For fans ages 21 and up!
It's often hard to know how sustainable or ethical an alcoholic drink is. Very little disclosure is required on most labels, and many of the recipes are proprietary. What is a conscientious drinker to do?
Shanna Farrell wrote A Good Drink: In Search of Sustainable Spirits in order to answer this exact question.
She and host Ross Kenyon discuss the strange world of amaros (or "amari" if you're really going for it!), whiskey, agave, and gin, and try to figure out how to even begin approaching this difficult consumptive choice.
N.B. If you really want to nerd out on amaro taxonomy, Brad Thomas Parsons's books on amaro and bitters are both quite useful; linked below.
Resources
Become a paid subscriber of Reversing Climate Change
A Good Drink: In Search of Sustainable Spirits by Shanna Farrell
Amaro: The Spirited World of Bittersweet, Herbal Liqueurs by Brad Thomas Parsons
Crushed: How A Changing Climate Is Altering the Way We Drink by Brian Freedman
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Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello out there, I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m a climate tech and carbon removal entrepreneur and the host of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. If you’re listening and you’re a fan of the show, can I please call on you to become a subscriber? It’s $5 a month, keeps this show financially viable, and gets you access to ad-free listening, bonus content, and potentially more as I build out the offerings. Link is in the show notes. And now begins the show intro.
Today I have a show for you that I’ve wanted to make for a very long time. When I feel like enjoying some alcohol, which isn’t wildly often, I prefer an amaro spritz. I like that it’s less alcoholic. It’s effervescent. It’s strange. Amaro, the singular in Italian, or amari, the plural, means bitter in Italian. The taxonomy here gets a little confusing. They’re not like bitters that you think of, like Angostura in a small bottle where it’s very concentrated. And then there’s also differences between amari, digestifs, aperitifs, and also Italian bitters like Campari, just technically not an amaro in my understanding. But the line between all these categories is a bit blurry.
But one thing you can say is that they’re often strange, medicinal, earthy. Sometimes they’re sweet like Aperol, but they often have a bit of a funk to them. They’re not normal, and that’s the fun of it. They go back centuries. I think of them as being herbally infused liqueurs or wines. And I associate them very strongly with strange little liqueurs, strange little drinks from Italian villages. And I know this isn’t always technically how it works, but I imagine them as being made in the same way with the same recipe for hundreds of years and being extremely local. Not typically an exported type of beverage, but something that maybe is just a passion of the local people there.
This has changed over time where some varieties of Italian bitters and amari have become worldwide phenomena. Is there a bar that you couldn’t get an Aperol spritz at in the summer? It’s increasingly common. People enjoy things like Negronis, which, with the Campari focus, are a strange beverage. It’s bright red and it’s not a straightforwardly sweet drink. There’s a lot of complexity to it. It’s just odd. And they’re all like this, essentially. Some of them are pretty sweet. Like I had an Amaro Montenegro in a drink recently and that was pretty sweet. But oftentimes you’ll have them all the way from something like Malört, which we talk about in this show, which is famously associated with Chicago as a rather aggressive drink.
There’s a beer bar near me that has these on the counter, Underberg, which is a digestive drink that I guess it’s a German thing that people will often drink after a meal. There’s all sorts of these bizarre little drinks where it’s actually pretty difficult to pick out a specific flavor and say, oh, this is definitely what that is. There’s some exceptions, something like nocino, it’s walnut based, and some of these drinks that are pretty straightforward, they just have a single ingredient or they focus on a specific featured ingredient, but some of them are secretive.
Chartreuse is a very famous example of this where, as far as I know — this might be marketing, I don’t even know if it’s true — but there’s a couple of monks that know what goes into Chartreuse, and when one of them dies, someone else is brought into the arcane mysteries of what makes Chartreuse Chartreuse, and that’s fun. I like the mythology of that. I think that’s a really cool thing. In a world where everything feels very corporate and more and more of these flavors become synthetic, I think it’s nice to have something that just feels mysterious and earthy, and even if it’s not always technically true, I kind of like that a little bit. That’s nice.
So anyways, they’re not straightforwardly pleasant drinks. They often have a medicinal, woody, earthy herbal component. I don’t think of them as having a very straightforward flavor. If you drink them, it’s unclear what is happening in them. There’s also flavors that maybe you don’t really know or couldn’t pull out, like gentian root, which is in a lot of these too, or quinine bark. A lot of these drinks have a medicinal intention. I associate them also very strongly with — and this is the bad version — snake oil salesmen and patent medicine in the 19th century. I think of traveling hucksters hawking suspicious vials of quite alcoholic concoctions mixed with herbs.
You’ll even see this now too, if you know anyone who’s an herbalist. And one of the techniques that’s very famous in herbalism is making tinctures, which is submerging various types of ingredients in alcohol and alcohol will pull that out of it. If you’ve ever made — this is also an example, I’m not even sure if this technically counts as an amaro, which is where this becomes blurred — but if you’ve ever made or consumed limoncello, it’s also the case where you mix various types of citrus with Everclear, if you can get it, and just pure grain alcohol, you end up diluting it later. But that alcohol is a very effective way of pulling flavor out of organic ingredients like that, and then you later dilute it.
But a lot of these drinks started as medicine. So they have this sort of extractive component, pulling the nutrients out of various types of herbs with the intention of settling the stomach or curing some ailment. And it has that medicinal heritage to it. And only to make the line more unclear, there are also drinks like gin, basically vodka that has been infused with various types of herbs and plants. Specifically, gin is famous for juniper, but there’s a lot else that ends up mixed in there too.
