Whiskey@Work

We’re a day late on this one (election hangover, more or less), but we crack open a bottle called Madam, from a women-owned DC distillery that crowdfunded its way into existence and put the first female vice president on the label. From there we wander into some genuinely strange whiskey history: George Washington running the country’s biggest distillery while losing (then winning) elections, a punch bowl that saved a presidential inauguration from turning into a riot, and a tax scandal that reached the Oval Office. Pour a glass. It’s a tall tale.

It’s Halloween week, and we’re starting with a real case file. A man runs into a New York hospital on Christmas Eve 1926 convinced Santa Claus is chasing him with a baseball bat. He dies that night. The culprit wasn’t supernatural. It was the government’s own Prohibition-era poisoning program, working through sixty other people across the city that same night. We get into how it happened, who knew, and why nobody ever answered for it. Then we pour something that actually belongs in October: As Above So Below’s Elvira bourbon out of Santa Fe, a high rye with cookie-spice on...

Rob and Mark get a cryptic text from Dan Brunner at Timmons Market, a picture of a fireman decanter and a bottle of Old Hoffman bourbon, with the challenge: what do these two things have in common? Turns out it’s a wild ride through Kentucky distilling history, from the Rippy family and Ezra Brooks to Julian Van Winkle renaming a shuttered distillery Old Commonwealth. Dan brings his liquor store expertise and a genuinely mysterious decanter he scored at a garage sale three blocks from his shop, and the guys crack it open on air to find out what’s hiding inside...

This was one of our favorite conversations with master distiller Allisa Henley of AJ Bond. Enjoy! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.