Episode 129: Noah Rothbaum & The Whiskey Bible

Noah Rothbaum has been writing about drinks for more than 20 years, and he’s been a whiskey enthusiast for even longer. His latest book, The Whiskey Bible, comes out in September from Workman Publishing (publisher of Karen MacNeil’s seminal book The Wine Bible), and he joins us to talk about researching and writing the book, the whiskey knowledge he uncovered along the way, and what keeps him excited about the world of whiskey.

Radio Imbibe is the audio home of Imbibe magazine. In each episode, we dive into liquid culture, exploring the people, places, and flavors of the drinkscape through conversations about cocktails, coffee, beer, spirits, and wine. Keep up with us on Instagram, Threads, and Facebook. And if you’re not already a subscriber, we’d love to have you join us—click here to subscribe. 

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Paul Clarke 

Hey everybody, welcome back to Radio Imbibe from Imbibe magazine. I’m Paul Clarke, Imbibe‘s Editor-in-Chief, and before we get into this episode, I should mention a couple of things. 

First off, this month, August of 2025, marks the fifth anniversary of the launch of Radio Imbibe. So happy birthday to us, and thanks for joining us for this little ride we’ve been taking these past few years. 

And second, in July, Radio Imbibe received a spirited award from the Tales of the Cocktail Foundation in the category of Best Broadcast, Podcast, or Online Video Series at the awards ceremony in New Orleans. So extra special thanks to all of our listeners, our subscribers, and to everyone who’s taken the time to appear on this podcast over the past five years. 

Okay then, way back in the summer of 2020, when we at Imbibe were first tinkering with the idea of launching a podcast, one of the people I turned to for advice was another long-time journalist covering spirits and cocktails, and who, at the time, was co-hosting a podcast with David Wondrich for the Daily Beast. Noah Rothbaum is now a former podcaster, but these days he’s the editor-at-large for Bartender Magazine, and the author of books, including his latest, The Whiskey Bible, which comes out this September from Workman Publishing.

Noah doesn’t like to do things small. Another recent role he played was as one of the editors, again with David Wondrich, of the Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails, which was a decade-long effort involving hundreds of entries and many, many writers and editors, including myself. So when I first saw the galley for The Whiskey Bible, it came as no surprise to me that it’s massive work, 640 pages, and an amazingly comprehensive and thorough exploration of pretty much everything you could ever want to know about whiskey.

So for this episode, we’re chatting with writer and editor Noah Rothbaum about The Whiskey Bible, what it took to put together such a detailed work, and why whiskey retains such a hold on his interest and imagination.

[music]

Paul Clarke

Noah, welcome to Radio Imbibe. 

Noah Rothbaum

Thank you for having me, Paul. 

Paul Clarke

Thanks for coming on the podcast. And you know, back before there ever was a Radio Imbibe, before this podcast ever existed, I remember talking to you about doing a podcast back to like the dark days of the COVID era, about like, is this a good idea? Should I do this? And so five years later, here I am. We’re doing it. So thank you for your advice back then. And finally, coming on to the podcast. 

Noah Rothbaum

Well, I remember that conversation as well. I think a lot of my advice was podcasts sound like a lot of fun, but in fact, they’re a ton of work. Don’t be fooled. A lot of folks start podcasts and then they realize, oh God, like, what have I got myself into? But obviously, five years later, this is a good fit for you. 

Paul Clarke

I figured out what I’ve gotten myself into. It is a lot of work. This is a lot of work. And this is, I think this is going to be episode 129. 

Noah Rothbaum

Wow. Amazing. Yeah. 

Paul Clarke

But I want to have you on this summer, because as we get into the fall, into September, you have your newest book coming out, The Whiskey Bible, A Complete Guide to the World’s Greatest Spirit. So first off, congratulations on the new book. 

Noah Rothbaum

Thank you. Thank you. 

Paul Clarke

Really, to get into the questions, why? If you do a little search on Amazon, there are many, many, many books on whiskey out there, at least one of which you have written. 

Noah Rothbaum

Yes. 

Paul Clarke

So where did you see the need for another book on whiskey? And what is The Whiskey Bible bringing to the conversation? 

Noah Rothbaum

Yeah, that’s a great question. Back in January of 2020, seems like a long time ago, the good folks at Workman reached out to me. Obviously, Karen McNeil’s legendary, best-selling Wine Bible came out in, I think, 2001, back in the day. And several years after that, about, I think, 15 years later, they added a Beer Bible, and then they decided, you know what? We want to add a Whiskey Bible, too. So they reached out.