And so as you’re probably understanding from this category, even though I’ve been very flexible in defining it, even to the point where I’m talking about gin, which is not an amaro, they’re highly idiosyncratic. And also there’s a connection here with vermouth, which is considered a type of aromatized wine, which means it’s wine and mixes in sugar and herbs and various other ingredients to change the flavor of it.
A lot of these ingredients are strange. They’re not necessarily always the most commonly found. I imagine some of them probably grow in microclimates where those ranges might be changing and some of them for the worse. I imagine the ones that are dependent upon the European Alps are going to become progressively harder to find as the climates along the mountains shift upwards as the climate warms, and we’re going to lose access or potentially see that shrink. So one of the things that we talked about in this show is to what degree amari are going to adapt to the changing flavors that are even available to us and to what degree that’s going to be synthetically recreated. And what do we lose when we lose some of that natural variability and end up with an extract flavor that’s dependable but maybe doesn’t have that spark of inspiration that we really look for when we want something that’s special and unique?
And if you’re seeking out a bottle like this, I think it’s not because you want always something that’s exactly the same every time. I think it’s because you want something that’s special. And I certainly feel that way. I don’t even really necessarily mind if some of these bottles change in the same way that you expect wine to change over the duration of ownership. But we’ve also come to expect liquor — with a possible exception of wine, which gets better over time up to a point, and beer, which gets worse up to a point until it skunks and is no longer drinkable — we sort of expect a lot of harder liquor to just be shelf stable and hang in there. For the most part that’s true, but as we talked about in this show, it’s really more complicated than that.
So I’m very glad to bring on Shanna Farrell today on the podcast. She’s an oral historian at Berkeley, a former bartender, and author of A Good Drink: In Search of Sustainable Spirits. I learned a lot from this book and I imagine you will too. It’s a good one. You should pick it up and read it. I also read a couple other books in the researching of this show. I read Crushed by Brian Freedman. It’s a very good book as well. And I’ve also enjoyed the writing of Brad Thomas Parsons and Amy Stewart. It is a highly specialized topic. And a lot of the manufacturers of these drinks are not sharing their procurement with a lot of people.
One of the things that we talked about in the show is that because of the way this is regulated, especially in the US, there isn’t strong regulation around sharing which ingredients make it into liquor. And that means that we don’t actually know a lot of times, unless they’re publishing recipes, which oftentimes they’re not because these recipes are proprietary and they want to keep them that way. So we don’t actually know, which makes it hard to have a topic like this explored to my full satisfaction. So we start to scratch this itch. But there’s still a lot more to say about this. I care about this topic a lot.
Somehow I know more about this than I maybe thought I did going into it. I’m able to mostly freestyle off of the various differences in drinks and how they’re made and the ingredients. In any case, thank you so much for being with me, Shanna. I’m really glad you’ve written on this topic. I hope you’ll write more in the future. And I think it’s going to become increasingly relevant as climate change progresses and some of the ingredients that we maybe take for granted in these strange bottles become harder and harder to find or increasingly synthetic. But thank you so much for being here with me. Thanks for listening. Enjoy the show.
Well, Shanna, thanks so much for being here with me today.
Shanna Farrell: Thanks for having me.
Ross Kenyon: My pleasure, I really enjoyed your book, A Good Drink: In Search of Sustainable Spirits. I feel like everyone assumes alcohol is bad so no one really cares about this. They just assume that it’s bad or never thought about it. Do you agree with that? Is that how it feels?
Shanna Farrell: You know, I think that there’s a lot of reasons that people don’t apply the same principles of sustainability and agriculture to spirits as they do other things. And I do think that, you know, nothing exists in a vacuum. And prohibition plays a role in this, and alcohol is a type of poison. But it still gets — I enjoy consuming it. It still gets consumed a lot. And so we still have to think about these things, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: You threw out so much bait there in that one small paragraph. Wait, what does prohibition have to do with the fact that people don’t care about the sustainability of alcohol?
Shanna Farrell: Well, I think what you were saying before about how people assume alcohol is bad, that’s where that comes from. It was villainized for so long, and then it took a very long time for things to recover after prohibition. And so the villainization of it gets repeated over and over again. And I think, yeah, I’ll leave it there for now. I’m gonna just go off on a tangent other way, so.
Ross Kenyon: Tangents are welcome. Wait, so it’s simultaneously a poison but also not an inherently bad poison? Is that what you’re saying?
Shanna Farrell: Well, I mean, I think that moderation is key, right? That’s the thing. And I think also too, if you just enjoy a cocktail every once in a while and, you know, have a drink once a year, once a month, it still matters where these things come from because it is a huge global industry. I might not necessarily — let’s say I’m trying to think of an example of something that doesn’t feel immediately relevant to me because it’s not part of my everyday life, but I still have to care about it, right? Because it affects the planet and our local ecosystems and that kind of thing.
Ross Kenyon: I think it’s even possible to care about it beyond the more abstract environmental sustainability reasons, where some of the stories in the book, just learning what goes into something like Campari is pretty spooky. I’m like, OK, I’m going to choose different Italian bitters from now on because I don’t know that I want to consume some of the things that are added to these beverages.
Shanna Farrell: Well, I did look it up the other day and Campari no longer uses some of the synthetic dyes, so they have made some changes.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, that’s good to hear. OK, that’s nice.
Shanna Farrell: I’m not sure if anyone there read my book and that’s why, but.
