Me and Christian met almost twenty years ago; when I was still living in the Netherlands, my friend Robin Weiss asked me to help judge the Havana Club Germany bartender contests, and Christian was involved even back then. In the next few years we hung out at Havana Club contests in Sylt, Dusseldorf, Havana itself and several other cities I can't recall, plus of course Bar Convent Berlin, and Christian always impressed me with his ability to both hang with even the newest and most junior...

This is the last of our Tales-recorded episodes, and our final collab with The Speakeasy! Amir, originally from Tel Aviv, runs the cocktail program at one of Manhattan's hidden gems, the amazing Ophelia Lounge on top of the Beekman Tower, one of NY's last remaining true Art Deco skyscrapers, overlooking the UN. He was down at Tales helping us at The Australian Embassy, so myself and Greg dragged him out from behind the bar and into our makeshift podcast studio for a quick martini and a ...

Francois escaped growing up in Belgium and, God help us, working in banking, to become a drinks writer, relocating to his beloved Spain and becoming an in-demand consultant to brands and bars, a World's 50 Best Bars Academy Chair, a drinks writer, drinks book author, and one of the two or three most expert and authoritative voices in the industry on vermouth. We've been friends for a long time, and this was a joy to tape and catch up on - enjoy! Francois on IG: https://www.instagram.com...

Sahil was down in New Orleans to re-launch Australian Bitters Co. in the US, and also because Australian Bitters Co scored both gold and silver medals in the New Orleans Spirits Competition, so me and Greg Benson of The Speakeasy lured him into our makeshift podcast studio and talked about the benefits of having royal family license plates, taking on the Goliath of cocktail bitters companies, and how he sees the bitters market as a whole. Enjoy! (Pic credit: The Cocktail Lovers, link: h...

Jake's one of the OG's of the UK bar scene, first making waves by winning multiple cocktail and bartending contests (including one where he won a £10, 000 diamond) when based out of his native Leeds, working in Leeds' top bars and then opening one of his own, then moving to London and opening beloved industry hangout The Portobello Star bar, co-founding the Alternative Bar Awards in the Star, and then upgrading both the Star and its in-house gin still to much larger premises, the Ginstitute, ...

Down in New Orleans during the Tales of the Cocktail festival, I helped Procera, a luxury gin from Kenya, to run a private hospitality House, which came complete with a pool, so myself and Greg Benson of The Speakeasy had the bright idea to interview the Procera founders, Guy and Alan, while drinking martinis on the rocks, in the pool. Yep, we invented poolcasting! Alan, born and raised in Nairobi, is one of Kenya's most celebrated chefs, a restaurateur, trained brewer (he founded Kenya's fir...

Myself and The Speakeasy Podcast co-host Greg Benson were both in New Orleans last week at the Tales of the Cocktail festival, and so were Alexandre Gabriel, master distiller and blender at Maison Ferrand & Planteray rum, plus Matt Pietrek, spirits author & publisher, who lives in the Crescent City. AND Alexandre and Matt had just published (with Matt's WonkPress company) "The Rum Never Sets: A History of Naval Rum", so we all decided to get in the pool (where else to tape a pod...

I first met Christian, who is Argentinian, in 2000, at the Quest for the Best world bartending championships in Orlando. I'd competed in Quest and Roadhouse and other contests like those quite a few times, but when many of us saw Christian that year - who competed in the Rookie division - a lot of us just decided to retire from competition and become judges! He was that good; next-level, Michael Jordan-good. And he was just getting started: Christian went on to utterly domin...

I've judged many a cocktail contest with Ian, and he's got a new book out AND just been awarded the Lifetime Achievement award by Tales of the Cocktail, so it was time for us to catch up over a rum or two. Having played basketball in his native UK, and rapped - he still gets royalties from a song of his featured on the soundtrack of "Space Jam" - Ian built a career as the self-styled Global Rum Ambassador, evangelising the whole category at a time when there was very little education ab...

Timo has been a friend for almost two decades now: first he was the bartender who served me, then my employee, then my bar's manager, and then a bar owner in his own right, before founding a bar show, and several other excellent bars. We could have gone for four hours. We've known each other through multiple marriages, got to know each other before my Dutch was good enough to switch from English, worked together, collaborated together...and always had a drink. (Although his new sk...