Obviously, my love and appreciation and knowledge of whiskey, I think, is well-known at this point. And Dave Wondrich and I were finishing up, finally, the Oxford Companion on Spirits and Cocktails with your help, Paul. So thank you for that. And I was looking for a new project. And it’s one of these things, at first, they said, oh, do you want to write The Whiskey Bible? I was like, do I? 

Paul Clarke

It sounds like a lot of work. 

Noah Rothbaum

Right. I mean, the Oxford Companion was already 10 years in the making, almost, right? I’d been on that project for about eight years. So that was coming to a close. There are a lot of whiskey, I knew how much work it would take to write The Whiskey Bible. And I realized, you know, after several calls with them, that, like, this was an opportunity that I really couldn’t pass up. You know, once I got the sign off from my family that it would be okay to devote all these hours to this book, I agreed to write it.

And to be honest, it was actually a very humbling experience, because we think we know everything about whiskey, right? You know, like, oh, what’s the big deal? You know, just write up all the stuff that we know. And really, you know, looking into all of these things, I realized how little collectively we know about whiskey and how much we think we know about whiskey turns out to be actually completely incorrect, right?

So that would be one of these things like, oh, let me just find that document that everybody references you know like let me let me see if I can track down what the Red Book of Ossory actually says you know about whiskey and distilling and all the Irish distillers always say well obviously we made whiskey first because if it’s in the Red Book of Ossory then you go and you try to find the Red Book of Ossory, which to your listeners it sounds like something from Game of Thrones right. It’s really because it was covered in a red leather covering that’s called this name and it’s it has nothing to do with distilling. Most of the book is about hymns and prayers in Latin.

And it turns out that there’s like you know the people who had used sort of the Red Book of Ossory is kind of like a catch-all and it’s in the collection in Kilkenny of the church, the arch, you know, bishop, and it’s one of these things where you’ve you actually took me weeks to find the actual text that relates to distilling. And it really has like a very small note about aqua vitae and who wrote it we don’t even know, right?

When they wrote it, we don’t know. Folks who who cite the Red Book of Ossory, they make a lot of jumps in their reading of because it really refers to making wine and the ideas like, well if people in Ireland were making wine, right, or aqua vitae or you know the Latin word for booze they wouldn’t be using grapes they’d be using grain, right?

So they must have been making whiskey, which is a huge leap of faith, we’re talking about whiskey in the first place also the idea that hundreds and hundreds of years ago whatever people were making had nothing really to do with our modern idea of whiskey. And it turns out archbishop of Kilkenny turns out to be English and that Kilkenny turns out to be the sort of English stronghold in Ireland. So if this is in a book in their collection, is the knowledge really that always cite about Ireland being first in terms of making whiskey actually English knowledge, right? Like is this proof that people in England were distilling some kind of whiskey before the Irish and before the Scottish which again nobody ever talks about right? 

Paul Clarke 

It runs counter to every narrative that we’ve ever heard.

Noah Rothbaum

Right, and you look in Chaucer and there’s reference to people know making beer and distilling beer and is it really that the English were distilling whiskey before the Irish and the Scottish right? So again I mean that’s just one thing but it’s one of these things where literally I was like, wouldn’t it be nice to quote the Red Book of Ossory in this chapter about Irish whiskey as the proof that people in Ireland were making whiskey before the Scots, right?

And then weeks and weeks later ordering all types of obscure books off the internet finally finding some kind of like academic journal from the late 1800s which had a translation. I mean I was the world’s worst Latin scholar, I took Latin for five years in high school and I was in no shape in school and no shape now to have translated the Red Book of Ossory, but thankfully I found the translation of all of these sort of side notes and footnotes that had been added and it’s not at all what I thought it was going to be. 

And that’s just sort of one example. I mean it’s this constant chain of epiphanies and you were talking about all of the different books that have been written about whiskey and even drinks in general and so much of it is based upon the common knowledge that we all think is correct, right, and very few of the people have actually gone to the primary sources, looked in old newspapers. I looked in old books, a lot of the stuff is hiding in plain sight, we just never bothered to go back and look at these things, we took the internet’s word for it, right?

