The Curious Bartender Podcast

We're doing something different this time: a special edition replaying the Liquipedia seminar we delivered live at Tales of the Cocktail 2026 in New Orleans, sponsored by Belvedere — forty-five increasingly unhinged questions about liquids, alcohol and drinking, answered (mostly correctly) in just under two hours. Jake Burger returns as the show's first repeat guest, joined by Mike Foster running the questions and Matt Pomeroy handling demonstrations, both from Belvedere. We test whether vacuum ice buckets actually chill wine faster than a plain ice bucket, work out why Bloody Marys taste better at 35,000 feet, and establish that you'd need roughly half a million licks — or five thousand people — to get drunk off other people's sweat. We go deep on water's age (some of it in your glass may predate the sun), whether climate change is quietly reshaping the world's great spirits regions, and why a Malaysian pen-tailed tree shrew is pound-for-pound a more accomplished drinker than Andre the Giant. There's a live blind taste test where Jake and Tris try to identify beer brands purely by the sound of the bottle opening, a full run-through of the maths behind why champagne towers waste hundreds of litres of fizz, and a proper history detour into the life and death of Mad Jack Mytton, the Regency-era MP who rode a bear into a dinner party and set fire to his own nightshirt to cure hiccups. We track down the world's most expensive liquid (spoiler: it's either horseshoe crab blood or deathstalker scorpion venom, depending how you count), debunk the myth that Ian Fleming actually drank his martinis at Dukes, and finally solve the mystery of why Jack Daniel's and Coke gets that strange white foam that no other whiskey and cola does. We close out with the story of Alfred Barnard, who visited 162 distilleries by horse and carriage in two years, and the real reason 19th-century restaurants had to lock up the Worcestershire sauce.

A few sound and video issues in this episode due to the intoxicated state of the producer and cast. Hope you enjoy it though!

David Wondrich is a drinks historian and author of Imbibe!, Punch and the Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails, and The Comic Book History of the Cocktail.
The conversation runs from a $3,000 freelance gig in December 1999 to four centuries of drinking history. Wondrich left academia, almost by accident, to become Esquire's drinks editor, and that training in chasing sources and revising a story when new evidence turns up has shaped every book since.
We get into how The Comic Book History of the Cocktail came together and what a graphic novel forced him to cut that a straight history wouldn't. From there we go back to the beginning: what punch actually was before it became shorthand for a bad party bowl, the unresolved fight over where the word "punch" comes from, and the likely, disputed origin of "cocktail" itself. We spend real time on the people usually left out of the story: William Schmidt, "the only William," New York's most famous 19th-century bartender, buried without a headstone; and Ned Stokes, who reinvented American bar service after doing time for murder.
Along the way: the birth of the American ice trade and why George Washington's "wine and bitters" might be an early cocktail. We didn't get past the early 20th century, so we'll be back for a part two, picking up the mid-century, the dark ages of the cocktail, and tiki.

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Julie Reiner arrived in New York in 1998 after a stint bartending in San Francisco, following her wife to a city she'd always wanted to live in, and found a scene stuck on sour mix and nothing fresh, years behind the coast she'd left. In this episode we trace the accidental, instinct-led arc of one of modern cocktail culture's defining bar owners: from cocktail waitressing in Waikiki and freewheeling San Francisco service through to Flatiron Lounge in 2003, the bar that introduced her to jiggers, consistency, that spearheaded the culinary cocktail movement, and that ran almost entirely on female talent in a scene that had never seen anything like it. We talk about the partnership with Dale DeGroff and Audrey Saunders that led to Pegu Club — a training ground that sent bartenders like Phil Ward, Sam Ross, Toby Maloney and Jim Meehan on to shape the industry's next chapter — and the move to Brooklyn for Clover Club, built around a 130-year-old antique bar and a classically-focused menu, nominated five years running before finally taking Best American Cocktail Bar. We get into the ventures that didn't survive too: the ahead-of-its-time tropical concept Lani Kai, and Leyenda, built around Ivy Mix's expertise in agave spirits, which closed after a ten-year run. We finish talking about Milady's, the revival of a beloved 70-year-old Soho dive bar, why nostalgia has to be earned rather than just served up, and how, after roughly ten bars and twenty-five years, she's settled into running the ones she loves rather than chasing the next opening.