Ross Kenyon: Let’s hope so.
Shanna Farrell: They’ve changed the recipe multiple times over the years, so.
Ross Kenyon: But also, you wouldn’t know from reading the label because for some reason spirits just do not require to list ingredients on them. I’m not even sure why that is.
Shanna Farrell: Yeah, that actually goes back to prohibition as well. So before prohibition, alcohol was regulated on a federal level. When prohibition got repealed, it went to states. So that’s why the three-tier system, or essentially how it goes from producer to retailer to consumer, how that changes based on what state you live in. And after prohibition got repealed, I want to say I’m 95% sure that the FDA did not exist then when prohibition was repealed, but it went to the TTB. So now it’s regulated under basically the tax bureau.
Ross Kenyon: OK. I wouldn’t have expected that and I’ve certainly bought liquor through — the first thing I think of is the, what does it even call, is it ABCs? What’s it called in Virginia? ABC. Yeah. I’ve been there before and I’ve also heard rumors of just how tightly regulated it is for like intermediaries or distributors of alcohol too. It’s very tight in my understanding.
Shanna Farrell: Yeah, I think that the three-tier system was put into place originally to try to balance out which stakeholder had most of the power, and so that’s why it is different per state. But the way things shift and evolve over time certainly change. And it’s easier in New York State to do some of these things, like selling directly from a producer to a consumer, than it is in a place like California where you have to go through a retailer. And it is different between wine, beer and spirits as well. So not all alcohol is regulated the same.
Ross Kenyon: How much do these regulations actually protect people, and how much of them maybe just look like it?
Shanna Farrell: I don’t think they protect people at all. So I would say —
Ross Kenyon: I ask that in a nice neutral way, but you didn’t know.
Shanna Farrell: I know. I don’t think they were put in place to protect people at all. I think that they were put in place to try to check some power, but it got shifted in other places. And, you know, before prohibition too, there’s a Kings County Distillery. One of the founders wrote a book that I’m blanking on the title of, but it’s one of my favorite books about whiskey history. And there’s some theories that I’ve kind of pulled from that book a little bit or was inspired by from that book. And that I think that prohibition was largely because the people were losing out on money, like the federal government was losing out on money. And so prohibition was a way of, from a federal perspective, trying to get some of that money. I mean, you think about the cannabis industry, and it’s sort of similar in that way. There’s some parallels to be made, I think, between the two. So I think it was meant to protect the government and not the actual consumers.
Ross Kenyon: OK, yeah, I guess I don’t know enough about it, but I can’t say it would entirely surprise me. Well, I’d like to talk about some of the various spirits here. You tell stories of several of them in your book. I think one of the ones that caught my ear the most is the one about bourbon. One, I think people don’t really know the history of bourbon that well, or they think they do, but they’re leaving out major parts of the story. But also a lot of it, even the fancy brands, end up just using a commodity-like grain alcohol seller essentially, where it sounds — maybe they put some nice finishings on it and have their touch on the process, but the bulk of it is not what you’d expect from a more artisanal producer. Thanks for ruining that for me, but also now I have a better understanding of what I should be buying and thinking about moving forward.
Shanna Farrell: So it’s hard to make a grand sweeping statement. Majority of the whiskey industry does — I mean, they are. There are not producers who basically have their own farms. There are — they’re few and far between. A few do, but the vast majority do not. So they have to source their grain from somewhere. And oftentimes I’ve been on distillery tours in Kentucky on the Bourbon Trail, and I’ve said, where does your grain come from? I’ve asked that question and the person is like, I don’t know, one of the square states in that direction. So they just have no idea even what state it comes from.
They are — a lot of distilleries get their own grain and then they cook it and ferment it and make the whiskey. But a lot of places do source that alcohol and then they put it in barrels and they finish it essentially. And I think if you’re on a distillery tour or you’re at a retail store, asking the question of like, hey, do they distill their own whiskey or do they source it, is a good question. And most of the time there is disclosure about that. So it’s not all doom and gloom. There are a lot of people who are doing really wonderful things and really forward thinking. And especially since my book came out, I have had people contact me and say like, hey, I’m working on this little project here, or I’m starting this distillery and I’m really making an effort to make sure I’m using locally sourced grain and I have a direct relationship with the growers of the grain. So there’s more of that happening now and it’s really inspiring. But I mean, in general, wheat is, yes, a commodity crop.
Ross Kenyon: I just have a suspicion, especially when I’m buying from a larger brand that is reliant upon the commodity system to some extent. I also think about this where, all right, I am very susceptible to this idea of amari as having each individual amaro being produced by some weird little Italian village. It’s been there for hundreds of years. They have their — and then if you dig into it a little bit, you’re like, oh, it’s owned by one of the major beverage manufacturers and it’s all synthesized at this point. It’s no longer just a weird little special thing. I don’t even know that it’s true. Is that even the correct assumption that I should have going into drinking?
Shanna Farrell: I don’t know that that’s completely true. That’s —
Ross Kenyon: Good. Please, please just disabuse me of it.
Shanna Farrell: In Europe, there are still a lot of grower-producers that are around, and in order to get more international distribution, they work with the big companies. So a lot of them still make their own products, but just in terms of how the logistics of it work, they do work — they’re maybe owned by larger companies and they distribute it for them. But a lot of places, especially in Europe, still are small grower-producers. Some things are synthetic. And again, this goes back to the fact that alcohol is not regulated by the FDA, so they don’t have to have ingredients listings on bottles. So we might never know where things are coming from and if there are synthetic chemicals in there or synthetic ingredients. But it’s not — I wouldn’t say that that’s the whole story. I think there’s a lot of people still doing some good stuff.