We took each other’s word for it, we took previous books word for it, and some of those books were written in a before the internet or before I’m you know it was easy to look in newspaper archives. I mean I was reading for the Japanese whiskey section, fascinating articles in the ’40s and ’50s from an English language newspaper published in Japan right, which gives you a completely different view of Japanese whiskey right.

Even something that we take for granted, the use of a new American oak barrel for making of bourbon and rye. I mean you ask folks even in Kentucky when did we start using new American oak, why do we only use American new oak, right, and they’ll say, oh like my you know this is how my family’s always done it, this is how for hundreds of years we made our whiskey this way.

And it turns out that when other people say it was like when the container ship came in in the ’60s and you know the definition was set and neither of those answers turns out to be actually correct. And I found the answer in of all places in a column, a syndicated column about national politics that ran in papers you know and New York and other places, and one of the columns was about the fight about how certain senators were trying to push through these regulations.

Once Prohibition was over, the federal government needed new standards of identity, partially for the making of spirits, but also for, most importantly, the collection of taxes. When they were creating these definitions, part of it was about the use of new oak barrels. And it turns out that the coopers had already lost the beer makers to steel kegs, so they were worried about losing all of their business. And also, bourbon really benefits from aging in new oak barrels, but rye, which was very popular at the time and was even larger, arguably larger than bourbon, doesn’t really benefit from new oak. So not only, you know, was it a win-win, the coopers and the bourbon makers sort of teamed up, and not only was it a win for them, but it was a way for them to stick it to the rye producers, right?

And there was this crazy fight that takes place in Congress over several years about whether or not we’re allowed to use a used barrel to make bourbon and rye. So it has literally nothing to do with traditions. It has nothing to do with distilling history or what anybody’s great grandfather did or grandmother did, or, you know, what the original settlers of Kentucky did. No, it has to do with taxes. I mean, so much of the history of whiskey has to do with the collection of taxes, taxation. That’s why Irish distillers use both malted and unmalted barley. It has nothing to do with flavor. Right now, it does. Right now, it’s one of the defining hallmarks of many Irish whiskeys is that they’re made from malted and unmalted barley.

But in the beginning, it was just a way for the brands to pay less tax because the taxes were being collected by how much malted barley you used, right? It’s now become this thing that, you know, we see as a signature flavor. But it started out as a way to just lower your production costs. 

Paul Clarke

Right. Now, you mentioned at the time you’re starting this, you were wrapping up the Oxford Companion Spirits and Cocktails with Dave Wondrich. A tiny little project that you guys have been working on for a while. And I witnessed the extensive range of research that was going on to put it together, really kind of poking into all kinds of normally overlooked nooks and crannies, challenging conventional wisdom. But to kind of create this reference work that would stand the test of time that would really have, you know, be based on fact and not just hearsay and things that we’ve passed out as you’re putting this together. You partially answered this already, but as you’re putting this together, did you find yourself returning to some of that same kind of process? 

Noah Rothbaum

Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, I, you know, like I didn’t go to graduate school. Right. Dave, now, obviously has a PhD in comparative literature and has been doing this type of sort of academic research for decades. So really working on Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails was, was in very much a master class on research and using primary sources and not settling for the common wisdom and double checking everything. And even stuff that, I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles was correct. Still double checking all of that. So absolutely.

I mean, I agreed to write this book and I thought it would, you know, I’d be traveling all over the world for the next few years. And January of 2020 was just right before, you know, the pandemic started and earnest and the lockdowns. And the amazing thing was, was that so many of the libraries opened up their collections during the pandemic. So that was an incredible help to me where you could either get a full scan or partial scan. And, you know, hours spent really looking in the collections of different universities and colleges and libraries around the world and finding all types of books and pamphlets and company training documents that for some reason wound up in the collection at Harvard or Princeton or the New York Public Library or other libraries. And really getting access to that kind of material was so invaluable.

In fact, thanks to this rapid digitization over the last few years, there’s almost too much information. We went from like too little information, right, where it was very hard to find old cocktail and whiskey books and spirits books to now almost there’s so much you can find basically everything online. So, you know, trying to ferret out even those sources, like which of those sources were correct, just because the book is old, doesn’t mean it’s always correct. So trying to find all of these resources and pulling all types of information. articles and documents from newspapers and magazines around the world.

If this book had been written five years before it would have been a very different book to be honest because I learned so much by doing all this archival research that I always wanted this book to be different than everything else that’s been written on the subject and that kind of deep research really allows book to be different because I found all types of information that I never knew, it will be interesting to see the reception as people read it.

