The Curious Bartender Podcast

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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Fever-Tree Mixers for the best fizzy liquids going
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🥃 Get 15% off the world's best drinking vessels at ⁠Denver & Liely⁠ using the discount code CURIOUS15 at checkout
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📷 ⁠Follow me on Instagram⁠
📚 I've written ⁠quite a few books⁠ on spirits and cocktails

We sat down — hungover, under-slept, and drinking before nine in the morning — with three of the people actually building British rum from the ground up: Lewis Hayes of DropWorks, Collin van Schayk of J. Gow, and Gergo Murath of Outlier. Between them they cover the full range of what this young category can be — Lewis running Europe's largest rum distillery out of Sherwood Forest with England's first copper double retort still, Collin fermenting wild yeast isolated from orchids beside a 2,000-litre pot still on an uninhabited Orkney island, and Gergo repping Outlier's wine-yeast, high-gravity, unfiltered rum out of the Isle of Man after thirteen years behind some of London's best bars. We trace how strange it is that Britain drank rum for centuries without distilling a drop of it until 2012, and dig into what's actually stopping British rum from having an identity yet — the fact that of roughly a hundred brands calling themselves British rum, only a third are fermenting and distilling here, and what a Geographical Indication might do about that. We get into the guts of production — dunder, backset, battonage, cane honey, double retorts versus double pot stills — and challenge the assumption that British ageing must be slower or lesser than tropical: DropWorks is releasing gold-medal-winning rum at a single year old, while J. Gow has just put out the oldest UK-distilled rum in existence, an eight-year-old matured through Orkney winters that regularly bottom out at two degrees. We talk about Haiti and clairin as a model of rum untouched by commoditisation, about the uncomfortable history British producers have to reckon with honestly, and about whether the long-promised rum boom is finally, slowly, arriving — and why slow might be exactly what keeps it from crashing the way gin did. Along the way we taste through six rums, including a whiskey-cask DropWorks expression built to provoke whiskey drinkers, And Outlier rum finished in Sauternes casks, and J. Gow's newest wild yeast release. We close by asking where each of them sees British rum in ten years — and get answers ranging from international distribution to a British "Japanese whiskey" moment.

📷 ⁠Follow me on Instagram⁠
📚 I've written ⁠quite a few books⁠ on spirits and cocktails

🥃 Get 15% off the world's best drinking vessels at ⁠Denver & Liely⁠ using the discount code CURIOUS15 at checkout
☕ Get 15% off the best coffee liqueur I have tried at ⁠Algebra Drinks ⁠with code CURIOUS15

Dré Masso is one of the most consequential figures in the modern cocktail world — a British-Colombian bartender whose career has stretched from the epicentre of 1990s London to a beach club in Bali and a cantina in Cartagena. We cover the moments that shaped him: growing up watching his Colombian mother work bar and restaurant shifts, the revolution quietly being assembled at the Atlantic Bar & Grill under Dick Bradsell, formative years at LAB with Douglas Ankrah, a brief stint at Jamie Oliver's landmark restaurant Fifteen, and the Lonsdale Bar meeting that sparked a creative partnership with Henry Besant. We get into the tequila pilgrimage that changed everything — six months following Julio Bermejo around San Francisco, a 2004 trip to Mexico he describes as the best of his life, and the extraordinary story of how a visit to Destilería Colonial and an impromptu tasting session with maestro Jesús Hernandez became the birth of Olmeca Altos, now one of the biggest tequila brands in the world. Dre speaks honestly about the commercial reality of co-founding a brand as a bartender, the grief of losing Henry Besant in 2013, and how that loss collided with a new chapter running Potato Head's sprawling Bali beach club alongside one of the most visionary entrepreneurs he has ever encountered. We close with a tasting of Nusa Cana rum, a deep dive into the forgotten history of Batavia Arak, and Dre's plans for what comes next, including a very public desire to get back behind the stick.

