EmbellishPod

Nick Maas of Dancing Goat Distillery joins the show to talk about Stillman's Sonder, the new 10-Year Bourbon and 10-Year American Single Malt honoring three generations of his family's work in whiskey — from his grandfather Duane Maas's behind-the-scenes production work at brands like Seagram's, to his father Tom's small-batch bourbon brand-building career, to Nick's own path running Dancing Goat today.The conversation starts with the word "sonder" itself — a term coined by John Koenig in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows — and how a concept about recognizing the full inner life of strangers became the guiding philosophy behind an entire whiskey brand. From there, Nick and John dig into the actual craft: how Andean oak (Quercus humboldtii) behaves differently than American white oak, why double-oaking was used to correct for a thin, fruit-forward base spirit, the mechanics of continuous still runs and where the "medicinal cherry" note in some MGP whiskey comes from, and how the American Single Malt was built through three rounds of blending across virgin oak, ex-bourbon, Wisconsin brandy, Cognac, and Calvados casks.They close on the Frank Lloyd Wright–inspired label art, a tribute to a late Dancing Goat team member woven into the packaging, and where to actually find a bottle.Spirits & distilleries mentioned: Stillman's Sonder Bourbon & American Single Malt, Dancing Goat Distillery, Death's Door Gin, Beren's Old Fashioned Brandy, MGP (Lawrenceburg, IN), RumChataLinks:stillmanssonder.com · dancinggoat.com · Buy: seelbachs.com, sharedpour.comPinkies down, headphones on. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.embellishpod.com

Meredith Mills-Merritt spent her career building prestige beauty brands before she ever thought about starting a spirits company. Then her mom's backyard gin cocktail — built on frozen lemonade concentrate, muddled mint, and a floral gin — became the recipe behind The Original Southside, a canned, ready-to-drink cocktail now on shelves in more than 20 markets.On this episode, Meredith walks through the 13-month development process that turned a family recipe into a business, the difference between a compound gin and a distilled gin, and why she bet on gin instead of the far more crowded vodka and tequila RTD categories. She and John dig into the beauty-industry habits she brought with her: obsessive ingredient sourcing, real cane sugar over corn syrup, and a refusal to hide behind a vague "clean" label.That obsession led Meredith to co-found the Clean Alcohol Collective with Conor Begley of Fathers Brewing — a coalition pushing for the kind of ingredient transparency that's standard in food and beauty but still optional in alcohol. They talk through the FDA's decades-old awareness of benzene risk in citrus-preserved beverages, why flavored malt beverages can legally pretend to be tequila cocktails, and what it takes for a brand to earn a spot in the Collective.Plus: how to actually drink a Southside (over ice, with a lemon wheel, or topped with prosecco), what breaks first when an RTD scales past 20 markets, and why sales patterns move across the map like a horseshoe each winter.Spirits & brands mentioned: The Original Southside, Fathers Brewing, Happy Dad, Cutwater, Salt Point, High Noon, Straightaway Cocktails, Hendrick's, Tanqueray🔗 drinksouthsides.com | embellishpod.com | [email protected] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.embellishpod.com

Katy O'Donnell spent years telling stories for one of the biggest whiskey brands in the world. Now she is telling a very different one. In this episode she joins John to explain what happens when a Buffalo Trace national brand ambassador goes all in on agave.We get into why a barrel-proof tequila is close to a physical impossibility, why aging tequila underground in Jalisco makes proof go down instead of up, and why that single fact flips everything a bourbon drinker assumes about "a well-aged spirit." Katy also fields a question she says nobody in tequila had ever asked her before, which came from a room full of whiskey buyers.From there we get into how Tequila Tromba actually gets made. Master distiller Marco Cedano built the brand around a commissary kitchen model, taking over a distillery he does not own and producing under his own standards. Katy explains NOMs, the seven-year math of planting agave against a market you cannot forecast, the Agave Rewilding Project planting species the brand can never sell, and how leftover agave fiber becomes compostable straws and cutlery.Guest: Katy O'Donnell is VP of Brand Development at Tequila Tromba. Previously she spent roughly seven years at Sazerac, including three as National Brand Ambassador for Buffalo Trace Distillery.Mentioned: Tequila Tromba (Blanco, Reposado, Añejo, Extra Añejo, Cafeto coffee liqueur, 3.75L Extra Grande), Buffalo Trace Distillery, Sazerac, Siete Leguas, Fortaleza, G4, Tequila Ocho, Don Julio, The Sustainable Agave Company, Sheer Agave, Arte Agave.Video version on YouTube. Full written piece on Substack.Find everything at embellishpod.com. @embellishpod on Instagram and TikTok. [email protected]. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.embellishpod.com

Legendary Hollywood producer Larry Kasanoff joins EmbellishPod to talk about what it actually takes to bet your career on a crazy idea — and win. Larry's résumé spans over 250 film and TV credits since 1987, including Platoon, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, True Lies, Dirty Dancing, and the entire Mortal Kombat franchise. He's the founder of Threshold Entertainment and co-founder of Lightstorm Entertainment (with James Cameron), and the author of A Touch of the Madness: How to Be More Innovative in Work and Life . . . by Being a Little Crazy. In this conversation, Larry breaks down the three principles at the core of his book — Create, Ask, and Play — and tells the stories behind them: greenlighting Platoon as a 25-year-old executive, convincing a skeptical CEO to hand over the rights to what became Mortal Kombat, talking Cher into her first-ever animated film role, and the infamous Guns N' Roses music video stunt behind Terminator 2. He also gets candid about the bets that didn't pay off, why he doesn't dwell on the misses, and how "embracing the madness" applies just as much outside the movie business as in it.A masterclass in creative risk-taking from someone who's lived it for four decades.Mentioned: A Touch of the Madness (BenBella Books), Threshold Entertainment, Vestron Pictures, Platoon, Terminator 2, True Lies, Dirty Dancing, Mortal KombatLinks: atouchofthemadness.com | thresholdentertainment.com | Instagram @larrykasanoffLive everywhere — audio, YouTube, and Substack. #PinkiesDown This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.embellishpod.com