And you know some of the brands, like I break up most of the chapters into sort of the history of that category and the production processes and culture and lore and then there are what I call family trees, right, so that people understand that Jim Beam makes Jim Beam but also Knob Creek and Bookers and Basil Hayden, those are all under the same umbrella. And a lot of the same people make those whiskeys which I think is incredibly helpful and something that you and I take for granted, that kind of insider knowledge.

So I mean ideally if somebody sees a bottle or a menu or referenced on your podcast or somebody gives them one, they can go to the book and say okay what what is special about this, like what’s the history of this brand, why should I drink it, where does it come from, and that I don’t think anybody’s really done that before.

And then at the end to help people really figure out how to drink it there’s an appendix with dozens and dozens of cocktail recipes from you know both classic whiskey cocktail recipes but also modern classics from some of the best bartenders in the world like our friend Jeffrey Morgenthaler and Erick Castro and Dale DeGroff, right some of the best bartenders in the world, Audrey Saunders, Kenta Goto, and there’s also a timeline which I’ve never seen really before that includes all whiskey history, right?

People have done timelines before just for scotch or American whiskey and here kind of combining all of the dates, sometimes felt like kind of like a matrix moment, right, where you realize, wow, like pulling back all of these different things happened in one year, right? Or because the Japanese whisky market crashes basically 10 years after America’s whiskey market and Scotland you realize oh my god the scotch industry was selling so much bulk whiskey to Japan that was the final kind of nail in the coffin of blended scotch.

Now the single malt distillers have to truly reinvent themselves right and that’s almost the moment where all the scotch distillers say god we have to like now make and bottle single malt for all these weird things that seem disparate and not connected suddenly you realize wow like this is a very small world.

Paul Clarke

Now your other book on whiskey, The Art of American Whiskey, came out in 2015, is that correct?

Noah Rothbaum

Yeah, that is correct.

Paul Clarke

Uh, so so 10 years ago and so the whiskey world has been all over the map in the past decade and your new book covers all types of whiskey around the world. We’ll get to that in a minute but since your first book focused on American whiskey and you revisited that realm for this new book. How much change had you seen taken place just within American whiskey between those two books?

Noah Rothbaum

Well 2015, I mean The Art of American Whiskey is a visual history told through label art and bottle design and started because I was going down to Maker’s Mark with Bill Samuels Jr. And he picked me up in his Astro van at the Louisville airport with air conditioning was broken and he asked me if it was okay if we made a few stops on our way down to Loreto. And I said, “Of course, I’m in your hands, Bill. Whatever you want to show me you show me.” So you know we looked at the Bernheim forest and E.H. Taylor’s old distillery which was still in ruins which is now Castle and Key, and then he wanted to go to the Heaven Hill Bourbon Heritage center because his old French teacher was a volunteer there right.

So he he came in they started hugging and crying, I said okay I’m just gonna give Bill and his teacher a moment here. I started walking around the bourbon heritage center. And I saw all these incredible artwork pre-production artwork for labels right like the artist proofs. I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be cool to have a book about like vintage whiskey labels and I was like huh. And I walked a few more feet, and thought, I should do that book! Like, I should write that book.

So that that ultimately, I did that book and that was I’m always trying to find projects that are different than stuff that’s already been done right? Trying to find a new angle, different angles, and that was cool because it really was through the lens of label art and bottle design and it sort of is a hybrid coffee table book, history book, cocktail book, bourbon lover’s book, you know, but rye lover’s book. 

But you’re right I mean in the 10 years between 2015 and 2025 seem like two different centuries. I mean in 2015 there were very few bars, for instance, that serve vintage whiskey right. Like there’s a bar in Detroit that i found one of the original Bookers bottles right and they were kind enough to send me a photo that bottle.

Right now that book would have been really easy to write, right, I would have gone to some of the bottle hunters right some of these collectors with a photographer, a scanner, and we could have done it in a weekend right? These people, but then it was so hard it was like pulling teeth to find some of these old label on bottle design also just the sheer number of distilleries you know I tried to include many not all but many of the new distilleries in that book right and that was still possible.

I mean I always say that when The Wine Bible came out 25 years ago I was astonished by the amount of information that Karen McNeill had been able to put in between two covers, right, but it also thoroughly convinced me I was never going to be a wine expert because there’s way too much to know, right? Too many varietals, too many grapes, too many countries, too much, just too much, right? There’s no way that one person could ever taste everything and know everything and all these countries and I was completely overwhelmed by the wine world, right?