With thanks to our sponsors:
Fever-Tree Mixers for the best fizzy liquids going
Belvedere for additive free, organic Polish vodka

Jörg Meyer is the founder of Le Lion — Bar de Paris in Hamburg, one of the most consistently recognised cocktail bars in the world and the birthplace of the Gin Basil Smash, a drink he created in 2008 that now accounts for upwards of 25,000 pours a year at Le Lion alone and has become one of the few genuine modern classics produced outside London and New York. In this episode we go deep on the full origin story of that drink: the Whiskey Smash he fell for at Pegu Club in New York, the G'Vine recipe booklet with a basil garnish that caught his eye, the batch of basil he borrowed from a restaurant warehouse next door, and the blog post on July 10th 2008 that set the whole thing in motion. We talk about the strange position of being a committed classicist who loves two-ingredient drinks and measures success in restraint... and yet being best known for a vivid green herb cocktail that outsells everything else on the menu by a considerable margin. Along the way we get into the surprisingly technical world of basil sourcing (500 kilograms a year, with quality varying dramatically by country of origin), why over-muddling produces a drink that tastes of chlorophyll rather than basil, and what a gin fizz served at Bar High Five in Tokyo taught Jörg about the cost of too much lemon. We also get into the World's 50 Best Bars list in considerable depth — Jörg was on it for seven consecutive years, peaked at number 16 in 2013, and has since developed a very clear-eyed view of what the list actually is, how it can be gamed, and why being on it can sometimes be more damaging than helpful for small independent bars. Elsewhere we cover the Diageo World Class competition and what happened when Jörg started asking questions about how it was being run in Russia, the business mechanics of Le Lion right now (sales up 30% without a price increase), the Le Lion summer pass modelled on an 80s German youth leisure scheme, and a Midori cocktail that a Ueno San of High Five in Tokyo served him with barely concealed contempt. We end on Germany's bar scene — where it came from, where it is, and Jörg's honest and slightly uncomfortable answer to the question of what Germany uniquely contributes to global cocktail culture.📷 Follow me on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/tristanstephenson/📚 I've written quite a few books on spirits and cocktails - https://www.thecuriousbartender.com/

This week we're filming on location at Wild Turkey in Lawrenceburg, sitting in the old station house with Bruce Russell — third-generation whiskey maker and associate blender, grandson and son of the two living legends whose names hang over the place: Jimmy Russell, the longest-tenured master distiller of any spirit, and his son Eddie. Bruce was headed for a career in robotics until a summer giving distillery tours, and one quietly devastating afternoon when his introverted father walked his tour and told him he didn't know much of anything, redirected the whole course of his life. We get into what it means to carry a name like Russell, the freedom in being told you'll never be Jimmy or Eddie so you'd better be yourself, and the uncanny way personality and palate skip a generation. We discover Jimmy's handwritten 1950s notebooks and the by-hand, by-feel craft that's quietly vanishing, chase the elusive "Wild Turkey Funk" of vintage bourbon and ask whether it can ever be made again. We don't dodge the state of the market — the glut, the overproduction, the correction coming around 2029-30, and why the big houses ride out storms that sink smaller players. There's plenty for the nerds: angel's share losses of 75 to 90 percent on the oldest barrels, the freakish top floors at Camp Nelson where the highest-proof whiskey somehow tastes the best, and how a single recipe becomes Jimmy whiskey or Eddie whiskey depending only on the warehouse. We trace the rise of rye, the difference between Wild Turkey's stewardship and the offence of Russell's Reserve, and the tight, almost familial culture binding the Kentucky distilling families. Along the way we taste through some genuinely rare liquid: Bruce's first solo project - Austin Nichols Gold Foil 16 Year Old - a sneak peek of Russell's 13 made for Eddie's 45th anniversary, then onto the near-mythical Russell's 1998, and hear how Generations brought all three Russells together for what turned out to be the last whiskey Jimmy actively worked on. We finish on a Wild Turkey that travelled to Japan, took on a second life at Chichibu, and came back tasting like nothing any of us expected.