The Curious Bartender Podcast

Tristan Stephenson

Long-form conversations with the leading minds in drinks, spanning history, science, culture, and craft, with bestselling author and bartender Tristan Stephenson.

  1. 6d ago

    #97 Dawn Davies MW - Champagne! Production, Appreciation, History; Leaving The Whisky Exchange and Why Coupes Should Be Banned

    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 Pinot Noir from Aÿ fermented in Argonne oak, Gosset's Grande Réserve from the oldest wine house in Champagne, a grower-style blend aged under cork, an English rosé from Gusbourne, and the Billecart-Salmon rosé that won a blind tasting at Zuma eleven votes to one. Along the way we get into chalk cellars and climate change, why Dom Pérignon spent his life trying to get the bubbles out, how the English invented the method long before the French claimed it, what 15 months on the lees actually does, why most champagne houses own very little of their own land, and the blender's art that turns hundreds of acidic base wines into one consistent house style. Dawn explains how to make bad champagne, why sugar and Meunier are champagne's unfair villains, and why she'd happily see coupe drinkers beheaded. We talk about the Taittinger and Pommery-led rush into English vineyards and whether it dilutes the champagne brand, and she tells us about the 1988 bottle on a hillside above the Marne that made her realise this was her career. We finish on her decision to leave The Whisky Exchange with no plan in place, and her mission to rebuild an industry she says is in a bad place. A little bit of self-fact checking: Meunier is not the most planted grape. Pinot Noir actually beats it.The famous perfume case was Yves Saint Laurent's "Champagne", not Chanel or LVMH.The Royal Society paper was 1662 (Merret), not the 1760s. (which we did correct ourselves on) - The glass "Robert something" is Sir Robert Mansell, who promoted coal-fired glass furnaces.Brut is up to 12g/L, not 14. Brut Nature is 0–3g/LThere are eight permitted grapes, not nine. The newcomer Dawn mentioned is called Voltis, a disease-resistant variety approved in 2022. Fever-Tree Mixers for the best fizzy liquids going Belvedere for additive free, organic Polish vodka 🥃 Get 15% off the world's best drinking vessels at ⁠Denver & Liely⁠ using the discount code CURIOUS15 at checkout ☕ Get 15% off the best coffee liqueur I have tried at ⁠Algebra Drinks ⁠with code CURIOUS15 📷 ⁠Follow me on Instagram⁠ 📚 I've written ⁠quite a few books⁠ on spirits and cocktails

    #97 Dawn Davies MW - Champagne! Production, Appreciation, History; Leaving The Whisky Exchange and Why Coupes Should Be Banned

  2. Sep 21

    #96 Valérie Gamond - Inside Chartreuse: Monks, A Vow Of Silence & The Liqueur They Refuse To Make More Of

    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 to turn it into the Élixir Végétal, and the 130 plants that only three monks in the world can name — one who weighs them into numbered bags at the monastery, two who take them ten kilometres down the valley to the distillery. Valérie explains why the received wisdom about the base spirits is wrong, how the liqueur descends through casks of 50,000, 25,000 and finally 1,200 litres, why the monks had the tannins stripped out of the new vats, and what the mysterious final decoction is doing to the colour. We cover the expulsion of 1903 and the Tarragona years, the rival company that was handed the trademark, the distillery and the market and went bankrupt anyway, the landslide that washed the stock into the river in 1935, and the special bottling sent to Queen Elizabeth II for her coronation. There's the lost stuff too: white Chartreuse, the four pure fruit liqueurs killed off by the decline of the kir, and the Tarragona bottles now trading at prices that mean nobody opens them, which Valérie thinks is a shame. And we get to the heart of it: why the monks capped production at 1.2 million litres when they could sell far more, what happens to the money, and what it means to run a business on behalf of people who have taken a vow of silence and would rather be praying.

    #96 Valérie Gamond - Inside Chartreuse: Monks, A Vow Of Silence & The Liqueur They Refuse To Make More Of

  3. Sep 14

    #95 James Crowden - England's Secret Champagne, the Tax That Toppled a Prime Minister, and the Fight for Cider's Future

    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 bears deserve more credit than they get, and the tragic story of Nikolai Vavilov, the Soviet scientist who identified those forests and later starved to death guarding the world's first seed bank. From there we move into England's golden age of cider, making the case that Christopher Merret and a circle of Herefordshire aristocrats, not Dom Pérignon, worked out how to put fizz in a bottle decades before champagne existed, and that it was English glass from the coal-fired forges of Newcastle, not French ingenuity, that made it possible. We cover the 1763 Cider Tax riots that helped bring down a Prime Minister in six weeks and gave us the phrase "an Englishman's home is his castle," the outbreak of lead poisoning that nearly finished off Devon's reputation, and the long slide of cider from the tables of the aristocracy to a byword for cheap, watered-down alcopops. We finish on the wassail, the community of small makers keeping real cider alive today, and where James thinks Somerset's orchards are headed as the climate changes, and he closes things out by reading one of his own poems. If you like this episode you'll probably enjoy my chats with Tom Oliver, Gabe Cook, and Henry Jeffreys too.

