Rethinking Smoke: Chava Peribán on Mezcal's Overlooked Complexity
For Salvador “Chava” Peribán, understanding mezcal means looking beyond its most recognizable characteristic to discover the extraordinary diversity of flavors, traditions and people behind the spirit.
The Past is on the Menu
Some bars preserve history through photographs, memorabilia, or dusty bottles hidden on a shelf. Others invite you to taste it. From Montreal to Georgetown to Grand Cayman, these bars are drawing inspiration from the past, collecting vintage spirits not just as curiosities but as ingredients rich with stories to share.
The Stories Spirits Tell
One sip of the Magnolia Martini at Cure in New Orleans palate-zaps you to a spring day, the warm air fecund with blossoms. One moment, you’re sipping a cocktail in Chicago; the next, the earthy freshness of baby carrots pulled straight from the soil carries you back to childhood. The sensory memories that transport the drinker also inspired the people who created the spirits. Here are a few of their stories.
Building Bright Without Citrus & Expanding Migraine-Conscious Hospitality
Karen Tartt of Clear Spirit & Mind, asks what happens when bartending’s favorite shortcut to freshness is off the table. The answer is not less flavor, but a more expansive way of building it.
What Makes Ontario Whisky Taste Like Ontario?
Every glass of whisky begins in a field. In Ontario, that story starts with corn and the conditions that help it thrive. Ask Dana Dickerson, Director of Market Development and Sustainability for Grain Farmers of Ontario, what shapes the province’s grain, and she points to soil, climate, drainage, and geology. Here, the relationship between land and flavour isn’t simply language borrowed from wine. It is the growing environment that shapes the corn long before that grain becomes the whisky in the glass.
To Create, You Must Destroy: Andrés Faustinelli on the Birth of BEAR-BON Whisky
Since pioneering Elementally Aged® BEARFACE Triple Oak in 2018, Faustinelli has continued to push boundaries through the brand's Wilderness Series releases. But with BEARFACE BEAR-BON™ Charred Barrel Whisky, he has done something categorically different. He has dismantled his own framework and rebuilt it from the ground up — questioning every assumption that underpinned the BEARFACE story so far…
Masters of Flavour: Andrea Fujarczuk & Dr. Don Livermore
Rum's Uncharted Territories: How Natasha Motsi & Karl Mudzamba Are Expanding the Rum Map
Rum has a geography problem.
Mention the spirit and certain places immediately come to mind. Jamaica, Barbados, Guyana and Trinidad have all helped shape rum's identity, developing distinctive production traditions that continue to influence how the category is understood.
Yet sugarcane grows across vast stretches of the world, from Africa and Asia to Central and South America. Wherever it grows, generations of producers have found ways to transform it into spirits that reflect their local ingredients, environments and traditions.
For Natasha Motsi and Karl Mudzamba, the Zimbabwean-born couple behind Canadian independent bottler 77 Spirits, that diversity is precisely what makes rum so interesting. It's also what makes its relatively narrow representation in Canada so frustrating.
The Anarchists of Rye
Sons of Vancouver is a Canadian micro-distillery producing big, flavourful, genre-busting rye whiskies.
The Instagram Effect
Is Social Media Changing the Way We Taste? In today’s cocktail culture, aesthetics aren’t just an afterthought, they’re often the starting point.