Distillate: The Hidden History of Cocktails, Spirits & Drink Culture

Season 1 of Distillate just wrapped, and this is a short thank-you before the break and a quick word about what's next and where to find it. New episodes return this fall. In the meantime, keep the show followed — there'll be some things showing up in the feed during the hiatus. You can also find The Alchemist's Bar on Instagram @the_alchemists_bar and at thealchemistsbar.com, and The Alchemist's...

In 1806, a twenty-two-year-old Boston merchant loaded a ship with a hundred and thirty tons of ice and sailed for the Caribbean, with no buyer waiting on the other end and a local newspaper already mocking him before he'd even left the dock. Frederic Tudor lost almost everything on that first voyage. Thirty years later, his ships were delivering ice to Calcutta, India, after crossing the equator t...

Dom Pérignon never said "Come quickly, I am tasting stars." The quote doesn't appear anywhere until an English-language advertisement in the 1880s, roughly 170 years after he died — and the actual historical record shows him spending most of his career trying to eliminate the bubbles, not celebrate them. This episode traces the real history of champagne: the English physician who documented delibe...

In 1822, a Burton-on-Trent brewer named Samuel Allsopp copied a London pale ale recipe and produced something sharper, cleaner, and clearer than anything the original brewer had ever managed — without changing a single ingredient. The only variable was the water. Nobody in the room understood why, and for the next fifty years, nobody needed to. This episode traces the chemistry underneath Burton's...

In 1832, seven men in a English mill town signed a pledge that broke from a hundred years of temperance tradition: not less drinking, but none. It would take the United States until 1920 to catch up, and fourteen years after that to admit it had gotten something badly wrong. This episode traces the history of the temperance movement from its religious and economic roots through the Woman's Christi...

In 1806, a newspaper in upstate New York published the first documented definition of a cocktail: spirits, sugar, water, and bitters. Bitters were there at the beginning. Most bars today have exactly one bottle. This episode traces the history of bitters from ancient medicinal tonics through the 1806 cocktail definition, through a German military surgeon named Johann Siegert who crossed the Atlant...

Long before the first still arrived in Mexico, the agave plant had been growing in the same soil for decades — accumulating sugar, waiting for a jimador who knew how to read it. The people who worked it had a word for what they made from it. That word is Nahuatl. The process that produced the spirit is not. This episode traces the history of mezcal from its roots in pre-Columbian pulque culture th...

In 1698, a broker named John Castaing started publishing a twice-weekly list of stock and commodity prices from Jonathan's Coffee House in Exchange Alley, London. That document is the direct ancestor of every financial data feed that exists today. The London Stock Exchange, Lloyd's of London, the Royal Society, the Royal Society of Arts, Sotheby's, Christie's — all of them trace their origin to a...

Wine is 8,000 years old. We know this because in 2017, archaeochemist Patrick McGovern identified tartaric acid — the chemical fingerprint of fermented grape — in pottery fragments from Neolithic villages in the Republic of Georgia. The vessels dated to 6000 BC. The people who made them decorated the clay with images of themselves dancing under grapevines. This episode traces the history of wine's...

Gin was said to have been invented by a Dutch physician as a cheap diuretic. Within decades it had crossed the Channel, and by 1743, London was consuming 2.2 gallons of gin per person per year — every man, woman, and child in a city of 600,000. This episode traces the history of gin from the Dutch Low Countries to the streets of Georgian London, where it became the first large-scale public health...

Rum was never supposed to exist. It was the garbage of the sugar trade — fermented molasses, the waste product of Caribbean plantations — and it became the fuel of an empire. This episode traces the story of how a byproduct of industrial slavery turned into the first drink manufactured at scale, how it moved across the Atlantic as currency and commodity, and what it means that the history of rum a...

The history, science, and human story behind what's in the glass — and what it reveals about the world that made it. Launching May 5, 2026. 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 a...