I recently sat down with Dr. Micaela Pallini, President and CEO of Pallini S.p.A. in Rome, for a conversation about what Pallini stands for. What I got was something closer to a masterclass in family legacy, agricultural science, and the particular kind of stubbornness it takes to run a 150-year-old company without losing what made it worth keeping in the first place.

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Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day. Neither Was This Limoncello.

The Pallini story does not begin in Rome, or on the Amalfi Coast. It begins in Antrodoco, a village of maybe five thousand people about an hour north of Rome, where a self-taught reader and trader named Nicola Pallini started making liqueurs in 1875 from recipes passed down by the women of the area. The village still has a Pallini Palace in its main square. The family’s first products were anise-based, including Mistrà, a dry, sugar-free anise liqueur whose roots trace back to Venetian sea traders who encountered uzo while working the Adriatic islands in the 1400s. It is still produced today. It is also one of those inside-baseball bottles that serious liqueur people tend to get very excited about when they discover it.

The move to Rome came in the 1920s, after Nicola’s son was injured in World War I and spent his recovery in the capital. The legend goes that during his time there, he met a Russian chemist who was fleeing the Revolution and who taught him the finer points of distillation. Whether you take that story literally or not, the outcome is the same. The family saw what Rome could offer that Antrodoco could not, and they put down roots that have now held for a century.

The Lemon Connection

Limoncello, as Micaela is quick to point out, is not an invention. It is a tradition. Every family in Italy has their own version. What Pallini set out to do was take a recipe that had lived in the family for generations and figure out what it would take to make it the best in the world.

Part of that answer came through marriage. Two of Micaela’s great-uncles married sisters from Ravello, a town on the Amalfi Coast. That connection introduced the family to the sfusato amalfitano lemon, and eventually to the farmers, the regional consortium, and the small processing facility near Vietri where Pallini peels those lemons fresh before vacuum-sealing them and shipping to Rome.

“Simple recipes are the most difficult to make well,” Micaela told me, and she reached for the analogy of a grandmother’s tomato sauce. You watch her make it a hundred times. You try to copy it exactly. And it is never the same.

The production process she described sounds almost too simple on paper. Fresh lemon peel, steeped in near-200-proof sugar beet alcohol for a precisely calibrated number of days. Not too long, because if you push it, the bitter compounds in the pith start to leach through. That infusion gets blended with a simple syrup made from beet sugar dissolved in warm water, no pre-dissolved corn syrup bases, and then a proprietary lemon oil extraction developed in partnership with the University of Naples. The whole thing gets bottled at 26% ABV, a number they landed on only after working down from 32%, looking for the exact point where perfume, sweetness, and citrus snap all hold together without the alcohol coming through too hot.

The Doctor Is In

Micaela’s path back to the family business was not a straight line. She pursued a PhD in chemistry partly, she told me with a laugh, because she figured it was complicated enough that her father would leave her alone. It did not work. What it did give her was a way of thinking about a recipe the way you would approach a research problem, systematically, with a willingness to rebuild from the ground up, and with genuine respect for the reality that in a distillery, one plus one almost never equals two.

When she joined Pallini in 2001, the company was solid but small. Since then, revenues have nearly tripled. The workforce has doubled. The brand now reaches over 80 countries. And along the way, she became the first female president of Federvini, Italy’s premier spirits trade association. She does not talk about it triumphantly. “When I came into the industry and started sitting in rooms with my colleagues, I realized how few of us there were. Every time, you had to wait your turn to speak. Once they realized you had something to say, they’d give you the floor a second time.”

Federvini is back to all-male leadership now. She notes it plainly, without bitterness, like someone who has been in a long fight long enough to know that one data point is not the whole story.

How to Actually Drink This Thing

Before we wrapped, I asked the question that I figured everyone listening really wanted answered. If you have never had limoncello, or if you have had it once and found it almost offensively sweet, where do you start?

Micaela’s answer was straightforward. Start cold, start neat. Not from the freezer because that kills the aromatics. From the fridge, with a single ice cube if you want one. What you are looking for is that citrus bite on the sides of the tongue, the note that lingers and pushes back against the sweetness. “It should bring you to the Amalfi Coast,” she said. “Not just taste like sugar.”

From there, she builds toward a spritz. Equal parts Pallini and prosecco, plenty of ice, with a splash of Campari if you want something that cuts through. There is also the limoncello margarita, which swaps in Pallini where triple sec usually goes. And then there is the limoncello tiramisu, ladyfingers dipped in half Pallini and half water, layered with mascarpone cream, white chocolate, and fresh berries. She posted a video of herself making it during COVID lockdown that is apparently still floating around on YouTube somewhere.

I will be attempting it this weekend. Pinkies down, fun up.

Pallini Limoncello is available nationwide. Find them at limoncellopallini.com and on Instagram at @pallinilimoncello. This episode is live now on all podcast platforms, YouTube, and right here on Substack.

New to EmbellishPod? Subscribe below. New episodes every Tuesday,(whenever I get a chance) with the long read dropping right here. See you next week.

This started as an attempt to build one from scratch and find out where that extra thing was hiding. White grapefruit, blood orange, lime, dark agave, high-proof blanco. Several rounds of testing to figure out what each decision was actually doing. The blood orange is why it’s called Sangre — sangre is Spanish for blood, and that felt more honest than calling it a blood orange Paloma when the blood orange is only half the citrus story.

It’s a peak season drink. Blood orange runs December through March, and the deeply red fruit you want for this only shows up when overnight temperatures are cold enough to develop the color. Outside that window, your mileage may vary.

The Recipe

Sangre Paloma

2 oz Tapatio Blanco 110
1 oz Ocean Spray Unsweetened White Grapefruit Juice
1 oz fresh blood orange juice
1/2 oz fresh lime juice
1/4 oz Agave In The Raw dark agave nectar
3 oz Mineragua or Topo Chico
Flaky sea salt — half rim

Collins glass over ice. Pour agave into the jigger first, then measure tequila and juices through it to pull the agave clean. Top with sparkling water. One gentle stir. Half rim of flaky sea salt applied before building the drink.

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The Grapefruit Decision

First variable was the grapefruit component — the foundational ingredient after tequila, and the one with the most ways to get it wrong.

Four options tested against each other with Teremana Blanco as the control: Fever-Tree Pink Grapefruit Soda, Stirrings Simple Paloma Mix with club soda, Ocean Spray Ruby Red Grapefruit Juice Drink with club soda, and Ocean Spray Unsweetened White Grapefruit Juice with club soda.

The commercial options didn’t survive the first round. Fever-Tree is sweet and convenient — both are liabilities in a scratch build. Stirrings runs 11 grams of sugar per two ounces and still doesn’t taste like enough grapefruit. Neither one lets you control the sweetness or the acid balance, which means the drink is already half-decided before you’ve touched it.

Ruby red and white grapefruit pulled ahead, but they’re not the same drink. White grapefruit is more tart, more bitter, and pure juice — no added sugar, no softening. Ruby red is labeled as a juice drink rather than pure juice, which means added sugar and less intensity. It’s not that ruby red is wrong. It’s that white grapefruit is a better foundation if you want the best version without extra pomp. The bitterness becomes a platform rather than a problem, and the pale yellow base makes the blood orange color hit harder than it would over pink.

One other finding worth noting: fresh squeezed red grapefruit was tested late in development against Ocean Spray Unsweetened White. No meaningful difference detected. The bottled product performs on par with fresh squeezed, which isn’t something you get to say often — don’t squeeze grapefruit for this recipe.

The Carbonation Problem

Both juice-based builds in the first round lacked effervescence compared to the commercial soda options. Two ounces of club soda into five-and-a-half ounces of liquid is roughly twenty-five percent of total volume, and that’s not enough for sustained fizz. Carbonation was flagged as a variable to solve later, with club soda held as the consistent baseline until that phase.

The salt discovery came out of this same period, and it was annoying in the way that obvious things are annoying once you see them. Salt added as a pinch directly into the build throughout early testing was causing nucleation — salt particles trigger CO2 release, and the fizz dissipated faster than it would without them. Moving salt to the rim fixed it, and it also reframed what the salt test was actually about. The question wasn’t just whether salt improves the flavor. It was where it lives in the build.

When carbonation was tested directly, Mineragua won over club soda. It’s a Mexican brand with more aggressive bubble structure, and there’s an authenticity argument for it in a Paloma. Topo Chico is equivalent and interchangeable. Final amount settled at three ounces — roughly forty percent of total drink volume, enough for sustained effervescence without drowning the citrus.

The Citrus Build

With white grapefruit settled, the next question was whether a secondary citrus component could add complexity and body to a drink that was tasting a little thin.

Three builds tested: pure white grapefruit control, white grapefruit and ruby red blend, white grapefruit and blood orange blend. Both tasters independently ranked the blends above the control, which settled the direction. There was disagreement on which blend — one preferred ruby red for softening the white grapefruit’s assertiveness, the other preferred blood orange for complexity. Blood orange was chosen. More distinctive, more interesting to write about, and the split gave it the edge.

Blood orange has a seasonality problem that’s worth understanding before you go buy fruit. Peak is December through March. Testing in May confirmed inconsistent results — pale, orange-red fruit read sweet and thin, without the tartness and complexity that make it worth using. The color is a direct quality signal: deeply red blood oranges are more tart and more complex because anthocyanins develop in cold overnight temperatures. When those temperatures aren’t there, neither is the flavor. If you can’t find deeply red blood oranges, ruby red grapefruit blended in is a reasonable fallback — not the same drink, but a coherent one.

Lime entered development later than it probably should have. Most scratch-built Paloma recipes include it as a brightening agent, and it was initially excluded because unsweetened white grapefruit was already delivering significant acid and bitterness — lime felt redundant. Tested at one ounce alongside blood orange as a separate component, it was too aggressive. It dominated and competed rather than complemented. The discovery came from mixing the lime build and the blood orange build together after tasting, almost by accident. The combination landed where neither could alone — lime providing brightness, blood orange providing complexity and color, and neither redundant at half the volume. Testing confirmed one-half ounce was the right call.

The Sweetener

Agave In The Raw dark agave nectar throughout testing. Dark agave over light for its more complex, earthy character — it’s a flavor contributor, not just a sweetener, and the natural affinity with tequila is hard to argue with given where both come from.

The viscosity makes conventional jigger measurement a hassle. Technique that actually solves it: agave goes into the jigger first, then tequila and juices are poured through it. The liquid pulls the agave clean and you’re not chasing residue around the inside of the jigger.

Sweetness calibrated throughout development — started at one-quarter ounce, briefly considered bumping to one-half, returned to one-quarter once the tequila proof question was resolved. Final amount balances the citrus bitterness without tipping the drink into sweet territory.

The Tequila

Teremana Blanco as the control throughout early testing — soft, approachable, clean. Teremana ran out mid-test. An honest testing reality.

Espolon Blanco tested next. Clean, citrus-forward, the reliable performer it always is.

Tapatio 110 was initially flagged as potentially too aggressive — the concern being that 110 proof would overwhelm the citrus and make the whole thing too boozy. That concern turned out to be backwards. The higher proof provided backbone and presence that stood up to the assertive citrus combination in a way the lower-proof options couldn’t. Espolon and Teremana both got lost against the bitterness of white grapefruit and the three-citrus build. Tapatio won.

The insight is about proof, not brand loyalty. Any high-proof blanco at 100 proof or above is worth trying — Tapatio 110 is the tested and preferred option, and it’s an affordable bottle for 110 proof. Most home bartenders reach for whatever blanco they have without thinking about how proof interacts with assertive citrus. This drink is a good argument for reconsidering that habit.

There’s a moment partway through a project like this where you realize you’ve moved past a variable you’re not totally sure about and you don’t want to go back. Revisiting the grapefruit decision after the citrus build was settled meant unraveling a lot of work that was already settled. So you don’t. You make a judgment call, document what you tested, and move forward. That’s not laziness — it’s how development actually goes. At some point the incremental gains stop being worth the sessions.

What I ended up with is a drink that finally has that extra thing I kept looking for. The bitterness is in the right places, the proof holds up against it, and the blood orange earns the name. Whether it would be better with different grapefruit proportions or a slightly different agave level, I genuinely don’t know. But it’s good enough that I stopped caring.

Next up is a Hemingway Daiquiri. Rum, fresh citrus, no sugar added(maybe) — Hemingway was diabetic and famously asked his bartender to make it stronger and sweeter, hold the sweet. We’ll see what that actually means to build from scratch.

The drink is named for what it contains. Make it between December and March, with the darkest blood oranges you can find.

Sangre Paloma.

SO Recordings · June 5, 2026 · @bigspecial_ · bigspecial.co.uk

My knowledge of British post-punk is thin. There’s too much music in the world to feel bad about the gaps. So when this one landed in my inbox I wasn’t entirely sure it was going to be my thing.

It was my thing.

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Joe Hicklin and Callum Moloney are from the Black Country — a stretch of the West Midlands named for the soot and smoke from two centuries of ironworks and coal mines. It’s the kind of place that makes a certain kind of music. Hicklin screams poetry. Moloney hits things. Somehow this produces sounds that feel less like post-punk from the English Midlands and more like a Southern Gothic revival meeting that got lost on its way to the Mississippi Delta. I don’t fully understand how. I’ve stopped needing to.

O’JOY! is out June 5 via SO Recordings. If you want context on where these songs came from, go listen to Postindustrial Hometown Blues and National Average first and think: this didn’t make the cut for that. What’s left makes its own thing.

It’s dedicated to the memory of their friend Handsome James Borrer.

The record opens with a spoken fragment — automated, distorted, no music underneath it. Just a voice and static:

What you have taken / will give you more than you were ever after / and the weight will pull you down to the rock of the earth / and you shall become it.

Then a creaking gate hinge. Then you’re in.

Plaintive Native arrives like something drifting from a bar on a Louisiana back road — synth drums, a banjo that has no business being this funky, Hicklin in spoken-word mode. Around the three-minute mark it drops into something more open. Proselytizing without a congregation: what do you care about / what are you allowed to care about / do you even care? Nobody responds. That’s the point.

Only Free When Sleeping opens on a saxophone hook and immediately sets a different temperature — lazy drum, greasy. True Blood without the vampires. A hymnal repetition builds until it stops — hard cut, no resolution. The lyric does the work the music refuses to finish:

You’re only free when you’re sleeping.

Oblivion as the only available exit. Cheerful stuff.

Lazarus is a church service. Not a metaphor — choir, organ, a preacher stepping in when the congregation pauses. The resurrection myth runs in reverse: stay down Lazarus / no new beginning / born digging / get digging. Somewhere in there a seagull catches fire, thinks “fuck it,” and that’s the most accurate description of late capitalism I’ve encountered this year.

The Wake strips everything back — a pissed-off goose of a horn, a guitar with real solitude in the picking, and a lyric that is simultaneously a literal wake and a eulogy for something cultural that got killed by television, the internet, and whatever came after. Nobody can quite remember what it was or when it died. But things have been different since.

This one requires multiple listens. I say that as a warning.

Family Bones opens on a bass line that would rattle the spoiler off a 1994 Mercury Tracer. The discomfort is physical before it’s intellectual. Midway it shifts into something orchestrated and strange — the audio equivalent of binaural beats on YouTube, except instead of calming you down it resonates specifically with your unease. A rotten apple fell and rolled four generations down. That’s the whole track in ten words.

Garden of Fools opens with flute — brave or deranged depending on your tolerance for unexpected woodwinds — and builds into something that functions like a sea shanty. A communal song for people who’ve had their tools and their hands taken. The flute gives way to trumpet halfway through. That’s not an accident. Flute is private grief. Trumpet is what you do with it.

Sluglife is the left turn. Warm acoustic guitar, a delivery closer to Baz Luhrmann’s sunscreen speech than anything post-punk, and a lyric about performing okayness for the neighbors while your spirit has a ruptured spleen. I just need a little time / we’re getting there. He says it three times. It starts to sound less like reassurance and more like something he’s trying to convince himself of.

Dragged Up a Hill (and Thrown Down the Other Side) is exactly what it says. Desolate, honest, unhurried. Builds toward something in the final stretch then asks a question it’s no longer sure about: is anything truly yours / is anything real. Shrugs. Keeps going.

Hotel opens with an automated phone system — hotel front desk energy — and then Hicklin just says it: this song is about depression. No metaphor. No runway. Then the peppiest beat on the entire record kicks in, which is either the most British response to mental illness I’ve ever encountered or the most honest one. Probably both.

We’re all living in a hotel room / high above the doom and gloom / but we’re gonna be leaving soon.

Temporary. All of it. The record ends there, and it lands.

I’m not sure if this record hit me because of where I am right now or because of where everything is right now. Maybe that’s the same question.

What I know is that a band from a sooty corner of the English Midlands made something that sounds like it came out of a delta church in 1962 and a hotel room in 2026 simultaneously, and the gap between those two things is exactly where this record lives.

The clip is empty. Whatever they make next is going to be something.

Big Special’s O’JOY! is out June 5 via SO Recordings. North American tour this fall — headline shows in DC (Oct 7, Pearl Street Warehouse), Brooklyn (Oct 8, Baby’s All Right), and Boston (Oct 9, The Rockwell), plus dates supporting Lambrini Girlz through the midwest and southeast. @bigspecial_

But there’s something different about buying the record. I picked up the original Planting by the Signs on vinyl about thirty days ago. When the rerelease dropped in May I thought, well, that’s a good enough reason to figure out what I’m actually hearing. Sometimes a record earns that kind of attention. This one does.

Fair warning before we go further: what follows are my interpretations. I did not interview SG Goodman. I did not verify my readings against her intent. Some of this is probably right. Some of it she’d hear and say “fuck off.” That’s fine. If you want to know what she actually meant, ask her. I didn’t. I just listened.

The first time I saw a satellite — one I actually knew was a satellite — I was in high school. One of the few benefits of growing up in a rural area is limited light pollution and genuinely beautiful summer night skies. I was at a friend’s place near the lake. A light crossed the sky, steady and deliberate. I’d seen enough airplanes and helicopters to know it wasn’t that. My friend told me what it was. Something shifted. The wonder didn’t disappear exactly, but it recalibrated. I was watching a machine pretending to be a celestial body and doing a decent job of it. A decent job isn’t the same thing as the real thing.

