Episode Details

In this interview, we sit down with Derek Brown and Bob Yule, co-authors of Spirits, Sugar, Water, Bitters: How the Cocktail Conquered the World. Some of the other topics we cover include:

• How Bob and Derek fused their expertise on opposing sides of the bar to create this book as a tribute to a ten part cocktail seminar series at the National Archives.
• Why and how we experience historical "echoes" in the cocktail world, and how these echoes can help connect us - at least in spirit -  with our tipsy ancestors.
• The importance of names and definitions in the cocktail world- both for the original cocktail and all the variants that spun off through the ages.
• Then, we get a little funky - we talk about what grows on the graves of dead Virginians, who's about to take a hatchet to Derek's bar, and the merits of a TGI Friday's caesar salad.

During this interview, we laugh, and we cry. We daydream about what Edgar Allan Poe liked to drink before he died in a puddle, and then we share our most embarrassing book errors and widely published typos.