The Curious Bartender Podcast

Liam Davy is Director of Bars at Hawksmoor, the British steakhouse group that's grown from a single Spitalfields opening in 2006 to fourteen sites across the UK, Ireland and the US, with Boston due in September. We sat down after a night at Hawksmoor's new St Pancras Martini Bar, which has sold over twenty thousand martinis since November.On the episode we dig into what it's like running a bar programme across cities and countries: what travels, what doesn't, and why a steakhouse group has bet so hard on the martini. We talk about the gin boom and its bust, why the Hawksmoor cocktail list is deliberately unfussy and built around the steakhouse experience, and what genuine training looks like inside a fast-growing group. We also get into his time outside Hawksmoor — running the Bad Sports taco place on Hackney Road and co-creating the War in Terroir Instagram account, the wine influencer parody that started during a stretch of unemployment and ended up shaping how a lot of the trade now talks about natural wine. Along the way we cover the cost of going out, what Gen Z actually want from bars, hospitality in the age of top-50 lists and content creators, the operators he genuinely rates — Dukes, the Connaught, Attaboy, Three Sheets, Bar Snack — the institutions that never miss, the elegant decline of bars that fall off lists, the state of British pubs, the resurgence of mezcal, and of course Shaky Pete's Ginger Brew.

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00:00:00 Hawksmoor's new Martini Bar at St Pancras00:02:34 14 restaurants and Boston coming next00:03:19 Why a martini bar00:05:08 The martini's cultural moment00:08:13 Gin's boom, bubble and aftermath00:09:52 Running a bar programme across cities and countries00:13:37 Lessons from the great American steakhouses00:17:03 How a British steakhouse plays in America00:21:39 Recruitment and training inside a growing group00:27:07 Liam's Hawksmoor history00:28:45 Bad Sports, hot dogs and Surfside Cornwall00:43:06 Lessons for anyone opening their own place00:47:38 The state of pubs and independents00:52:28 Who's doing it right00:55:33 The cost of going out01:00:19 Gen Z, phones and the truth about drinking habits01:09:59 War on Terroir: the wine parody Instagram01:14:51 Tribal drinking, natural wine, mezcal01:21:15 We are not normal: rethinking who bars are for01:25:26 Hospitality as entertainment and top 50 culture01:32:26 Dukes, Connaught, attaboy: institutions that don't miss01:39:52 Awards, recognition and elegant decline01:43:50 Shaky Pete's Ginger Brew01:46:45 20,000 martinis since November01:47:42 The Sour Cherry Negroni's lockdown roots01:48:36 Boston Hawksmoor01:55:05 Bringing UK bars on tour01:59:07 Mezcal, education and final thoughts📷 Follow me on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/tristanstephenson/📚 I've written quite a few books on spirits and cocktails - https://www.thecuriousbartender.com/

Thibaut Hontanx is only the seventh master blender in Courvoisier's nearly 200-year history, but that might not be the most interesting thing about his incredibly eclectic career.
From growing up around his grandfather's sawmill in France, to arriving in South Africa at 21 with a brief and a blank piece of paper to build the country's first agave spirits distillery from scratch, to seven years at Hennessy deepening his understanding of cognac ageing — all while completing an oenology degree in Bordeaux mid-career. Thibaut has accumulated a breadth of experience that very few people in this industry can match. We follow him to Martinique, where he oversaw production at Rhum Clément, and explore the surprising parallels between rhum agricole and cognac — two AOC-protected, terroir-driven spirits that share a philosophy but feel like completely different worlds.
Back in Cognac, we get into the technical craft behind Courvoisier's house style, the challenges of recent vintages in a changing climate, new grape varieties being trialled within the AOC, and what it means to hold a role where the decisions you make today will be drunk by someone thirty years from now. And why growing up around a sawmill turns out to be surprisingly useful preparation for a life spent thinking about oak.
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Dave Mulligan is the owner of Dublin's Bar 1661 and The Sackville Lounge, founder of Bán Poitín, and one of the most committed advocates for Ireland's oldest spirit currently working the floor. 

Poitín was banned by the British Crown in 1661 and remained illegal for 336 years, surviving in the hills of Connemara and Donegal as both an act of cultural defiance and a working farmer's economy. Now legal, GI-protected, and slowly finding its place on the world's best back bars, the category is at one of the most interesting moments in its history.
On the episode we trace the spirit's origins back through the 1500s and earlier, separating monkish folklore from the documentary record. We taste a remarkable bottle from the 1830s that may rewrite some of what we think we know about Irish distillation. And we work through a flight of contemporary expressions including Micil's malted barley poitín, the Micil x Kneecap collaboration finished in Buckfast casks, Killowen's peated Dead & Buried, Bán Poitín itself, a Bán expression finished in cocktail-seasoned casks, and an unlabelled brown-paper-bag illicit bottle from an unnamed distiller ;-)
We talk about what 1997 legalisation actually changed, why the 2008 PGI imposed a ten-week barrel limit, and why every poitín we taste sits as a fully resolved spirit in its own right rather than a stop on the way to something else. We also get into the early days of Sibín in Kentish Town, the founding of Bar 1661 and The Sackville Lounge, the Belfast Coffee origin story, and what it would take for poitín to become a serious global spirit category.