That memory is where SG Goodman’s (Re) Planting by the Signs found me.

The Concept

I own several Foxfire books - an anthology of rural past, a preservation of knowledge the world was busy forgetting while it was still being practiced. The first anthology hit shelves in 1972 and became a surprise bestseller. Twelve volumes followed over the next two decades, over nine million copies sold, the project eventually becoming a nonprofit that still runs today. If you’ve never spent time with them, foxfire.org is worth your afternoon. Fair warning — you may end up owning several.

We live in a time where rural carries a connotation, and it isn’t always flattering. There’s a version of rural that gets used as shorthand for something lesser, something to leave behind. Speaking as someone who grew up in and around that world — not the bitter version, just the honest one — there’s a beauty in the quiet of it, a grounding in simplicity that gets dismissed too quickly by people who’ve never sat with it. The Foxfire books exist to say that what happened in those hills and hollers was worth writing down.

The knowledge is real. It’s also increasingly available — apps, databases, agricultural extensions, all of it — and that’s genuinely useful. But there’s something different about being the app. About carrying that knowledge in your body because your grandmother carried it in hers. That’s where Goodman lives.

She found the planting by the signs section in that first 1972 volume and it unlocked something she’d been carrying since childhood without quite naming it. Her grandmother had her taken off the breast according to the moon. This isn’t a concept she discovered — it’s one she was born inside of. She spent more than a year researching it before she wrote a single song, poring over the Foxfire series and other texts, interviewing practitioners, until the images and details could arrive naturally instead of feeling forced.

Worth clarifying what planting means here — this isn’t commercial farming. This is subsistence farming. Growing what you can to survive off. Excess goes to trade with neighbors for what you can’t or don’t grow. A simple but hard economy built entirely on timing, knowledge, and the willingness to pay attention to things older than any algorithm.

The moon affects water. Water moves through everything living. Timing matters in ways the dashboard can inform but can’t replace.

The Record

Heaven Sold

Ninety-nine seconds of something that sounds like a monk chant. Sparse, repetitive, deliberately cleansing. A null set. Whatever you walked in with, put it down. The stars got sold. Now here we are.

Satellite

Follows immediately and the connection isn’t subtle — we traded the stars for a machine that mimic them. Apprehensive optimism underneath a kick drum that sets the pace like a heartbeat. A vocal that wants to believe things are okay but keeps watching the sky while it says so. The central image puts the moon and the satellite in the same verse — one pulls on tides and biology and the old signs, the other pulls on your attention. Same sky. Different relationship. The refrain lands as grief more than accusation. Look what it’s done to you.

Fire Sign

The biographical track, operating on at least two levels simultaneously. The astrological — fire signs are seekers, restless, driven, the ones who ask who’ll put the fire out and mean it as a dare. And then the one that only makes sense if you grew up near this world: in rural areas, a fire sign is the marker at the end of a long driveway. When emergency services need to find a property down a dirt road they can’t see from the highway, that sign is how they find you. No sign at the end of a driveway when there’s a fire, the people who put it out can’t locate it. Born a seeker, old story keeper. She’s locating herself in all systems at once.

The turn rows in the lyric are worth a moment — the unplanted headland at the end of a crop row where you turn the tractor(or any other planting implement), the necessary margin between passes. She’s navigating the spaces between. The psychedelic quality of the vocal over a driving beat isn’t an accident — exhausted and relentless at the same time, the fire burning whether or not anyone can find it.

I Can See the Devil

A gut check and a lesson in cultural fluency. The devil isn’t abstract — he’s beating on an old lady. The mamas working for a dollar appear in cities and hollers in the same line, same devil different zip code. The death row last meal is potlikker hugging on a hambone and Karo syrup on spoon bread and butter. Not a steak. Karo is thick corn syrup — dark or light — the thing that ends up on hot biscuits with butter because it fills a sweet hunger when you don’t have much. The most ordinary, nothing-wasted food of a specific Southern rural upbringing.

Worth noting: almost every lyric database online got Karo wrong. Multiple sites, multiple guesses, none of them landing because none of them know what Karo is in that context. The song has a built-in filter. If you know, you know. If you don’t, your guess reveals exactly where you’re from and what you’ve never had on a biscuit. Walking in the sunshine as the response to the devil isn’t naivety — it’s a specific kind of resilience that doesn’t require the devil to stop existing.

Snapping Turtle

Moves like its name suggests — slow, comfortable rise and fall, ripples in water. The turtle is the frame but Leanna is the subject. At eighteen she became a mother and had already raised her little brother. She spent a summer in Paris, Tennessee — the only Paris she’d ever meet. In the song Goodman was on a train through the south of France at the same time, young and poor and weighing her circumstance. Same starting point, probably same dreams, different trajectories — and the difference isn’t character or ambition, it’s luck. The other side of luck. The song has the discipline not to rescue Leanna or offer a lesson. It just holds the two images next to each other and lets the distance speak. Life is cruel no matter where you are in the world. The horrible beauty of it.

Michael Told Me

Builds urgency without becoming frenetic. The repetition of heard I love you from Los Angeles before the verse even moves — that’s the distance the whole song is about, love transmitted across geography and years of drift. The chorus articulates what friendship should be: threading the needle, setting the bone, holding someone’s legs while they scream because you know where the pain is coming from. Good friends give honest truths and then sit with you in them. Setting a bone isn’t gentle — it hurts more in the moment than the break did.

The chorus is the ideal. The verses are what happened. Michael Harmon was a real person — mentor, father figure, the band practiced in the quonset hut behind his house. He died in 2023 while she was writing this album. The song does the rest.

Solitaire

The beautiful one. A slow melody over a story of solitude that understands solitude better than most songs about loneliness manage to. You’re bound to lose if you bet against yourself. Two non-believers searching for ashes for their heads find not a church in town with a priest out of bed. They want the ancient ritual of grief and the institution that’s supposed to provide it is asleep. The bridge names the risk plainly: there’s a flaw in the turn. The agricultural margin again — and you might lose the river while you’re playing cards alone.

I’m in Love

A Sunday morning. What love does to solitary people, hard people. Suddenly RSVPing to things she knows she won’t attend, swimming naked in the neighbor’s pool, half hour conversations with strangers in the checkout line. The moon is right for cutting her hair and she’s checking out Walmart underwear collections. The ancient practice and the utterly mundane in the same two lines. Just let it run.

Nature’s Child

The soft yells and calls in the opening verse are the whole argument before a proper lyric arrives — before language, before structure, just a body making sound in response to the world. That’s nature’s child. A person who still has that in them. Two intimate souls in a tender moment, the junkyard king and his lady, marry me in inclement weather. Something private you accidentally overheard. After all the hard songs, this is the exhale. The reminder of what all the planting is for.

Heat Lightning

The front porch version of love. Centuries of summer-evening porch sitters watched the silent flashes, noticed they happened in hot weather, and named it accordingly. The folk term stuck because the alternative — distant thunderstorm lightning — doesn’t sit on a porch nearly as well. The porch sitters weren’t wrong that something was happening. They just named it from experience rather than a meteorology textbook. Which is exactly what planting by the signs is.

The love she’s describing exists at that same distance. You can see it from a hundred miles away but the thunder doesn’t reach you. The old timer’s voice preserved in an audio recording at the end of the track is the oral tradition the whole album is built around. Most people will skip past it. Don’t. It flows directly into the title track and suddenly the love song has a philosophy behind it.

Planting by the Signs

The thesis made song. Orion chasing the dogs across the western Kentucky sky in late winter isn’t poetry — it’s a calendar. When Orion is visibly pursuing Canis Major toward the western horizon the planting window is open. In western Kentucky that’s late February through April. What goes in the ground then: onions, peas, mustard greens, spinach, beets. The patient crops. The ones built for cold. You don’t plant tomatoes in March. You plant what can handle the conditions and wait.

The plastic stars on the bedroom ceiling alongside Orion — the satellite again, but tender here, because in the context of love even the imitation will do when the intention is true. The pedal steel underneath it all sounds like the sky bending toward you.

Heaven Song

Nine minutes that earn every second. The Chevy Malibu as the vessel of a life. Love hitching a ride at the first red light. Faith, Hope, Sin, and a drunk Jesus at the hotel bar — Jesus saying it’s hard being him when folks think God’s on their side. The most theologically honest line on this or possibly any album. Every war, every injustice, every cruelty committed with divine certainty lives in that sentence.

Real and Authenticity as twins you can barely tell apart, Real having a scar at the dip of his jaw — the mark that living leaves on what’s true. Howard the dog died in the night before they reach Heaven’s gate. The Malibu becomes a hearse before they hit the mud hole outside Heaven. Sin holds her at the gate until she answers for herself. The chorus — maybe if I see it then I’ll want it — is not belief and not denial. It’s someone driving toward something uncertain because stopping isn’t in the vocabulary. Neither sad nor happy, neither rushed nor restricted. Road trip speed.

The Bonus Tracks

I’m in Love — Dan Reeder

Reeder steps outside the song. Goodman’s original is a confession. Reeder’s is a portrait. He sings the whole thing in first person then shifts at the very end — she’s in love — stepping back and observing the person he loves being undone by love. His lo-fi domestic voice sounds like it was captured in the same kitchen where she’s been dancing and singing into a spoon. He produced the original, heard this song before almost anyone. His version is his response. Make of that what you will.

Heat Lightning Redux

Inside the clouds. Where the original is front porch observation — the safe version, the one where the storm is a hundred miles away — the redux is what happens when the distance collapses. Drum and cymbal driven, gritty, distorted guitar underneath the same lyrics. Joan Jett territory: driven beats underneath a vocal that holds its ground against the noise because it was always stronger than it looked.

Pepper

If you were a teenager in the nineties you already know this song. It was one of those tracks that felt like it shouldn’t work but absolutely did. Goodman runs it through humbuckers and a brush on the cymbals and a juke joint guitar solo that situates the whole thing somewhere along the Tennessee River. Soft calm delivery over light distortion makes the casualties feel inevitable rather than surreal. She builds to a louder second chorus, the narrator waking up inside the song, actually trying to look through other people’s eyes rather than just filing a report. The band steps off at the end: we’re gonna take a break and get a drink, y’all do the same.

The Butthole Surfers original is weird like a car crash. Goodman’s version is weird like a dream you can’t shake. She maintained the weirdness through stillness, which is harder than it sounds and most people can’t pull it off.

Planting by the Signs — Senora May and Tyler Childers

The full circle. Goodman has said Senora May was one of the first people she spoke with about building an album around this concept. It turns out May’s father farms by the signs — she didn’t just know the philosophy, she grew up inside it. The cover was recorded in the cabin where May and Childers met, and to Goodman’s knowledge it was the first time the couple had ever recorded together.

The first third of the track is intimate — the solitude of two well known lovers, settled, singing from inside the thing rather than toward it. Then the production opens up and what was a close two shot becomes a wide landscape: two small figures under Orion, a warbly organ somewhere between a musical saw and a leslie speaker sitting underneath like something ancient and slightly unnameable.

A Note on Public Radio¹

The royalties from the Childers and Senora May cover go to WKMS, Goodman’s local NPR station in Murray, Kentucky — which supported her career from the beginning, including giving her one of her first sold out shows after she won their Battle of the Bands. I know WKMS from my time on the board of a local community theater. They gave us airtime, promoted our events, showed up for on-air conversations about what we were doing like it actually mattered — because it did. That’s what local public radio does. It shows up for the things that don’t have marketing budgets.

With federal defunding of public media creating real pressure on rural stations specifically, the gesture isn’t incidental. It’s a statement. Goodman put it plainly: Kentucky neighborly fashion, east to west, taking care of neighbors. You take care of the things that took care of you.

Long live local radio. Long live local artists. Long live the ones who write in a language that requires you to have lived near something to hear correctly.

¹ WKMS is the NPR affiliate station at Murray State University in Murray, Kentucky, serving western Kentucky and surrounding regions. The station faces funding pressure consistent with broader federal cuts to public media. Goodman has been a public advocate for WKMS and directed proceeds from the Childers and Senora May track specifically to support the station. If you’d like to support local public radio in your own community, most NPR affiliates accept direct donations at their station websites. To find your local affiliate, visit npr.org.

The Recipe

2 oz Larrikin Daily Rind gin

3/4 oz fresh lemon juice

3/4 oz elderflower syrup

2 oz Veuve Clicquot Brut Champagne

Method: Shake gin, lemon juice, and elderflower syrup with ice. Double strain into a chilled coupe. Top with Champagne. Garnish with a lemon twist.

A Month of Testing

This recipe is the result of four weeks of systematic development. The process locked variables in sequence--gin first, then sweetener, then citrus, then sparkling wine. Each step built on the previous one. Because the French 75 is simple, the testing had to be precise. There’s nowhere to hide, and every choice matters.

The Development

Gin--Session One

The baseline had to be London Dry. The French 75’s history is built on it, and deviating would require evidence that something else works better. For this baseline test, I used simple syrup as the control sweetener--flat, functional, neutral. The point was to isolate gin.

Bombay Sapphire was the control gin--clean, technically correct, perfectly fine in a way that makes you not think about it at all. That’s exactly what a control should do. It established the floor and made everything else readable by comparison.

Then came the real testing. Three other gins:

Larrikin Daily Rind came first. It brought presence without competing with the lemon or the eventual sweetener layer. Supporting rather than demanding. My partner preferred it immediately and clearly. Strongest candidate.

Larrikin Outback Tuxedo was genuinely close. Both Larrikins are well-made, and the Tuxedo was legitimately competitive. Session notes show “very good, distinguishable from Daily Rind but not in a way that resolves the competition.” This is where partner preference became decisive. Daily Rind it was.

Moons of Juniper (Copper & Kings, Louisville) was the outlier. 96 proof, built on grape brandy rather than grain neutral spirit. The label promises “assertive juniper, forest pine, subtle woody spice, dark chocolate, cloaked in warm tropical orange.” In the cocktail, it delivered. The complexity was real. I preferred it on my own palate--more interesting, more distinctive. But my partner’s preference for Daily Rind was consistent when we tasted them side by side. And practically, that’s the right call for a locked recipe. A gin that only works for one taster isn’t a recipe gin. Moons of Juniper went into variations instead. It will pair with hibiscus syrup later, where its assertiveness won’t compete but complement.

Decision: Larrikin Daily Rind locked.

Sweetener--Session Two

Now that the gin was fixed, the sweetener question opened up. Simple syrup had been the baseline, but with Daily Rind locked, the question became: could we do better?

Simple syrup was functional. It dissolved. It sweetened. And it was flat--no flavor contribution beyond sugar. In a drink with only four ingredients, that’s a liability. The French 75 is elegant precisely because it’s precise. A sweetener that adds nothing doesn’t belong, especially when you have options.

I tested two alternatives: elderflower syrup and hibiscus syrup.

Elderflower Syrup made the difference. The method matters here, and it’s worth documenting because home bartenders will want to make it:

Make a standard 1:1 simple syrup (equal parts sugar and water by weight). Pull it off the heat completely. Let it cool for a few minutes. Then steep elderflower tea bags in the cooling syrup. This is important: do not use boiling water. The delicate floral compounds break down in extreme heat. Taste every minute or so. You’re looking for a moment where the floral note is clearly present but not perfumy or soapy. Pull the bags when you hit that note. The result is a delicate, floral sweetener that integrates seamlessly with gin and lemon. It doesn’t dominate. It supports.

Hibiscus Syrup deserves honest space because it’s not a failure--it’s a different drink. Hibiscus is tart, dark, berry-forward. In the French 75, it pushed toward wine territory, spritzers, something more autumnal and less spring. It wasn’t supporting the gin and lemon the way elderflower does. It was competing. That’s not wrong for a variation--it’s wrong for the recipe. The Moons of Juniper gin will pair with hibiscus later, and that combination might work. But for now, elderflower won decisively.

One important note on sourcing: elderflower tea (flowers from the elder plant) is completely different from elderberry tea (berries from the same plant). Elderberry is tart, dark, jammy, closer to hibiscus.

Decision: Elderflower syrup locked.

Citrus--Session Three

With gin and sweetener fixed, the citrus question became structural. Standard lemon was the baseline, and the question was whether anything else made sense.

The French 75 is elegant, but it’s also a structural drink. The lemon provides the acid that balances the sweetness, the gin, and the eventual Champagne. It’s not a flavoring element--it’s foundational. That work requires real acidity.

I tested blood orange and grapefruit informally during this session (fruit was on hand). Both read sweeter and softer than standard lemon. And here’s the key: when paired with elderflower syrup, both amplified the sweetness rather than providing contrast. The drink didn’t need more sweet. It needed the cut of acid that only standard lemon provides at this point in the season.

Grapefruit is worth flagging for later work. During this session, when I added more Prosecco to the grapefruit version (exploring sparkling wine ratios), the drink moved into drier, more interesting territory. That might matter for a Blood Orange Paloma variation in May--a longer, more effervescent format could work. But for April, locked in: standard lemon is correct.

Decision: Standard lemon locked.

Sparkling Wine--Sessions Four & Five (The Key Finding)

By this point, three variables were locked. Only the final variable remained, and it’s the most editorially significant finding of the entire month. The sparkling wine doesn’t just modify the drink--it fundamentally defines what kind of drink the French 75 is.

I tested two options extensively over these final sessions.

La Marca Prosecco is citrus-forward, approachable, and bright. In this recipe, with everything else locked, it reads closer to a lemon drop than a Champagne cocktail. The carbonation is present but doesn’t carry the same complexity you get from Champagne. The drink is fresher, more summery, less structured. My partner’s clear preference. She noted: “This is the one I’d order on a Tuesday in June.” There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a legitimate perspective.

Veuve Clicquot Brut is drier and more complex. It’s historically correct--Champagne is the drink. The acidity sits differently on the palate. The finish is longer. The drink reads as more substantial, more intentional. It’s my preference. My notes from tasting: “This is what the drink should be. This is the recipe.”

