Private cellar software

PourKeep

A ledger for people who take their bottles seriously — what's on the shelf, what it tasted like, and whether the next one is actually worth buying. One instance per collector, on their own subdomain.

What it's for

Three jobs, in this order

PourKeep started as one physician's whisky collection outgrowing a spreadsheet, and it still reads like a collector's tool rather than a beverage app. It does three things properly instead of forty things adequately.

I

Host a tasting

Pick a flight that fits tonight's crowd, pour it, capture each guest's scores and notes on a handed-around tablet, and remember which bottles got opened against which flight. Blind sessions hide the labels until the reveal.

II

Keep the library

Every bottle with its price, its provenance, why you bought it, and its full tasting history. Sealed versus opened, samples versus full bottles, what's been finished, gifted, or is still in transit.

III

Log what you find

Bars, restaurants, a friend's good cabinet. Photograph a label or a bottle list, log the pour with a location, and let it fold back into the same palate history as everything you own.

What's inside

Built out over a couple of hundred releases

None of this is aspirational — it's the working feature set of a system that has been in daily use for years, with whisky at the center and wine and beer alongside it.

The collection

  • Inventory with cost per pour, value tracking, and status from ordered to finished
  • Label scanning — photograph a bottle, or a whole shelf, and let it identify what it sees
  • Origins map plotting your distilleries across the world, with a Scotland inset
  • Analytics — origin mix, age distribution, score histogram, and how often you actually pour

Tasting

  • Curated flights with written host notes, plus a builder for your own
  • Blind sessions with per-guest scoring and a reveal
  • Flavor radar encoding nose, palate, and finish as separate axes
  • Critic aggregation — outside reviews pooled into a weighted mean with a per-source spread

The advisor

  • Shelf scanning — photograph a store shelf and get a buy, wait, or pass on each bottle
  • Gap analysis against what you already own, so it argues you out of duplicates
  • Standing decisions you set once, injected into every future recommendation
  • Acquisition roadmap ranking what would genuinely round out the collection

Beyond whisky

  • Wine cellar with a sommelier that knows your palate profile
  • Restaurant lists — photograph the wine list, get a shortlist inside your price band
  • Beer module with breweries, styles, flights, and label scanning
  • Food pairing scored across three axes rather than a vague suggestion
How it works

Your instance is genuinely yours

PourKeep is not a service with your data in someone else's table. Every collector gets their own deployment: their own databases, their own subdomain, their own backups. The code is shared, so improvements land everywhere — but nobody's collection is in the same database as anybody else's.

Your address
A subdomain of your own — you.pourkeep.com — with a real certificate and no shared login.
Your data
Three dedicated databases holding your bottles, tastings, and everything logged away from home.
Your keys
You supply your own AI provider keys, so the intelligence runs on your account and nobody meters you.
Your people
Guests can browse and score at a tasting without seeing what you paid or where you keep it.
Backups
Written nightly to object storage, with the full schema kept in version control alongside the code.
Offline
Your inventory and notes are cached on your phone, and anything you log in a bar with no signal syncs when it returns.
Getting one

It's set up by hand, one at a time

There's no signup form, and that's deliberate — every instance gets built and configured for the person using it. If you collect seriously and this sounds like the thing you've been keeping in a spreadsheet, get in touch.

Ask about an instance

A live instance, if you'd like to see one running: ajw.pourkeep.com