Krissy is a hilarious person that I got to know judging spirits contests together, and an accomplished drinks writer as well as being an outspoken proponent of the LGBTQIA+ community, so I wanted to catch up with her just as we round out Pride Month. We had a great chat, not even that much about that community, because we both had a lot to catch up on, and she had a hard stop as she had to go do some heavy drinking in Bristol, which is entirely understandable. But this was super f...

It's been a minute since we went over the news, and I've been rocketing around the world doing interesting things, so here's a DNN episode! We cover bar shows like BCBrooklyn, the Gulf Bar Show, the upcoming BCB London, the risers and fallers in the annual Millionaires List of million-case-selling liquor brands, Pernod's restructuring, the tiny cocktail trend, how I found the best cocktail bar at Disney Paris, and much more - enjoy. Oh, and if you're doing something cool at Tales of the...

I've known Lorenzo since his days bartending at The Savoy in London, and have also had the pleasure of his drinks during his stint at Argo Bar (HK). Now he's opened Bar Leone, which is the fastest-ever to get to #1 in Asia's 50 Best Bars and #2 in World's 50 Best, after opening in June 2023. He's also about to open Montana bar in HK together with his fellow Italian, Simone Caporale. We got together to catch up after a dizzying array of guest shifts and pop-ups on his part, and tal...

Woody, a New Zealander, has been a fixture in Australian bartending for as long as I've been in the business, and he built his flair bartending and cocktail catering firm into a massive business there, wrote ten best-selling cocktail books, toured with Guy Fieri, burned out, came back, and has now founded a new solution to revolutionise the import-distribution of liquor in Australia, Drinks Network. Clearly, we were overdue - enjoy! Hayden on IG: https://www.instagram.com/mrliquidkitc...

Me, Josh and a bunch of other people (including Julio Bermejo and Mauro Mahjoub) were together in Yerevan for Yerevan Cocktail Week (YCW), so I took the chance to tape an episode with Josh, who I always run into at Tales of the Cocktail, but never get to sit down and chat with. Josh is best known for Trick Dog cocktail bar in SF, a perennial award winner and two-time World's Best Cocktail Menu winner at Tales; in fact, Josh taught a class at YCW on cocktail menus. It was a special...

Taped live in an annoyingly child-ridden park on a lovely day in NYC, myself and the rock 'n' roll Irish-Italian Rome-based cocktail bar owner Patrick Pistolesi cracked some all-American tariff-free beers, washed 'em down with mezcal and 'Murican single malt whiskey, and talked about Japan, billionaires, awards, his adventurous Irish mum, bars, cocktails, and the profusion of guest bartending, plus looots more stuff - enjoy! Patrick on IG: https://www.instagram.com/_thepisto_?igsh=aDhxcz...

Ektoras Binikos opened Sugar Monk cocktail bar in Harlem just 9 months before the COVID lockdowns kicked off, after a career in both art and mixology, having emigrated to Manhattan from his native Greece. While weathering the storm of the lockdown, he and his team started making and selling amaros and liqueurs, and this venture has blossomed into a company, Atheras Spirits, which has a distillery and a cocktail bar/tasting room, Bitter Monk, in Industry City, Brooklyn. We sat down on a ...

Regular listeners will know New York drinks writer Tony Sachs, who occupies a place in The Philip Duff Show universe somewhere between "henchman" and "drinking buddy". It's been a while since we convened to drink our way through the literal lakes of booze Tony is sent on a daily basis, and because he was off to drink Direct Martinis from the hand of Alessandro Palazzi that evening, we started out with a nice run of tasting no- and low-alc drinks, including new low-alcohol gin Second Sip...

Warren has written six cocktail books - including on cannabis cocktails, as well as more conventional cocktail tomes - and he was way ahead of what is now a trend of quitting alcohol, back in 2018, during Tales of the Cocktail, which is like quitting skydiving mid-jump. He's recently created a range of delicious cocktail-inspired THC beverages named KLAUS, so it was high* time we sat down, guzzled a little Klaus, and caught up on the state of the world and the long, strange journey that...

Me and Rob have known each other since the early early days, back when I was still a competitive flair bartender in the 1990s, and together with fellow OGs Dean Serneels and Deborah Richards, he's just created and premiered the world's first documentary about flair, "Shaken & Stirred", so it was high time we had a chat. We talked about the wild network that was flair, before this Second Golden Age of mixology was properly underway: travelling the world, yard days, why - and how - fl...