Ross Kenyon: Is there any way to know as a consumer when you’re supporting one over another?
Shanna Farrell: Yeah, I think that a lot of, now with the Internet, there’s a lot of producers that have websites and so you can Google it and you can try to find out. There’s a lot of writers who are doing some interesting kind of travel pieces with visiting these places. And so I think if you just, you know, do an Internet search of the producer to see if they’re making it or if it’s going somewhere else, you can tell a lot from a website.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, OK.
Shanna Farrell: Yeah, no matter how many smoke and mirrors they put up, I think if you get below the surface, you can kind of figure it out. And some — if you’re like really looking at an obscure one, they might not have a website and that could actually be a good thing. So both directions there.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, interesting way to do the detective work. I think like a year ago, I got a bottle of Disaronno to bake with and then make some nice like nutty almondy pastries. And after reading your book, I had this moment. I’m like, please tell me this is not one of the bad ones. And I asked ChatGPT and, I don’t know if it’s true, but it assured me that this is not like fake almond flavor. You’re good.
Shanna Farrell: I’m not 100 — I’m not familiar with the Disaronno products. But yeah, sometimes those nut flavors are synthetic.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it did freak me out enough to where I’m like, I just want — is it so hard to make something that is authentically good? Like have we not lost all the taste buds where we want the strange and the non-clear chemical taste? Why not?
Shanna Farrell: Yeah, and I think that there’s a bit of a turn from that too. People are realizing, oh, I want something that I can get locally or there’s a story. I mean, where I’m local to St. George Spirits and they make eaux de vie. And you can, you know, visit the distillery and you see all the pears on the distillery floor and you can smell them when it’s pear season. And so you know that they’re using fresh real ingredients. And the same thing, I think, when you go to Leopold Brothers, they make a lot of liqueurs and they get most things from Colorado and a smaller footprint. And so you can, you know, go visit and see the fruit that’s actually there. And so I think that there are people who are still making things from actual products. Small Hand Foods does that. I think they’re still around, but like the orgeat, it’s nothing synthetic.
Ross Kenyon: Do you think it’s at all like how it is for natural winemaking, where I think people assume there’s some variability in using more natural products where sometimes the wine is really great and sometimes it’s undrinkable? I’ve certainly had bottles where I’m like, this is — is it not better to just, like, I think Barefoot would be better than this bottle essentially.
Shanna Farrell: Yeah, I mean, living in the Bay Area, natural wine is part — it’s like imbued in the fabric of the culture here. And I’ve definitely had some natural wines that I’m like, maybe this needed a little more time, but I’ve had some that are great as well. I think it’s different with spirits because they’re distilled, so some of that does make it a little bit more uniform. But I would argue, what’s wrong with having a bottle of eau de vie taste different year to year, or a bottle of whiskey that has different corn in it that has been grown from different places? I think that with alcohol, we’ve sort of gotten used to this idea that everything should taste the same all the time. And with wine, it’s always been part of the conversation, which vintage tastes different or which methods taste different. And so that’s just sort of how people have always talked about wine. But with hard alcohol, it’s like, well, how come this isn’t consistent? And so I think applying some of those same ideas that are just part of the wine culture to spirits makes a lot of sense because they’re both from agricultural products.
Ross Kenyon: Wow, that’s really fascinating. The only counterexample I can think of that is barely even a counterexample is, you know, scotches, we’ll say like 14 years, but it doesn’t list which year that started in, which, like, wine does. They’ll say it’s like 2017. I don’t know why. Why don’t they do that?
Shanna Farrell: That’s a good question. Some do, I think, or like when they’re barrelled and so you know how long that they’re aged for. And sometimes that’s — to be completely honest, in Europe I’m not as familiar with some of the rules that govern how the labeling works, but I do know in the US I think that there are age statements that are required, so.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I wonder how much of that is just governing Europe by the — what, DOPs and DOCs and just.
Shanna Farrell: Yeah, yeah. And I don’t know that Scotch — oh, was that right? I’m not 100% sure. Scotch may have a DOC. If not, they’re extremely protective over it in America.
Ross Kenyon: What, you have to call it single malt here, right? I don’t even think you can call it even like what — American single malt.
Shanna Farrell: Yeah, yeah. You can’t call it Scotch, but I think you can call it single malt. I think that’s how they do it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. We just start back at your story — actually, I, we skipped ahead. I have you here, so I dove right into asking all my questions. I’m sure there’s a dozen more waiting close behind it, but maybe you could tell us how you got into this topic. It’s not the most natural topic, I think, for a lot of people to dive into at this depth.
Shanna Farrell: Yeah. So there was like a confluence of things or an amalgamation of different experiences coming together, I would say. But I was really interested in environmental issues, let’s say, when I was in high school. I grew up along the Hudson River in an area that was really polluted. The Hudson River is actually the largest Superfund state — Superfund site in the United States. And I grew up kind of in the area where the source of the pollution came from. And I was in high school when there were a lot of fights around, do we clean it up or do we not? And so I got up really close and I used to go to town meetings. And I was really interested in this topic, ’cause it was pretty nuanced. In many ways it was nuanced. In many ways it was not.
