Author: Matt Pietrek

A Wonky Guide to Finding Unreleased and Obscure Spirits

If you ask me for my favorite site for learning about new spirits releases, I’m almost positive the answer will surprise you. Sure, there are great sites like Liquor.com and countless blogs (including this one) which breathlessly promote little nuggets of information, frequently gleaned from a spirits company’s PR rep. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) But what if I told you about a site that lists every single purchasable spirit, regardless of who makes it? And frequently well before it’s on any liquor store shelf? (Small disclaimer: This site only covers spirits for sale in the United States, but the U.S. has a huge spirits market.) Now are you intrigued? Even better, imagine that site was searchable by product name, type of spirit, or producer? Now how much would you pay?

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A Tale of Two Piscos: Pisco Portón and La Caravedo

Imagine you’ve taken a seat at your friendly neighborhood craft cocktail bar. As you scan the bottles, you see all manner of gins, tequilas, rums, brandies, but only a single bottle labeled “whiskey” – no Scotch, no bourbon, and no rye – just “whiskey.” You opt for a classic Manhattan, made with, of course, whiskey. Your first sip is filled with smoke and brine – it seems it’s a smoky Scotch whiskey, rather than a vanilla forward bourbon or a spicy rye like you’d expect.  Suddenly that classic Manhattan is not such a classic anymore.

You might think it’s ridiculous for a bar to have only one type of “whiskey” when there’s such a broad range of flavor profiles, but something akin to this happens with pisco, the wonderful grape-based brandy from Peru. If a bar has pisco at all, it’s likely to be a single bottle, which is a shame because the range of piscos available have quite a range of flavors. I was vividly reminded of this recently when I sampled two piscos from the same producer side-by-side.

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Will the Floome Portable Breathalyzer Blow Away the Competition?

As a techie with creds going back to the 1980s (ahem…), I relish the chance to mash together two of my loves–gadgets and spirits. So when I was contacted by Floome recently to see if I was interested in trying out their smartphone-based breathalyzer, I couldn’t respond fast enough. As a denizen of bars around Seattle (Hey, we have a lot of top notch bars here, OK?), I Uber whenever possible. Nonetheless there are still unforeseen times when I need to question my current blood alcohol content (BAC). My wonky ethos was all over this no-risk opportunity to try out a breathalyzer and put it through the paces.
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California Rum Fest 2015 and Rational Spirits Santeria Pre-Launch

It’s 10 PM on Saturday night and I’m standing in the dark by the side of Highway 17 in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. Bryan Davis, master distiller of Lost Spirits holds his iPhone aloft, flashlight lit, to help our friend Anders snap a rum bottle photo. A few feet away, a twelve-person party bus sits motionless with its doors open, exposing a veritable dance club’s worth of lighting. An epic Tiki party is awaiting us less than five miles away, if only we could get there. How is this my life? Let’s take it from the beginning – a photo tour of my crazy, rum-packed weekend.

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Checking out Tanqueray’s Bloomsbury Limited Release Gin

With the rise of craft spirits, established brands are finding themselves under attack by an army of Lilliputians, all touting their small batch, artisanal, hand-crafted credentials to great effect in influencing the buying public. The big players like Tanqueray aren’t all standing still, however. In addition to their standard lineup (Tanqueray, Tanqueray Rangpur, and Tanqueray 10), they’ve released a string of limited editions over the last three years, the most recent being Tanqueray Bloomsbury, which I received a bottle of for review here.

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Unveiling the THEA One Aging Reactor from Lost Spirits

Driving through Silicon Valley on U.S. 101, you’d be forgiven if you didn’t notice the southernmost town of Morgan Hill, a dusty bedroom community of 40,000 residents, two freeway exits, a Walmart, and some small vineyards. Mrs. Wonk and I are driving from San Francisco to Los Angeles, with a pit stop tonight in Pismo Beach, and have stopped here for a quick bite before our late-morning meeting. Driving through the town, it’s not quite the kind of place you’d expect a revolution in the distilled spirits industry to originate. However, that’s exactly why we’re here: Today’s agenda is visiting the new Lost Spirits facility, where Bryan Davis and Joanne Haruta are building the first batch of hyper-speed aging reactors that will create the equivalent of twenty years of barrel aging in a week’s time. (Yes, a week.) They’re about to start shipping reactors to distilleries around the U.S., and Joanne and Bryan have graciously allowed us a sneak peek.

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