    #95 James Crowden - England's Secret Champagne, the Tax That Toppled a Prime Minister, and the Fight for Cider's Future

  4. Sep 7

    #94 Giorgio Bargiani - Connaught, Reflections off Ago, Gucci's Martini, and the Glass Built for Two

    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 but direct: raised in Pisa around his family's restaurant and an 1884 perfumery boutique that once sold soap, essential oils and colognes by the litre, he studied Communications at university while working nights as a nightclub promoter, before a chance conversation sent him to Hotel Splendido in Portofino, then to Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons in Oxfordshire, and back to Portofino again — a journey from nightclub floors to near-military fine-dining discipline that eventually led him, on the 8th of August 2014, to a trial shift with Ago at the Connaught. On the episode we get into what that twelve-year partnership has actually been like from the inside — the moment he stopped framing himself as living in Ago's shadow and started seeing himself as lifted by his light, and exactly where their philosophies, palates and styles genuinely diverge. We talk about the 2018 crossroads when two job offers in Asia nearly pulled him away for good, the decision he and Ago made to build their own social media presence rather than hand it to a PR agency, and the unlikely creative surge Covid became for the bar. We get into his Gucci collaboration — born from a chance conversation about his Tuscan accent — and the thinking behind his own glassware collection with NUDE, including a double-pour Martini mixing glass built to solve a very specific problem: how to make two drinks at once without losing any of the theatre. And we talk about where he draws the line between innovation that means something and innovation that's just showing off. With thanks to our sponsors: Fever-Tree Mixers for the best fizzy liquids going Belvedere for additive free, organic Polish vodka Get 15% off Algebra's dry coffee liqueur at algebradrinks.com with code CURIOUS15.

    #94 Giorgio Bargiani - Connaught, Reflections off Ago, Gucci's Martini, and the Glass Built for Two

  5. Aug 31

    #93 Is This The World's Best Distillery? Capreolus, Eau De Vie, Inadequacy, Capturing Nature, King Charles, Baby's Heads - Barney Wilczak

    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 deep on what happens when you commit entirely to representing fruit rather than making alcohol: wild fermentation with no cultivated yeast or added enzymes, hand-grading tens of thousands of kilos of fruit a year on a sorting table his father welded together, and cutting away roughly nine times the volume of heads a conventional producer would keep — judged by nose and palate alone, with no meters. We talk through the arithmetic behind that obsession: a thousand kilos of raspberries yielding just eighteen litres of finished spirit, sixty-two kilos of fruit compressed into a single litre of elderberry eau de vie, and a thousand-variety orchard that ended up, improbably, in King Charles's Coronation cake. We get into what it actually feels like to have thousands of pounds of irreplaceable fruit sitting in a still, twenty seconds from ruin, and the philosophy underneath all of it — why Barney sees his own inadequacy as a producer as the whole point, why tasting notes can miss what actually makes a drink profound, and why art that's built to be consumed rather than preserved on a wall might be the more honest kind. Along the way we taste through raspberry, apple, quince, damson, blackcurrant and elderberry eau de vie.

    #93 Is This The World's Best Distillery? Capreolus, Eau De Vie, Inadequacy, Capturing Nature, King Charles, Baby's Heads - Barney Wilczak

  6. Aug 24

    #92 Jeff Bell - New York's Most Famous Speakeasy + Philosophy, Fatherhood, KP'ing, Pandemic & More...

    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 — and the guest-first heuristic he runs every new idea through: is this cool, tested against whether it's actually feasible, not whether the business can capitalise on it. Jeff traces his path from a philosophy degree in metaphysics at the University of Washington, through a brief and unhappy stint selling annuities, to a barback job at PDT in 2010 under Jim Meehan. We talk about what it actually took to buy PDT and Crif Dogs from their founder in the middle of the pandemic — the year the bar sat dark, the unemployment cheques, and he's candid about how much harder ownership turned out to be than he expected, and the burnout of rebuilding a team from nothing. That experience fed directly into Kees, his West Village bar built with longtime PDT colleague Victor Lopez: eight core cocktails, four variations each, and a menu stripped of anything that might confuse a guest before they've had a sip. We also cover the pitch that landed him the Waldorf Astoria's Peacock Alley and Lex Yard, and the story behind Highball Ltd, a bar named for a train signal a few hundred feet from Grand Central Terminal. Along the way: fatherhood as bartending training, why the industry's best operators eventually miss being behind the stick, and why specialising — rather than trying to be everything to everyone — is what keeps an old bar alive. With thanks to our sponsors: Fever-Tree Mixers for the best fizzy liquids going Belvedere for additive free, organic Polish vodka

    #92 Jeff Bell - New York's Most Famous Speakeasy + Philosophy, Fatherhood, KP'ing, Pandemic & More...

