The Modern Bar Cart Podcast

Eric catches up with Chris Kiertz (@cocktail_chris) about his pet project, The Home Bar Awards - an inclusive monthly cocktail competition hosted on Instagram designed specifically for home bartenders.

In this second installment of our three-part series on the art of the recipe, we emerge from the depths of ancient history and trace the recipe from its early modern origins to its current manifestation.

We take a trip into the deep past to locate the origins of the recipe. From the African Savannah, to Babylon, to Rome, we sift through clay tablets and scrolls with some of the world's oldest recipes to see what they can teach us. Along the way, we dabble in Epicurean physics and explore the parable of Don's Mix.

In this episode, we take questions from our listener mailbag and answer the most burning questions about spirits & cocktails. Some of the topics we cover include: How to flavor egg whites, the best way to smoke cocktail garnishes, which popular bottles might vanish from the shelves as a result of the COVID-19 Coronavirus, the most popular herbs for at-home cocktails, how to support Modern Bar Cart during this crisis, and much, much more.

Eric interviews gin expert, author, and spirits judge Aaron Knoll of TheGinIsIn.com. Some of the topics covered include: The story of how Aaron fell in love with gin at 3am at a dive bar in Buffalo, NY. How he developed his pentagonal (and later, hexagonal) visual representation of gin flavor profiles. How to distinguish a contemporary gin from a London Dry gin, from an Old Tom gin. What trends Aaron is most excited about from his recent statistical analysis of Consumer Taste Preferences.

Eric interviews Nick Fisher of Cocktail Chemistry (a cocktail education resource and wildly popular YouTube Channel) about his recent 9-bottle tasting of Fernet expressions from around the world.

Colleen O'Bryant is the Yoda of herbs. She knows the science, the physiology, and the technical scientific terms for everything, but instead of throwing around big words, she takes a very grounded, mindful approach to educating. “Ask the plant if it wants to be harvested,” she says. “Let it tell you how it wants to be used.” She’s a wonderful advocate for the flavors that can be found all around us in the natural world, and a true practitioner of natural health and healing.

We discuss the effects that COVID-19 Coronavirus has had on the spirits and cocktail industry and then examine the history of spirits during times of plague in bygone eras.

This time around, Eric gets to know two awesome bartenders-turned-consultants: Susan Eggett and Alex Maynard. They’re the masterminds behind the new beverage program at Sobre Mesa, a new Afro-Latino cocktail lounge opening in Oakland, California.

Eric interviews international food and drink maven Virginia Miller. She’s the Western North America Academy Chair for the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, as well as a contributor to some of the world's most lauded culinary and beverage publications.

We talk with a panel of esteemed guests about the rise of "Ready-to-Drink" cocktails (RTDs). These are the canned counterparts to contemporary beers and wines, and they are on the rise around the world.

This time around, we catch up with H. Joseph Ehrmann, proprietor of the legendary San Francisco bar, Elixir, and one of the driving forces behind Fresh Victor, an awesome, fresh-juice-based cocktail mixer line that’s been making waves in the beverage community.

We interview Master Distiller Lance winters of St. George Spirits in Alameda, CA. He's a pioneer in the industry and a champion of craft distilling. In this conversation, we cover the history of St. George Spirits, and Lance's approach to flavor and the art of distilling. Then we taste the following St. George Spirits and give you in-depth notes: Their pear brandy, Terroir Gin, Bruto Americano Aperitivo, and their single malt whiskey.

Xander Shepherd and Max Spohler are two of the three founders of Artet, a groundbreaking cannabis aperitif that's making waves in the cocktail space. We dig into the history of the aperitif hour, current cannabis regulations in the United States (February, 2020), how Artet is blurring the line between cannabis and cocktails, and much, much more.

The object of our investigation this episode is the word, “smooth.” We hear used all the time to describe drinks, and yet, most of us would have a hard time pinning down exactly what it means. In this hit piece against the word "smooth," we'll explore its meanings and connotations in the spirits and cocktail world, why it's a faulty descriptor, and how we can make conscious choices to avoid it on behalf of our friends and customers.