Here’s what matters: we have a split verdict, and both responses are legitimate. This isn’t a case where one is objectively right and one is wrong. This is a case where the choice determines the occasion and season the drink inhabits. The Prosecco version is approachable and accessible. The Champagne version is correct and elegant. I could argue for either one based on the situation.

I didn’t test Cremant d’Alsace (Lucien Albrecht), which would have sat between these two in acid and complexity. It wasn’t easily available locally. I’m documenting that gap honestly rather than guessing.

The published recommendation is Veuve Clicquot Brut as the recipe. La Marca Prosecco is documented as the practical substitute with a clear description of the character difference. You decide based on occasion, budget, and whether they want elegance or accessibility.

Decision: Veuve Clicquot Brut locked.

The Variation (Moons of Juniper + Hibiscus)

The gin I preferred on my own palate pairs better with hibiscus syrup than with the locked recipe. The juniper assertiveness and hibiscus tartness could create something genuinely interesting--more of a signature variation than a baseline cocktail. That’s worth developing separately, in a separate article, with its own testing. It doesn’t replace the locked recipe. It complements it.

The Result

A month of testing reduced to four bottles and a methodology. The French 75 is elegant precisely because it’s precise. Every variable locked in sequence. The gin supports but doesn’t dominate. The elderflower is delicate. The lemon provides structure. The Champagne defines everything. Get those right, and you have a drink that works as well in 2025 as it did in 1915--which is exactly what a classic should do.

There are two people in Jason Petty’s life who call him by his first name. His wife, Alma — refer to her by her prefix (iykyk)— and Jen Hatmaker. Everyone else calls him Prop.

Jen Hatmaker. Remember that name. We’ll come back to it.

I found him through the music first. Somewhere between Excellent and Crimson Cord, before Red Couch, before Hood Politics — that’s where this started for me. I joined his Patreon because the work mattered and I wanted it to continue. I’ve been listening ever since. So when I say This Is Our Fellowship — his new collaborative album with ProducerTrentTaylor (@producertrenttaylor_), out now — hits different, I’m not saying it as someone encountering him for the first time. I’m saying it as someone who has watched the arc. If you want the full breakdown of the record, I’ve already written it. Go read that first, or after — either way, it’s there. What happened in the conversation is its own thing.

I asked him when the shift happened — when he went from being a man full of answers to one willing to live inside the questions. He didn’t have a clean date. Nobody does. “I think you don’t know the day that it happens,” he said. “It’s just the maturation process.” The L’s accumulate. Assumptions get challenged. You look at the men around you and start running the numbers — this one never admits he’s wrong, and look at the trail he’s left; that one leads with humility, and look at who’s still in his corner. The math isn’t complicated. The doing of it is.

What kept coming back, in several different forms, was the weight of being a trusted voice. Not a famous one — a trusted one. There’s a difference. “It may not be millions of people,” he said. “But enough people are listening.” And rather than that inflating him, it pressed him toward accountability. He started thinking about what he wanted to model. Which meant first getting honest about the gap between who he thought he was and who he actually was.

He talked about his marriage in a way most men don’t, and won’t. The slow reckoning that comes when you believe something is going beautifully and Alma — Dr. Alma — was counting the days. Not because anyone was lying. Because he wasn’t listening closely enough to hear what wasn’t being said. Most men never get around to telling that story in public. Prop put it on a record, and then sat across from me and said it plainly.

The phrase at the center of everything — the album, the conversation, the whole ethos of this season — is “You Got It, Chief.” It’s not his coinage; it lives in the vernacular already. That affirmative response to something you fundamentally disagree with and have decided isn’t worth the fight. Sure. Whatever you need to believe. He and Jabee built a song around it, but the philosophy runs deeper than the track. It shows up in his early Twitter battles. In the faith spaces where people decided his “politics” disqualified his belief. In a political landscape where misunderstanding metastasizes into violence because nobody could stop performing long enough to actually listen. “There is so much,” he said, “for me to even answer the foolishness of what you just said — we’d have to go back to freshman year.” And sometimes, he’s decided, it’s just not worth it. You got it, chief.

That kind of peace reads differently in hip hop and in politics — two spaces that traditionally don’t reward what looks like backing down. Prop’s aware of the tension. He lives in it. But he traces the shift back to a slow grind, not a single moment: years of edges being rounded out, the way water rounds a stone. “When you pick those stones up,” he said, “they’re beautiful.” He said it quietly, like a man who has been sitting with that image for a while.

On faith he’s equally careful and equally direct. I Didn’t Leave You isn’t a deconstruction song in the way that label usually lands — it’s a correction. And here’s where Jen Hatmaker pays off. She wasn’t a throwaway name at the top of the conversation. She was the first thread of a longer pull — someone who got read out of the same institution for similar reasons, around the same time. When Prop mentions hanging around Michael Gungor, that’s the second name. The hat trick would’ve been Derek Webb. All different charges. Same verdict. The institution decided it was done with the questions, and the people asking them found themselves on the outside looking in — not because they walked away, but because the door closed behind them.

The Western American church has committed, and continues to commit, incredible harm toward the people inside it. That’s not a fringe take. That’s the lived experience of anyone who got close enough to see how the machinery actually works. Prop isn’t interested in re-litigating it. He’s interested in naming it clearly and moving on. “My views were basically that Mike Brown should still be alive,” he said. “That’s where it started. Y’all had a problem with THAT?” The barometers being used to measure his faith had nothing to do with his actual faith. The point was never to fight the church. It was to stop being its mascot.

Near the end of our conversation, he talked about what draws him toward ritual — coffee in Ethiopia, a cigar with a friend, the kind of unhurried presence he sees in elders and monks and imams and wants, badly, to cultivate in himself. Not mimicry. Absorption. The fellowship the album describes isn’t abstract or religious in the way that word usually sits. It’s some

thing older than that. Specific humans who’ve been in your life so long you can’t remember not knowing them. The casual holiness of just being together with people who knew you before you were anything.

He said he believes peace is a divine attribute. That if you follow an omnipresent God, you should be able to find evidence of that presence everywhere. So he goes looking. He stays curious. He lets the world keep rounding his edges.

This Is Our Fellowship is available now on all streaming platforms. The full album review is at embellishpod.com. This conversation is live on audio, YouTube, and Substack — if that’s your thing.

Pinkies down, fun up.

So what’s actually happening in Bardstown, Kentucky, every September? And how did a festival that started with nine distilleries in 2019 become the event that the bourbon world didn’t know it was missing? Randy Prasse, the Director of the Kentucky Bourbon Festival, joined me this week to answer exactly that.

Distilleries First, Everything Else Second

The framework Randy uses to explain KBF’s growth is deceptively simple: take care of the distilleries, and the enthusiasts will follow. It sounds obvious, but it represents a break from how many events in this space still work. When Randy reimagined the festival between 2019 and 2021, he made a deliberate bet: give the distilleries what they need to show up in a meaningful way, and they’ll keep showing up. So far, he hasn’t been wrong.

The introduction of on-site bottle sales was the inflection point. Randy describes what it did for small craft distilleries in terms that are hard to argue with — for some of them, a three-day window of being in front of several thousand pre-qualified bourbon enthusiasts ready to spend money was the difference between a profitable year and a very difficult one. What started as optional is now essentially mandatory for any distillery that legally can sell. And the consumers who come know it. They’re not just there to sip; they’re there to buy things they can’t get anywhere else.

“The bourbon festival has become the consumer electronics show for bourbon,” Randy told me. “Distilleries are either rebranding altogether or bringing new products to market starting with the festival.”

Lawrenceburg rebranded to Larrkin on the festival grounds. Dark Arts debuted to lines that rivaled Heaven Hill. EJ Curly was essentially unknown when the first modern KBF ran — and walked away as one of the most talked-about booths of the weekend. That unpredictability, Randy says, is a feature, not a bug.

The Line Problem (And the Very Deliberate Fix)

Ask anyone who has attended KBF in the last couple of years about the experience and eventually the conversation turns to lines. Randy doesn’t deflect from it. He’s spent a significant part of this off-season in direct meetings with the top distilleries specifically about line management — how to communicate better with people about what’s available, how to keep someone from standing in a 45-minute queue only to be told they missed the last bottle, and how to build in more moments of controlled anticipation rather than a free-for-all at 11 AM when VIP opens.

Staggered releases may be experimented with this year. Better front-of-house communication is a priority. And Randy draws a useful distinction: the lines aren’t a problem to eliminate, because waiting is a recognized part of bourbon culture. The problem is uninformed disappointment. Those are two very different experiences, and fixing the second one doesn’t require eliminating the first.

New Riff, the Featured Distillery, and the Bill Samuels Origin Story

The 2026 Featured Distillery is New Riff — which feels perfectly timed given that they just took home World’s Best Bourbon at the World Whiskies Awards. The story of how the Featured Distillery program exists at all is worth telling.

It started with Bill Samuels donating a barrel during COVID, before the re-imagined festival had even run its first event. He believed in what Randy was building, wanted to support it, and handed over a barrel’s worth of bourbon for the festival to bottle and sell. Randy’s honest admission that he didn’t quite know what to do with a barrel of bourbon — “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?” — is one of the better moments in the conversation. But from that gesture came a single barrel program, a VIP bottle inclusion, and eventually the full Featured Distillery experience: a named cocktail, the distiller’s dinner, elevated prominence on the grounds.

New Riff started at KBF in a 10-by-10 craft tent. They’ve been there since nearly the beginning. Watching them grow into a world-recognized brand, and then celebrating that by handing them the featured distillery platform, is exactly the kind of story the festival was built to produce.

The Part Nobody Sees

Bardstown has a population of roughly 13,000 people. The Kentucky Bourbon Festival effectively doubles it for a long weekend. You are, by most measures, temporarily building a small city in the grounds of Spalding Hall — a venue that shares its footprint with a Catholic church, a city hall, two schools, and streets that have to keep functioning for people who live there.

Randy talks about this with a seriousness that I think gets underappreciated from the outside. The eight-day setup. The three-day teardown. The $10,000 in overseeding and power-washing to restore the grounds afterward. The security perimeter that went up a full block around the festival after the industry’s profile grew enough to require it. The volunteer coordinator whose entire job is recruiting the hundred-plus people who show up to help distilleries unload trucks. None of this is visible on a Saturday afternoon when you’re sipping bourbon under the trees — which is exactly how it’s supposed to work.

“If we don’t get it right, we have 361 days until we have another opportunity to do it right.”

What’s Still Available for 2026

If you missed the main ticket window, not everything is gone. Sunday Sampler passes — one-day tickets for the final day of the festival — are still available as of the recording of this episode. Randy’s case for Sunday deserves consideration: it’s a more relaxed pace, the bottle-sale pressure has eased, and it’s an ideal entry point for first-timers or anyone who wants to test-drive the experience before committing to a multi-day weekend in 2027. Add-on premium experiences (culinary events, education sessions, cocktail programming, lockers, shuttles) were going on sale this week for anyone who already holds a ticket. Check kybourbonfestival.com and follow @kybourbonfest on Instagram and Facebook for timing.

The Bigger Picture

Fifteen countries represented in the attendee base in 2025. Eighty-five percent of ticket buyers coming from outside Kentucky. Small craft distilleries crediting the event with saving their year. A 36-year festival industry veteran who still wakes up at 3:30 AM on ticket sale day with a nervous stomach. The Kentucky Bourbon Festival isn’t just a good event. It’s become something more structural to the bourbon industry than that — a marketplace, a debut platform, a community gathering point, and a genuinely compelling reason to spend a September weekend in one of the most beautiful small towns in America.

The full conversation is worth your time. Listen wherever you get your podcasts, or watch on YouTube. And if you want more of this — interviews with the people who make, build, and run this industry — subscribe below. Pinkies down.

🎙 Subscribe to EmbellishPod on Substack for full show notes, articles, and more every week. Find all links at www.embellishpod.com · @embellishpod on Instagram and TikTok · #PinkiesDown

Yeah. That April.

The timing was bad, but COVID wasn’t actually the thing that nearly killed the project. It was the Wake County inspectors who approved his building design, then proceeded to make him change almost everything once construction started. By the time he opened in January 2021, he’d gone through his construction budget, his contingency fund, all the money set aside for process piping, and his entire 401k.

The stills he bought in 2018? They’re still sitting in the building in Zebulon. Never been fired up. Probably never will be.

When the Plan Falls Apart

Brandon’s original vision was straightforward enough: train a team to distill, lay down barrels, and eventually blend his own aged whiskey. But when the world changes theres a moment where he has to decide what he was actually doing.

“I had this come-to-Jesus moment with myself,” he told me. “What do I have to do, and what do I love to do? My craft is blending. And blending is completely different from distilling.”

So he pivoted. Hard.

Today Olde Raleigh sources from 11 different distilleries across five states. Brandon works with 14 cask types from around the world—Armagnac, Tawny Port, Palo Cortado Sherry, Spanish orange wine, honey casks, coffee casks. He doesn’t repeat batches. Ever. Each release is built from whatever he’s pulled from what he calls his “pantry” of barrels, and when it’s gone, it’s gone.

Building a Bouquet

Brandon talks about sourcing the way a florist might talk about building an arrangement. Some barrels are the roses—they anchor the blend, provide structure and volume. Others are accent pieces. A pop of flavor on the front. A long finish that builds into a crescendo. Something that wouldn’t work on its own but makes everything around it better.

“The art of blending is layering these elements on top of one another,” he said, “so the sum is greater than its individual parts.”

His small batch uses nine different recipes. The barrel proof pulls from four grains across nine mashbills, ranging from four to 21 years old. Both get dumped into a 350-gallon tank and rested—sometimes for three months—before he starts proofing down. And that proofing happens slowly. Weeks, not days.

“At 120 proof, it tastes one way. As you drop down, you’re taking the mic away from the fire. All these lighter notes start looking to sing. My job is to figure out if I like what’s being sung.”

The Thousand Blends Mission

Here’s where it gets a little crazy.

Brandon’s current project is to release 1,000 unique one-off blends. He calls it “Project Thousand Blends.” Every week, he puts out three one-of-one bottles—different finishes, different combinations, different experiments. Visitors to the tasting room can try flights of whatever’s current and scan a QR code to give feedback.

It’s part R&D lab, part proof of concept, and entirely about putting in reps.

“How do you become the best at anything?” Brandon asked. “You get the reps. That word ‘master blender’—I own that title. But I want to earn it by outworking every other blender in the world.”

At his current pace, he’ll release 181 distinct products this year. That includes the Thousand Blends bottles, member exclusives for the Olde Raleigh Whiskey Society, limited releases like Olde Stoge, and his core lineup.

I don’t know anyone else in the industry doing anything close to that volume of unique expressions to be released, not to mention the ones that never see the public.

Olde Stogie and the Armagnac That Wasn’t Ready

Olde Stogie is probably Olde Raleigh’s flagship limited release at this point—a bourbon finished in Armagnac and Tawny Port casks, designed to pair with cigars. It won best micro-distillery in the US at an international competition in 2023.

Brandon didn’t even know that was something you could win.

“I submitted it to get a report card,” he said. “I’m out here in rural North Carolina. The prominent blenders are in Scotland. I just wanted to know—how am I doing against the folks who started it all?”

Apparently pretty well.

But the real lesson from Olde Stogie was patience. Around month eight of the finishing process, Brandon noticed the Armagnac really starting to open up into the bourbon. Instead of bottling, he let it sit another six months.

“Sometimes good things just take time. You can rush it. But you’re probably not going to get the best version of what you’re making.”

Hand Everything

If you’re a process efficiency consultant, Olde Raleigh will make you twitch. There’s no automation. Blending is done with paddles. Bottling is by hand. Labeling is by hand. Brandon calls himself “a Six Sigma consultant’s worst nightmare.”

But that’s the trade-off for owning 100% of the company. No investors telling him that 181 releases in a year is excessive. No board questioning why he’s experimenting with a 10-cask finish that nobody asked for. No pressure to expand into 15 states before the product is ready.

“I don’t really have hobbies,” Brandon admitted. “Olde Raleigh is my baby. I had a couple drive five hours from Charleston to spend two hours with us, then drive five hours back. I think about that. They could’ve been anywhere. They chose to spend their Saturday here.”

The stills are still sitting in the building. Brandon calls them the most expensive art exhibit in Zebulon.

But the blending—the thing he thought he was working toward—turned out to be the whole point.

Olde Raleigh Whiskey is located in Zebulon, North Carolina. The next Olde Stoge release drops in two weeks. For more information or to join the Whiskey Society, visit olderaleighwhiskey.com.

#PinkiesDown

Propaganda & ProducerTrentTaylor Mid90s Records / Reflection Music Group Released April 10, 2026

A note before we begin: If you are offended by ideology that differs from yours, whether political, religious, or otherwise, you should listen to this album. Not as a warning to stay away. As a challenge to engage anyway.

I’ve been following Propaganda for a long time. Before Red Couch Podcast. Before Hood Politics. Somewhere between Excellent and Crimson Cord, back when I joined Patreon specifically to support him and Alma because the work mattered and I wanted to help keep it going. I had him on my podcast years ago. So when I say this album hits, I’m not saying it as someone encountering him for the first time. I’m saying it as someone who’s tracked the evolution from Humble Beast to here.

I’ve said it before: sometimes it’s best not to listen to a Prop album for the first time in the car. You’ll end up pulling over to parse through the words he just spoke. It’s dense. It’s worth it.

This Is Our Fellowship takes its time. Not urgent. Important. There’s a difference. ProducerTrentTaylor built this thing on vintage gospel samples at deliberate tempos, the kind of pacing that demands you stay present. This is not background music. It requires attention. Sometimes those messages need space to breathe. The room to pause.

The structure here is intentional. Gospel samples throughout give this the shape of a sermon. But it’s not preachy. It’s more like a TED talk from an old head — someone who’s been through enough to have earned the right to say something. The title track opens by asking you to soften before the message arrives. Open your eyes. Open your ears. Open your heart. What follows isn’t instruction from above. It’s wisdom from next door.

And while the language is rooted in Christianity and the focus is often on men and boys, the message reaches further than that. This is a letter to anyone who was taught to bury it all and knuckle up. Anyone handed a limited toolkit and told to figure it out. The specifics are Prop’s. The invitation is universal.

