Winter 2018 Issue

Turning the Lights Back On at a Historic California Brandy Distillery

Master distiller and blender Hubert Germain-Robin is helping E & J Gallo Distillers bring the historic McCall Distillery in Sanger, CA, out of mothballs....

Spiritual Training: How to Get a Formal Education in Distilled Spirits

In the spirits field, it’s rare to find someone with a formal education in distilling. While many master distillers have a strong chemistry background,...

Interview: Spirit Hound Distillers, Craig Engelhorn & Wayne Anderson

A “little” brewery by the name of Oskar Blues brought Craig Engelhorn and Wayne Anderson together. Meeting and working there in the late 1990s/early...

A Contractor’s Guide to Building a Distillery

The road to success is always under construction. —Arnold Palmer The advancement of any craft requires constant tweaking and fine-tuning. With distilling we find this to...

The Nature of Colorado Distillers

Colorado is a kaleidoscope of craft distilling. Every aspect of the spectrum of craft distilling has a model here, from world and national brands...

Book Reviews Winter 2018

Julep: Southern Cocktails Refashioned Alba Huerta and Marah Stets (California: Lorena Jones Books, 2018). 240 pages ISBN: 9780760351734 $25.00 Named Bartender of the Year in 2014 by Imbibe magazine, Alba Huerta...

Make Your Voice Heard

On October 19, 2018, the Alcohol Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) published its Strategic Plan for Fiscal Years 2018–2022. TTB’s second strategic goal of...

Top 10 of the World’s Best Bars

When you visit over 600 restaurants and bars every single year, some call you obsessed. They aren’t wrong. When it’s your work and your...

United We Thrive

In 2007, fifteen curious classmates with one shared goal — to learn the art of commercial craft distilling — attended the first American Distilling...

The Rise of the B Corporation

One of the greatest consumer shifts in America over the last thirty years has been back toward buying from local producers, away from larger...

Turning Around the Social Media Time Suck

Whether you love it or hate it, I think we can all admit that social media is here to stay. Selfies, never-ending foodstagrams, motivational...

The Alchemist

There wasn’t much in the way of coursework for distillers in the early 2000s, and early adopters in American craft distilling relied on the...

Matching Whiskey Production with Sales

Sales need to grow, right? But first, whiskey needs to age. Those distillers that have been making whiskey for a while now have probably...

Interview: Denver Bar Manager, Chad Michael George

St. Louis-born Chad Michael George has been keeping busy the last few years. He oversees the drink menu and staff at Denver’s celebrated The...

The Dodo Bird of
 Distillation Resurfaces

The distilling community got a small jolt of reverse innovation when Leopold Bros. began using a once-extinct style of still, based on designs from...

TTB vs FDA

When it comes to understanding the authority differences between the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), there is...

How Do You Define an “American-Style” of Rum?

Rum is the most malleable of spirits. It’s a liquid shape-shifter that can vary by region and culture, from the full-bodied double-retort pot still...