The Philip Duff Show

FINALLY an episode that's just me hanging out with someone, slurping down drinks and shooting the shit! Me and Dan solve all the world's problems, from his troubling lack of Tales of the Cocktail Spirited Awards to how everyone can crash at my place in Portugal this summer, to what it was like to fly maskless on a plane, how Ray Charles loved genever and how Ted Haigh got it onscreen, all while we're inhaling Old Duff Genever and Fresh Victor cocktail mixes. This was a fun one. Get in t...

An OG seminar I first gave way back in 2010, on behalf of the French grape-based G'Vine Gin. It's been really popular and I'm usually asked to teach it again every couple of years, most recently at Cabo Cocktail Festival in Mexico in 2017. It's a mini- Genever 101 and a mini-Gin 101, but mostly it traces the origins of gin from when distilling knowledge first came to Europe, through genever to the birth of what we would recognise as gin in England, which was complete when the column sti...

This is a rebooted version of a seminar named The Science of Citrus that I debuted at the much-missed Manhattan Cocktail Classic in, well, Manhattan waaaay back in 2011 (I say 2015 on the recording, oops). Because it's now online and we can't nose the liquid samples we had back then of decanal, limonene etc., and because I've also edited out the organic chemistry portion that explained what those nosing samples were, I've renamed this The Joy of Citrus. This one has it all - goats in ge...

This podcast episode started life as a seminar at the Tales of the Cocktail festival many years ago, and the Powerpoint deck on my Slideshare.net account (www.slideshare.net/philipduff )was the most-viewed of all the decks I uploaded, so this is the audio narration for that deck, updated for 2022. You can see the deck and hear this audio over on my YouTube channel, and there are a few amusing visuals there too. Strap in to hear about DCL, Irish dairy farms, P Diddy, David Gluckman and Unicorn...

OK, not every episode will be like this, but we gotta start somewhere! This is the audio for a webinar you can see on my YouTube channel, and its a great place to start if you don't know much about genever (or mixology) - there are more in-depth seminars on my YouTube too, by the way. If you're a pro, you'll like the second bit of this podcast, when I showcase some of the more impressive and innovative cocktails being made with genever, by some of the best bartenders working all around the wo...

Robert's a swashbuckling figure even by liquor biz standards: son of a fighter pilot, he grew up in England, set up a chain of radio stations across Europe in his youth, ran an agency, then slipped sideways into the liquor biz (armed only with a degree in languages) and climbed the greasy pole at Bacardi for 26 years, ending up as CEO of North America, after stints running the business in Moscow and Asia, among others. In 2015, with another Bacardi refugee, Juan Rovira, RFR founded Sams...

Angus is so old a friend that we can't remember exactly where we met but we're 99% sure it was at a bar show or get-together of some kind, probably in London, where he, a bartender from Oxford, was in on the ground floor of what we can now look back - after thirty years - to confirm was the birth of the Second Golden Age of cocktails. He and I were the two first people from the bar biz to have "Global Brand Ambassador" on our business cards (he for Tanqueray, me for Bols), and our caree...

I've been a fan of Ben's since his first book, Schott's Original Miscellany came out in 2002, a collection of quirky facts and insights into subcultures; his 13 (!) subsequent books expanded on the theme and have sold more than 2.5 million copies, in multiple languages, to date. Ben also wrote two of the best "homage" books in the style of PG Wodehouse, which, if you're a Wodehouse fan, I urge you to read. His newest book, Schott's Significa, delves into the worlds of hidden langu...

The irrepressible Edvinas "Eddie" Rudzinskas is a fixture at just about every bar show and party, and the Instagram he created, @cocktails_for_you, boasts 565, 000 followers. We sat down during BCBerlin to talk about how he went from working in his native Lithuania to bartending in a small town in Ireland, falling deep down the rabbit hole of mixology, and founding Cocktails for You, initially as a Facebook page sharing all the seminars and events he'd attend, first in Ireland and then ...

I've always followed the industry in Australia closely, as in my opinion it is, pound-for-pound, the best mixology nation on Earth; I've visited often, for teaching and consulting, and wrote a column in Australian Bartender magazine for some years. Last year the Sydney Morning Herald broke a story (sadly, only the first of many) uncovering alleged wide-ranging abuse at the renowned Australian hospitality group Swillhouse, with allegations ranging from management ignoring complaints righ...

I met Andrea in the End Times, even though we didn't know it, then; he made several delicious cocktails with Old Duff Genever for me, in New Zealand, in mid-March 2020, before the world closed down. Andrea is a remarkably cool guy who came from Italy to, first, Australia, and then NZ, to perfect his craft, knowing that first he had to perfect his language skills. He then worked months - even after winning national and international cocktail contests! - washing glasses, before bein...

Edmund co-founded Nightjar, a speakeasy cocktail bar with live music, in London with his life and business partner, Roisin Stimpson, in 2010, with its first head bartender being Marian Beke. Nightjar quickly stormed the lists of nominations, Best Bars, and more, and a lot of that success was due to Marian's incredible cocktail presentations, in bespoke vessels, using skill and flavour combinations that upped London's game significantly, and have since been copied widely. Hand-in-h...

I met Steve at Cologne Bar Symposium earlier this year, which also hosted the first-ever launch of Skrewball Peanut Butter Whiskey outside the USA. We chatted a bit and I attended his seminar; to say Steve's life is fascinating is like saying Elon Musk is a decent engineer. From a childhood of wealth in Cambodia with servants and bodyguards, to contracting polio and losing the use of one of his legs, to years of barely subsisting in a Thai refugee camp, being sponsored to come to ...

Our mutual friend (and PR guru) Laura Peet suggested I have liquor biz lifer Ken on, and he was a great guest! We chatted about the liquor industry, recent developments like GLP-1 inhibitors, the effects of phone-based gambling on drinks sales in bars, the Seagrams curse, and a whole bunch more, while I was drinking a Fre Damm Tostada a non-alc beer whose parent brand, Damm coincidentally is imported to the US by United States Beverage, where Ken's been brought in to bolster the liquor ...

Sarah Morrissey is a little bundle of joy on the NY bar circuit, but also a skilled mixologist who's had her bar programs reviewed in the likes of the New York Times on multiple occasions, shepherded bar programs to James Beard and Tales of the Cocktail nominations (and wins) and is rightly respected by all who know her. She's done stints at Le Veau d'Or, Frenchette, Ernesto's, Dutch Kills, and many more. She recently also started a Substack with some highly controversial posts, and tha...