Listen along while I scribe my thoughts in a hopefully intelligible manner.

This Is Our Fellowship

The album opens with vulnerability about emotional tools denied in childhood. Prop uses the image of crayon boxes: boys handed the 8-pack when they needed the 64. Limited palette for a full spectrum of experience. “Learning to paint with more colors,” he says. “We made this song cry.” The song becomes the container for what couldn’t be expressed elsewhere.

Who Is You

This track maps the machinery that creates the limitation. Sports metaphors as the first language boys get handed. Toxic masculinity as the downstream effect. Peer pressure as the enforcement mechanism. But also the way out: experiencing the world opened up the language he needed to move past it all. Travel as education. Getting outside the system that built you in order to see it clearly.

There’s a Mike Tyson quote that floats around about not being capable of great peace without being capable of great violence. Prop’s doing something with that here. Hip-hop as a historically “tough” genre creating space for vulnerability. A man who’s never had to be hard talking about softness reads as naive. A man who’s been in it for two decades choosing vulnerability reads as evolved. The credibility of the vessel matters.

Gas You Up (Street) [feat. Danny A. Thomas]

Does exactly what the title says. The kind of song you hear and know it was written for someone else but you can lay it neatly into your own life. That’s the best version of what music does.

Figure It Out [feat. Curtiss King]

Shifts to boom bap and mentorship, a lighthouse for whoever needs it. There’s no blueprint for growing up. Just the invitation to find your way through this world and grow beyond your own history, traumas, and the rest.

And then he reaches into sexuality. This may be uncomfortable for a portion of his audience still in the church, those not deconstructed. But Prop hasn’t been in that lane in a long time. The spiritual undertones remain because that’s foundational to who he is. The institutional constraints? Gone for years.

Not In Danger [feat. Scarub]

Centers on an image that stuck with me: a bear in a cage. A violent entity kept in the dark until it needs to be let out, but on a chain. Prop’s talking about how he got rid of his. Set your anger free. You aren’t in danger. The title becomes permission to disarm. The threat you’ve been preparing for isn’t coming the way you think. The readiness itself is the weight.

Wish You Well

Draws a line: be the storm or the safe harbor, but you can’t be both. Not at the same time. Not to the same people. He doesn’t give preference to either. Both are useful. He uses the imagery of discovering fire for the first time, the beauty that can come from destruction. The problem isn’t being one or the other. It’s pretending you’re something you’re not.

The track is about being self-aware, working to grow, but not forgetting that we’re all working on ourselves and none of us will get out of this alive. Nothing but joy, nothing but peace, no more dying, the sample repeats. Soft funk organs and a sway like a choir.

Burn It Down [feat. Fashawn]

This is the storm. Prop names the whole grid of broken systems: church, school, political, armed forces, police state. All of them. If you aren’t a little progressive, this song is going to step on your toes. He mentions being in his “Jesus and the money changers” mode right before the beat drops. Sanctified testosterone. Molotovs in backpacks. The cleansing fire isn’t partisan. It’s total.

Build

The necessary sequel. The sample slows way down. Prop tells the story of LA during the wildfires, when community members who had every reason not to cooperate put differences aside to help keep their neighborhoods together. Fellowship in action. Not theory.

“The absence of rulers is not the absence of leaders.” That’s a bar.

The people who step up when the structure fails were always there. The broken systems just kept them out of the rooms where decisions happened. The call to political action is at the local level. Let it bubble up from there. You don’t rebuild by replacing one set of rulers with another at the top. You rebuild from the block. From people who actually know each other.

You Got It Chief [feat. Jabee]

Takes aim at people who are incredibly informed in their own wrongness. Folks who have a stronger interest in winning an argument or winning an election than in being right. In doing the right thing. We have a limited number of words in our life. A limited number of breaths. Some people aren’t worth wasting them on.

I Didn’t Leave You

This is where the album becomes an outright indictment of the American Christian church. Plain and simple. He specifically mentions Trump and his disdain for the institution that chose that alignment.

Prop’s argument is direct: Trump consumed the church because he hates what it actually stands for. Found a power structure that, if he could devour, would allow him to gain power at a higher level. Not seeking faith. Seeking apparatus. The church was consumable. Available to be eaten. The institution made itself into food for a man who was never there for their God.

“A little more nuance that comes with a little age / a little less ego, a lotta less rage / a lotta less steeples, a lotta less stage.”

Three lines mapping his whole trajectory.

Don’t It Feel Good [feat. Derek Minor]

Arrives as an exhale after the indictment. Almost universalism in his beliefs now. This is about being refreshed by the presence of the things you enjoy. The decisions you’ve made that have grown you. Derek Minor’s verse draws on the imagery of field versus house — the hard work outside might be more respectable than chewing back who you are to get inside. The institution is the house. Prop chose the field.

You Can’t Name A Day One

Ends the album with a lighter flick. A joint being lit. The childhood memory of figuring out who among the characters in your life would become the through line of friendship.

If you can’t name a person who was there for you in the beginning, you are untrustworthy.

That’s the test. Not what you say about yourself. Who’s still around from the start.

There’s an old phrase: lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas. But Prop flips it. It’s not just who you’re with now. It’s whether you still have the people from the beginning. If you can’t name them, you didn’t pick bad company. You didn’t keep any company. You burned through people. Used them up. Left them behind.

The fellowship this album describes isn’t abstract. It’s specific humans who’ve been in your life so long you can’t remember not knowing them. The joint is the sacrament. The lighter flick is the call to gather. End of the album, we’re back in the backyard from the cover art. The chairs. The handwriting. The casual holiness of just being together with people who knew you before you were anything.

This Is Our Fellowship is available now on all streaming platforms.

John Hughes writes about cocktails, music, and whatever else won’t fit in the main section at Embellish. This review appears in Off-Menu.

She was a cardiovascular nurse practitioner, working the front lines during COVID, putting herself through grad school on a $50 whiskey budget. The bottle of Blanton’s she received as a gift sparked curiosity. The frustration of never finding Buffalo Trace on Ohio shelves sparked something else—a stubborn determination to find what was actually good without chasing hype.

That accidental education became a podcast presence, then barrel picks, then brand ambassador work, then a national role helping build someone else’s company. And then, after four or five years of pouring blood and tears into another person’s dream, a question: Do I keep doing this for someone else, or do I bet on myself?

She bet on herself. The result is Archer Eland.

An Homage in Rye

The name is a living letter to her mother. Eland is Wendy. Archer is her mom—a woman whose work ethic and determination mirror the grain itself, thriving under harsh conditions.

“Culturally speaking, that’s kind of what you do,” Wendy told me. “You thank your parents for everything. And so this was my way of doing it through the nuance of rye.”

Archer Eland is a 100% rye whiskey brand. No corn. No wheat. No secondary grains. Just rye—95% unmalted, 5% malted—distilled and blended at Middle West Spirits in Columbus, Ohio. It’s a deliberate choice in a market that often treats rye as bourbon’s spicier sibling rather than a category worth exploring on its own terms.

“I traveled so much and I’d seen enough markets to know there was a need,” Wendy said. “Seas of bourbon on the shelves. Maybe one or two rye offerings. Pigeonholing is number one. Lack of diversity within the rye section is number two. I wanted to fix that.”

The Collection

Archer Eland launched with four expressions, each telling a different chapter of Wendy’s transition from healthcare to whiskey.

Solstice (104 proof) came first. Light. Citrus-forward. Floral. “I was wanting to hold onto hope,” Wendy said. “I was wanting to hold onto that warmth, that there’s something else on the horizon.” It blends four and seven-year barrels to create something delicate enough for the rye-curious but complex enough to reward attention.

Aurora (110 proof) was the problem child. It required four recalculations. The original yield was supposed to be 40 cases; Wendy blew through that and had to keep adjusting. At one point, exhausted and fed up, she told her team to just dump what was left of the seven-year barrels into the blend. Two days later, she tasted it and thought: This is really good.

“Aurora taught me to trust myself,” Wendy said. “It was a dark time. But I pulled through.”

Cashmere (126 proof, seven years) was supposed to be part of the same lot as Suede. When blended together, they were terrible. Split apart, they became two distinct expressions.

“That was the first time I thought, I’m going to be okay,“ Wendy said. “My first real exhale.”

Suede (126 proof, seven years) is the happy accident. Wendy remembers growing up in Zimbabwe, where tobacco auction floors stretched for miles and the smell of drying leaves changed with each stage of the harvest. Leather.

Suede is a one-and-done release. Once it’s gone, it’s never coming back.

First Generation

There’s a phrase you hear constantly in American whiskey: seventh generation, eighth generation, ninth generation. Families who have transcended time, who kept distilling through Prohibition and wars and market crashes. We honor those names.

But Wendy is building something different. She’s first generation. First of her name. An African woman in an industry where that’s almost unheard of, putting down stakes meant to outlast her.

“How many times have you ever seen a first of its name and it continuing to grow as a legacy?” she asked. “We love and admire those ones that have transcended time. But to actually see someone go through in real time, putting stakes, first generation? I’ve never seen it been done before like that.”

By the end of the year, Wendy will be laying down her own new make. She’s researching different rye varieties. She’s already running barrel modeling projections at 2 a.m. She recently bought her first finishing barrels—a purchase that triggered what she described as her first “hyperventilating episode.” The money was real. The stakes are real.

But so is the vision.

Where to Find Archer Eland

Archer Eland is available at 25 OHLQ stores across Ohio and online at shop.middlewestspirits.com (shipping available to Kentucky and other states). Cashmere is nearly sold out—down to roughly 10-18 bottles as of recording. Suede will take its place on allocation.

This is a brand built with intention. With purpose. With the kind of audacity that comes from betting on yourself when the safer path is right there waiting.

Wendy put it simply: “I only have one life. I don’t want to be on my death bed wishing I had done it.”

Listen to the full conversation: [Audio link] | [YouTube link]

Follow EmbellishPod: @embellishpod on Instagram and TikTok

#PinkiesDown

Content note: This album deals directly with suicidal ideation, particularly tracks one and seven. 988 is available 24/7. Take care of yourself first.

I came to this sideways.

Mid-40s. Fully marinated in the era when every white dude with an acoustic guitar was running the Dashboard Confessional playbook into the ground. Dorm rooms. Coffee shop open mics. That guy at the party who needed you to really listen to this one. You know the guy. You might’ve been the guy. I might’ve been the guy. The confessional singer-songwriter thing wasn’t a subculture. It was the weather.

A connection got me early access to Hit Like a Girl’s fifth LP, and the timing felt right for reasons I couldn’t explain until I’d listened three times through.

Nicolle Maroulis (they/them) has been making records since 2017. They run No More Dysphoria, a nonprofit helping trans people afford transition — funded through merch sales at DIY shows, because that’s how you do it when nobody’s writing grants for you. Philadelphia scene kid. Show up, pay dues, build things with your hands.

I’m not from that world. But Burning at Both Ends doesn’t check membership cards. Just: have you felt something, lost something, kept going anyway?

Yeah. Same.

The Shape

Eight tracks. Twenty-seven minutes. Every song earns its place.

Opens with someone lying in cold dying grass while the narrator’s at the store buying their favorite sweets, oblivious. Closes with the narrator receiving mail for someone who’ll never read it. Between those points: polyamory betrayal specific enough to use the word “metamour,” a friendship that dies when someone moves to the West Coast to find themselves (meditating or whatever), and the kind of mental health spiral where you start planning who’ll watch your cat.

Heavy. But the songs move. There’s a propulsive quality even in the darkest stuff — the only way out is through, keep walking.

Track one: you’re watching someone else’s crisis unfold. Track seven: the crisis has migrated inward. The album teaches you to watch for signs in others, then reveals the person you should’ve been watching was yourself.

This is a record where the tracklist matters. Remember when artists used to wrestle with sequencing? What comes next, what’s the arc, where do you land the listener? Streaming playlists and shuffle buttons have mostly killed that instinct. But someone sat with these eight songs and thought about the journey — crisis to betrayal to tenderness to anger to collapse to grief. You’re supposed to take it in order. It rewards you for staying.

Sonic Geography

Press materials say: midwest emo, synth pop, hardcore. Sure. But that’s like describing a cocktail by listing the spirit categories.

Track one opens with steel guitar and ambient wind. That’s Tim McGraw territory. “Please Don’t Take the Girl” energy. Old country is just emo with a twang anyway — feelings too big for talking, set to a melody you can carry in your truck.

Track two kicks in with rockabilly tremolo, then dissolves into noise. There’s a synth line on track three that would’ve killed on Guitar Hero circa 2007. Track four’s keyboard wash could score a John Hughes film if John Hughes made films about queer people begging partners to just say it already.

Producer Matt Schimelfenig and Jacob Blizard (Lucy Dacus, Illuminati Hotties) give this thing sonic range that keeps it from feeling like one long song. It’s not a genre exercise. It’s: here’s the feeling, what sound does it need? — and assuming your ear knows how to follow.

The Dual Voice

Here’s the trick that makes this work physically: two vocal approaches, running simultaneous or in sequence. One singing. One screaming.

The scream is release. The singing is trying to hold it together. When they happen at the same time — that’s the reality of being a person. Falling apart and functioning. Both at once.

For those of us who grew up screaming along to songs that weren’t built for screaming — willing the Indigo Girls to be louder than they were, adding catharsis to someone else’s melody — there’s something generous here. The scream is built into the architecture. You’re not doing it alone. The song shows you where to let go.

And look: Maroulis is thirty-eight. They know you can’t scream for twenty-seven minutes. The clean passages let you breathe. Rest stops on a highway heading somewhere dark. Songs built for people who want to feel everything and also survive feeling it.

The Specific and the Universal

“Metamour” shows up in the third verse of track three. No explanation. Either you know it means your partner’s other partner, or you figure it out, or it washes over you. Maroulis isn’t here to educate. They’re here to describe what it feels like watching your partner teach someone else your songs while you leave the room.

Specificity runs throughout. Mom’s kitchen table the ex might still have. Joshua Tree hike where promises got made. Gemstones and tarot cards on the mantle next to the funeral collage. Details aren’t decorative. They’re evidence. This happened. This exact thing.

There’s a High Fidelity moment in track three. You know the scene — Rob Gordon is making a mixtape for another woman and his girlfriend walks in. Nobody’s undressed. Nobody’s yelling. But everyone in the room knows what it means. The look on his face is the whole confession.

Track three has that moment:

Remember when you taught me all your old songs
And one day I caught you teaching them to him
I’ll never forget the look on your face
That was when I knew I’d been replaced.”

Not cheating. Not fighting. Just: oh. This is where your attention actually is. And you both know it now.

What surprised me: the specificity makes it more accessible. I’ve never had a metamour. Never been exiled from a DIY scene. But I’ve watched someone struggle and not known how to help. Had friendships end badly. Sat with objects that belonged to someone who isn’t coming back.

Particular unlocks universal. Confessional songwriting has always known this. Maroulis is just working with materials the genre hasn’t always had access to — or been willing to name.

Joy as Resistance (No, Not the IDLES Album)

The phrase traces back to Black poet Toi Derricotte, through Audre Lorde, into ACT UP during the AIDS crisis. Simple idea: when systems want you dead or diminished, your capacity for pleasure and connection is defiance.

Maroulis runs No More Dysphoria. They know the statistics on trans suicide. They made an album with a song called “Romanticize” that asks how many ways a person can romanticize ending their own life.

But the album also has “Are You in Love” — synth-pop patience and hope. Has “Keepsake Theory” — crying through a concert and staying anyway. Joy and crisis coexist. They have to.

There’s a moment in track two: two people at a show, singing along to the same song, both using it to grieve the same relationship. They might know the other one’s there. Doesn’t matter. They’re both still singing. Crying. Alive.

Crying and singing are the same thing.

That might be the whole review.

The Close

Final track: “Funeral Collage.” Exactly what it sounds like.

Someone’s gone. Mail still arrives. The dog doesn’t understand. Narrator hasn’t touched their guitar in months — might still carry the touch.

The voice goes lo-fi at the end. Answering machine quality. Something preserved but degrading. Past reaching into present.

Last image: eventually, put the belongings in the garage. Wipe dust off the funeral collage. Not healing. Continuing. Maybe continuing is healing. Move the objects. Keep the dog. Go outside.

Emo done well can take it out of you. This one took it out of me. I gutted it out, took notes on my computer, and came out the other side a little hollowed.

But that’s the point. Genre exists because some feelings are too big for talking, too complicated for crying. Only option left: make it into something with a beat you can move to.

Hit Like a Girl made something you can move to. It’ll cost you. You’ll get through it.

Now if you’ll excuse me — vitamin D. Touch grass. The alive kind.

Burning at Both Ends is out now on Cryptid Records.

Hit Like a Girl tours through spring 2026. Dates include Silk City (Philadelphia), Pouzza Fest (Montreal), and — for those keeping score at home — Midwest Friends Fest in Newport, KY.

For more on No More Dysphoria: nomoredysphoria.org

If you made it through: what landed for you? Hit reply or drop a comment. This is Off-Menu #2, and I’m still figuring out what belongs here.

This is where I landed. Not the platonic ideal, but the point where further improvements would cost more time and money than they’re worth. I could keep chasing perfection with $200 bottles of single pot still or high-acid citrus varieties that don’t exist at my grocery store. But diminishing returns are real, and knowing when to stop is part of the process.

The Recipe

Stupid Simple Sour

• 2 oz Fighting 69th Irish Whiskey

• 1 oz fresh Meyer lemon juice

• ½ oz agave syrup

• 1 egg white

• 2 dashes Angostura bitters

Shake all ingredients hard with ice for 30 seconds. Strain out the ice, then dry shake for 15 seconds. Double strain into a coupe(i know it’s supposed to be for ice shards but for me it’s for the egg white bits that might not get integrated…..not interested in a side of snot with my drink).

The Development

Irish whiskey’s appeal is its lighter profile. Smooth, approachable, easy drinking. That’s also why it’s tricky in a sour. Every choice you make shows up in the glass with nowhere to hide.

The standard whiskey sour template — grab any citrus, any sweetener, shake with foam if you feel like it — doesn’t hold up here. I tested systematically: one variable at a time, everything else constant, documenting what worked and what didn’t.