And so when I kind of fast-forward to when I was in graduate school, I was really interested in the way water affects communities in different ways. And so I’m an oral historian full time at UC Berkeley. And I was getting a master’s degree in oral history and I was kind of studying the Hudson River and what this was happening. I was really interested in actually how water affects alcohol and spirits and that kind of thing. Because also too, if you travel to different places, water tastes different. And so I’m endlessly fascinated by water. And originally this book was going to be about water, but it was way too niche and I couldn’t find anyone to publish that version of it.
And so I was also bartending to put myself through graduate school. And I tell the story at the beginning of the book, but there was a producer whose label — they made whiskey and said it was New York State grain. And I thought that that was really interesting. It was the first time I had seen a company right up front say this is New York State grain. Also, it was a very eye-catching label and it was also some of our most expensive stuff. So I was naturally drawn and interested in this. And so when I was getting my graduate degree, I was doing an oral history project and the distillery is on property that’s just off the Hudson River. So it’s like, maybe I can see if I can interview this distiller as part of my graduate work. And my advisor was like, yeah, that’s a great idea.
So I ended up talking to them and the distillery has since switched owners. And so the original owner had said, you know, it was kind of a cost thing, and was like, I could save a lot of money if I just create a direct relationship with a grain grower. So why don’t I do that? So he was able to do that and then he was also pretty instrumental in changing some of the state laws so you could actually, you know, sample your product at a farmer’s market or something like that. So it kind of fit in with some of the farmer’s market rules. And so it just really opened my eyes to what was possible.
And then fast-forward years later — well, I guess it was a few years later, it wasn’t a lot — I’m now living in San Francisco and this is kind of controversial to say, but I feel like California is a little bit of a hit, like maybe a couple years ahead of the food culture in New York and probably it’s —
Ross Kenyon: Controversial.
Shanna Farrell: Yeah. But I mean, I strongly believe that a lot of trends that are happening here you kind of see happen later there. But, you know, listing what farms different ingredients come from or how fish were caught, that kind of thing, it’s really common here and I would be seeing these things. So I was getting more and more interested in like, OK, you have a vegan restaurant and you say that you have a vegan bar, but I also know that the stuff on your back bar isn’t vegan. So there’s a huge disconnect here. Or restaurants that are like, oh, we are totally organic, we’re farm to table, the same things — we’re not applying to the bar. You know, you go into renowned restaurants who are known for these things and then you see a bottle full of dye and synthetic flavors on the back bar and you’re like, well, you’re not paying as much attention to the bar. And bars are the profit center of restaurants. So I don’t know, I just think there’s a disconnect there as well. And so I just kind of got deeper and deeper into this and here we are.
Ross Kenyon: It’d be nice if the bars at these restaurants did have more artisanal bottles available, but I also noticed that even for something that I imagine — some of the ingredients in some drinks are well and some of them are more premium, but it almost doesn’t matter. It’s hard to get a cocktail for seemingly under what a meal costs a lot of places too. So how much would it cost to just get all of the local artisanal production going?
Shanna Farrell: I mean, that’s changed so much and there’s a lot of economic reasons that I, not being a bar owner or bar manager at this point, like I can’t necessarily comment on super intelligently. But like prices of everything have gone up, so alcohol prices have gone up. I think COVID had a big impact on a lot of this stuff. People are still trying to make up costs lost from that. And, you know, I do know with — you’re trying to keep your drink cost low, so you have wells versus more premium liquors that are on the back bar. And I think that bartenders get excited when you want to try something other than the well. And they’re like, yeah, what would this rum taste like in a daiquiri? Oh, that’s awesome. You want to try that in an old fashioned, or you just want a pour of it to try it on its own? That’s great. I mean, it is exciting for people to try that. But I don’t know, I can’t really comment on specific costs of more kind of artisanal ingredients.
There was a bar in San Francisco that was around for a long time in a few different iterations called Bar Agricole. And the bar owner Thad Vogler did a lot of work on this front in the early 2000s with his work at Bar Agricole, trying to just have a lot of grower-producer products and things that did not have synthetic chemicals, where he knew where they were coming from and that kind of thing. Just using ingredients in cocktails that were seasonal. Citrus doesn’t grow year round, or normally, in many parts of the country. So, like, you know, what does it mean to not have a daiquiri at a time when limes don’t grow — a little bit different in California. But it’s interesting ideas to see how they work or don’t work in practice.
Ross Kenyon: It’s pretty fascinating. I don’t think of alcohol as seasonal at all. Obviously at least the various garnishes are going to be seasonal in some cases, but if the whole point is preservation, so there is almost less seasonality to it, it’s supposed to be around just forever.
Shanna Farrell: Yeah, there’s that. The sort of the farm-to-glass thing has been around in the Bay Area for a while, kind of looking at what is growing in season and trying to incorporate it into a cocktail, whether that be a garnish or as an ingredient. But you know, you are right with the preservation. That’s why shrubs are around, because it was really a way of preserving a season. And so, yeah, it’s interesting. I see a lot more of that. I’ll see bars or restaurants like, OK, we make our own bitters, we make our own shrubs, various things like that. But I guess I haven’t seen it too much beyond that.
Ross Kenyon: I guess I’ve seen eggnog places too. I also age my own eggnog. Every year I set one up for the following year. It’s so easy. I’m not like a brilliant chef, but I plan ahead and I feel like time does most of the heavy lifting for me. But I think that’s mostly what I see at restaurants and bars too, in that way.