The Backlog EpisodeI’ve been quiet for a bit. Not the good kind of quiet where I’m off somewhere sipping something rare and taking notes for later — the kind where life just eats your recording schedule alive. The samples kept arriving anyway, stacking up on the shelf like little reminders that I owed some friends of the show an actual conversation. So that’s what this one is: a backlog episode. Seven pours, no formal tasting notes, and a lot of catching up on what’s actually happening in this industry right now.Two States, One Bottle (Sort Of)The first thing I cracked open was a pair of bottles that are clearly in on the joke with each other — one labeled Kentslyvania, one labeled Penntucky. It’s a collaboration between Liberty Pole Spirits out of Washington, Pennsylvania, and MB Roland Distillery out of Pembroke, Kentucky, timed to land around the country’s 250th anniversary. The concept is simple on paper and more interesting the longer you sit with it: each distillery picked one of its own barrels and one from the other, then built its own blend from the same four base whiskies. Liberty Pole’s version leans on their sweet-mash, double-pot-distilled Monongahela rye tradition. MB Roland’s leans on their pre-prohibition style and that dark-fired corn they’re known for in western Kentucky.I could pick out the MB Roland character almost immediately just from the nose — that distinct house profile doesn’t hide easily, blend or not. The Penntucky version read a little more rye-forward to me, though I’ll cop to that being purely anecdotal. What I actually want to flag here isn’t which one “wins,” because that’s not the point. It’s that I think we’re going to see more of this kind of thing — distilleries using each other as an introduction to markets they don’t already have a foothold in. If you want to understand western Kentucky whiskey, MB Roland is a great front door. If you want Pennsylvania rye, Liberty Pole is exactly that. Pairing up isn’t a competition, it’s a proxy.A Blending House Doing What It Does BestFrom there I moved to something that’s been sitting on my shelf longer than I’d like to admit — Dark Arts Whiskey House’s Empyrean, a high-rye bourbon finished separately in red and white port casks. Macaulay Minton and the Dark Arts team have built their whole identity around blending and finishing rather than distilling from scratch, and this one leans into that fully: seven-and-a-half-year Indiana distillate, finished in white port casks specifically, which is a less common move than the usual red port play. The name is a reach for “highest heaven,” and honestly, letting it sit and open up in the glass for a while, it earns a little bit of that reach. Thick, syrupy texture, long legs in the glass. No notes today, but it’s good. Real good.Grown on Eleven AcresNext was something I picked up in person, not shipped to me — an Estate Bourbon from Lux Row Distillers in Bardstown, from a trip I took a few months back with their team. This is a five-year rye bourbon mash bill (78% corn, 12% malted barley, 10% rye) where the corn was grown on the eleven-acre plot that now houses three of their rickhouses. That’s the kind of detail that sounds like marketing copy until you actually think through the logistics — harvesting a single eleven-acre field means dedicated equipment runs, dedicated storage, no cross-contamination with any other crop. It’s expensive to do at that scale, which is exactly why a five-year bourbon carries a price tag that would otherwise raise an eyebrow. It’s a limited, distillery-exclusive pour, and it’s a genuinely interesting one for anyone who cares about where their grain actually comes from.Pride of Anderson County Goes NationalThen there’s a whiskey with a complicated history: Pride of Anderson County, the collaboration between Rare Character Whiskey Co. and Wild Turkey historian David Jennings. The original run was a limited lottery release tied explicitly to Wild Turkey — expensive, scarce, and it made a lot of people upset in the way whiskey people get upset. This new chapter is different. It’s transitioning into an ongoing single barrel series releasing twice a year, going national instead of staying a one-off. Whether or not it’s tied to a specific named source doesn’t really change my read on it — Rare Character’s track record speaks for itself, and this pour backed that up. It might be the best thing I tried all night.Decanters, Barrel Picks, and What’s ComingA couple of quick hits before I wrap: Green River Distilling Co.‘s tasting-room-exclusive ceramic decanters are some of the most fun packaging in the category right now, and the whiskey inside holds up regardless of what else is happening with their parent company — a story I’ll let the actual news outlets cover.And finally, the one I’m most excited about: I joined Casey Jones Distillery‘s new public barrel pick program, open to anyone who wants to sign up. We worked through five barrels alongside folks from the Kentucky Bourbon Festival, converged on the same favorite before anyone knew what it was, and that barrel is now the official Kentucky Bourbon Festival pick for the year. It’ll be available at the festival this fall — and if you’re going, that’s a bottle worth standing in line for.What’s NextOff the spirits beat, I’m keeping up the monthly cocktail series on Substack (this month: a bourbon blackberry smash) and running album reviews as advance copies come in. More episodes are coming, including some familiar faces from the Kentucky Bourbon Festival world before summer’s out.If you want the full conversation — the tape-wrestling, the tangents, all of it — the episode is live now on audio, YouTube, and right here on Substack, if that’s your thing.#PinkiesDown This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.embellishpod.com