Foam Agent(s)

Aquafaba is the liquid from a can of chickpeas. It foams like egg white when you shake it, which makes it a vegan substitute for cocktails that need that silky texture. I’d seen it in other drink recipes, so I figured it was worth testing.

It wasn’t.

The chickpea undertone that bourbon would bury? Irish whiskey’s lighter body puts it on full display. This isn’t about dietary accommodation or personal preference. It’s format incompatibility. Notes of hummus have no place in a whiskey sour for me. Keep the chickpeas in the falafel.

Egg white resolved the problem. What it does for this drink is similar to what whipped cream does for a slice of key lime pie — it softens the citrus edge, adds textural interest, and makes everything feel more cohesive. You get the balance and the presentation working together.

I started with a traditional dry shake but I prefer reverse dry shake for this one — shaking with ice first, then straining and shaking without to build the foam. Traditional dry shake works fine too; this is just where I landed.

Locked: egg white, reverse dry shake.

Sweetener

I decided to make my own syrups for this project. Tested simple syrup, honey syrup, and agave against the baseline recipe.

Simple syrup did what simple syrup does. Clean, neutral, functional. Lets the other ingredients carry the weight.

Honey was the anticipated winner going in. Irish whiskey already has floral character, and honey feels like a natural complement. In practice, the two floral notes competed rather than layered. It didn’t taste bad — it just didn’t add what I expected.

Agave was the surprise. There’s a quality to agave’s sweetness that finishes quick and stays out of the way. The drink felt more cohesive without tasting any sweeter. Hard to articulate exactly what changed, but it was unmistakable in the glass.

One note on honey syrup: shelf life is about three weeks in my house before it starts fermenting. I discovered this when I went to make a coffee tonic and the syrup fizzed. That’s not a flavor profile I was chasing.

Locked: agave syrup.

Spirit Selection

With foam and sweetener locked, I tested four Irish whiskeys against the working recipe.

Fighting 69th was the control — an approachable Irish blend, nothing fancy. Light body, clean flavor, lets the recipe do the talking.

Keeper’s Heart Irish + American has a rye component that looked promising on paper. More body, a little more spice to push back against the citrus. But the sour format compressed everything. Whatever distinguished it from Fighting 69th neat didn’t survive the shaker. I do wonder if the simple syrup would have worked better here.

Waterford Rathclogh 1.1 is a single malt with real terroir character. Mineral, fresh grass, floral notes. Exceptional for sipping. When I shook it with citrus, it produced a medicinal edge that threw off the whole drink. The complexity that makes it interesting neat becomes a liability in this format. There’s an audience for this version but it wasn’t what I was going for.

I didn’t test Waterford Cuvée Koffi — it has really unique notes, and I didn’t want to continue to chase rabbits. Still curious though. Might circle back to that one after this is published. Something tells me it could work with the right adjustments.

Great sipping whiskeys and great cocktail whiskeys aren’t always the same bottle. Fighting 69th won because it did exactly what a cocktail base should do: provide a clean, authentic foundation and get out of the way.

Locked: Fighting 69th.

Citrus

Meyer lemon was my baseline throughout development. I used it because thats what Kroger Pickup put in my bag. The other variables optimized around it, so it’s worth acknowledging that a different starting citrus might have led to a different final recipe.

Tested Meyer lemon, standard lemon, white grapefruit juice, and blood orange.

Grapefruit threw me off. It was sweet in a way I wasn’t expecting — sugary sweet, not citrus sweet. Pushed the drink toward candy territory, which is its own thing and not what I was building here.

I wanted blood orange to work. Really wanted it. Same problem. Too sweet, not enough acid. Both options surrendered the structure that makes a sour a sour. But optically it would have been really nice to shoot.

Standard lemon was fine. Got the job done structurally. But it felt incomplete somehow — the right acidity without any of the aromatic complexity.

Meyer lemon landed best. The lower acidity and rounded, almost floral character paired with Irish whiskey instead of fighting it. Everything clicked.

Worth noting: Meyer lemon’s lower acidity required a ratio adjustment. This recipe uses 1 oz citrus to ½ oz sweetener — more juice, less sweet than the classic 2:1:1 template. The ingredient dictates the ratio, not the other way around.

Locked: Meyer lemon at 1 oz.

What This Taught Me

The foam works like whipped cream on pie. It softens sharp edges, adds texture, makes everything come together. Skip it and the drink feels unfinished.

Aquafaba doesn’t belong here(or anywhere in a cocktail maybe). What bourbon can mask, Irish whiskey exposes. Chickpea undertones are not subtle.

Meyer lemon changes the math. The classic sour ratio assumes standard lemon acidity. Different citrus means different proportions.

Agave is underrated in whiskey sours. Its quick-finishing sweetness keeps everything else in focus. Honey, the intuitive choice, created redundancy instead of depth.

Expensive doesn’t mean better for cocktails. Two bottles that cost significantly more than Fighting 69th got outperformed. The sour format compresses subtlety rather than showcasing it.

St. Patrick’s Day is one day. This works year-round.

Stupid Simple Sour.

Appendix: Syrups

If you’re making your own, here’s what I used:

Agave Simple 2 parts agave nectar to 1 part water by volume. Combine in a jar and shake until incorporated. No heat required. Keeps refrigerated for several weeks.

Honey/Sugar Syrup 1 part honey/sugar to 1 part water by volume. Warm gently to combine since the sweetener doesn’t cooperate cold. Keeps about three weeks refrigerated before fermentation becomes a risk.

What’s your go-to Irish whiskey for mixing? I’m curious whether anyone’s found a mid-range bottle that outperforms Fighting 69th in this format.

Tickets are already selling out. Here’s everything you need to know.

A 30-Minute Ceremony That Changed Everything

Bardstown, Kentucky, 2018. A small gathering on the lawn of historic Spalding Hall. The mayor reads a proclamation. A handful of master distillers raise a glass. Thirty minutes later, everyone goes back to work.

That was the first National Bourbon Day celebration the Bourbon Capital Alliance ever put together. No tickets. No schedule. Just a toast and a handshake.

Fast forward to 2026, and it’s eight full days of events — June 14th through June 21st — across some of the most storied distillery campuses in Kentucky. Two events sold out within the first three hours of ticket sales opening. And the man sitting across from me on this episode has been there for virtually every step of the journey.

Sam Lacy is the Executive Director of the Bourbon Capital Alliance, the Bardstown-based 501(c)3 nonprofit that organizes, markets, and runs National Bourbon Week in partnership with ten distillery partners. He joined the show on the day tickets went live — March 26th — and if the constant mentions of his phone buzzing with sellout notifications were any indication, things are already moving fast.

How a Small Town Claimed Its Identity

Before there was a National Bourbon Week, there had to be a reason to build one. That reason, Sam explained, goes back to 2016, when local distillery leaders walked into a meeting with Bardstown’s mayor and economic development office and essentially said: you’re not doing this justice.

Bardstown calls itself the Bourbon Capital of the World, but at the time, there wasn’t a cohesive infrastructure to back that up. The distilleries were there — Heaven Hill, Makers Mark, Beam, Barton — but nothing tied them together into an experience a visitor could navigate or a community could rally around.

Out of that meeting came a task force, and out of that task force came the Bourbon Capital Community Alliance in 2017. Sam took over as Executive Director in 2019, initially carving out five hours a week from his day job at the tourism commission. He grew up in Bardstown, spent time in Atlanta working for Travel South USA, and came back with a perspective on what genuine destination tourism looked like. He saw what Bardstown could be.

And he quietly started building it.

Growing Up: From Three Days to Eight

The math here is pretty remarkable. The 2018 ceremony was thirty minutes. By 2019, Sam had expanded it to three days of events. COVID hit in 2020, and rather than go dark, they pivoted to virtual content and kept the momentum alive. By 2024, the first official National Bourbon Week launched as a six-day run. In 2025, seven days. And in 2026? A full eight days — starting on National Bourbon Day, June 14th, and running straight through to the following Sunday.

“We’re the bourbon capital of the world,” Sam told me. “Let’s own it.”

The other thing that makes this work, Sam was quick to point out, is the unusual willingness of the partner distilleries to cooperate. These are, in the traditional sense, competitors. They’re fighting for the same shelf space at the same liquor stores. But in Bardstown, something different happens. The distilleries understand that when a visitor leaves Heaven Hill, if somebody from Heaven Hill tells them to go visit Willett or Lux Row, everybody wins. That community-first mentality has allowed National Bourbon Week to schedule events across the week without distilleries stepping on each other — the bigger names up front, the smaller operations given prime days in the middle of the week.

“It’s a credit to them,” Sam said more than once.

What’s Happening in 2026: The Full Breakdown

So what are you actually signing up for? Here’s the shape of the week:

Sunday, June 14 — National Bourbon Day

The week kicks off with two very different vibes happening simultaneously, and honestly you could make a strong argument for attending both.

Heaven Hill opens the door — literally — with the Elijah Craig National Bourbon Day Celebration at their Bourbon Experience on Gilkey Run Road. It runs 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., it’s free to attend with registration, and it sets the tone nicely: tastings, craft demonstrations, and exclusive merchandise on-site. A low-pressure, high-reward entry point into the week.

A few miles out, Preservation Distillery is doing something altogether different. Their Boone Family Reunion Distillery Festival runs 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. and is one of the more thoughtfully constructed events on the entire calendar. You get product tastings with a souvenir glass, food, a custom Clayton & Crume leather keepsake, and live seminars led by Proprietor Marci Palatella, Master of Maturation Kyle Lloyd, and Head Distiller JT Leasor. If you know Preservation’s juice — Very Olde St. Nick, Rare Perfection, the 10-year they just released — you already know why this one is worth your time. If you don’t know Preservation yet, this is your introduction. Either way, you’re not leaving disappointed.

Monday, June 15

The Beam Backyard Luau at the Beam Family Home in downtown Bardstown. Fred and Freddie Noe. Bourbon. BBQ. A backyard. They brought this one back after it sold out last year, and it sold out again — fast. If you got a ticket, you already know. If you didn’t, put it at the top of your list for 2027. One of the most genuinely fun nights in bourbon.

Tuesday, June 16

Two experiences on Tuesday, and both reward the kind of person who shows up to learn rather than just to drink.

Log Still’s Proofed by the Spring is capped at 24 guests at $150 a ticket and is led personally by founder and president Wally Dant. The premise is simple and brilliant: go to the limestone spring that feeds the distillery’s water, taste the water, taste the bourbon, understand the connection. Log Still’s campus is one of the most beautiful anywhere on the Trail — actual lodging on site, an amphitheater, rolling Kentucky hills — and doing this experience with Wally himself is the kind of thing you’d struggle to put a price on.

Old SteelHouse has two seatings for their Finish Your Own Blueprint Series Batch 002 Experience, held out at the former T.W. Samuels distillery site in Deatsville. You tour the property, take a short finishing class, and then walk out with your own Blueprint Series Batch 2 bottle and four wood cube options to finish it exactly how you want. Educational, tactile, and genuinely interactive — this is the kind of experience that makes you think differently about what’s in the glass.

Wednesday, June 17

Wednesday is the fullest day of the week and it’s not particularly close.

Lux Row kicks things off with their Front Yard BBQ with Master Distiller John Rempe — 200 tickets, the custom smoker is going, and they’re up on that hilltop campus five minutes from downtown with access to the Stonehouse and visitor center. Big, social, and exactly the kind of afternoon that slides naturally into evening.

Over at Maker’s Mark, Bill Samuels Jr. and Master Distiller Dr. Blake Layfield are hosting Bill’s Bourbon Soiree in the visitor center — cocktails, bites, and that stunning campus as your backdrop. The word “soiree” is doing real work here. This is an elegant evening.

And in Springfield, Potter Jane is running their Big Vat Blending Class — second seating, because the first one sold out within hours of tickets going live. Twelve people, maximum. Denny and Jane running the room. Go to the website to find out what “Big Vat” actually refers to.

Thursday, June 18

James B. Beam Distilling Co. hosts A National Bourbon Week Celebration at the Kitchen Table — an intimate dinner at one of the best restaurant spaces on any distillery property in the state. Thoughtful food, exceptional cocktails, and the kind of evening that earns its place on the calendar. Potter Jane also runs an additional seating of the Big Vat Blending Class for anyone who missed Wednesday.

Friday, June 19

This is the anchor. The Bourbon Capital Mash Up at Bespoke in Bond in downtown Bardstown is the event Sam Lacy and the Bourbon Capital Alliance have been building toward all week, and in its second year it’s gotten bigger and sharper.

All ten partner distilleries under one roof. Every one of them paired with a local chef or their own culinary team. Small bites designed to sit alongside a specific pour from each distillery — thoughtfully paired, a mix of savory and sweet, and enough food that you genuinely don’t need dinner beforehand. Master distillers in the room. Accessible. Approachable. All in one beautiful downtown event space.

GA tickets are $150 and get you in at 7 p.m. VIP is $375 and gets you in an hour early at 6 — plus exclusive access to Neat Bourbon Bar throughout the night, a dusty cocktail on arrival, and three dusty pours from partner distilleries across the evening. If you’re not sure what “dusty” means: we’re talking vintage whiskey. The kind of bottles that are genuinely difficult to find in the wild, let alone taste in a curated setting. Both tiers get an etched glass to keep, courtesy of Kentucky Bourbon Festival. VIP is selling faster than GA. If you’ve been sitting on it, stop sitting on it.

Saturday, June 20

Saturday is where the week becomes something a little bigger than a bourbon festival.

Limestone Branch — new partner distillery this year and a sister operation to Lux Row — opens the morning with Barrels & Biscuits with Master Distiller Stephen Beam. A brunch experience, a beautiful craft distillery, a master distiller who clearly enjoys what he does. Strong start to the day.

Downtown, Potter Jane’s Big Vat Bar Crawl kicks off in the afternoon with Denny and Jane personally leading the group through their favorite watering holes, starting with a Big Vat pour at Evergreen. The official end time is 5 p.m. The unofficial end time is whenever everyone runs out of steam. Wear comfortable shoes. Say yes to things. Hydrate before, during and after.

Out at the Amp at Log Still in Gethsemane, the Ying Yang Twins and Mike Jones are performing live on Saturday night. There is no way to make that sentence sound normal, and that’s kind of the point. It’s a bourbon distillery in rural Kentucky with a proper outdoor amphitheater, and early 2000s hip-hop legends are going to be on stage. June 20, 2026. You cannot make this up.

And back downtown, the 23rd Annual Bourbon City Street Concert — United We Jam takes over Third Street with live music, the open container district in full effect, and a Kids Zone running noon to 4 p.m. with bouncy houses, face painting, games, and putt-putt for the younger crowd. The whole town out on the street. The community cap on an extraordinary week.

Sunday, June 21 — Father’s Day

Father’s Day Bourbon Brunch & Tour at Barton 1792. Twenty-five tickets. Sold out on day one. Master Distiller Ross Cornelissen hosting a brunch and rare behind-the-scenes tour of one of the oldest continually operating distilleries in Bardstown — a property that is not normally open to the public. If you got a ticket, you have a very good Father’s Day locked in. If you didn’t, keep an eye on returns.

Why Bourbon Tourism Hasn’t Slowed Down

There’s been a lot of noise lately about the bourbon market correcting — secondary prices dropping, distilleries pulling back on production, bottles sitting on shelves longer than they used to. I asked Sam whether any of that has hit the tourism side.

Short answer: not really.

“Those folks that want to experience bourbon are still going to come here,” he said. The visitor experience component of Kentucky distilleries has evolved dramatically over the past decade. Twenty years ago, you showed up, got a tour, and left. Now there are restaurants on site, vintage whiskey programs, barrel experiences, fill-your-own-bottle events. There’s always something new, which means even people who’ve done the Trail before have a reason to come back.

In a boom market, consumer acquisition is cheap and easy. In a tighter market, events like National Bourbon Week become more important, not less — they’re one of the most efficient ways to get bourbon in front of new and returning drinkers at the same time, in the right context, with the right experience around it.

The Bottom Line

If someone asks you how to do the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, my new answer is: go to National Bourbon Week. In one week, you can hit ten distilleries, access vintage pours you won’t find anywhere else, take a blending class, eat food paired specifically to what’s in your glass, and watch the Ying Yang Twins perform at a log-cabin amphitheater in the Kentucky hills. That is not a normal week.

Tickets are at nationalbourbonweek.com. Some events are already gone. VIP for the Mashup is selling faster than GA. If you’ve been on the fence, this is your sign to get off it.

Full conversation with Sam Lacy is live now wherever you get your podcasts, and on YouTube.

EmbellishPod is an independent spirits podcast. Pinkies down, fun up. Subscribe here on Substack for episode writeups, cocktail recipes, and more. Find us at embellishpod.com or @embellishpod on Instagram and TikTok.

I get emailed pitches inconsistently. Spirits brands, kitchen gadgets, wildlife preserves, podcast guests. Never music to review.

A PR email showed up about a Swedish jazz album featuring Bobby Gillespie from Primal Scream, and I didn’t delete it. I don’t know why. I’m not a jazz critic. But something about this one stuck, and I kept pulling the thread until I’d built an entirely new section of this publication just to have somewhere to put it.

Welcome to Off-Menu. The section for stuff that doesn’t fit but won’t get thrown away.

Who Is This Guy?

Björn Yttling is the Björn in Peter Bjorn and John. You know their song even if you don’t know their name. “Young Folks.” The one with the whistling. Six hundred million streams. Gossip Girl. FIFA 08. Every coffee shop in 2007.

Before the whistle heard round the world, Yttling was a trained jazz musician. Private lessons with Swedish jazz legend Esbjörn Svensson. Top EU conservatory. He released a jazz album in 2005 called Oh Lord Why Can’t I Keep My Big Mouth Shut.

Then Peter Bjorn and John exploded. He spent twenty years producing pop records for Lykke Li, Franz Ferdinand, Robyn, The Hives, and Primal Scream. The jazz thing got shelved.