  7. Aug 17

    #91 Liquipedia Live – Tree Shrews vs Andre the Giant, Getting Drunk on Sweat, Champagne Tower Architecture, How Old is Water, Ian Fleming, Drinking Rocket Fuel, Soju & Swimming Pools

    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 running the questions and Matt Pomeroy handling demonstrations, both from Belvedere. We test whether vacuum ice buckets actually chill wine faster than a plain ice bucket, work out why Bloody Marys taste better at 35,000 feet, and establish that you'd need roughly half a million licks — or five thousand people — to get drunk off other people's sweat. We go deep on water's age (some of it in your glass may predate the sun), whether climate change is quietly reshaping the world's great spirits regions, and why a Malaysian pen-tailed tree shrew is pound-for-pound a more accomplished drinker than Andre the Giant. There's a live blind taste test where Jake and Tris try to identify beer brands purely by the sound of the bottle opening, a full run-through of the maths behind why champagne towers waste hundreds of litres of fizz, and a proper history detour into the life and death of Mad Jack Mytton, the Regency-era MP who rode a bear into a dinner party and set fire to his own nightshirt to cure hiccups. We track down the world's most expensive liquid (spoiler: it's either horseshoe crab blood or deathstalker scorpion venom, depending how you count), debunk the myth that Ian Fleming actually drank his martinis at Dukes, and finally solve the mystery of why Jack Daniel's and Coke gets that strange white foam that no other whiskey and cola does. We close out with the story of Alfred Barnard, who visited 162 distilleries by horse and carriage in two years, and the real reason 19th-century restaurants had to lock up the Worcestershire sauce. A few sound and video issues in this episode due to the intoxicated state of the producer and cast. Hope you enjoy it though!

    #91 Liquipedia Live – Tree Shrews vs Andre the Giant, Getting Drunk on Sweat, Champagne Tower Architecture, How Old is Water, Ian Fleming, Drinking Rocket Fuel, Soju & Swimming Pools

  8. Aug 10

    #90 David Wondrich – Cocktail History: The Only William, Savoy Without a American Bar, WW2 Supply Officers, Business Cards, Unmarked Graves, America's Love of Ice

    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 a story when new evidence turns up has shaped every book since. We get into how The Comic Book History of the Cocktail came together and what a graphic novel forced him to cut that a straight history wouldn't. From there we go back to the beginning: what punch actually was before it became shorthand for a bad party bowl, the unresolved fight over where the word "punch" comes from, and the likely, disputed origin of "cocktail" itself. We spend real time on the people usually left out of the story: William Schmidt, "the only William," New York's most famous 19th-century bartender, buried without a headstone; and Ned Stokes, who reinvented American bar service after doing time for murder. Along the way: the birth of the American ice trade and why George Washington's "wine and bitters" might be an early cocktail. We didn't get past the early 20th century, so we'll be back for a part two, picking up the mid-century, the dark ages of the cocktail, and tiki. 🍋‍🟩 Fever-Tree - For the very best mixers that taste pretty damn good even by themselves☕ Algebra Drinks - The world's best coffee liqueur (partly because it's low in sugar - get 15% off at http://www.algebradrinks.com with the code CURIOUS15🌾 Belvedere Vodka - Organic vodka, with substance, made from Polish rye and absolutely no additives.🍷 Denver & Liely - The best glassware on the planet - get 15% off at http://www.denverandliely.com with the code CURIOUS15📷 Follow me on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/tristanstephenson/📚 I've written quite a few books on spirits and cocktails - https://www.thecuriousbartender.com/

    #90 David Wondrich – Cocktail History: The Only William, Savoy Without a American Bar, WW2 Supply Officers, Business Cards, Unmarked Graves, America's Love of Ice
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5
out of 5
17 Ratings

About

Long-form conversations with the leading minds in drinks, spanning history, science, culture, and craft, with bestselling author and bartender Tristan Stephenson.

Information

  • Creator
    Tristan Stephenson
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    97
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Tristan Stephenson
  • Show Website
    The Curious Bartender Podcast

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