ARTICLE ARCHIVE
Explore every Barlist article, guide, and editorial note in chronological order.
Discovery and Education
By the beginning of the 1900s, Britain and Ireland were producing whisky on an industrial scale, exporting it across an expanding commercial world and presenting it as a drink rooted in tradition. Yet the industry could not agree on a basic question. What, legally and culturally, was whisky? For pot still distillers, particularly those defending […]
June 27, 2026
Partnership
Rum is often presented as one broad family, although its identity changes considerably with raw material, geography and method. In Martinique, the most distinctive tradition begins with sugarcane crushed for its fresh juice rather than processed first into crystallised sugar and molasses. That raw-material choice places Martinique within the wider world of pure cane juice […]
June 26, 2026
Video
Behind every memorable cocktail lies more than a recipe. It is shaped by technique, timing, and the person preparing it. Few modern bartending methods illustrate this better than the Hard Shake, a technique developed by Kazuo Ueda that has become one of the defining symbols of Japanese bartending. More than a distinctive way of shaking […]
June 25, 2026
Cocktails
The Manhattan cocktail emerged from a city learning how to display power. During the closing decades of the 1800s, New York was becoming richer, larger, and more divided. Railways, banking, shipping, property, newspapers, and industry created fortunes on a scale the country had rarely seen. Private clubs multiplied, hotels grew more elaborate, and dining rooms […]
June 25, 2026
Barlist
At Springbank Distillery, barley still arrives at one end of the production process and bottled whisky leaves at the other. Between those points, the grain is steeped, spread across malting floors, dried in the kiln, milled, mashed, fermented, and distilled. The resulting spirit is filled into casks, matured in Campbeltown, bottled, and labelled by the […]
June 24, 2026
History
Single barrel bourbon existed as a distillery practice before it existed as a recognised commercial category. Warehouse teams had always known that barrels matured differently. One might develop with unusual balance, another with greater depth, while a third might remain awkward even after years in the same building. Distillers occasionally reserved exceptional casks for owners, […]
June 23, 2026
Spirits
The name Havana Club does not refer to the same rum everywhere. Across much of the world, it belongs to a Cuban produced brand managed through Havana Club International, the joint venture created by Corporación Cuba Ron and Pernod Ricard. In the United States, the name appears on a different rum made in Puerto Rico […]
June 22, 2026
History
The Gin Craze is often told as a morality tale. Cheap spirit flooded London, the population lost control, William Hogarth exposed the damage, and Parliament restored order. The real history is less convenient. Government policy helped expand the market in the first place. Poverty and overcrowding made the consequences more visible. An attempt to suppress […]
June 21, 2026
Cocktails
Set a bottle of Angostura bitters beside almost anything else in a bar and it looks slightly misprinted. The label is too large for the glass, the type is densely packed, and the yellow cap seems almost defiantly plain. Nothing about it follows the quiet visual order usually expected of a product that has survived […]
June 20, 2026
