Episode 91: Thad Vogler and the Single Village Fix

In the January/February 2024 issue, San Francisco bartender, bar owner, and author Thad Vogler shares his story of the Single Village Fix. Vogler first created this simple mix of mezcal, lime juice, and pineapple gum syrup for a bar menu in 2008, tying together his passions for agriculturally rooted spirits and simple, classic formulations. In the years since, the cocktail’s become not only a modern classic, but it’s come to epitomize San Francisco’s cocktail culture during the heat of the cocktail renaissance. And it’s also influenced Vogler’s own path forward as the owner of Imbibe 75 Place to Watch Bar Agricole. 

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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 a few months back, when our editorial team was talking about different ideas that we could pursue for 2024, my colleague Penelope Bass proposed a unifying idea for the personal essays we run in each issue in our back page Quench section. What if we approached a handful of individuals within the drinks world, professionals who’ve spent years or decades working on the creative side, building programs and reputations and in some cases a range of businesses, and ask them about a single pivotal drink in their career that’s influenced the direction of their lives?

The drink could be anything: A glass of wine that changes the way you think about wine. A great cocktail or a terrible cocktail that put your creativity in motion. A cup of coffee that made you understand the entire process that went into making it and set you on a particular path in your career. 

To inaugurate the series, we asked longtime bartender, bar owner, award-winning author and spirits professional Thad Vogler about the drink that led him to where he is now. Thad’s the proprietor of Bar Agricole, a bar, restaurant, and bottle shop, now in its second iteration in San Francisco. As readers of his book, By the Smoke and the Smell, might remember, Thad’s not only an accomplished bartender with deep respect for classic formulas and approaches, but he also has a sincere appreciation for spirits that demonstrate a true relationship to their places of origin and their manners of production, and somehow reflect a kind of agricultural authenticity. 

We talked about several possible drink candidates that influenced his career path and landed on one of his own cocktails. The Single Village Fix is a drink that helps summarize the factors that have influenced him and led him to where he is today. For this episode, we’re chatting with Thad Vogler about his Quench essay in the January/February issue, and about the Single Village Fix—the drink that, in its way, set him on his current path. 

[music]

Paul Clarke

Thad, welcome to Radio Imbibe. 

Thad Vogler

Hi, Paul. Thank you. I’m really happy to be here. 

Paul Clarke

Absolutely. And, you know, thanks for joining me for this. I wanted to have you on the podcast for a couple of reasons. First, because I always love talking to you and I look forward to any opportunity to do so, but also more timely. We’ve had you in Imbibe a number of times over the years. But for our January/February issue, that’s out now, you make your debut in our pages as a writer, for which we’re very appreciative and excited. 

And the piece you wrote for us, it follows a theme that we’re going to be coming back to again and again over the course of this year. And that is asking various professionals in the hospitality and bar communities to look back at their own personal histories and to highlight an individual drink that played a significant role in the direction their lives and careers eventually followed. 

When I asked you about this, you had several suggestions. And one of them, the one we wound up following, was for one of your own original cocktails, the Single Village Fix. As you surveyed your options, what were some of the other contenders, and why did you choose to go with this one besides the fact that I said, “Oh yeah, that’d be good.” 

Thad Vogler

First of all, great to be here with you. And I also am excited for any opportunity to talk. The two other main candidates were agricole rhum and the Mojito, both rum you know, adjacent, obviously. But yeah, agricole rhum, yeah, a spirit when I first tasted that kind of opened my mind to the way I wanted to think about spirits going forward. 

You know in San Francisco, bars are always parts of restaurants. Some liquor licenses are incredibly expensive, you have to have big revenue. And that’s often why there’s a pretty evolved food component with the bar or vice versa. So it was always relating as a bartender and then as a consultant before I opened my own place, was always relating bar concepts to food concepts. And I was always seeing this sort of disconnect between these, you know, very NorCal, ingredient-driven, farm-to-table kitchens. And then what was on the back bar, which was, often, particularly when I was getting going, which was the vodka era where all these industrial-produced marketed spirits that have no real relationship to the food. It always felt kind of like the same bar everywhere you go. 

And then, I mean, really is with Ed Hamilton starting, when he first started bringing these agricole rhums in, and first time I tasted the sort of wild breadth of flavor and the realization that this is agriculture, your taste, and they also had rum. And then I would indeed go on to think about, you know, spirits as agriculture for the next 20 years. So that was a big deal. 

