Expert interviews, brewing insights, and industry trends.
From distillery build-outs in historic buildings to process concerns with calcium-rich water and building a flavor through-line in sourced-bourbon releases, Castle shares lessons learned over 15 years of distilling in Kentucky and Tennessee.
As a journeyman master distiller and now a consultant, Johnny Jeffery has left his mark on American craft spirits and learned from unusual experiences along the way. Here, he shares some of his best advice for craft distillers trying to succeed today.
With estate grain and a climate-controlled rickhouse, Minden Mill’s team is exploring the impact of terroir on their spirits while taking a slow, measured approach to predicting how the environment impacts their maturation and flavor-focused blends.
Understanding the dynamic way casks interact with the liquid inside and the environment around them is key to producing the components of a great whiskey blend.
The master distiller for Alberta, Canada’s Black Velvet embraces the challenge of blending dynamically different distillates into a cohesive whole, with a process focused on consistency, quality, and repeatability.
Get your bugout bag ready! In this special episode, co-hosts Molly Troupe and Sydney Jones reunite to swap advice with American Cane CEO Maggie Campbell and Jennifer Wren, an industry veteran who now specializes in coaching women on professional development.
Todd Leopold of Leopold Bros in Denver is part historian, part tinkerer, part creative muse, and part sounding board for the broader craft-distilling world—and his multi-stream approach to experimentation in the service of flavor over style is more relevant than ever.
Great rum is a magical thing, and when all the elements come together—ingredients, culture, fermentation, maturation, and story—there are few spirits that can match its joie de vivre. Today, Maggie Campbell and Chaz Vest are aligning these forces of flavor to cast light on rum’s legacy in America, and telling that story through American Cane.
Agave may get the lion’s share of distillers’ love, but it’s far from the only game in town when it comes to distilled Mexican and Southwestern spirits. Desert Door, on the outskirts of Austin, is out to show the beauty and range in sotol—made from the desert spoon plant and sustainably harvested from wild plants.
The journey from art student to distiller may strike some as unusual, but for the plant operations administrator at Denver’s Stranahan’s, creativity matched with effective and disciplined execution is the key to successful spirits.
Distilling in Florida’s hot and humid environment, and producing spirits specifically tuned for cocktails in a tourism-driven locale—those are the major guideposts for the creative direction of these sibling distilleries, as well as for their methods of barrel aging and adding flavor.
Whether she’s engaging with the wide world of ingredients or sourcing those from her own high-mountain backyard, master distiller Sara Sergent combines well-honed sensory skills with a methodical process for testing how processes and treatments change aroma and flavor expression in her award-winning botanical spirits.
Bob Dillon joins the podcast to discuss the technical and artistic vision behind his more familiar spirits as well as his ACSA best-in-show-winning Vidisha’s Masala liqueur.
Whether she’s distilling in far-flung locales, blending beautiful spirits, or writing about others’ processes, Devon Trevathan crafts stories in both words and flavors.
Rum with distinctive character and refined expression is key for this Maryland distillery, and head distiller Brett Steigerwaldt doesn’t leave flavor up to fate.
As a chemist with a background in pharmaceutical quality, Ashley Barnes developed scientific discipline and a data-driven approach. Now as master blender at the Blending House, she applies that same rigor to the subject of aging and blending spirits.
Character and expression in “simple” vodka distillations? Is it really possible? The cofounder and master distiller behind this Santa Fe, New Mexico, craft distillery not only thinks so, but she walks through her process of using atypical grains and other ingredients to produce vodka with spirit and verve.
There’s more to agave than Blue Weber, and Gian Nelson is on a mission to show just what’s possible with California agave through careful work with growers, adaptive fermentation processes, and an embrace of the inherent inefficiency of agave in general.
The cofounder and head distiller of Baltimore Spirits discusses their approach to producing distinctive rye whiskeys—such as the award-winning Epoch—as well as other unusual spirits, from a pechuga-inspired apple brandy to a smoked-tea whiskey collab with Ja Rule.
She’s not one for hard and fast rules, instead employing the deep strategies of fine fragrance makers and molecular gastronomy chefs to understand the chemical underpinnings of the layered, nuanced aroma and flavor compounds in her spirits.
Hosts Sydney Jones and Molly Troupe recount some of the most intriguing and thought-provoking episodes of the past year, discuss developments such as the American Single Malt designation, and look toward what 2025 has in store.
The senior spirits blender at Sydney's award-winning Archie Rose shares his perspectives on sensory analysis, blending, and producing distinctive spirits with Australia’s ingredients and climate.
Over her 30+ years at Jack Daniel’s, Sherrie Moore served in a variety of roles, from working in the visitor’s center in the mid-70s through stints as chemist, processing manager, warehousing manager, and more before retiring as director of whiskey production. Now, she works with spirits brands in a consulting capacity, sharing the knowledge she built over decades of bust-and-boom producing whiskey for one of the world’s largest brands.
The world of gin, from the creative and technical side to marketing and sales, is experiencing the same flux that’s affecting the broader craft-spirits world. But Ward—veteran spirits journalist, brand builder, and consultant—offers a broad look at the category, from evolving definitions and flavors to breakthrough marketing.