The Modern Bar Cart Podcast

Eric investigates the words we use for large groups or collections of spirits and cocktails.

This episode is brought to you by Near Country Provisions. If you live in the Mid-Atlantic and want to enjoy ethically raised (and delicious) meat from local farmers delivered to your door every month, then you need Near Country in your life.

Head over to NearCountry.com and enter the code BARCART when you sign up for your subscription to receive 2 free pounds of bacon or ground beef in your first delivery.

In this cross-over interview courtesy of the Drinks Adventures Podcast, James Atkinson interviews ESPN journalist Baxter Holmes about the NBA’s burgeoning wine obsession.

It’s a perfect little rabbit hole in which to think about the intersection of flavor, popular culture, and the network effect that can occur when a few influential people become evangelists and educators with the power to open the eyes (or in this case the palates) of a vast audience.

This episode is brought to you by Near Country Provisions. If you live in the Mid-Atlantic and want to enjoy ethically raised (and delicious) meat from local farmers delivered to your door every month, then you need Near Country in your life.

Head over to NearCountry.com and enter the code BARCART when you sign up for your subscription to receive 2 free pounds of bacon or ground beef in your first delivery.

In this viticultural conversation with SUYO Pisco founders Alex Hildebrandt and Ian Leggett, some of the topics we discuss include:

• How two born-and-bred Peruvians met and became friends in the world of American corporate finance, then turned their sights on celebrating the flavors and aromas of their beloved home country.
• What it means for a distillate to be “single-origin,” and how Ian and Alex went off the beaten path to find and partner with Pisco producers who are making truly remarkable spirits.
• How to think about Peru’s fascinating Geographic Indication for Pisco, also known as it’s Denomination of Origin, which specifies what materials can be used, where grapes can come from, and even how many times it can be distilled.
• Then we taste through SUYO’s inaugural offerings, a fruity, complex Quebranta made in the foothills of the Andes, and a sea-swept Italia bursting with floral and mineral complexity.
• Along the way, we cover the complicated topic of “purity” in different kinds of spirits, the age-old controversy of Chilean vs. Peruvian Pisco, a potentially record-setting pisco sour performance by Ernest Hemingway, and much, much more.

This episode is brought to you by Near Country Provisions. If you live in the Mid-Atlantic and want to enjoy ethically raised (and delicious) meat from local farmers delivered to your door every month, then you need Near Country in your life.

Head over to NearCountry.com and enter the code BARCART when you sign up for your subscription to receive 2 free pounds of bacon or ground beef in your first delivery.

Eric gives you a few things to look out for during the second half of 2021, including Japanese spirits and cocktails, orchard-to-table drinks and garnishes, and a few surprises and teasers along the way.

In this American, singular, and distinctly malty conversation with Tyler Pederson (@cerealdistiller), master distiller at Westland Distillery, some of the topics we discuss include:

• How Tyler came to be an American Single Malt distiller and what it’s like to develop a resilient supply chain of farmers and malt houses that can sustain itself year after year.
• Why distillers use the “hot steep” method to conduct sensory analysis of different barley strains, plus a hands-on demo where we compare three different samples from Westland’s barley portfolio.
• The difference between a “single malt whiskey” versus a true single varietal whiskey, plus what it takes to get a farmer to take a risk cultivating a varietal they’ve never grown before.
• And what the rules and standards submitted for approval to the TTB by the American Single Malt Whiskey Commission could mean for the styles and varieties of spirits that will be available on shelves and behind bars for the foreseeable future.
• Along the way, we pursue other interesting tangents, like why you don’t see much barley growing in the South, how the Japanese concept of Kaizen plays into running a distillery, Tyler’s personal thoughts on whether or not Bigfoot is real, and much, much more.

It’s entirely possible that this hot steep experiment and side-by-side tasting is the first time the process has been laid out and recorded for the public to see outside of a distillery or a brewery or a malting house. And because I’m super excited about that, I carefully recorded the whole process, and that video will be live on our YouTube channel within an hour or so of when this episode hits the podcast apps.

Featured Cocktail: Malted American Trilogy

This episode’s featured cocktail is the Malted American Trilogy. To make it, you’ll need:

• 1 oz American Single Malt Whiskey
• 1 oz Applejack
• A couple dashes of Orange bitters
• Some kind of dark, brown sugar - either a quarter-to-half an ounce of rich demerara or panela syrup, or a dark brown sugar cube.

Combine these ingredients in a cocktail mixing glass with ice - and of course, if you’re using that sugar cube, do your muddling with the bitters and a splash of soda water first. Give everything a good stir, mixing until the drink is properly diluted and chilled, then strain into a rocks glass over a single large cube, garnish with an orange twist, and enjoy.

The American Trilogy cocktail was developed at the famous NYC cocktail bar, Little Branch, in 2006, and it traditionally employs rye whiskey, rather than American Single Malt. But simple cocktail formats like this modified Old Fashioned are a great opportunity to test the character of a whiskey - so why not give it a shot with American Single Malt (which is beginning to play the role today that rye whiskey played when the drink was invented)?