I mean I love to drink wine but I knew okay this this is not for me, and like my head’s swimming and at the time I could really wrap my head around whiskey because there were only a few bourbons, rye was like a unicorn i’d heard heard sightings of it but had never actually seen it in the wild myself you know. So like there were only a few bourbons, there were a few blended scotches, a few single malts, that was about it right? I mean if you were lucky you might find you know Yamazaki you know 18 the Japanese whiskey, you had a whiskey fest Irish whiskey you Jameson and Bushmills and the Cooley brands and that was it right?

I mean now alone in Ireland there were dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of brands right and distilleries right? There were only three distilleries you know 25 years ago in Ireland, and that was it. They were producing every single brand no matter what the label said. I remember once going with Jameson dinner and saying oh I just done this big article for Money magazine about Irish whiskey and I said the Tullamore Dew stuff was surprisingly good, and the distiller said to me, he said well thank you. I said what do you mean thank you? And he said, who do you think makes that? And he just looked at me like i was the biggest dummy in the world and he was right.

He obviously made you know probably god knows how much of the whiskey being bottled under different labels. So I mean it’s it’s a completely different world where all of these things that one point seemed kind of like novelties right, even now single malt made in Nova Scotia I remember writing about it 20 years ago, seemed like incredibly bizarre and strange, and now people make single malt basically all over the world. I think global single malt doesn’t raise people’s eyebrows anymore.

Paul Clarke 

On that note, when you look across distilled spirits categories you have the traditional producers who’ve been doing it for ages and then especially now you have typically the smaller typically the upstart who are doing innovation and experimentation and sometimes digging things out of the historical record and reintroducing them whether it’s through you know a particular style of spirit or production technique. When you were putting this book together and looking at whiskey, how did you balance that in the way that you’re presenting whiskey’s story today, where you’re you know recognizing the influence of these long long-standing big companies and the products they have out that we all know with some of these newer producers who are actually like you know being an active part of the whiskey conversation right now.

Noah Rothbaum

I mean it’s a lot right? Sometimes the whiskey conversation sounds like you know shouting, right. Sometimes it’s hard to pick out one voice or one conversation, right? It’s like being in like a crowded pub and having all these different people you know having their own disparate conversations but all over a drink, right? And I think the whiskey world has sort of gotten that way where you have certain areas where we have a defined style right but then sometimes we’ve realized that defined style was just a defined style because we only had one brand, right?

You know everybody always thought Irish whiskey it has to be honeyed and smooth, right, well we were all describing Jameson, right, but Irish whiskey doesn’t actually have to be that way right? So it’s one of these funny things where as the universe has expanded and the number of producers have expanded, it’s made me rethink, in many ways, everything I thought I knew about some of these categories.

I mean, you look at Todd Leopold’s three-chamber still from Leopold Brothers, their rye whiskey. Tastes nothing like any other rye whiskey I’ve ever tasted, right? It doesn’t have those big black pepper notes, the spice. But instead, it’s like incredibly complex and rich, almost like some of the older bourbon, some of the, like some of the older Wild Turkeys, right, that I’ve had. This sort of depth of flavors that you find in other whiskeys, too, like Michter’s sometimes. And it made me rethink, like, my God, like, we don’t know anything about what whiskey tastes like 50 years ago, let alone 100 years ago.

So, I mean, so much has changed over the 150 years in terms of ingredients, different strains of grains, the water, the types of barrels, the way that the barrels were made, the distilling apparatus. You know, Kentucky was so famous for, you know, it’s called log and copper, right, for many years. And that was because it was all made in a log chamber still, literally made out of wood, like a, or a log, a chamber still, and then redistilled for a second time in a pot still, right? And people in Kentucky don’t even know that, right? You sometimes see logs still appear on labels or reference. But that allows us, finally, to have a unique and different style of whiskey that was being made in Scotland or Ireland, right?

We finally have our own unique and distinct whiskey style, and it’s all because of the chamber still. All that was lost, right? I mean, we had such consolidation because, you know, after the ’70s, the bottom falls out of the whiskey market. So, really, so much of what we assumed whiskey was or how it should be made or how it should taste was really just based upon the three or four people still making. And it wasn’t actually, like, how it could be made or the full range of possibilities.