And then, almost duplicate of the idea I had for the Single Village Fix, was I spent like eight months in Cuba. I went to Cuba like four times between 2000-2003, culminating with an eight-month stay. And that was sort of I had just finished bartending in the ‘90s where it was vodka and Mojitos. The Mojito was this horrible thing that we were all tired of. And then kind of getting reacquainted with it as this really simple, elemental mixture of very simple components.

Also it ended up being a tool when I got back from Cuba that I used to teach bartending, where it’d be like, because the Mojito contains everything, it contains a neat spirit, it contains a simple sour, and the version of the Daiquiri. Then you’re adding a little bit of seltzer, which makes it a Collins. And then you’re augmenting it to make it a, you know, a bitter Collins. And then, you know, another aromatic component.

So you can sort of work through an evolution of five or six drinks in teaching this one drink, which also has sweet, sour, bitter. Effervescence, talk about dilution. Anyway, it just became a really cool tool to teach bartending and a drink that people underappreciated. But obviously when you get it just right and it’s just like kind of painfully acidic and effervescent and that dash of bitters that I didn’t understand until much later was an essential part of the drink. It just like it’s really cool if you master that drink and love that drink, there’s a certain humility and a certain skill that I think you’re going to come out of it with. 

Paul Clarke

Right, right. And you know, so we landed on the Single Village Fix as the direction to go. And for those who are listening, who may have lived a sheltered life and have somehow not come across a Single Village Fix yet, just briefly, tell us what’s in it and how is it made. 

Thad Vogler

Yeah, it’s basically, it’s a tequila Gimlet with mezcal. It’s called the Single Village Fix because you use single-origin mezcal if you can, and then it’s sweetened with pineapple gum syrup. It’s an homage to a tequila Gimlet, but also to a Bay Area, one of the Bay Area kind of classics, the Pisco Punch, which was sweetened with pineapple gum. 

Paul Clarke

And I’m happy you landed on this one because, for one thing, it’s a great cocktail. I’ve loved it ever since I first heard about it and eventually had one many years ago. But it fills a very particular role in the cocktail world and in drinks history. For the piece in the magazine, you traced these two themes that kind of intersected in this drink, and I’d like to talk about each of those individually a little bit. First off, can we look at this drink from a classic cocktail perspective, looking simply at the formula and the foundation of it? How and where does it fit out into the cocktail universe? 

Thad Vogler

Yeah. I mean, it’s a sour, right? It’s a simple sour which, the universe that contains Gimlet and Daiquiri, you know, sweet and sour with a base spirit. So that’s sort of one of the main ways we’re going to ingest spirits, one of the main ways which are going to serve them. Yeah, there was like you say, there is an untold number of the simple drink, and there wasn’t a standard that contained agave-based spirit.

Basically 15, 20 years ago, everyone was sort of in the renaissance. Everyone was going through all the old books and trotting out all these old drinks. And you sort of realize, “Wow, there is nothing really that hasn’t been done.” But then there is a vacuum where there are spirits that weren’t, you know, in heavy rotation, 100 years ago. So like you say, there is kind of a vacuum where agave spirits were concerned. So it became really fun to just sort of plug those into old recipes. That’s all making drinks is obviously, you know, it’s a shell game. 

Paul Clarke

And one of the things I love about this cocktail is its brute simplicity. You know, as you said, it’s a three-ingredient cocktail, a simple sour. It fits into the simple sour family. And if you took this formula and just kind of, like, slipped it into the pages of a 19th-century cocktail manual, it would feel right at home. You know, before we get into the mezcal, can we talk about the pineapple syrup for a moment? Because, in that classic cocktail canon, how does this ingredient fit into the story, and kind of have that throughline from classic cocktails of the 19th and early 20th centuries? 

Thad Vogler

Yeah. So I mean, fixes were simple sours sweetened with a component that had a fruit aspect to it. So that’s the beauty of drinks and recipes, there’s no one rule. You know, even Dave Wondrich would agree that you can sort of get 90 percent of the way there. But there’s always going to be exceptions or people that took things to mean something else. But yeah, so a sour with a fruit syrup, very often pineapple, in recipes, would be a fix. 

I had been trying to make pineapple syrup on my own to do Pisco Punches. And then Jen Colliau, a friend with whom you know obviously, she was simultaneously starting to fill a need in the market with these really simple traditional syrups that were showing up in recipes. So a gum, a gum syrup and a grenadine and orgeat and stuff like, you know, reading all of these beautiful recipes and then at first everyone was making all of the things themselves.

