Hosted by Unknown Host · EN · 10 episodes
Established thought leaders with verified media credentials.
Distillate is a narrative podcast about the history, science, culture, and human stakes behind what people drink. Not technique. Not recipes. The story — the people, the chemistry, the politics, the accidents, and the moments in history where what was in the glass reflected something larger about the world. Rum built an empire on the back of slavery and molasses waste. Gin brought 18th-century London to its knees before it became a symbol of craft and refinement. Coffee didn't just wake people up — it reorganized how they thought, and built the institutions of the Enlightenment in the process. The history of drinks is the history of transformation: of raw materials, of cultures, of human ambition and catastrophe. Distillate is hosted by Shawn Spitaleri and produced by The Alchemist's Bar — craft mixology through the lens of alchemy as proto-chemistry. The alchemy framework is the editorial lens here: transformation through material process, observed with precisio
Unknown Host hosts Distillate: The Hidden History of Cocktails, Spirits & Drink Culture, a society show with 10 episodes published.
In 1806, a twenty-two-year-old Boston merchant loaded a ship with a hundred and thirty tons of ice and sailed for the Caribbean, with no buyer waiting on the other end and a local newspaper already mocking him before he'
Dom Pérignon never said "Come quickly, I am tasting stars." The quote doesn't appear anywhere until an English-language advertisement in the 1880s, roughly 170 years after he died — and the actual historical record shows
In 1822, a Burton-on-Trent brewer named Samuel Allsopp copied a London pale ale recipe and produced something sharper, cleaner, and clearer than anything the original brewer had ever managed — without changing a single i
In 1832, seven men in a English mill town signed a pledge that broke from a hundred years of temperance tradition: not less drinking, but none. It would take the United States until 1920 to catch up, and fourteen years a
In 1806, a newspaper in upstate New York published the first documented definition of a cocktail: spirits, sugar, water, and bitters. Bitters were there at the beginning. Most bars today have exactly one bottle. This epi
Long before the first still arrived in Mexico, the agave plant had been growing in the same soil for decades — accumulating sugar, waiting for a jimador who knew how to read it. The people who worked it had a word for wh
In 1698, a broker named John Castaing started publishing a twice-weekly list of stock and commodity prices from Jonathan's Coffee House in Exchange Alley, London. That document is the direct ancestor of every financial d
Wine is 8,000 years old. We know this because in 2017, archaeochemist Patrick McGovern identified tartaric acid — the chemical fingerprint of fermented grape — in pottery fragments from Neolithic villages in the Republic
Gin was said to have been invented by a Dutch physician as a cheap diuretic. Within decades it had crossed the Channel, and by 1743, London was consuming 2.2 gallons of gin per person per year — every man, woman, and chi
Rum was never supposed to exist. It was the garbage of the sugar trade — fermented molasses, the waste product of Caribbean plantations — and it became the fuel of an empire. This episode traces the story of how a byprod
The history, science, and human story behind what's in the glass — and what it reveals about the world that made it. Launching May 5, 2026. Distillate: The Hidden History of Cocktails, Spirits & Drink Culture is a produc
Sponsor detection runs nightly. Check back soon.
No public pitch examples yet for this show.
Generate your own personalised pitchBased on semantic analysis of episode topics and host coverage, this show is a strong guest fit for executives in:
Industry fit is computed by PitchCentric using vector embeddings of the show's episode catalog.
Shows with the most semantically similar episode content. Pitch one, pitch all; producers cluster.
To pitch Distillate: The Hidden History of Cocktails, Spirits & Drink Culture, visit https://thealchemistsbar.com/distillate for contact information, then craft a tight one-paragraph hook that ties your expertise to a gap in their recent society coverage.
Distillate: The Hidden History of Cocktails, Spirits & Drink Culture is hosted by Unknown Host. The show is categorised under society (culture) and has published 10 episodes.
Distillate: The Hidden History of Cocktails, Spirits & Drink Culture has published 10 episodes.
Distillate: The Hidden History of Cocktails, Spirits & Drink Culture regularly covers society, culture, history. It sits in the society category, with a culture focus.
Distillate: The Hidden History of Cocktails, Spirits & Drink Culture is accessible for guests with genuine society expertise. A personalised, episode-aware pitch will still outperform a generic one every time.
Distillate: The Hidden History of Cocktails, Spirits & Drink Culture hasn't explicitly signalled guest openness in recent episodes. That doesn't rule out pitching. your hook just needs to be especially compelling and relevant to their recent content.
Episodes of Distillate: The Hidden History of Cocktails, Spirits & Drink Culture average 23 minutes. a focused format where a clear narrative arc and tight preparation matter most.
Our data rates Distillate: The Hidden History of Cocktails, Spirits & Drink Culture's guest bar at 80/100 (Premium tier). Established thought leaders with verified media credentials. Sign in to PitchCentric to see how your own Pod Score compares against this show.
Methodology. Booking Probability™ blends Listen Score, 30-day Virality, open-to-guests detection, and Apple ratings. Data refreshed every 60 minutes. Listen Score and Booking Probability are calculated by PitchCentric.