Long-form conversations with the leading minds in drinks, spanning history, science, culture, and craft, with bestselling author and bartender Tristan Stephenson.
The Curious Bartender Podcast
Claim This Podcastby Tristan Stephenson
4.9(87 reviews)
88 episodes
Updated Daily
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76
Podcast Authority
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YouTube86
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Podcast Overview
Long-form conversations with the leading minds in drinks, spanning history, science, culture, and craft, with bestselling author and bartender Tristan Stephenson.
Language
🇺🇲
Publishing Since
11/24/2024
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76
Podcast Authority
BetaGoodBased on show quality, social media presence, reviews, charts, and more
Quality84
Social0
YouTube86
Engagement85
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Recent Episodes
July 27, 2026
#88 Grover Sanschagrin - Agave Matchmaker, CRT, Additives, Lawsuits, Police Raids, Agave Syrup
<p>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.</p>
July 20, 2026
#87 Daniele Biondi - Indiana Jones of Rum, Clairin & Haiti, Viche & Colombia, Hampden, Velier, Luca Gargano
<p>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." </p><p>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?</p><p>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.</p><p>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. </p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>Side note: he also wrote the introduction for the Italian version of my rum book.</p><p>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.</p><p><br></p><p>With thanks to our sponsors:</p><p><br></p><p><a href="https://fever-tree.com/" target="_blank" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer">Fever-Tree Mixers</a> for the best fizzy liquids going</p><p><a href="https://www.belvederevodka.com/" target="_blank" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer">Belvedere</a> for additive free, organic Polish vodka</p><p><br></p><p><br></p><p>🥃 Get 15% off the world's best drinking vessels at <a href="https://denverandliely.com/" target="_blank" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer">Denver & Liely</a> using the discount code CURIOUS15 at checkout</p><p>☕ Get 15% off the best coffee liqueur I have tried at <a href="https://www.algebradrinks.com/" target="_blank" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer">Algebra Drinks </a>with code CURIOUS15</p><p><br></p><p>📷 Follow me on Instagram</p><p>📚 I've written <a href="https://www.thecuriousbartender.com/" target="_blank" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer">quite a few books</a> on spirits and cocktails</p>
July 13, 2026
#86 British Rum Special - Dropworks, Outlier, J. Gow: History, Production, GI, Tasting, Rum Market, Future of Rum, British vs. Caribbean
<p>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.</p><p><br></p><p>📷 Follow me on Instagram</p><p>📚 I've written <a href="https://www.thecuriousbartender.com/">quite a few books</a> on spirits and cocktails</p><p><br></p><p>🥃 Get 15% off the world's best drinking vessels at <a href="https://denverandliely.com/">Denver & Liely</a> using the discount code CURIOUS15 at checkout</p><p>☕ Get 15% off the best coffee liqueur I have tried at <a href="https://www.algebradrinks.com/">Algebra Drinks </a>with code CURIOUS15</p><p><br></p>
88 total episodes available
Recent guests on The Curious Bartender Podcast
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Rémy Savage
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Sandor Katz
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Serge Valentin
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Tony Cecchini
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Harold McGee
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Jeffrey Morgenthaler
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Jared Brown
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Anastasia Miller
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Kevin Armstrong
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Dave Broom
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Henrietta Lovell
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David Mabberley
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