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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 🥃 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 📷 ⁠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/1633533689Find Jonny Website: https://jonnygarrett.co.ukThe Craft Beer Channel: https://www.thecraftbeerchannel.comAlso mentioned A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom StandageDrunk by Edward SlingerlandWood & Beer by Dick Cantwell and Peter Bouckaert

Dawn Davies MW is back for a rare second appearance. We asked, and she answered with six bottles of fizz, each one a chapter in a career that started as a waitress and bar hand in Edinburgh, ran through Zuma, The Ledbury and Selfridges, and ended up with eleven years at The Whisky Exchange, where she built the Champagne Show from scratch. We work our way through a Blanc de Blancs from Vertus, a Pinot Noir from Aÿ fermented in Argonne oak, Gosset's Grande Réserve from the oldest wine house in Champagne, a grower-style blend aged under cork, an English rosé from Gusbourne, and the Billecart-Salmon rosé that won a blind tasting at Zuma eleven votes to one. Along the way we get into chalk cellars and climate change, why Dom Pérignon spent his life trying to get the bubbles out, how the English invented the method long before the French claimed it, what 15 months on the lees actually does, why most champagne houses own very little of their own land, and the blender's art that turns hundreds of acidic base wines into one consistent house style. Dawn explains how to make bad champagne, why sugar and Meunier are champagne's unfair villains, and why she'd happily see coupe drinkers beheaded. We talk about the Taittinger and Pommery-led rush into English vineyards and whether it dilutes the champagne brand, and she tells us about the 1988 bottle on a hillside above the Marne that made her realise this was her career. We finish on her decision to leave The Whisky Exchange with no plan in place, and her mission to rebuild an industry she says is in a bad place. A little bit of self-fact checking: Meunier is not the most planted grape. Pinot Noir actually beats it.The famous perfume case was Yves Saint Laurent's "Champagne", not Chanel or LVMH.The Royal Society paper was 1662 (Merret), not the 1760s. (which we did correct ourselves on) - The glass "Robert something" is Sir Robert Mansell, who promoted coal-fired glass furnaces.Brut is up to 12g/L, not 14. Brut Nature is 0–3g/LThere are eight permitted grapes, not nine. The newcomer Dawn mentioned is called Voltis, a disease-resistant variety approved in 2022. Fever-Tree Mixers for the best fizzy liquids going Belvedere for additive free, organic Polish vodka 🥃 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 📷 ⁠Follow me on Instagram⁠ 📚 I've written ⁠quite a few books⁠ on spirits and cocktails

Chartreuse is the most sought-after liqueur in the world. In this episode Valérie Gamond gives the first ever interview from Chartreuse on a podcast. She was born in Voiron, started at the Chartreuse cellars as a 21-year-old summer guide, and thirty-two years later has still never met the monks she works for. We get into the 1605 manuscript handed to the Carthusians in Paris, the 150 years it took to turn it into the Élixir Végétal, and the 130 plants that only three monks in the world can name — one who weighs them into numbered bags at the monastery, two who take them ten kilometres down the valley to the distillery. Valérie explains why the received wisdom about the base spirits is wrong, how the liqueur descends through casks of 50,000, 25,000 and finally 1,200 litres, why the monks had the tannins stripped out of the new vats, and what the mysterious final decoction is doing to the colour. We cover the expulsion of 1903 and the Tarragona years, the rival company that was handed the trademark, the distillery and the market and went bankrupt anyway, the landslide that washed the stock into the river in 1935, and the special bottling sent to Queen Elizabeth II for her coronation. There's the lost stuff too: white Chartreuse, the four pure fruit liqueurs killed off by the decline of the kir, and the Tarragona bottles now trading at prices that mean nobody opens them, which Valérie thinks is a shame. And we get to the heart of it: why the monks capped production at 1.2 million litres when they could sell far more, what happens to the money, and what it means to run a business on behalf of people who have taken a vow of silence and would rather be praying.

James Crowden is a soldier turned shepherd turned cider historian and poet. He is the author of Ciderland and Cider Country - among others - and In 1999 he was made the Apple Day Poet Laureate. On this episode we trace the entire story of cider from the wild apple forests of Kazakhstan to the orchards of Somerset today. We talk about how the apple travelled west long before it reached France, why bears deserve more credit than they get, and the tragic story of Nikolai Vavilov, the Soviet scientist who identified those forests and later starved to death guarding the world's first seed bank. From there we move into England's golden age of cider, making the case that Christopher Merret and a circle of Herefordshire aristocrats, not Dom Pérignon, worked out how to put fizz in a bottle decades before champagne existed, and that it was English glass from the coal-fired forges of Newcastle, not French ingenuity, that made it possible. We cover the 1763 Cider Tax riots that helped bring down a Prime Minister in six weeks and gave us the phrase "an Englishman's home is his castle," the outbreak of lead poisoning that nearly finished off Devon's reputation, and the long slide of cider from the tables of the aristocracy to a byword for cheap, watered-down alcopops. We finish on the wassail, the community of small makers keeping real cider alive today, and where James thinks Somerset's orchards are headed as the climate changes, and he closes things out by reading one of his own poems. If you like this episode you'll probably enjoy my chats with Tom Oliver, Gabe Cook, and Henry Jeffreys too.

