No. 109: May/June 2024

Five years ago, if you’d pulled up a barstool next to an unsuspecting stranger and asked them to tell you everything they knew about the Japanese spirit shochu, you’d likely have received a blank stare (or worse) in return. Ditto for the pineapple brew called tepache, or the Mexican spirit sotol, or the then-almost-nonexistent category of THC beverages. All of these drinks were in their gestational stages in the U.S. back then, for sure. But diving into any of those categories at the time, looking for depth and diversity, would’ve been painfully premature.

That was five years ago—and change, as slow as it may seem at times, does come eventually to every corner of the drinks world. Consider shochu, for starters. The signature spirit from Japan, shochu was then a relative stranger to American drinkers (outside of Japanese bars and restaurants). But today’s growing interest in Asian spirits, combined with a rising tide of imports, is changing shochu’s stateside fortunes. I tasted my way through a number of distilleries on Kyushu last autumn, checking out a few of the brands now being poured into American cocktails, and we’ve got the full shochu story for you starting.

And tepache? Sure, bartenders have been tinkering with this fermented Mexican pineapple drink for several years now, mostly looking to repurpose fruit scraps that might otherwise have been discarded. But as Javier Cabral tells us in his feature for this issue, tepache has deep cultural and culinary traditions, and a growing future, that goes far beyond simply eliminating waste. Many states have also been revisiting their laws restricting the recreational use of cannabis and hemp-based THC, and today’s result is a greater visibility of THC-infused drinks across the country. For this issue, Josh Bernstein brings us the inside look at the growing business of THC beverages.

Betsy Andrews roamed the globe to check out regions like Denmark and Tasmania that might never have gained the attention of winemakers, if not for the creep of climate change. And bartenders have been telling their guests for years about the subtle distinctions between tequila and sotol—Rich Manning shares several ways to mix this spirit in cocktails.

We’ve also got Robert Simonson’s profile of spirits veteran Colin Asare-Appiah, who helped launch a new cocktail conference in Africa earlier this year, a taste test of crushable rice lagers, perfectly timed for the arrival of warm weather, and Wayne Curtis’ look at the timeless art of trolling as it was once practiced by cocktails and postcards. And when’s the last time you sipped a Seven & Seven? Tiffanie Barriere shares the story of how this simple highball changed her life and career.