About
Matt Frye — writer, whiskey drinker, keeper of notes.
I spend my working hours around software and my off hours around whiskey, old books, and cold air. This site is where those two halves get written down in the same voice.
The short version: I got curious about a bottle, and the curiosity never narrowed back down.
Whiskey turned out to be a doorway. Ask why a bourbon tastes the way it does and you end up reading about river commerce, grain prices, immigration, and the peculiar American habit of legislating flavor. History stopped being a school subject for me right around then.
My day job is technology, which is why I write about it sparingly. Proximity breeds skepticism. I am far more interested in which tools survive a decade of real use than in whichever one is currently being announced.
The rest — fires, knives, long walks, a decent pair of boots kept oiled — falls under what I think of as ordinary competence. None of it is remarkable. All of it is worth knowing how to do, and worth writing down before it slips.
How this site works
Four rules I do not bend
Read the source
If a claim about history shows up here, I have gone looking for where it came from. Secondhand summaries are how myths survive.
Bought, not sent
Every bottle and every piece of gear written about here was paid for out of pocket and used long enough to have an opinion.
Plain language
No tasting-note theater and no jargon used as a shortcut. If it cannot be explained simply, it is not understood yet.
Slow on purpose
Fewer entries, longer thinking. This is a study, not a feed, and nothing gets published to keep a schedule happy.
How I got here
A few chapters, in order
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2014
A bottle handed over at the right moment
A neighbor poured me two fingers of bourbon on a cold porch and explained why the label mattered. I started keeping notes that week and never stopped.
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2018
Down the archive rabbit hole
Chasing where charred oak came from led to shipping records, tax ledgers, and a permanent habit of reading primary sources for fun.
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2021
Writing instead of accumulating
Two decades around software taught me that unwritten knowledge evaporates. The essays started as a defense against my own forgetting.
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2026
mattfrye.net
One address for all of it — whiskey, history, technology, and the pursuits that keep a person steady between deadlines.