Until now. Illegal Hit dropped September 2025 and got a Swedish Grammy nomination. Illegal Hit (Out of Bounds), a three-disc expanded version with vocal collaborations, drops March 27, 2026. Bobby Gillespie singing over Swedish jazz is the headline. The instrumental album underneath is the actual discovery.

Listen Along

The Instrumentals: A Soundtrack Without a Film

Yttling didn’t make a jazz album. He made a soundtrack for eleven different movies that don’t exist.

I kept a running list. The films living inside nine instrumental tracks:

1. Spaghetti Western (Morricone, obviously)

2. Roger Moore-era Bond

3. Pink Panther

4. Ocean’s Eleven

5. David Lynch (something unsettling underneath the smooth)

6. The Mandalorian

7. The Mask (Jim Carrey version, not the weird comic)

8. Old Hollywood musical (choreographed but silent)

9. Fairy tale music box

10. Encanto (”Surface Pressure” energy)

11. Tarantino end credits

A lot of tonal real estate for one album.

Things That Caught My Ear

Sodon the Mountain Man opens discordant. Piano doing something wrong on purpose. Then it settles into a Pink Panther slink, sly and mischievous. The horns come in and at one point they die off like a strangled goose into a balloon exhaling all its air. Then a saxophone shows up and just starts showing off.

It holds. All of it.

“He keeps you leaning forward and then cuts to black.”

Illegal Hit (the title track) is straight heist montage from Ocean’s Eleven. As it transitions from one instrument to the next, it’s almost written for the camera to hand off from one character to another. He’s writing edit cuts into the arrangement.

And then he ends it before the job goes down. You’re left in the van, waiting for the signal.

City in Darkness (the instrumental) is a death march to a firing squad. Odd that another track was a hangman’s noose. Two executions on one album. Different methods, same weight.

But there’s something romantic or reluctant to it all. At 2:20, a horn shows up out of nowhere. Where the fuck did that come from? Somehow it lands.

The track ends without deciding if it was a death or not. Rifles raised, blindfold on, breath held. Cut.

Tanto in the Night has operatic vibes over what sounds like a super low frequency kazoo(I know it’s not a kazoo but the vibration frequency and thinness of the modulation reminds me of that). Opera floating over a kazoo in the basement. He’s putting the absurd underneath the grand and making it work.

This is the album closer, and he gives you a proper pièce de résistance finish. Big ending. Curtain call.

Then the last ten seconds are almost silent.

He can’t help himself. Even when he’s resolving, he has to leave a little space.

The Pattern

Yttling leaves quieting noise at the end of these tracks. He likes the exhale. He’s not cutting to black. He’s letting the scene fade.

And he keeps putting something slightly wrong in the mix. The discordant piano. The strangled goose horns. The woodblock that doesn’t belong. He’s testing the seams. How wrong can something feel before it breaks?

Twenty years of pop production teaches you that. He knows exactly how much tension an audience can take before they check out.

“He knows the rules. So when he breaks them, it’s a choice.”

The Vocal Remakes

The third disc collects vocal versions of the instrumentals. Different artists, same beds. Hand someone a complete piece of music and see what world they build on top of it.

Joshua Idehen took the title track and gave it vibes. Spoken word riding the groove. At one point there’s a hard edge that feels like it’s pushing toward an EDM drop, then he pulls you right back into the groove. Tension without release. The groove is the payoff.

The Tallest Man on Earth sounds almost strained trying to break into the song. It creates urgency. He’s patiently waiting in line to enter a chaotic mix. By the end, his voice echoes into distance. Maybe he got stranded on the other side of the room from where he wanted to be.

El Perro del Mar takes “City in Darkness” and transforms the firing squad into a dreary walk on a rainy day. Stripped down to voice, piano, and ethereal noise. A dark lullaby. The death got taken out. Now it’s just melancholy. Far-away rusty hinges swinging.

Matt Sweeney replaced the original texture entirely with guitar pickups doing gnarly work. Give me a 2x12 Fender amp, a vintage electric guitar with rich pickups, and a bit of intentional distortion. Just hanging out listening to a dude jam. He has comfort with the song but isn’t afraid to do what he wants. All fun playing.

Same beds. Different rooms.

Bobby Gillespie: The Headline Act

Before I could evaluate what Gillespie does on “Strange,” I had to figure out who the hell Bobby Gillespie is.

Quick homework: lead singer of Primal Scream. Drummed for The Jesus and Mary Chain in the 80s. Primal Scream has refused to stay in one lane for forty years. Acid house. Gospel. Southern rock. Cure-style moodiness. They have a song that sounds like a laser tag arena.

The guy is a chameleon. When he lands on a Swedish jazz track, it’s not a stunt. It’s just Tuesday.

Yttling produced two Primal Scream albums. These two have history.

What “Strange” Does

First impression: the opening sounds like a 70s Clint Eastwood western. Man in the desert on a horse. Sun-parched. Then it moves into Roger Moore-era Bond.

Gillespie’s voice fits into a psychedelic 60s thing, floating across the top of all the changes. Think Moody Blues but softer. The track shifts underneath him, western to Bond, sparse to driving, but he stays in his lane. He’s the thread while the scenery changes.

“The guy who can stomp chose to whisper.”

The percussion drives hard in the last third, but Gillespie doesn’t match the energy. He keeps floating while the ground shakes.

And then he’s gone. The voice disappears for the last thirty seconds and the song resolves itself.

He was a visitor. He floated through, the arrangement carried him, then he stepped out and let the instruments close it down.

The instrumentals were complete before any vocalist showed up. The singers are guests in Yttling’s house. They get their moment. Then the house settles back into itself.

The Verdict (Sort Of)

I’m not qualified to tell you if this is good jazz. I lack the vocabulary, credibilty and/or authority. But I can tell you this:

It rewards attention. It conjures scenes without needing a film. It leaves space for you to bring your own associations.

If you want jazz that sounds like jazz, this might frustrate you. If you want something that feels like a soundtrack to a film that doesn’t exist, with guests drifting through the frame, this is worth your time.

“He’s not making jazz for jazz rooms. He’s making jazz for the movie in your head.”

Gillespie’s “Strange” is the headline. The instrumental album underneath is the real discovery. And the whole expanded Out of Bounds package is a document of what happens when you hand the same raw material to different artists and let them build.

Kind of like handing someone a base spirit and seeing what cocktail they make.

Maybe that’s why I didn’t delete the email.

Illegal Hit (Out of Bounds) drops March 27, 2026 on YEAR0001. “Strange” featuring Bobby Gillespie is out March 24.

If you listened along, I want to know: which track landed for you? Drop a comment or hit reply.

This is the first Off-Menu piece. If you want more of these, stuff that doesn’t fit my lane but I can’t stop thinking about, let me know.

There’s a moment every spirits enthusiast knows well. You’re on a brand’s website, maybe it’s 11pm, maybe there’s a glass in your hand already, and you find the limited release you’ve been hunting for. You click Buy Now, type in your card number, and wait. A few days later, a brown box shows up on your porch. You tear it open. Perfect. Undamaged. Done.

What you probably never thought about: the brand didn’t ship that bottle. In most cases, they couldn’t — legally.

That’s the conversation I had recently on EmbellishPod. My guest was a representative from Vista Fulfillment Group, the San Diego-based company that’s quietly become the largest spirits fulfillment operation in the United States. Vista works with over 500 brands and 20-plus marketplaces, and unless you’re deep in the industry, you’ve almost certainly never heard of them. That’s by design.

The Three-Tier System (and Why It Makes Everything Complicated)

If you’re a regular listener, you’ve probably heard me talk around the three-tier system before. But let’s break it down plainly, because it’s the whole reason companies like Vista exist.

After Prohibition ended in the 1930s, the U.S. established a mandatory structure for alcohol commerce: a product must flow from producer to wholesaler to retailer before it ever reaches a consumer. Every bottle. No exceptions. A distillery in Kentucky literally cannot ship you a bottle, even if they wanted to. The product has to move through the system.

So when you go to a brand’s website and click Buy Now, what you’re actually doing — from a legal standpoint — is transacting with a licensed retailer. The brand’s website just looks like it’s the one selling to you. The consumer sees the brand. The back end is Vista, acting as the licensed retailer, purchasing the product from a distributor and shipping it to your door.

My guest put it simply: “The consumer, for all they know, is shopping directly with the brand. But in the back end, the transaction is really happening with us.”

It’s seamless. It’s compliant. And it requires a nationwide logistics operation most people don’t know exists.

From a Back Room to a National Footprint

Vista didn’t start as some tech-forward logistics company with a vision deck and venture funding. It started in the back room of a liquor store.

The company’s founder spent his whole life in the retail alcohol business. He bought his first liquor store in 2000, grew that to multiple locations, and then in 2016 got a call from Reserve Bar — an early player in the spirits e-commerce space — asking if he could be a fulfillment partner. He said yes, figured he had the warehouse space, and thought maybe it’d cover some rent.

That’s not how it went.

By 2019, Vista had outgrown the liquor store back room and moved into a proper warehouse in California. Then COVID hit. And suddenly, everyone who couldn’t walk into a shop was ordering alcohol online. What had been a slow build became a rocket ship. By 2021 and 2022, Vista had expanded to Austin and New York City — three locations chosen to cover the entire country with reasonable shipping times.

Today they’re working with brands ranging from Bardstown Bourbon Company and Green River Distilling to Johnny Depp’s Three Hearts Rum and the cast of Vampire Diaries’ Brothers Bond Bourbon. They’re fulfilling for Men’s Journal readers. They’re powering influencer storefronts for accounts like Brewzle in Alabama, who runs a bourbon club with dedicated followers willing to buy whatever barrel he picks.

3JMS: Named After Three Sons

When Vista got serious about growth, they did something a lot of companies in their position don’t do: they built their own technology from scratch.

The system is called 3JMS — short for 3J Management Systems. The 3Js? Three sons, all whose names start with J. The founder is clearly proud of his kids. The software handles order management, inventory, shipping logistics, accounting, sales tax, credit card fees — essentially everything that makes a multi-state spirits fulfillment operation function at scale. There is no off-the-shelf solution for this, because this industry didn’t really exist before they helped build it. Every competitor that tried to bolt on existing warehouse software hit a ceiling they couldn’t grow past.

Now they’re layering in AI on the back end — not consumer-facing chatbots, but logistics tools for inventory placement, ordering patterns, and warehouse efficiency. The kind of AI that makes fewer things fall through the cracks, not the kind that replaces people.

Finding the Diamonds in the Rough

I asked what kinds of brands Vista is most excited to work with. The answer wasn’t the celebrity labels or the established names. It was the small craft distillery that doesn’t know online sales are an option.

“We want to find the brands that are not serviced,” my guest said. “Once we teach them how to do this online, they’re amazed at how much business they’re getting.”

There are no minimums. No monthly fees. If you’re a small distillery in Nebraska with a tasting room, a handful of local retail relationships, and a product you believe in — Vista will work with you. You need distribution in California, Texas, or New York to start (that’s where their warehouses are), but once that’s in place, they’ll help you access the entire country.

One of their favorite client stories involves Detrling Rum out of Alabama. Started small, was barely moving bottles when they first partnered. Now every release sells out in ten minutes.

That’s the model they’re chasing. Not just moving bottles — watching brands grow.

Why This Matters for the Spirits World

I’ve talked to a lot of brands on this show. Founders, master distillers, brand ambassadors. The question of e-commerce comes up constantly, and a lot of smaller operations treat it like this distant, daunting thing. Too complex. Too expensive. Too much infrastructure to figure out while you’re also trying to make great whiskey.

Vista’s whole pitch is that it doesn’t have to be that way. They handle the compliance. They handle the logistics. They handle the technology. The brand just has to market.

That division of labor makes a lot of sense. A small distillery’s competitive advantage is in the liquid in the bottle and the story behind it — not in navigating state-by-state shipping regulations or building a warehouse management system. Let the people who are good at that do it.

The spirits world is at an interesting inflection point right now. The boom years are cooling a little. Some brands won’t survive. The ones that figure out how to meet consumers where they are — online, on their phones, buying based on an influencer recommendation at midnight — probably will.

Vista is the infrastructure underneath all of that. Invisible, by design. Essential, by necessity.

If you run or represent a small spirits brand and want to explore e-commerce fulfillment, you can reach Vista through their website. Links will be in the show notes.

Enjoyed this one? Hit subscribe on your podcast app, drop a comment on YouTube, or share this piece with someone in the industry who needs to hear it. You can also find all of EmbellishPod’s episodes, links, and contact info at www.embellishpod.com. Pinkies down, fun up.

There’s a moment in my conversation with Zach Johnston where he drops a line that’s been rattling around my head ever since: “You’re not going to get 2% of Diageo. You might get a half, but you’re never going to get two or three. Whereas over here, you can create your own 5%.”

It’s the kind of clarity that only comes from someone who’s seen the spirits industry from every angle—behind the bar, behind the keyboard, and now behind the brand.

The Long Way Around

Zach’s path to Blackwood Distilling reads like a novel with too many genre shifts to be believable. Film school in LA. Cocktail bars in Prague. Then Berlin’s Victoria Bar—the kind of place where Stefan Weber (co-author of The Art of the Spirited Drinking) takes you under his wing and teaches you that a proper Old Fashioned might take 20 minutes, and that’s perfectly fine.

“Being observant, and then internalizing what’s already happening,” he tells me. “If you can adjust something to make it more efficient, prove it. If not, follow what’s already there.”

That philosophy “observe, internalize, refine” carried him from folding bar towels on top of espresso machines (”so they’d dry evenly”) to building Uproxx’s whiskey vertical into one of the most-read spirits publications online. The differentiator? He actually tasted the whiskey before writing about it.

“A lot of the whiskey reviews in the mainstream were just reposting press releases,” he explains. “We made a pact that I had to taste the whiskey and do my own tasting notes and give you a bottom line of what is this good for, who is it for.”

The 10% Reality

What strikes me most about Zach is his clear-eyed view of the whiskey world’s actual demographics. We spend so much time in our enthusiast bubbles—the subreddits, the YouTube comments, the tasting groups—that we forget we’re outliers.

“About 10% are your regulars, who are ride or die,” he says, drawing from his bartending days. “The 90% of the other people? They’re there because they read about it somewhere. They heard Old Fashioneds are cool again.”

This isn’t dismissive—it’s strategic. If you’re selling a $40 bourbon, Zach argues, go hard on Instagram and YouTube. But Blackwood’s $80-200 products need different gatekeepers: chefs at Michelin-starred restaurants, bartenders at hotel lobby bars where guests don’t flinch at $40 pours.

“If you get the bartenders on your side, the price won’t matter.”

Chasing Ghosts (The Good Kind)

Here’s where Blackwood gets interesting. When founders Guinness and Justin looked at the toasted barrel market in 2019-2020, they saw a gap. Every toasted product was oak-forward—which is fine, but it’s not the whole story.

“What wasn’t out there,” Zach explains, “was utilizing freshly toasted barrels for the toasted wood sugars that caramelize—as opposed to the actual oak.”

Their process—one-to-one rebarreling from the original barrel into new Kelvin Cooperage barrels, medium toast, no char (or char four and char two with medium toast heads)—creates something that evokes a different era entirely. Through his work with Justin Sloan at Justin’s House of Bourbon, Zach has tasted enough vintage pours to recognize the connective tissue.

“There’s a parallel line between an old Fitz from 1956 or an old Granddad from 1972 and our whiskey,” he says. “The body’s similar. It’s got the same viscosity. That depth on the caramel, stewed fruit side.”

The Barrel Market Silver Lining

We talk about the current state of American whiskey—the surplus (Zach diplomatically avoids “glut”), the dropping barrel prices, the brands that won’t survive. But he’s genuinely optimistic.

“You can get four-year-old, pretty good Kentucky bourbon for $850 a barrel, which is almost cost,” he notes. “That 2020 surplus? It’s going to be eight years old in less than 18 months.”

For Blackwood, lower barrel prices have meant lower consumer prices—about 20% down since Zach joined. Their core Toasted 105 now sits at $79.99 MSRP, making it viable for bars and restaurants where pour cost actually matters.

The Products

For those keeping track:

Toasted 105 Bourbon & Rye: 52.5% ABV, ~$80. The core lineup, proofed to maintain density while trimming the edge.

Barrel Strength Bourbon & Rye: 58-59% ABV, $134-150. Small batches from 9-14 barrels.

Single Barrel: $174-199. Highly allocated, primarily medium toast and char four barrels.

On the horizon: a 12-year age-stated (non-toasted) bourbon and a collaboration with a German distiller on what they’re calling “the world’s first German American rye.”

Where to Find Blackwood: blackwooddistillingco.com/ , bourbonoutfitter.com for online orders, Justin’s House of Bourbon in Louisville, or ask your local high-end liquor store to bring it in.

Follow Zach: @ztpwhiskey on Instagram

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Hotel Monteleone • New Orleans • 1938

The final recipe is called The Carousel.

There’s a version of this article where I just give you the recipe. You’d make a solid Vieux Carré, enjoy it, move on. But that version leaves out the part where my wife told me it tasted like black licorice and I had to go back to the drawing board. It leaves out the budget vermouth that made everything feel vaguely incomplete, like a sentence that trails off. And it skips the moment I figured out why Dale DeGroff’s pimento bitters were the right solution to a problem I didn’t fully understand yet.

So we’re doing this the other way. The recipe is at the end. The story is worth reading first.

What You’re Actually Drinking

The Vieux Carré was created in 1938 by Walter Bergeron, head bartender at the Hotel Monteleone’s Swan Room in New Orleans’ French Quarter. ‘Vieux Carré’ is French for ‘Old Square’ — the French Quarter’s original name, back when the French actually ran the city.

Bergeron designed it as a tribute. The French Quarter in 1938 was genuinely multicultural in the way that tends to get romanticized in retrospect but was apparently just true: Americans, French, Italians, Caribbean communities all living in proximity. He built those communities into the glass.

• Rye whiskey = the Americans

• Cognac & Bénédictine = the French

• Sweet vermouth = the Italians

• Bitters = Caribbean influence

It’s a Manhattan that went to finishing school in Paris. Spirit-forward, complex, but not muddled. The IBA classifies it as an ‘Unforgettable’ — their designation for classic cocktails that aren’t as well-known as they should be. They’re right about that.

