About

I started writing things down because I kept forgetting what worked. A wine that surprised me. The way a braise comes together when you finally stop rushing it. What actually happened in the oven versus what the recipe said.

Bottle & Flame started in 2013. Twelve years and a move to Lake Oswego, Oregon later, it’s still the same project.

The name splits what I care about equally. The glass and the heat. Wine, whiskey, gin — whatever’s worth opening. And everything that happens on the other side of the flame. No culinary school — just years of using every knife and every bowl in the kitchen, making the same dish five times until it stops being a guess.

This is a notebook, not a how-to. I write about what I’m learning and what I think is worth keeping.

I live outside Portland with my wife and twins. Product builder by trade. Home cook by choice. Bottle collector by compulsion — wine first (mostly Walla Walla and Yakima Valley, some California), then whiskey, then gin, then whatever else earns a place on the shelf. The old fashioned, the Manhattan, the gin martini with a twist. Getting better at all of it, slowly.