And Jen sort of timed it perfectly because like, look, it’s good to have some—we don’t distill our own spirits, we don’t have to make all of our own ingredients. She kind of satisfied that need in the market. She and I were working together with Eric Adkins over at Slanted Door and got to taste through demos of that syrup. And so that was just kind of hitting the market. So it was like perfect to kind of roll that into that recipe. 

Paul Clarke

This is where the contemporary cocktail renaissance comes into play because it brings it very much into this time and place in San Francisco in the early 2000s, where you’re working with Jen, you were working with Eric at Slanted Door, you’re opening Beretta. It was a time of this kind of very dynamic mode in San Francisco, in the cocktail world overall. But San Francisco, there was a lot of cool stuff going on at that time. And you mention this in your article in terms of the number of people that you’re working with at the time. But paint a picture for us, for people who didn’t have the fortune of being in San Francisco, drinking in bars at that time. What was the culture and what was the kind of creative vision going on at the time? 

Thad Vogler

San Francisco was starting to have its own awakening. Some people were going to New York and coming back and taking ideas. And we were just sort of coming out of a kind of awkward early renaissance where everyone was kind of making these farmers market cocktails. They’d get these, you know, the mixing glass would just have like herbs and fruit. And people were muddling everything. Dave Nepove was Mr. Mojito. He was selling these big baseball bat mojitos, and people were still kind of stuck in ‘90s drink making. And this idea of like you know, farm-to-table drinks were uniform. Yeah. So this was kind of cringeworthy. 

Paul Clarke

You brought the whole farm to a—

Thad Vogler

Yeah. 

Paul Clarke

—farm-to-table drink. You had everything you could cram in there.

Thad Vogler

And so as you went to like, Milk & Honey and, and really like austere, you know, purist places and you’re like, “Oh God. Right.” These are just little, little flavor explosions with three or four ingredients. Very traditional, very humble, you know, no one’s trying to reinvent the wheel. Sort of that started to inform San Francisco, attention to good ice making drinks, not over-diluted, smaller glassware.

So right around then that kind of cross-pollination was happening. And Todd Smith, Ryan, and John Santer all left Bourbon and Branch, which was sort of the great cocktail bar. But it was still, they did, they did a market cocktail every day there. I worked there for a bit and we’d run across the street to the liquor store of the Tenderloin to like grab a bottle of mango juice or something. And everyone was sort of surrendering to these new books. All these reprints were hitting. So I think that we were trying to kind of honor this old-new sensibility of these simple, simpler drinks, like you were saying, canonical drinks. 

Paul Clarke

The other thread that we wanted to follow, you brought it up just a moment ago, is that of mezcal, which is funny, in a way, that we’re talking about as a contemporary touch to the cocktail, considering mezcal has extensive history in Mexico. But in the first decade of the 21st century, we were just kind of discovering this stuff for the first time in the U.S.

Thad Vogler

For sure. Yeah. You know, in the ‘90s when you’re a bartender, there are a couple cachaças, and there were a couple mezcals, and they were terrible. Right. And yeah, so there was just an idea that mezcal was bad tequila. And then, you know, again its importers are so often underappreciated as people that shape the culture. But Ron Cooper, of course, you know, he starts to bring in these mezcals, you know, these beautiful small-batch, coming out of terracotta stills. And, you know, just really, again, a beautiful sense of place like these amazing spirits that really like change your understanding of the category. 

So the arrival of that stuff was very much like the arrival of agricole rhum, you know. These better base spirits are hitting the market so Ron was sort of really just starting to take over those. Yeah, it was a cool moment. And I think that definitely the point of choosing that was just to say, I don’t know. You look back and you think about your life and you know, you remember what? I never thought I was going to be a bartender, for God’s sake. You know what I mean? And you realize how little agency you have in your life. You know, like what you end up doing is totally bizarre and then drinks making is the same. You’re just, you’re just a small player in this, you know, the juggernaut of history.

