About Distillate: The Hidden History of Cocktails, Spirits & Drink Culture
Distillate is a narrative podcast about the history, science, culture, and human stakes behind what people drink. Not technique. Not recipes. The story — the people, the chemistry, the politics, the accidents, and the moments in history where what was in the glass reflected something larger about the world.
Rum built an empire on the back of slavery and molasses waste. Gin brought 18th-century London to its knees before it became a symbol of craft and refinement. Coffee didn't just wake people up — it reorganized how they thought, and built the institutions of the Enlightenment in the process. The history of drinks is the history of transformation: of raw materials, of cultures, of human ambition and catastrophe.
Distillate is hosted by Shawn Spitaleri and produced by The Alchemist's Bar — craft mixology through the lens of alchemy as proto-chemistry. The alchemy framework is the editorial lens here: transformation through material process, observed with precision. Every episode follows a single drink, ingredient, or moment to where it breaks open into something larger.
Every drink has a story. Most of them are stranger than you think.
New episodes every Tuesday.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.
Publisher
Shawn Spitaleri - Drinks History & Narrative Storytelling
Women and the Brewer's Craft: Alewives, Hops, and the Hidden History of Beer
On a high mountain mesa in southern Peru, the ruins of a 1,000-year-old imperial brewery hold a secret: scattered across the floor among massive fermentation vats are ornate metal shawl pins worn exclusively by high-status, aristocratic women.
In ancient Mesopotamia, Sumerian hymns celebrated female tavern keepers, and in medieval England, over seventy-five percent of commercial ale traders were women known as brewsters. So how did a craft that began across the ancient world as the sacred, exclusive domain of women become, centuries later, an industrial trade that explicitly barred them from entering the room?
This episode examines the history, economics, and chemistry behind women and the brewer’s craft. From the legal doctrine of coverture and the arrival of hops to the true origin of the surname Brewster and the dismantling of popular witch myths, this explores how commercialization transformed a domestic art into a capital-intensive trade—and what that history left behind in the glass.
Full show notes, research sources, and transcript at thealchemistsbar.com (https://thealchemistsbar.com/).
Distillate: The Hidden History of Cocktails, Spirits & Drink Culture is a production of The Alchemist's Bar, part of the Obscura Meridian family of projects. New episodes every Tuesday at 6:00 AM Central.
Full show notes, research sources, and transcript at thealchemistsbar.com.
Follow The Alchemist's Bar on Instagram @the_alchemists_bar. Subscribe to the Alchemist's Ledger — the monthly newsletter where the research that didn't fit in the episode lives — at thealchemistsbar.com.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.
6 Oct 2026
The September Compromise: Oktoberfest, Märzen, and the Bavarian Brewing Calendar
The six-pack labeled "Oktoberfest" on an American grocery shelf carries two names that both point backward. The festival it advertises opens in September, and the amber Märzen style inside traces back to a 1553 Bavarian law that banned summer brewing from April 23 to September 29.
Also covered: the 1810 royal wedding and horse race that started the festival, Georg Lang, the Nuremberg innkeeper who used straw bidders to build a giant beer hall in 1898, Josef Sedlmayr's amber Märzen of 1872, the paler golden beer the Munich breweries pour today, and the Fischer-Vroni fish tent, whose famous founder is a nickname. Plus a Märzen and Festbier pairing, with an alcohol-free pour at equal standing.
Full show notes, research sources, and transcript at thealchemistsbar.com (thealchemistsbar.com).
Distillate: The Hidden History of Cocktails, Spirits & Drink Culture is a production of The Alchemist's Bar, part of the Obscura Meridian family of projects. New episodes every Tuesday at 6:00 AM Central.
Full show notes, research sources, and transcript at thealchemistsbar.com.
Follow The Alchemist's Bar on Instagram @the_alchemists_bar. Subscribe to the Alchemist's Ledger — the monthly newsletter where the research that didn't fit in the episode lives — at thealchemistsbar.com.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.
29 Sept 2026
Deep Dives: Vanilla
In 1841, on a French colonial island, a twelve-year-old enslaved boy solved a problem that had defeated European botanists for decades — a technique so simple it took seconds per flower, and so effective it's still how nearly every vanilla bean in the world gets pollinated today. He received nothing for it. A rival tried to steal credit for it twenty years later. He died in a public hospice in 1880, in an unmarked grave whose location nobody knows. This episode tells his story directly, using his own obituary as its closing word.
It's also a genuinely strange chemistry story: the same flavor compound in real vanilla forms independently inside a charred oak barrel, has been extracted from cow dung by a Nobel-adjacent researcher, and was recently synthesized from PET plastic bottles by scientists trying to turn waste into flavor. And the actual pollinator of the vanilla orchid in the wild — the thing Albius's technique replaced by hand — remains, after two centuries, scientifically unconfirmed.
Full show notes, research sources, and transcript at thealchemistsbar.com (thealchemistsbar.com).
Distillate: The Hidden History of Cocktails, Spirits & Drink Culture is a production of The Alchemist's Bar, part of the Obscura Meridian family of projects. New episodes every Tuesday at 6:00 AM Central.
Full show notes, research sources, and transcript at thealchemistsbar.com.
Follow The Alchemist's Bar on Instagram @the_alchemists_bar. Subscribe to the Alchemist's Ledger — the monthly newsletter where the research that didn't fit in the episode lives — at thealchemistsbar.com.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.
Reach and audience
Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.
Apple Podcasts (US)
5.0 / 5
3 ratings
Spotify
5.0 / 5
3 ratings
Contact Distillate: The Hidden History of Cocktails, Spirits & Drink Culture
Guest appearances
Does not typically book guests
Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.
Host of Distillate: The Hidden History of Cocktails, Spirits & Drink Culture?
Claim your podcast to manage its listing and keep your show details accurate.
Pod Engine is an independent podcast discovery and analytics service and is not affiliated with or endorsed by this podcast. Artwork and show content belong to their owners. Full legal notice.
Explore this show Podcast research with Pod Engine