Shanna Farrell: Yeah, I feel like I do know people who age their eggnog. We’ve tried it before. I know that there are some like eggnog competitions where bars will like put in a barrel and try it the next year. That one I think can be polarizing. It’s just the perishableness of the ingredients. But that also kind of lends itself to this conversation as well, is like how comfortable are people with ingredients they’re not so familiar with, or familiar with the scientific properties, like eggnog, right? Like, it’s OK to drink it in a year if you’ve aged it properly, but a lot of people don’t think that. So how do you change a consumer’s mind about what’s like fun and interesting to drink?
Ross Kenyon: I mean, I think just thinking about — I mean, honey is immortal because the sugar content’s so high. Putting that much booze and that much sugar into dairy, at some point it just becomes like, I think it’s good.
Shanna Farrell: Absolutely. And you’re completely right. It’s safe to drink. But like the perception is that it’s perishable. So it’s changing. And I think with some of these lesser known, more artisanal products, it’s how do you get people interested and excited about things that they aren’t familiar with and they’re not seeing billboards for, right?
Ross Kenyon: I think probably it goes hand in hand with the growth of and acceptance of fermentation and fermented products too. I think people are increasingly comfortable with things. I remember as a kid I had a close Korean friend. I remember, like, he had a hard time growing up. And then now, like, Koreans have seemingly conquered the world culturally with, you know, music, film and food, in a way where it’s heavily dependent upon stuff that would have been considered stinky as hell when I was a kid.
Shanna Farrell: I mean, living in the Bay Area, there’s lots of — I mean, it’s just fermentation. And yes, there’s many places where you can get amazing banchan. And I think sometimes too, it’s a regional thing.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it could be. I mean, I’ve seen countless artisanal pickle places. I remember one time I walked across Brooklyn in an afternoon. I was like, OK, this stuff’s now everywhere, it seems. They can’t get enough of fermented things. And I mean, cheese is the one exception to that that’s always been somewhat popular, but I remember people making fun of stinkier cheeses as a kid too. And like, what even is the one I’m thinking about? I can’t — is it Limburger? What is it? I’m not sure. What is like the — like cheese? No, it’s like a really runny, like soft, like an aggressive, probably like Norman cheese. I’m trying to remember what — anyways, there’s like cheese, I remember, were jokes in kids’ cartoons, and I feel like I hear less of that stuff now as an adult. I’m like, oh, actually, we’re much more tolerant to these extreme fermented flavors than we ever had. Kombucha’s everywhere. And I wonder if we’re just gonna see more, like, where’s it gonna be culturally in 10 years? Are we gonna be comfortable with things I don’t even know about yet that are like, this comes from Uganda and this is their fermented product, now it’s conquered the world as well?
Shanna Farrell: I mean, that’d be great. It’s how we learn about each other, right?
Ross Kenyon: Do you know much about the ingredients sourcing for amari? Is it harder to find?
Shanna Farrell: Like, yeah, so it’s interesting. And knowing that this was something you were thinking about, I did, you know, amaro is not in the book. So I did look up a little bit of this. And I think part of this goes back to the fact that ingredients are not listed on bottles. So half the time, you know, we don’t know what the recipe is. Or something like Fernet-Branca. They’ll tell you what’s in it, but they won’t give you the percentage. So there’s that. I think sometimes knowing exactly what ingredients are in there, that can be very challenging because of the way things are regulated. And then there, I would say in terms of a lot of the common ingredients in amaro, there’s interesting similarities between tea and the environmental impact with tea and the ingredients used in amaro, because they’re often similar.
Yeah. And I was — ’cause I was like, oh, let me look into this a little bit. There’s a book called Botany at the Bar. It’s called The Art and Science of Making Bitters. But they do have a passage in here about sourcing sustainable botanicals and kind of some of the things you should look for. It’s not super in depth, but one of the things they mention is a conservation status. So looking, as you’re sourcing things, what’s the conservation status? And then asking, when you’re sourcing botanicals, like where it came from, who harvested it and how is it harvested? You know, some of the things like try to source cultivated botanicals from farms that use sustainable agricultural products such as organic, biodynamic, and diversified farming. That’s easier said than done. Like, how do you dig in and really know that? I get that question a lot, of how do you know that? I think asking questions is probably the best thing to do, but it is hard. Sometimes you can’t go to the place where they’re harvested to see it. So yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it’s fascinating. I think one likely option is that if there are ingredients that are altitude dependent and those growing areas in the Alps shrink, I mean, they could probably go somewhere else. That’s probably not great either. But I think the most likely option is they just become synthesized and are just recreated.
Shanna Farrell: Yeah. And I did, so looking at some of the similar issues that are facing the tea industry with like deforestation and pesticide use and water use, apparently that is causing lower yields, kind of like what you’re saying. If the Alps are shrinking, there’s going to be less available. Or they’re planted in a way that they weren’t always, you know, that it’s not their ideal growing environment. So the quality decreases. And then I think, yeah, again, if you don’t have to put ingredients on a bottle, you can use synthetic ingredients and no one is really going to know. So it’s going to be interesting to see where this goes.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, yeah, it’s gonna be interesting. By the way, I just have to hang a lampshade on this since we both use it in different ways. There’s something that’s especially pretentious about saying amari and amaro. It’s like the — it’s not a martini, it’s a martino. Like, kind of annoying comment. Like, you’re a bartender. If someone said that to you, would you just be like, get out of my bar?
Shanna Farrell: Like, if somebody called it, tried to use a pluralized martini? Yeah. I would be like, oh, wow, this — up this. Yeah, but I mean, amari — and both are right, amaro and amari. So that does not faze me in the slightest.