So, you’re right. I mean, it’s interesting because you have the legacy producers who continue making their products. I would say the gold standard is consistency, right, which is always so impressive to me that they’re making millions and millions of cases, some of them, of their whiskey, and it tastes basically the same year in and year out. Then you have all of these upstarts and smaller brands.

And, in the book, I argue that the major advantage that a craft brand or a small brand has over a large brand isn’t in the tools because the tools are the same. It’s not in the ingredients. If anything, the bigger brands often use better ingredients because they have early access to them. But it’s innovation, right? It’s the ability to make one barrel, and if it’s not good, you could throw it away or blend it out or sell it at the distillery, right, where if you’re a big brand, you’re going to introduce a new whiskey. It’s got to sell 40,000 cases, 40,000 9-liter cases, right?

So, in the first year. I mean, it’s crazy. I mean, when you really think about it. So, the smaller distillers are often coming up with new ideas, new flavors, new types of whiskey, and that’s really their advantage over the larger legacy players, and that’s part of the reason why we’ve seen a wave of acquisitions where these smaller brands have been bought by bigger brands because these smaller brands were able to create new ideas, and then these legacy brands can take those ideas, those embers, blow on them, and turn them into, you know, a fire, right, into a real trend, into a viable business.

Paul Clarke

I should just pause for our listeners. You mentioned Todd Leopold and his three-chamber still. A couple years ago, we had Todd and Nicole Austin on this podcast talking about the three-chamber still and the collaboration rye that they put together. So, for folks listening, you can go back through our archives. You can find that episode. It’s a really cool episode. You should listen to it. On this book, it took you ages to put this together, I’m sure, and one of the things about this work and working within print is there are some things that are going to be almost immediately obsolete as soon as the book comes out, you know. 

Noah Rothbaum

Thanks for bringing that up, Paul. Like, thanks for reminding me of that. Yes. 

Paul Clarke

And, you know, so when you were looking at where do you see some of the greatest turbulence or dynamics in the whiskey world where it’s moving so rapidly that the story could be significantly different six months or a year from now, and what parts of the whiskey world do you see enduring relatively intact for the longer run? 

Noah Rothbaum 

I mean, I see the biggest, what do they say, unexpected rough air, right, on airplanes now coming from acquisitions, right, where just as we were about to go to print, the Edrington Group sold Famous Grouse to William Grant, right, and it was fortunately able to move Famous Grouse to the William Grant section and mentioned that it had been sold right and I was like please everybody no more acquisitions like until September 9th right like please please.

Paul Clarke

Right

Noah Rothbaum

I don’t think anybody listened but yeah, I mean, I see that like brands shifting from one portfolio to another which would obviously require a second edition at some point I mean I tried to, just as we were all about to go offline for the holidays and the book was in its final edits, the government finally published its definition for American single malt whiskeys.

So thankfully we were able to get that in before it went to the printer that was that would have been a big miss but like I think most of the book really is evergreen right like the knowledge right and even if somebody finds another layer of history below the the level that I went to I think would only add to the story right where it would only add to that. But that’s part of the reason why I didn’t want to do tasting notes like traditional tasting notes or lists of bottles to buy because as we both know bottles come and go right, their ages change, their flavors change, their ingredients, their styles change, whether or not the distilleries want to talk about that or not.

So like by doing these sort of family trees of brand was one way to hopefully future proof this to give people more of an idea of a house style and history ,and even if that house style changes people can say oh right like this is how it used to be made, it used to be known for this type of thing. So hopefully it’s interesting and evergreen. I mean I still have my original copy of The Wine Bible that has plenty of post-it notes from different stories and research missions I was on years ago and I still turn to it.

I mean obviously I’ve the new editions of it too, but you know, whether or not you pick this up in September or a year from now or two years or five years from now know hopefully you’ll still learn so much and find it interesting. And above all I wanted to make the whiskey world approachable. I think so many of the books so many of the brands in our industry shame people right? You know that people often feel very intimidated by whiskey. I think all adults should be drinking whiskey. Whiskey is for all of us, right? You should drink whiskey however you enjoy it.