So all of these things are happening in the marketplace, certain kinds of ingredients, certain kinds of fashionability. And, you know, you think, “Oh, I’m going to invent something” in a way that’s just not possible. You’re just kind of going to get out of the way and let things happen, you know what I mean? So that drink is like to say, “Oh, I invented a three-ingredient sour with three, you know, ingredients that have been around forever, and in a proportion that’s been around forever.” It just it’s silly, but…

Paul Clarke

And you know, you touched on this a little bit, but it seems so obvious in hindsight. You know, you think, well, mezcal loves lime. Lime loves pineapple, pineapple loves mezcal. What? But put them all together. It’s not a question of like, “oh my God, this is genius. I put it together.” Like, why didn’t this come up before? Because—

Thad Vogler

Yeah. 

Paul Clarke

—it seems, you know, it’s one of those things when you taste, like this is so obviously wonderful, how is this, how have I not encountered this before? 

Thad Vogler

No, for sure. I mean, we got to understand, like, bartending. You do understand that bartending in the ’90s is just like endless vodka, right? So the idea of a base spirit that you could taste was, you know, antithetical to bartending. And all it was was like, how do I get my medicine down without tasting it? So, you know, Cosmopolitans and it’s just like the endless, endless like, citron cranberry splash soda, citron soda splash cranberry, citron orange splash cranberry soda, etc. You know, like pepper with tomato juice. Like it just, you know, Absolut orange soda splash, bam. It’s just like these rounds of drinks were insane. But I mean, you’d be you’d have a great memory, you know, working a vodka, vodka with different, you know, yeah. The splash or the you know, it’s just bonkers. 

So at any rate, then you start—and so people were starting to drink spirits that had flavor. So bourbon and then, wow, you’re interested in the base ingredient. What about rye? I remember the point, you know, Wild Turkey, three days a year they made rye. Right. And then rye just started to happen. And you couldn’t get rye anymore because people wanted to taste the different grain. Right? And so then you’re moving from column-distilled industrial rums to agricole rums or demerara rums or Jamaican rums, like things are like, whoa. So, so that was just a super exciting time where you’re pulled into the spirit. 

And I think that’s one way in which California, that San Francisco might, might have blazed a trail a little bit more. We’re interested in those agricultural origins of the flavor. So like, big base spirits, you know what I mean? And which, of course, same was the case in New York. But New York, initially, there are such great bar managers also, you know. They just, like, they’d use the most affordable spirits and make the most amazing drinks and you know, really focus in on dilution and acidity. And, you know, like, this is a great drink and we don’t need to waste money on and indeed that’s, as decades passed, like that’s the true test of a bar, to stay viable financially, you know what I mean?

That anyway, so there was a kind of brand-new quality to tasting these mezcals, like agave is in the asparagus family. So there are all of these like green, savory, vegetal flavors. And then, you know, you harvest, you harvested it when the sugar, there’s this accumulation of sugar before it’s about to send up this massive like palm tree-size stalk. So it’s just packed with sugar. And that’s called a pina because it does look like, so there’s all of this sugar and acidity green, you know, verdant, savory qualities. And it’s just an amazing flavor. So pina, obviously you think, oh, pineapple. And then so you get sort of lock there, you know, with the agave pina and the flavor of the pineapple. But yeah, it’s a no-brainer, as you say, but at the same time is also a really cool time. 

Paul Clarke

Right. And in terms of how this drink affected your life and career, you’d mentioned that this use of mezcal and of rhum agricole as well helped kind of open the door for a more thorough exploration of the relationships between agriculture and distilled spirits. And that’s a path that you obviously followed to some degree with Bar Agricole and your other establishments. Would you have reached the same point with Bar Agricole if you hadn’t gone down these particular rabbit holes? Did it assist in the journey in some way? 

Thad Vogler

Yeah, totally. I mean, I was just kind of a jerk when I was, I’m very Generation X, you know. Generation X, like I grew up listening to, you know, the Clash and being very kind of anti-commercial, divestment, you know. And I was always going to be something other than a bartender. I was that service industry person who was like this isn’t, although I loved service and I was nice, definitely like, I really liked helping people be happy. And I think that’s why a lot of us end up staying as it is helping someone to feel happy when they’ve had a shitty day. It feels good, you know what I mean? It’s a service, you know, it is a calling. So I did like that. 

But, but I always thought I’d, you know, be something else. And then. Then I just, you know, got more and more responsibility. And then started determining inventory, so that it was just sort of like being at a record store and being like, That’s cool. That’s cool. Lame, lame, lame. And then then it was sort of like, okay, there’s all of this consolidation happening around. The late ‘90s producers get bought and then production is multiplied by 10 and then it’s not, wow. So 10 years later, like, God, that doesn’t taste the same as it used to. And so it became very sort of, and it became a very kind of anti-commercial thing, you know. Like, don’t sell out, you know. Like I say, it’s like very Generation X, and then so this idea of what, well, what are you going toward? Right. 