Ross Kenyon: Great. Now I don’t know which direction to go. I’ll conform to your standard for amaro. There’s something about it where because of the way that I conceptualize amaro, I think of it as so distinctly of a place and of a specific foodway tradition that the idea of making a new one just seems — it hurts my brain a little bit. But people surely are coming up with new combinations and making new amaro, right? Like this does happen.
Shanna Farrell: Yeah, I think so. I think it’s also sort of a, you know, there’s a lot of things that go into it. And amaro has like, you know, a defined somewhere in the spectrum of the flavor, like there’s a lot you can do in there, you know, whether you’re heavier on the rose or you’re heavier on the bergamot or something. I mean, it really depends on what your recipe is. And I do think you’re right. I think amaro can be one of those things that are very emblematic of place, like, you know, associated with Italy and that kind of thing. And they could be some — like Campari is an amaro, but Fernet’s also an amaro. And so, you know, where they live in that. And I think that there’s a lot of room for interesting things. There’s California amari using more California botanicals. I think we’re going to see some of that pop up a little bit.
I’d be curious. I did actually before this try to see what the global sales percentage was. And I found an article. Oh man, where is it? It’s like Wine Enthusiast published it and they were like, oh, we did a Google search and it said that amaro went up in popularity 143% over the past five years. I was like, but you really don’t have a source for that. You’re just saying you Googled it. So I don’t know. But you know, with Brad Thomas Parsons’s books Bitters and Amaro, you know, there’s been attention to it and it’s gotten more popular. And again, I live in San Francisco and Fernet has always been a thing.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, for its laxative use, right?
Shanna Farrell: For some people, probably yes.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I associate it most strongly with Argentina. I feel like they basically own Fernet-Branca at this point.
Shanna Farrell: Well, the two biggest areas for Fernet sales are San Francisco and Argentina. So they’re in conversation with each other. They’re just drank in very different ways. Not with soda here typically.
Ross Kenyon: Do you think Malört is as toxic as it tastes?
Shanna Farrell: It’s all relative, I mean.
Ross Kenyon: Relative.
Shanna Farrell: All relative.
Ross Kenyon: I think all the time I’ve spent in Chicago, that was always the initiatory, OK, you got to try, but it was always kind of a gag.
Shanna Farrell: Yeah, I, you know, I was a bartender for so many years that I still have a bartender’s palate, where I like — and I’m not a super taster. So bitter does not bother me. I like bitter. So it wasn’t like, but I’m somebody who’s had this stuff like countless times. So I don’t know. Malört doesn’t really bother me as much as some people do. But yeah, I think it’s for sort of like the Chicago, like, can you hang with us? We’re gonna pour you some Malört.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. One of the stories I like from your book was about the protective status of tequila, where in designating the one variety — was it Weber? Blue Weber.
Shanna Farrell: Blue Weber.
Ross Kenyon: But by designating that as ostensibly to protect the tequila industry, to make it secure, and this is what tequila is, it basically crowded out all of the weirder production. So it’s one of those cases where the regulation probably sounded good, but it actually produced an unexpected second-order result.
Shanna Farrell: I’m not sure. I think in many cases that would be right. I think in this case it wasn’t necessarily. I think some of the intention behind that was to crowd out.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, you think it was just actively malicious in the way that they designated this?
Shanna Farrell: Malicious maybe is too strong of a word, but maybe a little nefarious.
Ross Kenyon: OK. Wow, a very, very careful word in here, but OK.
Shanna Farrell: Also, because I’m not from Mexico and, you know, there are things that I certainly do not understand about like the history and the culture and the politics and the economy. But from many things that I have heard from people who are much closer to it than I am, I think some of the intentionality behind that is questionable for precisely the reasons that you had just said about the secondary consequences, crowding out some of the stuff there, some of the other products there.
Ross Kenyon: I always love stories like this because on the surface they sound good. The example that first comes to mind — I don’t know if you’ve read this book or come across it. Do you know the book Peasants into Frenchmen?
Shanna Farrell: No.
Ross Kenyon: It talks about the Académie Française and various ways in which the French nation state, in creating an official language, basically crowded out like Gascon and Occitan and other types of more regional dialects of French. And basically just in creating an official language, just kind of stamped all of that variety out. So in trying to protect something, we almost just made all of the rivals to it unprotected and especially vulnerable. I wonder how many cases like that even happen still with foodways and alcohol.
Shanna Farrell: Yeah, it’s entire— that’s a great— I mean, and without having read the book, I think that that’s a really interesting— I think that there are always unintended consequences that people might not even be thinking about. But I do think that that’s why it’s important when some of these things, like, you know, making something official or big sweeping changes, talking to the smaller producers, like talking to everybody no matter where they sit, is really helpful to kind of understand the bigger picture of what some of those unintended consequences might be, to make it more [unclear]. I mean, that would take forever and things might not get done, but it would be a lot more intentional and take all of the stakeholders into account. Because with, you know, in the example of losing regional dialect, I’m sure that there are people who kind of knew that might happen.
Ross Kenyon: Oh yeah, I think it would be hard to create the modern nation state without having a common language and a common culture in this way. So it might just be part of the transition from the ancien régime and empire into the modern nations. Like maybe that is required. For better or for worse, you can say that happened without having to necessarily have a judgment upon it, a good or bad or somewhere in between. But yeah, I wonder how much that happens with foodways as well. I imagine there’s probably examples of it where it totally saved everything, to give this a special protected designated status. And there are probably also cases where it was a form of protectionism that was wielded against certain recalcitrant enemies of the cheese or of the wine in some way. I’m sure it’s like, well, that family on the other side of the valley, they’ve been making wine this other way, but we’re closer to government. We’ll screw them.