It first appeared in print in Stanley Clisby Arthur’s 1937 book Famous New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix ‘Em — which, yes, predates the 1938 Hotel Monteleone origin story by a year. History is messy. The drink exists. That’s what matters.

The Licorice Problem

Traditional Vieux Carré recipes call for equal dashes of Peychaud’s and Angostura bitters. This makes sense historically — Peychaud’s is a New Orleans institution, practically the official bitters of the French Quarter. It also contains anise, which gives it that distinctive licorice note.

Two dashes of Peychaud’s isn’t a lot. But in this particular combination of spirits, it was enough to flatten everything else. My wife tried the first test version and said it tasted like black licorice. She wasn’t wrong. The anise was punching above its weight and pulling the drink in a direction that Bergeron probably didn’t intend.

The solution took a while to find because I kept trying to reduce Peychaud’s rather than replace part of it. One dash instead of two helped but didn’t solve it. The flavor profile I wanted — Caribbean warmth that honored Bergeron’s tribute without introducing a licorice thread — needed something else.

Dale DeGroff’s Pimento Aromatic Bitters turned out to be exactly right. Pimento here means allspice, not the pepper — warm, Caribbean-inflected, no licorice. Two dashes of those, two dashes of Angostura for backbone, one dash of Peychaud’s to maintain the NOLA character without letting it dominate. The math worked. More importantly, the flavor worked.

The bitters blend actually connects more directly to Bergeron’s intent than the traditional version does. Pimento bitters are the Caribbean community in the glass, explicitly. It’s honoring the tribute more accurately while also tasting better. That doesn’t always happen.

The Sweetness Problem (and How Vermouth Fixed It)

Here’s the thing about vermouth: there’s a full ounce of it in this drink. Not a modifier amount, not a half-measure. An ounce. It’s not in the background — it’s structural.

I ran early tests with a mid-tier sweet vermouth. Not the cheapest option, but not premium either. The results tasted fine in isolation and incomplete as a cocktail. Something was missing, and I couldn’t isolate what it was by adjusting other variables. The drink wouldn’t cohere.

Switched to Carpano Antica Formula and immediately understood what ‘incomplete’ had been pointing at. Carpano is richer, more velvety, with pronounced vanilla notes that complement cognac’s oak in a way that lighter vermouths don’t. At 16.5% ABV, it has the body to hold up against the rye and the cognac. The Cocchi Vermouth di Torino — which legitimately won a PUNCH blind tasting competition in 2021 — was also excellent but read a little thin against this particular spirit combination. Carpano made everything feel settled.

Vermouth quality is non-negotiable here. That’s not a gatekeeping statement, just the practical reality of what the cocktail requires. Also: refrigerate it after opening, use it within two to three months. Old vermouth is the reason a lot of otherwise good Vieux Carrés taste like wine-adjacent disappointments.

How I Actually Tested This

Three sessions, eight total cocktails, roughly two weeks of development. I tested variables in isolation: cognac selection first, then rye, then vermouth. Testing spirits before vermouth matters because the vermouth needs to complement the spirits you’ve chosen, not the other way around. If you lock in vermouth first and then discover your rye doesn’t work with it, you’ve built the house on the wrong foundation.

Session 1: Cognac

Martell VS vs Pierre Ferrand 1840. This one wasn’t close. The Ferrand 1840 was developed with cocktail historian David Wondrich using 19th-century techniques — it’s literally designed for historic cocktails. Drier, more structured, better fruit-to-oak balance. The Martell was fine but added sweetness the drink didn’t need. My wife’s preference aligned with mine: Ferrand by a comfortable margin.

Session 2: Rye

Four candidates: Michter’s Barrel Strength, Rare Character Hurstknoll, Sazerac, and MB Roland.

Michter’s Barrel Strength won the taste test. Around 110 proof, intense complexity, handled everything you throw at it. The problem is that it’s also the most expensive option and its intensity makes it better suited for occasions when you want maximum impact rather than regular making. It’s the premium version.

Rare Character Hurstknoll Rye — a craft Kentucky selection — delivered 99% of the Michter’s experience at a more sensible price point for regular use. It stood up to the cognac without dominating it, integrated with the Carpano cleanly, and didn’t have that slightly precarious quality that sometimes comes with barrel-strength pours in stirred drinks.

Sazerac was a respectable third. Good NOLA connection given the cocktail’s origins. MB Roland didn’t work — the flavor profile pulled against the other ingredients rather than integrating.

Session 3: Vermouth

Cocchi Vermouth di Torino vs Carpano Antica Formula. As covered above, Carpano won. Both are legitimately good vermouths. In this specific combination, Carpano had the body and vanilla notes to pull everything together. Cocchi would be a solid choice in a different build.

The Vieux Carré Build — The Carousel

Walter Bergeron built his Vieux Carré at the Hotel Monteleone’s Swan Room, which has since been replaced by the Carousel Bar — a slowly rotating circular bar that’s become one of the more absurd and beloved things in New Orleans. Seemed like the right name for a Vieux Carré that keeps coming back around: same bones, refined by testing.

This is the standard version. The premium version swaps Hurstknoll for Michter’s Barrel Strength; everything else stays the same.

Amount

Ingredient

Notes

1 oz

Rare Character Hurstknoll Rye

Premium swap: Michter’s Barrel Strength

1 oz

Pierre Ferrand 1840 Cognac

Purpose-built for classic cocktails

¾ oz

Carpano Antica Formula

Refrigerate, use within 3 months

¼ oz

Bénédictine D.O.M.

Not negotiable; not B&B

2 dashes

Dale DeGroff’s Pimento Bitters

Caribbean warmth, no licorice

2 dashes

Angostura Bitters

Classic backbone

1 dash

Peychaud’s Bitters

NOLA authenticity, used sparingly

Lemon twist + Luxardo cherry

Garnish

Express twist; cherry optional

Construction

1. Add all ingredients to a mixing glass with ice.

2. Stir for 30 seconds. This drink needs the dilution. Under-stirred tastes hot; over-stirred (60+ seconds) goes watery. Thirty to forty seconds is the window.

3. Strain over a large format ice cube in a rocks glass.

4. Express a lemon twist over the drink from about four inches up. Rub the rim, place on ice.

5. Optional: add a Luxardo cherry on a pick. It’s a Manhattan connection, not a garnish afterthought.

Serve in a double old fashioned glass. Nick and Nora works if you want to go up — stir 40-50 seconds for the up version, no ice — but rocks is the traditional serve and it develops interestingly as it warms, which is exactly what you want.

Curiously I came across a TikTok shop glass that had nice color panels and spun like a carousel. I thought it was perfect for this and gave me a great excuse to spend even more money on this project.

If Something Tastes Wrong

Too sweet: Check vermouth freshness first. Then consider whether you under-stirred (needs more dilution). Bénédictine can be reduced to 1/8 oz if everything else checks out.

Too much licorice: Reduce to a single dash of Peychaud’s, or cut it entirely and go to four dashes of pimento only. The Liquor.com version uses that approach and it works.

Thin or watery: You stirred too long, or you’re working with a low-proof rye. 100-proof minimum makes a real difference in this build.

Too hot or boozy: Under-diluted. Stir the full 30-40 seconds. Also let the drink rest a minute before tasting — it needs a moment to settle.

Gets worse as it warms: Usually old vermouth or too much Bénédictine. Both create the same symptom: increasing sweetness that turns unpleasant rather than developing.

The Cost Reality

Initial investment runs approximately $195-225 to stock everything. That yields 25-30 cocktails from the first purchase. At roughly $5-6 per cocktail for the standard version and $6-7 for the premium, you’re looking at craft cocktail bar quality ($14-18 at most places, $18-24 at high-end hotel bars) for substantially less. The investment front-loads itself; ongoing costs after the first build-out are closer to $2-3 per cocktail.

The one place not to economize: vermouth. That $15 versus $38 decision will show up in the glass every time.

What I’d Do Differently

Test vermouth before cognac. I went spirits-first because the spirits felt like the anchor, but the vermouth turned out to have the biggest impact on the overall character of the drink. Either order can work, but if I were starting from scratch I’d identify the vermouth first and then find spirits that pair well with it.

Also, half-batch testing earlier in the process. Once I started making half-portions — roughly three-quarter ounce rye, three-quarter ounce cognac — I could run more variations without the obvious problem of consuming eight full cocktails across an afternoon. Palate fatigue is real and it makes you less useful as a taster.

To Walter Bergeron

The Hotel Monteleone’s Carousel Bar is still there, still rotating slowly in the French Quarter. Bergeron’s original Vieux Carré recipe — equal parts rye and cognac, sweet vermouth, Bénédictine, Peychaud’s and Angostura — is still what gets made when you order one at most places that carry it.

What I’ve done here is a modern interpretation with some specific preferences baked in: less sweetness, a bitters blend that actually emphasizes the Caribbean tribute Bergeron intended when he created the Vieux Carré, cognac chosen for cocktail integration rather than sipping quality. He probably would have used something like Dale DeGroff’s pimento bitters if they’d existed in 1938 — or he might have made something similar himself.

The Carousel keeps coming back around to the same place Bergeron started: diverse communities, integrated into something that’s better as a whole than any single element. That turned out to be exactly the right way to make a Vieux Carré.

I wanted to explore a new spirit this month. January’s calendar slot said “Black Russian”—vodka and coffee liqueur, straightforward build, good contrast after December’s butter-washing complexity with the Butterbeer. Simple enough.

Then I got the chance to talk to Sam Lerman from Spyrt Worldwide last month. They sent samples for testing. Three different Ukrainian vodkas, actually—Ukrainian Freedom, Hetman, Ukrainian Spirit, and I threw in Silly Goose from Texas as a control.

That conversation changed what this cocktail needed to be.

The Renaming

When you pick Ukrainian vodka for a Black Russian, the name stops working. There’s a war happening. Calling a cocktail made with Ukrainian spirit a “Black Russian” isn’t just awkward—it’s wrong. The cognitive dissonance ruins the drink before anyone tastes it.

So this became the Kyiv Noir. Ukrainian city, film noir aesthetic, dark sophistication. The name respects the spirit’s origin and captures what the drink actually is: moody, coffee-forward, evolved past its 1949 ancestor.

Testing the Vodkas

Made half-recipe tastings—1 oz vodka, 0.5 oz Meletti Coffee Liqueur, side-by-side. Ukrainian Freedom won clearly. Smoothest finish across all candidates, clean neutral profile that let the coffee shine through, no harsh ethanol bite. Better integration with the liqueur than the others.

The vodka matters more than you’d think in a coffee cocktail. Harsh vodka creates discord with bittersweet coffee notes. Smooth vodka creates harmony. Ukrainian Freedom made the name “Kyiv” authentic, not just thematic.

But then I tasted the full 2:1 build.

The Sweetness Crisis

2 oz vodka, 1 oz Meletti. Stirred it down. Tasted it.

Too sweet. Way too sweet. And this was before any topping.

This is where most people reach for bitters to suppress sweetness, maybe add citrus to balance it out. But that’s treating symptoms. The problem was foundational.

Meletti is an amaro-style coffee liqueur. Beautiful in its own right—herbal complexity, depth, Italian craftsmanship. But it brings amaro sweetness to what should be an espresso-forward drink. The coffee flavor was buried under sugar and botanical complexity that didn’t fit the noir concept I was chasing.

Critical realization: The coffee liqueur IS the cocktail in something this simple. Two ingredients plus bitters. If the liqueur is wrong, you’re building on a flawed foundation. Bitters can’t fix that. You need a different foundation.

Complete replacement necessary.

The Coffee Liqueur Showdown

Tested four liqueurs using the same taster format—1 oz Ukrainian Freedom vodka, 0.5 oz liqueur, 2 dashes Bittercube Bolivar bitters for direct comparison:

Meletti - Too sweet (~7/10 on sweetness scale), amaro-style wrong for this application. First to get eliminated.

Copa de Oro - Even sweeter (~8/10), vanilla-heavy, budget quality showed through. The kind of liqueur that works in a crowd-pleasing frozen drink but not in a two-ingredient stirred cocktail where there’s nowhere to hide.

Kamora - Middle ground (~6/10), less sweet than Kahlúa but still sweet-forward. Better than Copa de Oro, not good enough for what I needed.

Caffè Borghetti Di Vero Caffe Espresso - Clear winner.

Why Borghetti Changed Everything

Bittersweet profile sitting around 5/10 on sweetness. Not just “less sweet”—actually bittersweet, with espresso’s natural bitter edge present and accounted for. Tastes like concentrated espresso with sugar, not vanilla candy with coffee flavor added as an afterthought.

That’s the fundamental difference: espresso-forward vs dessert-forward.

25% ABV vs the typical 20% in most coffee liqueurs. Doesn’t sound like much but it matters in stirred cocktails. Higher proof stands up better to dilution during the 30-second stir. Creates a spirit-forward rather than dessert-forward character. Better integration with 40% vodka. Maintains intensity as the ice melts.

Made from real Italian espresso using a large moka pot process. Best-selling coffee liqueur in Italy since 1860. Less syrupy texture than Mexican liqueurs. Dark chocolate notes underneath the coffee. The kind of thing Italians actually drink, not something engineered for American dessert culture.

This creates noir depth. Sweet liqueurs create dessert drinks.

The Critical Variable: You Need Less-Sweet Coffee Liqueur

This recipe only works with a less-sweet coffee liqueur. That’s not optional. If you use Kahlúa or another dessert-forward liqueur, you’ll get the same problem I had with Meletti—too sweet before you even add the foam topping, and the foam will compound the issue into something that tastes like tiramisu had a baby with a milkshake.

Recommended coffee liqueurs for this recipe (in order of preference):

1. Mr. Black Cold Brew Coffee Liqueur - The gold standard. Around 3/10 sweetness, 25% ABV, intense Australian-made coffee. If you can find this, use it. Best option available.

2. Caffè Borghetti Di Vero Caffe Espresso - What I used. Around 5/10 sweetness, 25% ABV, Italian espresso character. More available than Mr. Black in most markets.

3. St. George NOLA Coffee Liqueur - Around 4/10 sweetness, 25% ABV, chicory notes, California-made. Excellent if you can source it.

4. Tia Maria - Around 5/10 sweetness, 20% ABV, Jamaican coffee and rum base. More available than the others, less sweet than Kahlúa, works in this application.

Avoid for this recipe: Kahlúa (~7/10), Kamora (~6/10), Copa de Oro (~8/10), or any vanilla-forward liqueur. They’re fine in other contexts—White Russians, frozen drinks, coffee added to desserts. But they create a dessert drink here rather than a sophisticated noir cocktail. The structural foundation doesn’t work.

Building Complexity

With the right liqueur in place, added Bittercube Bolivar bitters—chocolate, cola nut, vanilla. Two dashes standard, can increase to 3-4 if you want more depth.

Chocolate element ties to the dark chocolate coffee bean garnish. Cola nut adds unexpected complexity that works surprisingly well with coffee—brings a subtle spice character without being identifiable as “cola.” Vanilla bridges the vodka and espresso liqueur without adding sweetness. No cinnamon—didn’t want mulling spice character that would push this toward autumn territory instead of year-round noir sophistication.

The bitters add depth without calling attention to themselves. They create sophistication rather than acting as sweetness suppression. That’s the difference—you’re building layers, not compensating for structural problems.

The Dalgona Challenge

Initial plan was dalgona coffee foam as topping. Korean whipped coffee—equal parts instant coffee, sugar, and hot water beaten to stiff peaks. Visually dramatic, Instagram-worthy, all that.

First test used brown sugar dalgona with the Meletti base. Complete disaster. Brown sugar added molasses notes on top of already too-sweet amaro liqueur. Dessert bomb. The kind of thing that sounds good in theory—”brown sugar adds depth!”—but in practice just compounds the sweetness problem.

Almost abandoned the dalgona concept entirely. Seemed like the topping was fundamentally incompatible with the drink.

Then I switched to Borghetti’s bittersweet base and tried standard dalgona with white sugar. Actually worked. The 2 tablespoons of sugar in the foam balanced against the espresso-forward liqueur instead of compounding sweetness into oblivion.

This is optimization, not compromise. The topping works because the foundation works.

Visual drama delivers: dark drink, white foam, dark chocolate coffee bean garnish. Film noir aesthetic that’s functional, not just pretty. The foam adds coffee intensity without diluting the cocktail. Texture contrast between silky stirred base and mousse-like topping. Holds structure for photography and for the actual drinking experience.

Why Instant Coffee is Essential for Dalgona (The Science Part)

You can’t make dalgona foam with brewed coffee or fresh espresso. Only instant coffee works. I tested this because I was skeptical—seems like cheaping out on ingredients, right? But there’s actual chemistry behind why instant coffee is essential, not just convenient.

Concentration is critical. Dalgona uses 1:1 instant coffee to water, creating very concentrated coffee. Regular brewed coffee is 98%+ water—too diluted for the chemistry to work. The surfactants that create foam need high concentration to form stable bubble structures.

Instant coffee is pre-brewed and dehydrated by manufacturers using either spray-dry or freeze-dry techniques. Only about 10% of the original volume remains after drying. When you rehydrate it with minimal water, you get maximum concentration. That’s why it works—you’re essentially getting 10x concentrated coffee compared to brewing fresh.

Surfactants create bubble barriers. Coffee contains proteins and polysaccharides that act like surfactants—they lower surface tension between liquid and gas. When you whip the mixture, these surfactants coat each air bubble and trap it, similar to how egg proteins work in meringue. The more concentrated the coffee, the more surfactants available to coat bubbles, the more stable the foam.

Low oil content enables foam. Fresh coffee beans and grounds contain natural oils. Those oils are great for flavor but terrible for foam—they break down the surfactant barriers and inhibit foam formation. Instant coffee, especially cheaper spray-dried versions, has much less oil remaining after processing.

Here’s the counterintuitive part: Don’t buy expensive instant coffee for dalgona. Cheaper spray-dried instant coffee foams better than premium freeze-dried because it has less oil content. The expensive stuff tastes better as instant coffee, but it actually performs worse in dalgona. Save your money and get better results.

