About BottleScout

Built for ourselves first.

BottleScout is the free Chrome extension and open API from Boozemakers — the editorial publication covering bourbon, whiskey, cigars, and cocktails for the modern enthusiast. We made BottleScout because the spirits-buying experience on the open web is structurally broken: every retailer's reviews are biased toward whatever they're selling, every affiliate-driven publication scores everything above 90, and the secondary market is opaque enough that price discovery takes 30 minutes per bottle if you're willing to put in the work.

BottleScout puts what we already publish at boozemakers.com — sourced reviews, a 100-point scoring framework, fair-price context — directly in your cart. No paywall. No affiliate gates on the review content. No tracking.

What it does, technically

• Web app at boozemakers.com/bottlescout for direct bottle lookups.
• Chrome extension that injects a sidebar on the eight supported retailers: Reserve Bar, Total Wine, K&L Wines, Caskers, Drizly, Cigars International, Famous Smoke, and Holt's.
• Open JSON API at /bottlescout/api/v1. CORS-open, rate-limited at 60-120 requests per minute per IP. Bartenders, retailers, and bloggers embed our scores via iframe or direct fetch.
• Auto-generated 1080×1350 score-card PNGs for Pinterest, Twitter, and Open Graph.

Where the reviews come from

Every review surfaced in BottleScout was written by the Boozemakers editorial team and published at boozemakers.com first. We don't aggregate scores from other sites. We don't crowdsource ratings from anonymous users. The 100-point scoring framework is the same one documented in our flagship ebook, Drink Smarter, and abbreviated for free in the Spirits Tasting Journal.

Where the prices come from

Public product pages on the eight supported retailers. We scrape prices once a night, politely (one request per second per host, cached for 24 hours). The fair-price band shown on each bottle detail page is the median, 25th, and 75th percentiles of the most recent observation per retailer over the last 14 days. If a retailer is out of stock or blocks our scraper, that retailer drops out of the band until it's available again.

We do not currently track allocations, scarcity premiums, or the deep secondary market (eBay, Bottlecollectors, etc.). That's on the v2 roadmap.

Open source

The Chrome extension is open-source under the MIT license at github.com/reviewstercom-arch/bottlescout. Issues and pull requests welcome.

The honest part

BottleScout exists because we wanted it to exist for us. The fact that it builds an email list for boozemakers.com — the publication that pays for the editorial team that writes the reviews — is the economic engine that lets us keep the tool free and the reviews honest. Every page on BottleScout has a contextual link to our free Spirits Tasting Journal. If you find the tool useful, the easiest way to support it is to subscribe and stay on the list.

Questions, feedback, or want to embed BottleScout on your site? Email booze@boozemakers.com.