The Cottonmouth Club Presents: Bars, Bar Culture, Cocktails & Spirits - Episode Seven: American Single Malt Whiskey with Westland Distillery’s Chris Riesbeck

Episode Seven: American Single Malt Whiskey with Westland Distillery’s Chris Riesbeck

05/24/20 • 55 min

The Cottonmouth Club Presents: Bars, Bar Culture, Cocktails & Spirits

The Cottonmouth Club Presents promotes bars, bar culture, cocktails and spirits. In this episode, we do a deep dive into American Single Malt Whiskey with Westland Distillery’s Chris Riesbeck.
Our discussion starts with Westland Whiskey, but we ended up talking about so many aspects of whiskey, how it’s produced, and the idea of provenance as it applies to distilled spirits. Some highlights include:
- What is American Single Malt?
- The specific science of distillation
- How malting is like a Giant Hamburger
- The Barley Economy
- Microclimates in the Northwest
- The utility of barley as a flavor component
- Distilling 101
- Mind your teeth!
- What do yeast eat?
- How local is local?
- Why America should be known for its single malts
- Prohibition resets the clock
- What is the American Spirit?
- Cultural Terroir
- Beer connection to the Northwest
- The craft spirits movement as true craft
- Where you age matters
- Air dried vs. kiln dried barrels
- Tannins
- Coopers and the things they know
- What about charcoal?
- Do you have to be so dorky?
- Regional topicity (whatever that means)
- Whiskey as an agricultural product
- What about cocktails?
- Seattle as an incubator of ideas
Music: The following samples were retrieved from the Free Music Archive of the Library of Congress, Web Archives Division: “The Place that Never Get Old,” “A Weird Mechanism,” “Every Myths Are True,” “Frog in the Well”

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Previous Episode

Bartender Masterclass: On Mastery featuring Master Bartender Toby Maloney (Part 2)

If you would like to leave a virtual tip for the bar staff who helped produce this podcast, you can go to Venmo and contribute to TheCottonmouthClub-Staff. All proceeds go to the staff for food & essentials until we all have some clarity as to how this will all play out.
Training for Mastery takes years of work and dedication, and after a certain point there is no road map in any industry that helps the novice graduate to the journeyman, and the journeyman transform into the master.

In our continuing Bartending Masterclass, host & Master Bartender Michael J. Neff, discussed the different phases of mastery. This time, we’re focusing on Mastery of the Heart with special guest Mr. Toby Maloney.
Mr. Maloney has worked in bars for many years, working behind the stick at dive bars and nightclubs around the country, as well as some of the most renowned cocktail bars in modern memory.
He was the very first bartender hired at the original Milk and Honey in New York, and has opened storied cocktail bars in Minneapolis, Nashville and Chicago, where he currently co-owns The Violet Hour and the soon-to-open Mother’s Ruin Chicago.
The Violet Hour received the James Beard Award for Best Bar Program in 2015.
Some highlights from Part 2 of our conversation:
“It comes down to the confidence you exude, and if you can nail those flair moves, people’s drinks taste better.”
“(Bartending) is kind of like acting and kind of like drugs...”
“People will go back to a bar that has great service and mediocre drinks, but if you have great drinks and mediocre service, people are like...meh.”
“The difference between cooking and bartending is cooking is a marathon and bartending is figure skating. Both are insanely hard, but no one cares what you look like after a marathon.”
Weird-tempo Banjo Tune: Tomcat Blues

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Next Episode

Episode Eight: The First Night Back Open—An Audio Diary

Friday, May 22nd was the day the Governor of Texas declared that bars in the state could re-open after the mandated COVID-19 shutdown up to 25% capacity. We at The Cottonmouth Club thought long and hard about whether or not to do that, and ultimately decided we would, though the safety protocols we instituted were above what was recommended.
In this podcast, edited by our friend Blair Ault of Whiskey Women Podcast, you’ll hear the audio from our live stream Virtual Bar, which we hosted for the first time in an actual bar that was actually open. Her editing captured all of the questions, all of the anxiety, all of the euphoria, and all of the interactions between the staff themselves and the guests, both virtual and real, that they hosted.
Extra special thanks to Blair Ault for her guest edit, and to all of the people who came and followed the rules we laid out for them. To all of you who will have to make this choice in the future, we wish you the best and hope that you, too, choose to do the best you can.
Weirdo-tempo Banjo Song: Wayward Stranger

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