to pull everything together, and sometimes the whole is greater or less than the sum of the parts.

How many reviewers that use a 100-point scale have you seen rate a whiskey below 80? Not many. We’ve developed a more simplified, visual rating system that ranks products from 0.5 to 5 barrels. We’re not afraid to rate a whiskey as a single barrel and we’re not at all hesitant to award a whiskey five barrels if it deserves it.

Our tasting notes are very important because they put our ratings and opinions into perspective. Sometimes it’s hard to assign a definitive barrel rating. There are quite a few variables that go into it at any given time – how you feel, what you’ve tried recently, and what you have yet to try, for instance.

The intention of our tasting notes is to put our ratings into perspective and also to add some fun facts along the way. We don’t expect everyone to agree with us and we hope that our readers find our reviews, ratings, and tasting notes to be useful in their never-ending quest to find new, different, or just plain amazing bourbon and whiskey.

We love all things bourbon and American whiskey. We strive to empower consumers to make their own informed decision in 15 seconds or less with a quick search on our site to determine if a product is worthy of their hard-earned money or not.

We love surprises, fun facts, and unexpected stories. Is there something you can share that might surprise us?
When most people think of bourbon, they think of Kentucky.

Breaking Bourbon is actually headquartered out of Syracuse, New York.

While we often travel to whiskey hubs such as Kentucky, Tennessee, and others, we hope that Breaking Bourbon serves as a reminder that you don’t need to live in Kentucky in order to appreciate and drink bourbon and other American whiskeys.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.breakingbourbon.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/breakingbourbon
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/breakingbourbon
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/BreakingBourbon

Image Credits
Breaking Bourbon