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 goingBelvedere 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 booksOne 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 JonnyWebsite: https://jonnygarrett.co.ukThe Craft Beer Channel: https://www.thecraftbeerchannel.comAlso mentionedA 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 goingBelvedere 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 goingBelvedere for additive free, organic Polish vodkaGet 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.