The Curious Bartender Podcast

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 Faw...

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-le...

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 r...

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 th...

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 Pi...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 a...

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 M...

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 ha...

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&...

Dré Masso is one of the most consequential figures in the modern cocktail world — a British-Colombian bartender whose career has stretched from the epicentre of 1990s London to a beach club in Bali and a cantina in Cartagena. We cover the moments that shaped him: growing up watching his Colombian mother work bar and restaurant shifts, the revolution quietly being assembled at the Atlantic Bar &amp...

Jörg Meyer is the founder of Le Lion — Bar de Paris in Hamburg, one of the most consistently recognised cocktail bars in the world and the birthplace of the Gin Basil Smash, a drink he created in 2008 that now accounts for upwards of 25,000 pours a year at Le Lion alone and has become one of the few genuine modern classics produced outside London and New York. In this episode we go deep on the ful...

This week we're filming on location at Wild Turkey in Lawrenceburg, sitting in the old station house with Bruce Russell — third-generation whiskey maker and associate blender, grandson and son of the two living legends whose names hang over the place: Jimmy Russell, the longest-tenured master distiller of any spirit, and his son Eddie. Bruce was headed for a career in robotics until a summer givin...

Simon Ford is the co-founder of The 86 Co. and creator of Ford's Gin, and the man widely credited as the first brand ambassador the modern spirits industry ever produced (though he's not so sure about that). In this episode, we trace his career from a London wine shop job secured despite admitting he didn't actually like wine, through his years at Ideal Brands working on Absolut alongs...

Valentine Warner is a chef, food writer and broadcaster who trained as a portrait painter before swapping the brush for the spoon in the kitchens of Alastair Little. He went on to make his name on BBC2 with What to Eat Now and a run of further series, and is co-founder of the Moorland Spirit Company, the Northumberland distillery behind Hepple Gin, as well as curator of the immersive food-and-craf...

Julio Bermejo is the owner of Tommy's Mexican Restaurant in San Francisco, which is the bar credited by the Wall Street Journal as "the epicentre of tequila in the United States" and the place where the Tommy's Margarita was created in the 90's. In this episode we trace his journey from the family's Yucatecan roots and the early days of a restaurant that didn't even h...

Yumi Yoshikawa is the global brand ambassador for Chichibu Distillery, the small operation in Saitama Prefecture, Japan, which has become the most celebrated whisky producer in the world. We map out the full picture: two malt distilleries in Chichibu and a brand-new grain distillery that started production in Hokkaido in January 2026, before going deep into what actually happens at Distillery I —...

Freddy Andreasson is a 6'4" Swede from the small town of Falkenburg who grew up working a conveyor belt at the Falcon Brewery, spent his late teens dealing weed, and bought a one-way ticket to Melbourne with the proceeds. He arrived in Melbourne with nowhere to stay and a litre of Jim Beam in his bag. That journey through Australian kitchens and coffee machines, via a period of real perso...

Liam Davy is Director of Bars at Hawksmoor, the British steakhouse group that's grown from a single Spitalfields opening in 2006 to fourteen sites across the UK, Ireland and the US, with Boston due in September. We sat down after a night at Hawksmoor's new St Pancras Martini Bar, which has sold over twenty thousand martinis since November. On the episode we dig into what it's like runn...