If you take anything away from this conversation or this book, it is that you should drink it any way that you like it, that brings you joy. Don’t drink it neat because that’s what your parents told you or a bartender or a colleague or a boss or some brand ambassador or newspaper article told you or magazine article. If you want to add ice you should add ice you want to add ginger ale and ginger ale that’s a delicious drink right? My job here is just to really help people find ideally what they’ll enjoy most right it’s not to shame them it’s not to yell at them I think people are a little bit disappointed that I’m not there to do those

Paul Clarke 

To knock the glass out of someone’s hand.

Noah Rothbaum

Right? That’s I mean and a lot of those supposed rules are really fairly modern affectations. And you know Americans, we were sold a line of goods for a lot of this, because it made good ad copy or it made good way to sell products, but didn’t make it true. And if you go to Scotland a lot of supposed rules that we all keep aren’t really a big deal there. I mean they don’t add ice to their whiskey because if you go to Scotland it’s 60 degrees in the summer.

Their idea of what summer is very different than what like say Americans consider summer, it’s 90 degrees in many parts of the country during the summer of our country. Yeah I’m gonna be adding ice to my whiskey, because I need that right? If it was 60 degrees maybe not. When it’s rainy and cold a nice smoky peaty scotch like Laphroaig or a Bowmore sounds pretty good to me. On a 90-degree day I’d want something a little bit lighter, I want ice and maybe club soda right? I mean the same thing with American whiskey.

Booker Noe obviously, the legendary American distiller who helps relaunch the whole American whiskey industry, and like Jim Bean’s descendant you know, he you know according to his son Fred every day he would drink what he called you know Kentucky tea, which was just his whiskey with ice and branch water like you know just steam water, and depending upon the day he had he’d change up the ratio of the ingredients. If Booker Noe could add ice and water to his whiskey, then… everybody should feel entitled to add water as whiskey because 

Paul Clarke

Do whatever you want

Noah Rothbaum

Right? I mean that’s, I think that’s what that’s probably the biggest takeaway. And also you know I wanted people to feel confident and to really own their whiskey choices and to be knowledgeable drinkers so that when somebody says why did you order that, which is the worst question you could possibly get, you can say oh did you know about that this distillery goes back to blah blah or you know it’s really interesting how they make it and like oh really because I mean look I mean I love drinking whiskey for its flavor and what’s in the glass but what really excites me and fascinates me are the stories behind the whiskey, the people who make the whiskey, the place that it comes from, it’s all reflected in the glass but that makes it really come alive right?

The part that makes me really excited about drinking whiskey but also writing about whiskey is that part and I’ve tried to capture as much as I possibly could in this book. I mean it is over 600 pages so I think we’re reaching the capacity of binding technology.

Paul Clarke

You’re reaching the length of the actual Bible at this point so you know you need you need to put some boundaries.

Noah Rothbaum

Exactly.

Paul Clarke

We could talk about whiskey all day, but we’re not going to do that. So as we head toward the exit here, are there any final thoughts about the book you’d like to share that maybe we haven’t touched upon?

Noah Rothbaum

You know I’m following in Karen McNeil’s very very big footsteps and trying to make this book interesting and approachable for people who are just getting into whiskey, but also putting in so much information that if you’re really into whiskey that hopefully you’ll come back to the Whiskey Bible, and you’ll keep coming back to you know especially as you discover new whiskey producing regions or new brands or new ways to drink it.

Paul Clarke

Noah thanks so much for coming on the podcast and sharing all of this and congratulations on the book and good luck with it.

Noah Rothbaum

Thank you for everything Paul, it was my pleasure.

[music]

Paul Clarke

The Whiskey Bible will be released out into the world starting September 9. We’ve got a link in this episode’s notes for where you can pick up a copy. And you can find Noah Rothbaum on Instagram @Noah_Rothbaum. We’ve also got that link for you in this episode’s notes.

And as we’ve done the past couple of summers, Radio Imbibe is going to take a short break for the remainder of August so we can take it easy for a little while before coming back again after Labor Day. We’ll have a favorite past episode for you coming up this month for your listening pleasure, but please stick around for our new episodes to drop starting again on September 9. 

And that’s it for this episode. Be sure to subscribe to the award-winning Radio Imbibe on your favorite podcast app to keep up with future episodes. We’ve got tons of articles and recipes for you online at our website imbibemagazine.com. Keep up with us day to day on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Threads. And if you’re not already a subscriber to the print and or digital issues of Imbibe, then let’s get you on board. Just follow the link in this episode’s notes and we’ll be happy to help you out.

I’m Paul Clarke, this is Radio Imbibe. Catch you next time.