The Curious Bartender Podcast

Sean Harrison is been the Master Distillery for Plymouth Gin for over 30 years. Sean left the Royal Navy in 1994 to join a four-person team making a gin that most people had forgotten.
Record at the Black Friars Distillery in the hidden speakeasy, we sift through the history of the distillery and brand and sort fact from folklore in one of gin’s oldest stories: why the building was never a monastery, where the 1793 date on the bottle comes from, whether the Pilgrim Fathers ever stayed here, and the 1811 notebook behind Mr King’s recipe. We follow Plymouth’s rise to become the gin in the first dry Martinis and the subject of an 1898 New York court case over its name. Then comes the long slide through eight changes of owner, an American importer that all but killed the brand, and a 1990 memo that predicted its comeback.
Sean explains why Plymouth let its geographical indication lapse and how Navy Strength got its name almost by accident. He tells us why a distiller must never chase the oil, what a drought summer does to juniper, and why he thinks of his job as flavouring something rather than making it. We finish with the state of the gin category, the one thing Sean says must never change, and the question he’d put to Thomas Coates if he had a time machine.

Bevan Fawcett is an eight-generation maltster, and this episode was recorded on the floor maltings at Thomas Fawcett & Sons in Castleford, West Yorkshire. Fawcett’s has made malt on the same site since 1809, and it still germinates barley by hand on stone floors alongside Saladin boxes and modern germinating kilning vessels. We talk about why malt is the quiet bass player next to hops, how Fawcett’s keeps heritage varieties like Maris Otter, Golden Promise and Halcyon alive, and what it takes to persuade farmers to grow a barley that yields less. We break down what a maltster tests for (nitrogen, grain size, screenings and germinative capacity), how steeping, germination and kilning turn a hard seed into brewing material, and whether floor malt really tastes different from vessel malt. Along the way: oat malt and the hazy beer boom, crystal and roasted malts, English whisky’s growing interest in old varieties, the £3,000 trip to Denver that opened up America, and what it was like for Bevan and his brother to take over a 200-year-old business young.

This episode is sponsered by:
🍋‍🟩 Fever-Tree - For the very best mixers that taste pretty damn good even by themselves🌾 Belvedere Vodka - Organic vodka, with substance, made from Polish rye and absolutely no additives.

📷 Follow me on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/tristanstephenson/📚 I've written quite a few books on spirits and cocktails - https://www.thecuriousbartender.com/

For episode 100 we turn the tables. Craig Harper, a close friend and regular drinking partner, takes the interviewer’s chair and puts questions from listeners and friends to the host himself. We start with how three podcasts led to this one, the nerdiest episodes so far, and the night at Purl when London’s hotel bartenders turned up after midnight. From there we get into Black Rock: the flavour-led whisky bar, the oak table with whisky inside it, the bars in China, and where whisky goes next. There’s also the bottle that got away at Chichibu station, Whisky Me and the sample pouch that rescued it, Rosemaund, and a meeting with Guy Ritchie that created a whisky brand. A trip back to the 1650s makes the case for the busiest decade in drinks history. The quickfire round asks whether you can smell sugar, who gets a fist fight, and where the smart money is. We finish with a sunset on a Cornish beach.

Thanks to everyone that sent in questions and sorry we couldn't get through them all. We will look to address more of them in the future episodes.

With many thanks to our sponsors who have made this show possible: Fever-Tree, Belvedere, Denver & Liely, Algebra.

This week we’re at the home of Steven Moore, Antiques Roadshow regular, former dealer, auctioneer, curator and pottery manufacturer, and the self-styled David Attenborough of teacups.
It’s an episode best watched rather than heard, with a table full of objects that tell the story of how Britain learned to drink. We start with the cup and saucer: why the saucer was made for drinking from, how the raised little finger came before the handle, and why the champagne coupe owes nothing to Marie Antoinette. Steven explains how tea and coffee reached London within a decade of each other, why early tea was taxed as a brewed liquid and sent round town by coffee-house boys, and how the tea table gave 18th-century women a rare kind of social power. Along the way he tests us on a 300-year-old Venetian glass tea bowl painted to pass as Chinese porcelain, a Georgian punch cup and a sugar bowl bigger than the teapot (we don’t do well). We get into why 18th-century wine glasses were kept off the dining table, the Venetian art of drinking all day without getting drunk, a friend who coated his martini glass with frozen vermouth and flung the rest into the Grand Canal, and how Murano became an island prison for glassmakers. Steven also gives his verdict on a vintage plunger-action martini mixer, tells the story of the original People’s Princess from his book The Stuff of History, and makes the case for using antiques every day rather than collecting them to sell: a 1760 dining table for £20 beats flat-pack every time.

Buy The Stuff of History now!

With thanks to our sponsors:

Fever-Tree Mixers for the best fizzy liquids going
Belvedere for additive free, organic Polish vodka

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

Award-winning beer writer Jonny Garrett, co-founder of YouTube's Craft Beer Channel and the only writer to win Fortnum & Mason Drinks Book of the Year twice, joins us in the week his new book One More Round hits the shelves. We follow his 4,000-mile road trip in a borrowed red Mini called Allan, through 150 pubs and the 58 that made the cut, and pull apart some cherished pub myths along the way: why the bar you order at is a Victorian idea borrowed from the gin palaces, why queuing at the bar was once completely normal, and why almost every claim to be Britain's oldest pub falls apart under scrutiny. We get into the beer tie and why, by Jonny's estimate, only around 10,000 UK pubs can truly choose what they pour, his campaign for UNESCO recognition of cask ale, what cask could learn from Guinness and the Bass revival, the closure of Sharp's in Cornwall and the quiet collapse of British hop growing. Then we go back 13,000 years with The Meaning of Beer: a Natufian brewery beside a burial site, a pre-pyramid mega-brewery at Abydos, Gilgamesh, the refrigerator built for a Munich brewery, how sour beer led Joseph Lister to antiseptic surgery, the Carlsberg Laboratory and Hitler's beer halls. We finish on craft beer's identity crisis, why drinking together still matters, and the breweries Jonny is most excited about right now.
Jonny's books
One More Round: Exploring the Best of British Pubs (2026): https://atlantic-books.co.uk/book/one-more-round/
The Meaning of Beer: An Alternative History of the World (2024): https://atlantic-books.co.uk/book/the-meaning-of-beer/
A Year in Beer (CAMRA Books, 2021): https://shop1.camra.org.uk/product/a-year-in-beer-a-beer-lovers-guide-to-the-seasons/
Beer School: A Crash Course in Craft Beer (2016, with Brad Evans): https://www.amazon.com/Beer-School-Crash-Course-Craft/dp/1633533689
Find Jonny
Website: https://jonnygarrett.co.uk
The Craft Beer Channel: https://www.thecraftbeerchannel.com
Also mentioned
A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage
Drunk by Edward Slingerland
Wood & Beer by Dick Cantwell and Peter Bouckaert