Shanna Farrell: Yeah, it’s like, you know, goes down to money and power.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, you can’t be Nebbiolo. Nope, sorry. You don’t get to be in this Barolo. Sorry, we can’t call you Champagne because you’re not from Champagne, France.
Shanna Farrell: I do think that there are people who are — well, yeah. One thing that I do want to say is that when people are thinking about sustainability, it’s a spectrum and there’s not one-size-fits-all. And I think as long as people are trying and, you know, ideally trying their best, that does make a difference. Like the more you think about this and the more you ask questions, I think a lot of times it depends on how you’re asking the question, but asking the questions and feeling like you can ask the questions, they should be asked. And that’s how things change, no matter kind of where you are, where you sit, just asking questions. It’s really important. But yeah, again, it’s a spectrum and there’s not a one-size-fits-all approach.
And also different spirit categories are so different, like the environmental pressures and impacts and land management is going to be so different when you’re looking at a pear tree or a wine vineyard or an agave field or like a sugar cane farm. So it just depends. And I think that there are lots of people who are thinking pretty deeply about this and really are doing their best. And they can be models. And I think at least the people who are in my book like talking about this stuff and feel excited about it and are happy when the conversation turns more to this. And there’s a lot more people that are doing some really cool things that are not in the book. Some I just didn’t have room to include and some who I found out about after.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t know that I’ve asked many bartenders about this. Surprisingly, I’m not actually that big of a drinker, but I’m interested in the topic somehow. But I mean, there’s that famous Portlandia sketch of like, where did the chicken come from, kind of thing, which I also associate very strongly with Alice Waters and California food. Like that’s really where it comes from. But I can imagine asking a bartender that, I think in some ways I might get some eye rolls if I did that at the wrong bar.
Shanna Farrell: I think, again, I think it depends how you ask, right?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think it depends how you ask. Coach me, like how? How should I ask this?
Shanna Farrell: So I mentioned before, I’m an oral historian, and our famous answer when people ask questions about oral history is, the answer is always, it depends. And that’s how I feel in this situation. Like, you know, if you’re going into a dive bar where they’re like, maybe—
Ross Kenyon: I ordered an old fashioned at one once and it’s like, this is probably the stupidest drink order I’ve ever made in my entire life. They’re just like—
Shanna Farrell: It was, yeah. Like if you’re walking into a dive bar and you want a Negroni, don’t ask if they have a Campari substitute, because if they’re gonna like, you know, kind of know where things are. But you could say, like, can I have a local beer? Like, what’s your most local beer? That kind of thing. Or like, you know, if I walk into a dive bar in San Francisco, like, hey, do you have any whiskey that’s made in California, like something like that? You know, if you walk into a cocktail bar that touts themselves as being sustainable and like artisanal, craft, kind of being part of all those conversations, I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with asking the bartender. Like, hey, I’m really interested in sustainability and I would love to have something that was made locally or as locally as possible or with local ingredients. Like, do you have anything that you could make me? Can you make me a — trying to think of a good example here — like, do you have a gin that’s made locally? I’d really like a gin and tonic or something. You know, I don’t know, I’m trying to think of something that’s more basic and not like a paper plane or something, but.
Ross Kenyon: What if you’re four beers deep at P.F. Chang’s at 2:00 on a Wednesday?
Shanna Farrell: I would say maybe don’t ask in that case then.
Ross Kenyon: That was the silliest example. But that’s real, because people might feel like they’re confident enough to ask at that point.
Shanna Farrell: And then I would say like, you know, just while you’re asking, and I also think putting, if you’re asking, putting your cards on the table. And it depends also on the volume of the bar. If you’ve gone into a P.F. Chang’s on a Tuesday at 2:00 PM and you’re the only person at the bar, yeah, you can ask questions. But if you’re at a top 50 bar on a Friday night and you’re like two people deep, maybe don’t ask those questions then, right? I would also say at that point too, if you’re interested in spirits, you can go to a retailer and ask those questions too, and kind of start from there. But, you know, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with asking at a bar. Just be conscious of, you know, how busy they are and how much time you’re taking up, because it’s hard when somebody wants to like really get nerdy with you when you’re flying all over the place and it’s a really busy night.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, when you’re in the weeds, I can imagine you don’t want a question like that.
Shanna Farrell: Yeah. But yeah, I mean, bartenders do pay attention to questions that guests are asking. Like if they’re asking for something local, they’re probably gonna tell their manager or the owner or whoever’s ordering the products for them, like, hey, we’re getting a lot of requests for this thing. And there’s power in those questions.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s a good point. I’m sure enough people will repeat that. I think they’re going to want to make sure they have an answer at the very least, if not a product that it can sell the person asking for it.
Shanna Farrell: Well, thank you for having me, this was fun to talk about.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, thanks for being here, Shanna. I’m really grateful. If you’re listening, I hope you enjoyed this conversation. A Good Drink: In Search of Sustainable Spirits by Shanna Farrell. It’s a really fun book. I learned a lot from it, and there’s so much to it that we didn’t even cover in this show because how could we? She wrote a whole book about it, and that’s longer than a podcast. But thanks so much for listening.