Giorgio Bargiani is Assistant Director of Mixology at The Connaught Bar in Mayfair, where he has spent close to twelve years working alongside Agostino Perrone — starting as a bar back in September 2014, promoted to Head Mixologist in 2019, and now recognised in his own right, including the peer-voted Altos Bartenders' Bartender Award at Europe's 50 Best Bars in 2026. His route there was anything but direct: raised in Pisa around his family's restaurant and an 1884 perfumery boutique that once sold soap, essential oils and colognes by the litre, he studied Communications at university while working nights as a nightclub promoter, before a chance conversation sent him to Hotel Splendido in Portofino, then to Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons in Oxfordshire, and back to Portofino again — a journey from nightclub floors to near-military fine-dining discipline that eventually led him, on the 8th of August 2014, to a trial shift with Ago at the Connaught. On the episode we get into what that twelve-year partnership has actually been like from the inside — the moment he stopped framing himself as living in Ago's shadow and started seeing himself as lifted by his light, and exactly where their philosophies, palates and styles genuinely diverge. We talk about the 2018 crossroads when two job offers in Asia nearly pulled him away for good, the decision he and Ago made to build their own social media presence rather than hand it to a PR agency, and the unlikely creative surge Covid became for the bar. We get into his Gucci collaboration — born from a chance conversation about his Tuscan accent — and the thinking behind his own glassware collection with NUDE, including a double-pour Martini mixing glass built to solve a very specific problem: how to make two drinks at once without losing any of the theatre. And we talk about where he draws the line between innovation that means something and innovation that's just showing off. With thanks to our sponsors: Fever-Tree Mixers for the best fizzy liquids going Belvedere for additive free, organic Polish vodka Get 15% off Algebra's dry coffee liqueur at algebradrinks.com with code CURIOUS15.

Barney Wilczak spent the first part of his career as a conservation photojournalist, building a media library of habitat restoration for botanic gardens around the world, and then, in what he calls his first midlife crisis, walked away from it to convert the lean-to greenhouse of his childhood home in Cirencester into Capreolus Distillery. In this episode we sit just outside that greenhouse, going deep on what happens when you commit entirely to representing fruit rather than making alcohol: wild fermentation with no cultivated yeast or added enzymes, hand-grading tens of thousands of kilos of fruit a year on a sorting table his father welded together, and cutting away roughly nine times the volume of heads a conventional producer would keep — judged by nose and palate alone, with no meters. We talk through the arithmetic behind that obsession: a thousand kilos of raspberries yielding just eighteen litres of finished spirit, sixty-two kilos of fruit compressed into a single litre of elderberry eau de vie, and a thousand-variety orchard that ended up, improbably, in King Charles's Coronation cake. We get into what it actually feels like to have thousands of pounds of irreplaceable fruit sitting in a still, twenty seconds from ruin, and the philosophy underneath all of it — why Barney sees his own inadequacy as a producer as the whole point, why tasting notes can miss what actually makes a drink profound, and why art that's built to be consumed rather than preserved on a wall might be the more honest kind. Along the way we taste through raspberry, apple, quince, damson, blackcurrant and elderberry eau de vie.

Jeff Bell is the owner of PDT — Please Don't Tell — the hidden-phone-booth speakeasy that helped define modern New York cocktail culture, alongside Crif Dogs, Mixteca, Kees and the newly opened Highball Ltd inside Grand Central's 10 Grand Central building. We get into the arithmetic of running one of the busiest small rooms in the city — turning a 44-seat bar nine times on a Saturday night — and the guest-first heuristic he runs every new idea through: is this cool, tested against whether it's actually feasible, not whether the business can capitalise on it. Jeff traces his path from a philosophy degree in metaphysics at the University of Washington, through a brief and unhappy stint selling annuities, to a barback job at PDT in 2010 under Jim Meehan. We talk about what it actually took to buy PDT and Crif Dogs from their founder in the middle of the pandemic — the year the bar sat dark, the unemployment cheques, and he's candid about how much harder ownership turned out to be than he expected, and the burnout of rebuilding a team from nothing. That experience fed directly into Kees, his West Village bar built with longtime PDT colleague Victor Lopez: eight core cocktails, four variations each, and a menu stripped of anything that might confuse a guest before they've had a sip. We also cover the pitch that landed him the Waldorf Astoria's Peacock Alley and Lex Yard, and the story behind Highball Ltd, a bar named for a train signal a few hundred feet from Grand Central Terminal. Along the way: fatherhood as bartending training, why the industry's best operators eventually miss being behind the stick, and why specialising — rather than trying to be everything to everyone — is what keeps an old bar alive. With thanks to our sponsors: Fever-Tree Mixers for the best fizzy liquids going Belvedere for additive free, organic Polish vodka

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. 🍋‍🟩 Fever-Tree - For the very best mixers that taste pretty damn good even by themselves☕ Algebra Drinks - The world's best coffee liqueur (partly because it's low in sugar - get 15% off at http://www.algebradrinks.com with the code CURIOUS15🌾 Belvedere Vodka - Organic vodka, with substance, made from Polish rye and absolutely no additives.🍷 Denver & Liely - The best glassware on the planet - get 15% off at http://www.denverandliely.com with the code CURIOUS15📷 Follow me on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/tristanstephenson/📚 I've written quite a few books on spirits and cocktails - https://www.thecuriousbartender.com/

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