Sugar provides structure. Sugar increases viscosity—makes the liquid thicker, more syrup-like—so water drains more slowly from the bubble walls. Also creates protective layers between bubbles that prevent them from merging and collapsing. Acts as structural glue holding everything together.

You can make sugar-free dalgona if you’re trying to reduce sweetness, but the foam will be darker in color and collapse faster. Still works, just less stable. Salt actually works almost as well as sugar for stabilization, which is fascinating from a chemistry standpoint but doesn’t taste right in a coffee cocktail.

The whole process is basically coffee meringue. Whipping introduces air into the mixture, proteins coat the bubbles creating separation that keeps them intact longer, sugar stabilizes the structure. Takes 3-5 minutes with a hand mixer, 10-15 minutes if you whisk by hand. When it’s done, the mixture should be light golden-brown and thick like peanut butter—holds stiff peaks when you lift the whisk.

Presentation and Proportions

The 8oz coupe holds a full cup at the brim. Double the recipe to fill it properly—makes enough for two drinks, but you’ll only serve one and leave the rest behind.

Stir 4 oz vodka, 2 oz coffee liqueur, and 4 dashes bitters with ice for 30 seconds. Strain enough into the chilled coupe to fill about two-thirds of the glass (roughly 5-6oz after dilution). Top with generous dalgona foam to fill the remaining third. This creates proper visual balance—substantial base, dramatic foam cap, looks intentional.

The extra cocktail base goes into your tasting glass or down the drain. You’re building for presentation, not efficiency.

Alternative if you prefer smaller presentation: Use 5-6oz coupe with the standard single recipe (2 oz vodka, 1 oz liqueur). Fills closer to two-thirds naturally with 4oz after dilution, needs only 2-3 tablespoons foam. Less dramatic but still works.

Alternative if you prefer rocks glass: 10-12oz rocks glass with large cold brew coffee ice cube. The cube takes up volume, so standard recipe plus foam achieves similar proportions. The coffee ice provides flat surface for foam and adds flavor as it melts.

What This Is and Isn’t

vs. Black Russian: Ukrainian vodka instead of Russian vodka (political statement plus quality showcase), premium espresso liqueur instead of Kahlúa’s vanilla-forward sweetness, chocolate bitters add complexity where the original is just two ingredients, dalgona foam topping brings modern craft element, dark chocolate coffee bean garnish instead of no garnish. More sophisticated, more complex, more intentional.

vs. Espresso Martini: Stirred not shaken (creates silky spirit-forward texture vs frothy coffee-forward), coffee liqueur only instead of requiring fresh espresso shot, intentional dalgona topping vs natural crema from shaking, served in coupe or rocks vs martini glass, descended from 1949 Black Russian vs 1983 invention. Different lineage, different character, different aesthetic—this is classic noir, Espresso Martini is trendy contemporary.

vs. White Russian: Optional foam topping vs heavy cream as integral ingredient, dark with white foam cap vs muddy beige throughout, foam enhances first sips vs cream stirred into milkshake texture, sophisticated craft presentation vs casual approachable drink. The White Russian is what college kids drink because it’s sweet and easy. This is what you make when you want something with coffee that doesn’t taste like dessert.

It’s evolved past its ancestor. Not trying to be a better Black Russian—trying to be something that had to move beyond that framework to become what it needed to be.

What Didn’t Work (The Honest Part)

Meletti Coffee Liqueur - Amaro-style sweetness fundamentally wrong for this application. Created dessert drink before any topping was added. Beautiful liqueur, wrong context. Eliminating it was the single most important decision in the entire development process.

Copa de Oro - Even sweeter than Meletti, vanilla dominated coffee, budget quality showed through immediately in direct comparison. The kind of thing that works if you’re making coffee liqueur cocktails for people who don’t actually like coffee.

Brown sugar dalgona - Compounded sweetness problem with Meletti base, added molasses notes that didn’t fit noir aesthetic, pushed the drink toward autumn/pumpkin spice territory when I wanted year-round sophistication. White sugar was the right call once the base was fixed.

Large ice cube logistics without coffee ice solution - Foam needs flat surface to sit on properly. Regular large ice cube creates sloped surface. Foam slides off, looks messy, doesn’t present well. Only works if you use cold brew coffee ice cube that you actually want melting into the drink.

Single recipe in 8oz glass - Doesn’t fill properly for the two-thirds base, one-third foam presentation. Solved by doubling the recipe and accepting you’ll leave some behind. Building for the photo, not efficiency.

The Recipe

Kyiv Noir

Base Cocktail:

• 4 oz Ukrainian Freedom vodka

• 2 oz Caffè Borghetti Di Vero Caffe Espresso liqueur (or other low-sweetness coffee liqueur—see recommendations above)

• 4 dashes Bittercube Bolivar bitters

Dalgona Coffee Foam:

• 1/4 cup (2 tbsp) instant coffee granules

• 2 tbsp granulated sugar

• 1/4 cup (2 tbsp) hot water

Garnish:

• Dark chocolate-covered coffee bean

Method:

Make the dalgona foam first. Combine instant coffee, sugar, and hot water in mixing bowl. Beat with hand mixer until stiff peaks form—3-5 minutes with mixer, 10-15 minutes by hand if you’re feeling ambitious or don’t own a hand mixer. Mixture should be light golden-brown and thick like peanut butter when done. Can be made up to 2 days ahead and refrigerated, which is useful if you’re making multiple drinks.

Add vodka, coffee liqueur, and bitters to mixing glass with ice. Stir for 30 seconds until well-chilled. You’re looking for proper dilution and temperature, not just mixing—30 seconds is intentional.

Strain into chilled 8oz coupe glass, filling about two-thirds of the glass height (5-6oz after dilution). Reserve remaining cocktail.

Spoon generous dalgona foam onto surface of cocktail to fill the remaining third of the glass. Don’t just dump it—actually spoon it gently so it sits on top rather than mixing in. Place dark chocolate-covered coffee bean on the foam. Serve immediately.

Serves: 1 (with extra base left over)
Time: 10 minutes including foam preparation
Glass: 8oz coupe (or 10-12oz rocks glass with coffee ice cube)

Variations:

• Single serve in smaller glass: Use 2 oz vodka, 1 oz liqueur, 2 dashes bitters in 5-6oz coupe

• On the rocks: Use cold brew coffee ice cube for foam platform, serves in rocks glass

• No foam version: Serve stirred cocktail alone for simplified presentation when you don’t want to deal with dalgona prep

• Cream float: Replace dalgona with heavy cream float for Irish Coffee-style effect, simpler than dalgona but less dramatic presentation

Started this month wanting to explore Ukrainian vodka. Got samples, did testing, found the right spirit. Then discovered the coffee liqueur was more important than the vodka. Then realized the topping only works when the foundation works. Then figured out you have to build for presentation, not efficiency.

The vodka selection matters. The coffee liqueur matters more. The foam is chemistry that happens to look dramatic. The proportions create the presentation. The name honors where the spirit comes from while capturing what the drink actually is.

This isn’t a Black Russian anymore. It’s something that had to evolve past the name to become what it needed to be. That’s what testing new spirits does—takes you somewhere you weren’t expecting to go, and you build the map as you walk.

When prescription anxiety meds leave you blank for hours, where do you turn? Morgan Smith found his answer in a plant that’s been consumed safely for thousands of years.

This week on EmbellishPod, we venture beyond bourbon to explore kava culture, sustainability, and the growing movement toward alcohol alternatives.

The Moment Everything Changed

Picture this: You’re a software developer working in the high-stakes world of payments and finance. One minute of system downtime equals millions in losses. You’ve just had your second child. The pressure mounts. Your doctor prescribes an SSRI and benzodiazepines for panic attacks.

Then you take one at work.

“I don’t remember what I did the rest of the day,” Morgan Smith tells me during our conversation. “I came to a couple hours later at night and thought, whoa, what happened? It turns out I was driving coworkers to lunch, doing all sorts of work, and I thought—what’s going to happen if my newborn son needs to go to the hospital and I’m out of my mind on this stuff?”

That terrifying realization sent Morgan on a journey that would eventually lead him from tech cubicles to kava farms in Hawaii and throughout the South Pacific.

What Actually Is Kava?

Before we go further into Morgan’s story, let’s address the obvious question: what the hell is kava?

Kava (Piper methysticum) is a plant native to the Pacific Islands that’s been consumed ceremonially and socially for over 3,000 years across Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia. The active compounds, called kavalactones, produce a calming, mildly euphoric effect without the cognitive impairment of alcohol or the blanking effects of benzodiazepines.

“It’s just like coffee for the afternoon,” Morgan explains. “It’s normal. It’s safe. It’s something that’s not going to hurt you and it’s not going to cause long-term problems.”

Unlike alcohol, kava doesn’t impair judgment or motor skills. You won’t wake up with a hangover. And there’s no addictive potential like prescription anxiety medications.

From England to the Tropics

Morgan’s background couldn’t be further from Pacific Island culture. “I’m big into ancestry,” he shares. “Most of my family is from England, Scotland, Ireland, and a little bit of Germany. And I always think—kava is one of those things that people are drawn to because they’re trying to get away from alcohol.”

He pauses before adding with a laugh, “My past family’s generations were probably creating a bunch of whiskey, and that ended up maybe not helping some people. And kava hopefully will kind of reverse some of that. I have a family history of alcoholism, so I was very concerned about that growing up.”

This personal connection to the downsides of alcohol, combined with his own struggles finding appropriate anxiety relief, made kava a revelation when he discovered it over a decade ago.

Building KALM with Kava

Today, Morgan owns and operates KALM with Kava (Kalm with a K), one of the nation’s largest kava distributors. The company imports kava from Tonga, Samoa, Fiji, and Vanuatu, while also farming it on Hawaii’s Big Island alongside sugarcane and taro.

The business was originally started about 15 years ago by Morgan’s friend Mike, whose legacy still drives the company’s vision. “I have a picture of him at the office on my back wall and I think about him all the time,” Morgan shares. “I was reading his text messages from 2018 a couple months ago, kind of looking back and thinking, ‘what would Mike do in this situation?’”

Mike’s plans for the farm—shared in a 2018 text message—are now Morgan’s roadmap for 2026-2028. “I’m taking what he actually said and I’m doing it. The plants he first started growing in Hawaii have tons of progeny now, and soon people will be able to enjoy all of his work.”

Magic Mushroom Rum (No, Really)

One of KALM’s more intriguing products is their Magic Mushroom Rum—which, despite the name, contains neither magic mushrooms nor rum. It’s a kava-based beverage that delivers the plant’s traditional effects in a modern, accessible format.

The naming reflects the creative approach many kava companies are taking to make the botanical more approachable to American consumers who might be intimidated by traditional preparation methods (which involve mixing the powdered root with water in what Morgan calls “muddy, root-flavored nastiness”).

The Sustainability Challenge

Our conversation takes a serious turn when discussing the kava industry’s biggest challenge: supply chain sustainability.

“People are drinking kava today that was planted three to four years ago,” Morgan explains. “It takes that long to grow. So if we don’t plant today, in three or four years there’s not going to be any kava to drink. And unfortunately, a lot of kava farmers out there are not thinking about that.”

The issue is particularly acute in the South Pacific, where educational access and long-term planning resources may be limited. “What I’d like to see is investment into the kava space where people really understand what happens when you don’t plant,” Morgan emphasizes. “These communities throughout the South Pacific depend on this.”

Testing, Transparency, and Trust

As kava gains popularity in the United States, Morgan is adamant about one thing: testing and transparency.

“I’d like to see kava companies really showing their lab tests saying, ‘this is what we test for and this is how we test it,’” he states. “Kava is an herb grown in the middle of the South Pacific. We need to make sure that whatever we’re putting into our bodies isn’t going to hurt us. We have to test for things like E. coli and salmonella.”

I couldn’t help but add my two cents here: “If you are a kava producer, get the test and publish them now, because all it requires is a handful of bad reactions in the United States to create an infrastructure that requires you. If you do the work on the front end, maybe they don’t ever require you to do it because you’re already doing it.”

The alternative—waiting for federal regulation after problems arise—would be far more burdensome than voluntary testing now.

Why This Matters for Spirits Culture

You might be wondering why a bourbon and whiskey podcast is covering kava. The answer is simple: the spirits world isn’t about gatekeeping or narrow definitions. It’s about understanding what people consume, why they consume it, and how culture shapes those choices.

The rise of kava, THC beverages, and other alcohol alternatives doesn’t represent a rejection of spirits culture—it represents an evolution. Younger generations are approaching consumption more intentionally, whether that means choosing craft cocktails over cheap beer, exploring non-alcoholic options, or seeking botanical alternatives that fit their lifestyle.

“I think people are being more intentional,” I noted during our conversation. “The volume isn’t there like it used to be. When people do want to consume alcohol, it’s usually through cocktail culture or through high-end spirits. It’s more like, ‘I want to actually enjoy what I’m consuming and the time that I am consuming it.’”

Kava fits into this broader trend of mindful consumption.

Finding Your Alternative

Morgan’s journey from tech burnout to kava farming demonstrates something important: there isn’t one right path for everyone. Whether you’re doing Dry January, reassessing your relationship with alcohol, or simply curious about what else is out there—having options matters.

“If you’re thinking about finding something just to help you wind down at the end of the day, kava could be it,” Morgan offers. “If not, that’s fine too. Let’s just be friends. Let’s connect. Let’s hang out.”

That’s the spirit (pun intended) that makes this conversation valuable. No dogma. No judgment. Just authentic exploration of what works for different people.

Listen to the full episode on your favorite podcast platform or watch on YouTube. Find KALM with Kava on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook @kalmwithkava.

Pinkies down, fun up.

Want more spirits content, industry interviews, and cocktail culture exploration? Subscribe to EmbellishPod on your podcast platform of choice, follow us on Instagram and TikTok @embellishpod, and visit www.embellishpod.com for articles, episode details, and more.

Duncan McCallum bought Glen Scotia Distillery in 1924 when Campbeltown was already collapsing—over a dozen distilleries had closed, more were failing. He believed quality and persistence could turn it around. By December 1930, he drowned himself in Campbeltown Loch. Official record says accident. Locals know better—failed deals, mounting debt, watching an entire region’s whisky heritage disintegrate.

Distillery workers still report strange occurrences at Glen Scotia after dark. McCallum’s ghost, they say. Probably superstition, but it’s a useful reminder that people bet everything on these businesses.

What Actually Happened

In the 1880s, Campbeltown had 20+ active distilleries. Alfred Bernard called it “the whisky capital of the world.” The Kintyre Peninsula’s isolation worked in their favor—hard for excise officers to reach, abundant resources, deep water harbors.

Then American Prohibition created massive illegal demand. Campbeltown producers rushed to meet it with shorter fermentation, inferior casks, premature bottling. When legitimate markets returned, their reputation was destroyed. Seventeen distilleries closed in the 1920s alone. By 1934, only Springbank and Glen Scotia survived. The region nearly lost its status entirely.

The Lowlands Took a Different Path

The Lowlands encompasses everything south of an imaginary line from Greenock to Dundee—more tradition than actual geography. Where Campbeltown faced isolation, Lowland distilleries operated near major cities. Less romantic, more industrially efficient.

Many use triple distillation (unusual for Scotland, common in Ireland), creating extra smoothness that makes them excellent entry points. Glasgow Distillery exemplifies the modern urban approach—solving logistical challenges, integrating with blending operations, proving approachable doesn’t mean boring.

Lowland whisky doesn’t demand attention. It offers finesse over power, light grassy flavors instead of smoke and maritime funk. The best expressions layer complexity without intimidation. They’re training wheels that serious enthusiasts never outgrow.

Tonight’s Lineup

Glasgow 1770 Triple Distilled (92 proof)
Thin color by bourbon standards. Nose: cherry candy, orange, grass. Palate: pepper, artificial lemon, finishes with pithy citrus bitterness—the white parts of any citrus fruit. This is elegance through restraint, harder to achieve than it looks.

Glen Scotia 15 Year (92 proof)
More color from age, same proof, completely different personality. Nose: saltwater taffy and caramel with citrus oils. Palate: spice-studded orange (like Christmas stovetop decorations), wood, slight medicinal notes. Finishes with smoke and oak. This is what perseverance tastes like.

Kilkerran Cask Strength
Significantly younger but intensely colored at cask strength. Needs a deep breath before diving in—jumping almost 20 proof points. Immediately smoky, earthy, caramel, dry red wine, leather. Palate is thick like homemade jelly, proof feels like pineapple eating your tongue (high acidity). Finishes with smoky grapefruit. This is Campbeltown’s distinctive funk—polarizing but worth preserving.

The Business Case for Revival

Hedley Wright’s 2004 decision to reopen Glengyle Distillery (producing Kilkerran) after 125 years wasn’t pure sentiment—it was sound business calculation that Campbeltown whisky could be profitable with proper investment. That brought the count to three active distilleries, securing regional status.

Wright passed in 2023, but family trust ownership ensures continuity. They’re not chasing growth for its own sake—they’re protecting something irreplaceable while remaining profitable. That’s the sweet spot: financial viability supporting cultural preservation.

McCallum didn’t live to see Campbeltown’s revival. He died believing the region’s whisky culture had vanished. But Glen Scotia survived 90+ more years. Glengyle reopened 74 years after closing. Today, Campbeltown’s experiencing genuine renaissance with new distilleries planned and international recognition growing.

McCallum was right about what mattered—the whisky itself was worth fighting for. He was just in the wrong timeline. Sometimes belief in quality takes generations to vindicate.

What We Learned

Whisky regions survive through different strategies. The Lowlands lost most distilleries but are experiencing urban revival. Campbeltown nearly vanished but held on through stubbornness. Approachable doesn’t mean simple. Distinctive regional character is worth preserving, even when it limits market appeal.

Every bottle reflects choices about production philosophy, target audience, and relationship with tradition. The contrast between urban versus rural, innovation versus tradition, accessibility versus complexity reveals whisky’s incredible diversity within a relatively small country.

Next Time: Independent bottlers who select exceptional casks outside corporate house style constraints—whisky curation. Finding the outliers, the special moments, the expressions distilleries might not bottle themselves.