Distill by Stillbound

Inspiration

Whiskey is the most explained and least understood drink in the world. Tours and books describe the process. Nobody lets you make the decisions and taste the consequences. I spent 18 years in the drinks trade, including Diageo, and never found a tool that taught the craft by letting you practise it. So I built one.

What it does

Distill is a whiskey-making simulator that runs on whiskey time.

You choose a style, build a grain bill, run a fermentation, make the still cuts and fill a cask. Séamus, the head distiller, explains the science behind every choice in plain language. Then you wait. One real day is one year in the cask. A 12-year whiskey takes 12 days.

The wait is the point. Every decision you made before the cask closed shows up in the glass years later, and the app tells you when it is worth checking. At bottling you name your whiskey, design the label and reveal its flavour profile, its score and the real whiskeys it tastes closest to.

The whole grain-to-glass journey is free. Distiller Mode, a one-time purchase, opens the advanced controls: more styles and casks, manual yeast, custom mashbills, a second cask slot and Distiller's Analysis.

Live on the App Store in 165 countries, including the US, UK and all 27 EU member states.

How RevenueCat is used

RevenueCat is the purchase authority in the app. It wraps StoreKit for the non-consumable Distiller Mode product, mapped to the distiller_mode entitlement. The app reconciles customer information at launch, listens for entitlement changes and offers Restore Purchases in both the purchase sheet and Settings. Customer IDs are anonymous. The app has no accounts and no server of its own.

How we built it

Expo, React Native, TypeScript, Zustand, AsyncStorage, StoreKit and react-native-purchases.

The flavour engine is the heart of it. It is built on distilling science: what grain, yeast, cut points, char and cask do to flavour, modelled year by year as the spirit matures. It is calibrated against a reference set of real commercial whiskeys, with a master distiller reviewing the outputs. It is deterministic and runs entirely on the device. No LLM.

Challenges

Real-time maturation is the design bet. It is also the feature most likely to make a new player think the app is broken. The answer was Poitín. The first build is pre-set to an unaged Irish spirit, so the first bottle lands in a few minutes. The waiting starts only once you understand why it matters.

What we learned

Ship the loop, not the feature list. Every hour on the engine competed with an hour on the first five minutes, and the first five minutes won every time.

What's next

A leaderboard for shared bottles, a deeper engine update already in the queue, and learning from the first players now filling casks across 165 countries.

Built With

• expo.io
• react-native
• revenuecat
• storekit
• typescript
• zustand