So you can be going away, you know. And I mean you can be, you know, raising the middle finger at the man or whatever, which, that’s no way to live. That’s not, you have to be going towards something. So these spirits coupled with, you know, learning more about wine and learning more about food, learning, you know, coming to enjoy certain kinds of wine, you know, you know, 2000, 2001, 2000, like the whole natural wine explosion hadn’t really happened. It was just wine. But wine are these beautiful, simple, you know, you’re really enjoying the secondary, you know, flavors of this agricultural crop, and like, well, why can’t spirits be more like wine? And then starting to find these more wine-like spirits, agricole, mezcal, Armagnac, Calvados, you know what I mean? Like, so they’re just, just cool or more agrarian.

So then you start to go towards something, you know what I mean? Instead of just going, instead of just negating stuff, you’re like, and people are always going to, like, want to be around something positive instead of being, you know, negative. So that was huge in terms of my, that’s when my career just started. I was going towards something, and it was like sunshine and love rather than, you know, isolation and anger. 

Paul Clarke

Yeah. And so with the benefit of time, you know, it’s 2024. Back in Bar Agricole 2.0, when you look back on the Single Village Fix and that kind of thought process and evolution that was going on back then, do you still see how that kind of thinking resonates in what you’re doing today? 

Thad Vogler

Yeah, for sure. It’s, I mean, I’m definitely like most interested in spirits. And we have a retail label and we’re doing, you know, independent bottling and in all categories. So still working with producers, working with importers to get really cool spirits, you know what I mean? And then selling bottles, you know, as like an off license, having two liquor licenses and on and off premise so people can take home a bottle. Because I do think that everyone realizes the best drinks are simple. I can make them at home. 

And if I make them at home, people have no problem with like a 40, you know, $40 bottle of wine. That might be a nice bottle of wine to have at home. You know, not cheap, but not insane. And, you know, that’d be eight bucks a drink, right? And then so the idea of like a $70 bottle of something of booze to take home and there’d be 15 drinks. Right. And that’s like so it becomes like the $5 each of the drinks you’re making at home is, is only $5. So like, if you’re, if you’re going to make drinks at home, you can, you can start to use a better base ingredient.

You know, to use some of these single-village mezcals now it’s just, it’s too expensive and that the financial aspect of the business is harder and harder and harder. Arguably, that’s the art of it, is how do you make the most beautiful thing for a price that people want to pay, that generates revenue that will keep you afloat? And I think everywhere, especially in San Francisco, that puzzle is just like, it’s dominating. At any rate, yeah, the add in the independent bottling and really focusing on the spirits and continuing to write about them and stuff definitely it feels continuous or contiguous with the earlier of the article but also a sign of how it’s evolving and how it might stay relevant for a longer. 

Paul Clarke

Right, right. Any closing thoughts on the Single Village Fix or pretty much anything as we head toward the exit here? 

Thad Vogler

Just, I just want to be extra, extra clear that, you know, I didn’t throw it out there as like, “Look what I did.” It just sort—

Paul Clarke

Yeah. 

Thad Vogler

—of like, it’s cool the way these things work, the way food works, the way fashion works, the way it’s just, there are these cultural currents that are bigger than we are, that we become a part of. And that was a really cool time. 

Paul Clarke

Well, Thad, my friend. It’s always so wonderful to talk to you. 

Thad Vogler

Likewise. 

Paul Clarke

Thanks so much. And I’m looking forward to seeing you again. Hopefully very soon. 

Thad Vogler

Same, thanks so much for the time, Paul. 

[music]

Paul Clarke

Head online to baragricole.com to learn more about Thad’s bar and bottle shop, and stop by the next time you’re in San Francisco. 

And that’s it for this episode. You’ll find plenty more articles and recipes online at our website imbibemagazine.com. Be sure to subscribe to Radio Imbibe on your favorite podcast app to keep up with future episodes. You can find us on Instagram, Threads, Facebook, and Pinterest for your social media needs. And if you’re not already a subscriber to the print and/or digital issues of Imbibe, here’s your opportunity to change that. Just follow the link to 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.