The Philip Duff Show

Agave all day! (Although we were drinking rye whiskey, as it goes).  Had a blast sitting down with the one and only Salvador "Chava" Periban, a Michoacan friend, combustion engineer, former head distiller, agave devotee (& expert), Mexico City resident and another of my fellow judges at the ADI awards.  You may have heard him on The Speakeasy or Agave Road Trip podcasts but trust me,...

Managed to carve out some time old friend, bar supremo, longtime West Coaster, and dude who sends out thousands of cocktail kits every month with Shaker & Spoon,  Danny Ronen!  We were both sequestered in a hotel in ritzy Tiburon, California, judging  the American Distilling Institute's Craft Spirits Awards, so we took a break from judging spirits to......sit down and drink some and fix t...

Well THIS really was a Springsteen-in-his-prime length episode, a whopping three-and-a-half hour opus chez Sachs where we drink a selection of cocktails from the stunning new Wanderlust menu at London's Pine Bar in the Biltmore Mayfair hotel, confirm that both Khoosh and Dr. Hostetter's bitters  taste delish with champagne or genever, drink some genever that - shock! horror! - isn't...

This is a MAMMOTH episode with the legendary co-founder of the Employees Only bar empire, co-founder of The 86 Co (famous for Ford's Gin and recently acquired by Brown Forman), author of "Speakeasy" and certified good time, Dushan Zaric, a friend of mine for going on twenty years now. It's so hilariously amateurishly edited (we did two recording sessions) that after about an ho...

What a few weeks! Time to talk our way through what's been happening.  Shitty Serena Williams ad for Superbowl for Remy Martin? Check! Controversy about the technical files for Irish single pot still whiskey? cHECK! Jack Daniels? Ago Perrone? Salvatore Calabrese? Simon Ford? Matsuhisa Nobu? Bob de Niro?  Check, check, check, check?.  Wild times  - ENJOY THE LISTEN!  ( Get in touch with Duff!...

 Here I cover the history and production techniques of sake and shochu at a 101 (basic) level, and then Kenta Goto of the acclaimed New York bars Bar Goto and Bar Goto Niban takes over and unveils a whole new template for creating cocktails using sake or shochu as the base, as opposed to whisky or gin. We tried to make this seminar podcast-friendly but the visuals mean that watching this with vide...

David Gluckman is a drinks industry legend, and he  reeaalllly doesn't like the concept of the new non-alcoholic "spirits". This from the man who invented Baileys Irish cream liqueur, Tanqueray TEN gin, The Singleton whisky, and many more liquor brands. (You can read, watch and listen all about it, with links to old ads, videos and music jingles, by buying his book "That Will N...

Back with a bang after a few months off, I thought I'd do a roundup of all the news of 2022: world news, bar & cocktail news, spirits business news and what I was up to myself. Damn thing ran to almost two hours and I still forgot to mention that Netflix show "Drink Masters". Get yourself a large beverage to hand, make sure you're sitting comfortably and hit play... ( Get i...

There's been a lot of debate recently as to whether gin (which was definitely first created in England) descended from Dutch genever - or from somewhere else. In this seminar I add a lot of information only available from Dutch-language sources, and try to explain why, although gin didn't have a single ancestor from a single country, the most influential distillate that led to the creati...

I sat down last week with my old friend Oron Lerner  in Tel Aviv , where he's beverage director for the World's 50 Best Bars-listed Imperial Craft bar, as well as their other excellent outlets La Otra and Bushwick. Over a few martinis and quite a bit of genever, we chat about life in a war zone, perceived happiness, the one kind of diversity people don't want to get behind and why y...

I had huge fun taping this epic two-hour episode with the hilarious noted drinks writer and music fiend Tony Sachs, wherein we drink Silver Bullet cocktails with hundred-year-old kummel, Improved Holland Gin Cock-tails with hundred-year-old angostura bitters, ponder if you should lisp when you say Jerez, what a Katy Perry cocktail would taste like and have a celebrity basketball players' tequ...

FINALLY an episode that's just me hanging out with someone, slurping down drinks and shooting the shit! Me and Dan solve all the world's problems, from his troubling lack of Tales of the Cocktail Spirited Awards to how everyone can crash at my place in Portugal this summer, to what it was like to fly maskless on a plane, how Ray Charles loved genever and how Ted Haigh got it onscreen, al...

 An OG seminar I first gave way back in 2010, on behalf of the French grape-based G'Vine Gin. It's been really popular and I'm usually asked to teach it again every couple of years, most recently at Cabo Cocktail Festival in Mexico in 2017. It's a mini- Genever 101 and a mini-Gin 101, but mostly it traces the origins of gin from when distilling knowledge first came to Europe, t...

 This is a rebooted version of a seminar named The Science of Citrus that I debuted at the much-missed Manhattan Cocktail Classic in, well, Manhattan waaaay back in 2011 (I say 2015 on the recording, oops). Because it's now online and we can't nose the liquid samples we had back then of decanal, limonene etc., and because I've also edited out the organic chemistry portion that expla...

This podcast episode started life as a seminar at the Tales of the Cocktail festival many years ago, and the Powerpoint deck on my Slideshare.net account (www.slideshare.net/philipduff )was the most-viewed of all the decks I uploaded, so this is the audio narration for that deck, updated for 2022. You can see the deck and hear this audio over on my YouTube channel, and there are a few amusing visu...

OK, not every episode will be like this, but we gotta start somewhere! This is the audio for a webinar you can see on my YouTube channel, and its a great place to start if you don't know much about genever (or mixology) - there are more in-depth seminars on my YouTube too, by the way. If you're a pro, you'll like the second bit of this podcast, when I showcase some of the more impre...