POITÍN TASTED IN THIS EPISODE
In rough order of tasting:

​Bán Poitín (in the Belfast Coffee at the open, then neat later in the episode) — Dave's own brand. Blended from malted barley, Comber potatoes and Irish grain, distilled at Echlinville. https://www.ban-poitin.com
​A forgotten ~1830s spirit from County Tyrone — discovered around 2019–2020. Not commercially available.
​Micil Poitín — six-generation family recipe dating to 1848. https://micildistillery.com
​Micil x Kneecap Poitín — limited collaboration, Buckfast-cask seasoned. Available via Micil. https://micildistillery.com
​Killowen Dead & Buried — peated, 67.9% ABV, distilled by Brendan Carty in collaboration with historian Fionnán O'Connor. https://www.killowendistillery.com
​Bán 1661 (cocktail-cask finish) — limited release finished in casks seasoned with Bar 1661's own cocktails. https://www.ban-poitin.com
​A mystery stout based poitín — from a sizable distillery; not yet released.
​An illicit, unlabelled bottle — currently being made off-grid; not commercially available.

Featured venues: Bar 1661 — https://www.bar1661.ie · The Sackville Lounge — https://thesackvillelounge.com

Fionnán O'Connor is the mentioned author of A Glass Apart

Edward Slingerland is a distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, whose research spans early Chinese thought, cognitive science, and evolutionary psychology. He is, among other works, the author of Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization. Our conversation starts by traging the origins of his thinking on alcohol to his earlier work on wu wei, the ancient Chinese concept of effortless action, and explore how downregulating the prefrontal cortex, whether through drinking, flow states, or long-distance running, unlocks the lateral thinking and spontaneity that the self-conscious mind tends to suppress. We get into the Ballmer Peak, the Google whisky room, and our own experiences of writing and creating under the influence, before turning to the central argument: that alcohol is not an evolutionary mistake but a genuine cultural technology, one that has been helping humans solve the problems of creativity and large-scale cooperation for at least 13,000 years. We dig into what the archaeological record reveals, from Gobekli Tepe to the Epic of Gilgamesh, making the case that the desire for intoxication may have preceded and even driven the development of agriculture and civilisation itself. We explore the hidden social intelligence embedded in drinking rituals, the way toasting customs, rounds at the pub, and the unspoken etiquette of sharing a bottle all serve to pace and regulate consumption within a group, before examining the two conditions that make alcohol most dangerous: distillation and isolation. We compare northern and southern European drinking cultures, look at what Italy's historically low alcoholism rates can teach us, and ask what cultures that abstain entirely reveal about alcohol's social role. Along the way we taste through two whiskies, discuss whether a pill that replicated alcohol's effects would ever replace the real thing, and hear Ed's thoughts on his next book, which turns his evolutionary lens on foraging, food, and our need to reconnect with the natural world.00:00:00 Introduction00:00:06 From Wu Wei to Whisky: How This Book Came About00:03:56 Flow State, Wu Wei and the Prefrontal Cortex00:10:45 Why Does a Poison Persist in Every Culture?00:11:07 Alcohol and Religion: Costly Behaviours, Hidden Benefits00:14:18 The Brain Hijack Theory and Why It Falls Short00:27:02 Humans as the Creative and Communal Animal00:29:20 Creativity, Lateral Thinking and the Maturing PFC00:33:05 The Ballmer Peak and Google's Whisky Room00:35:22 Writing Drunk: Personal Experiences with Alcohol and Creativity00:37:34 The Negroni That Wrote the Book Proposal00:52:59 The Pub as Social Infrastructure00:57:01 Whisky Tasting: Kilchoman00:58:30 Toasting Rituals and the Hidden Etiquette of Drinking Together01:01:28 The Twin Dangers: Distillation and Isolation01:05:15 Getting Drunk: The Bonding Functions Beyond 0.0801:09:35 Those Who Puke Together Stay Together01:10:07 Archaeology: The Beer Before Bread Hypothesis01:16:32 The Epic of Gilgamesh: Beer Makes You Human01:19:31 Hard Numbers vs the Intangible Benefits of Alcohol01:21:23 Northern vs Southern Drinking Cultures01:24:16 Italy as a Natural Experiment01:28:00 Cultures That Don't Drink: Islam and Mormonism01:29:34 Whisky Tasting: Highland Park 1401:49:00 Ed's Next Book: Foraging and Reconnecting with Nature01:51:24 Alcohol as Culture, Place and Technology01:53:19 Would We Still Drink if a Pill Could Replace It?📷 Follow me on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/tristanstephenson/📚 I've written quite a few books on spirits and cocktails - https://www.thecuriousbartender.com/

Mathieu Sabbagh spent fifteen years navigating the corporate corridors of Pernod Ricard, working on the relaunches of absinthe and Suze, before packing it in, driving around France looking for something real, and ending up buying a mobile still in Beaune. He's now the sole travelling distiller in Burgundy, running Alambic Bourguignon and his own label Sab's — and in this episode we pull apart how that happened and why it matters. We talk about the slow industrial death of France's once-thriving network of mobile distilleries, the customs regulations that govern when a still is allowed to run, and the three-pot preheating system that means someone has to be up at 4am during distilling season. Mat explains the difference between Marc de Bourgogne and Fin de Bourgogne, why Burgundy's grapes (Pinot noir and Chardonnay harvested at full maturity) make a fundamentally different spirit to cognac or Armagnac, and how he sources wine barrels from some of the most sought-after producers on earth because, quite simply, they're next door. We taste through an extraordinary range: four gins (including a navy strength, a barrel-aged expression and one infused with Pinot pomace), aged Marc and Fin finished in Islay whisky and mezcal casks, and three unaged fruit eaux-de-vie from apricot, mirabelle and pear. The conversation keeps circling back to the same idea: a great spirit is just great ingredients honestly handled.Find Mathieu and the full Sab's range at alambic-bourguignon.com.