Grover Sanschagrin is the co-founder, alongside his wife Scarlet, of Agave Matchmaker — the platform, formerly known as Tequila Matchmaker, that has spent over a decade cataloguing how tequila and other agave spirits are actually made. Grover found tequila through Scarlet, who discovered it while working as a journalist in Mexico City, and the pair went on to live in Guadalajara, at the heart of Mexico's tequila region, for eight years, visiting hundreds of distilleries and eventually building an app now used by over 400,000 people to navigate a notoriously opaque category. Grover walks us through how additives — both the legally permitted abocantes (glycerin, caramel colour, oak extract, sugar syrup) and a wider set of undisclosed synthetic ingredients — found their way into a huge share of the market, which by his and Scarlet's own estimate runs as high as 85%, and how their attempt to flag which products were additive-free grew from a simple checkbox into a full verification programme built on sensory training and, eventually, laboratory testing. That work made them two of the most influential, and for parts of the industry most uncomfortable, voices in tequila, and in March 2024 their home in Guadalajara was raided by federal agents while they were thousands of miles away in New York — an experience Grover walks us through in detail. Their legal situation is still working its way through the courts, so there's a fair amount here we've had to leave out or keep light on for now, and we've deliberately avoided naming the parties involved directly. Grover also gives us his read on the recent wave of US class-action lawsuits alleging that some major tequila brands, including names linked to Diageo, Costco and Michael Jordan, fall well short of their 100% agave claims, and we close out talking about where tequila and the wider agave spirits category — now expanding well beyond Mexico's borders — goes from here, plus a look at Rispetto, his own traditionally-made agave syrup.

Daniele Biondi is one of the world's leading experts on the rum category. Working with Luca Gargano at Velier, he is one of the key figures behind the international rediscovery of Haitian clairin, the new wave of Colombian sugarcane spirits, and a driving force behind the Hampden Estate story. He's been working with rum since the 90's but over the last 15 years particularly, Daniele has spent much of his time travelling to the world's least-documented rum-producing regions — Haiti, Colombia, the Philippines, and more — searching out distilleries that, in his words, "aren't on Google."
These distilleries are often so numerous and geographically dispersed that it bodes the question - have we actually seen or tasted much of the world's rums?
Daniele began his career bartending in Milan in the late 1990s, and found there was almost no reliable information on the category available anywhere so he began researching obsessively. That personal research project became, in February 2007, one of the first rum blogs in Europe: not just a blog, but a functioning reference work, a "kind of Wikipedia" for rum at a time when the internet had almost nothing on the subject. It grew past 3,000 readers before he even realised it was a significant following, and led directly to him becoming president of Italy's Rum Club.
From there, his path diverges from almost every other rum communicator working today. Rather than build a personal media brand, he was recruited into an EU-funded Caribbean producers' association and spent years as a full-time, on-the-ground rum educator — travelling constantly (by his own account, "14 islands in 14 days," well over 100 days a year in some markets), running tastings, PR and trade negotiations, and building direct relationships with producers across Italy, France, Spain and the UK.
Then came the discovery work most people do associate with him, even if they don't always connect the name to it: it was Daniele who, in 2012, first went looking for Haiti's undocumented clairin distilleries — "not on Google" — and helped bring what's now a globally recognised spirit category into being. He did the same, more quietly, in Colombia, surfacing viche and the Afro-Colombian women producers behind it, and again in the Philippines, discovering a young distiller working in methods inspired by Hampden. And alongside Luca Gargano, he's been one of the central figures shaping Hampden Estate's modern reputation and the whole aged-clairin project — categories and products that are now widely celebrated, even if the person who did much of the groundwork isn't always credited alongside them.
That's arguably the throughline of Daniele's career: he's one of the most consistent, sustained driving forces in modern rum education and discovery over the last two decades, and by his own description, one of the least self-promotional. He calls Velier "a dependent bottler" rather than claiming credit, describes his own day-to-day as "90% of my time on Excel," and treats the travel and discovery as the job itself rather than a platform. He's recognised within the trade — but given the scale and duration of what he's actually built, still arguably deserves to be a much bigger name than he is.
Side note: he also wrote the introduction for the Italian version of my rum book.
The conversation ranges from muddy backroads in rural Haiti to the fermentation room at Hampden, and from the mechanics of ester chemistry to why flavour is ultimately an emotional, personal experience.

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📚 I've written ⁠quite a few books⁠ on spirits and cocktails