Tiffanie Barriere is an Atlanta-based bartender, educator, mentor, consultant—and now author of her first book, “Good Spirits: The Joy of Cocktails and the Stories Behind Them,” written with David Joachim and debuting September 29. For this episode, Barriere fills us in on the process that led to the book, the stories that she chose to share, and the drinks and people that continue to inspire her.
Tiffanie Barriere is an Atlanta-based bartender, educator, mentor, consultant—and now author of her first book, Good Spirits: The Joy of Cocktails and the Stories Behind Them, written with David Joachim and debuting September 29. For this episode, Barriere fills us in on the process that led to the book, the stories that she chose to share, and the drinks and the people that continue to inspire her.
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 at imbibemagazine.com, and 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.
Paul Clarke
Hey everybody, welcome back to Radio Imbibe from Imbibe Magazine. I'm Paul Clarke, Imbibe's Editor-in-Chief.
And way back in 2021, to get everything started in January with that year's Imbibe 75 issue, we had a bartender in the lineup and on the cover that we've been delighted to work with several times over the years. We first encountered Tiffanie Barriere while she was working at One Flew South in Hartsville Jackson Atlanta International Airport, where she helped turn One Flew South into perhaps the country's and maybe the world's best airport bar. Tiffanie moved on years ago, but over time her profile has only grown as a bartender, an educator, a mentor, a writer, as the founder of the Barriere Collective creative hospitality agency and a consultant for brands and events all over the world.
Starting this month, Tiffanie's adding another title to her resume, that of author, with her first book, Good Spirits: The Joy of Cocktails and the Stories Behind Them coming out September 29th from Voracious, written with David Joachim. I've known Tiffanie for many years now and she's one of my very favorite people in the cocktail world today, and I know I'm not alone in being able to say that. I spoke with Tiffanie earlier this year to talk about her book and her career. We shared a short excerpt from that interview in our September-October issue, which is available now, but we wanted to share the full interview with Tiffanie Barriere with our podcast audience because…well, Tiffanie Barriere is a force of nature and we can't keep that to ourselves.
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Paul Clarke
Tiffanie, welcome to Radio Imbibe.
Tiffanie Barriere
Thanks, Paul, good to be here.
Paul Clarke
It is always such a pleasure to talk to you. And now today it's an extra special super pleasure to talk to you because not only do I get to spend a little time with you, but we're talking about your brand new book, "Good Spirits: The Joy of Cocktails and the Stories Behind Them," which comes out September 29th. So, first off, yeah, that's amazing.
Tiffanie Barriere
Yeah, we did it. We wrote it.
Paul Clarke
Now, you know, I've known for years about your personal interest in the deeper, richer history and the stories that accompany certain drinks. In the past you've run long pieces on social media delving into this and you've talked about it a number of times over the years. What was the prompt or the rationale to bring this fully into book form at this time? Why did you decide now's the time for the book?
Tiffanie Barriere
I should have done it a long time ago, but honestly, I just felt ready, because as you said, I'd already been doing it. I've been gracing food festivals and conferences and symposiums and social media with a lot of history and culture or just a different like POV of a certain cocktail, along with myself. And I just thought, we need to compile this. It's basically like having a bunch of notes all over the place and being like, let's clean this up. Let's get everything in one place. It was time, but also I just hadn't seen the cocktail book that I was looking for yet. I just wanted to have something really fun and whimsy, but also something that hits hard in the conversation around cocktails. So, I did it.
Paul Clarke
Right. Fantastic. That's amazing. And now, you've worked as a bartender for a number of years, and I think it was while you were at One Flew South in Atlanta that I first came across you, and that we first included you in Imbibe, at what point in your bartending career did you start coming across some of these stories behind the drinks that led you to start digging a little deeper?
Tiffanie Barriere
At One Flew South, Chef Duane Nutter, obviously, we were in the South, and so every dish he was putting out was something from home or definitely had this Southern, you know, connection. Me being a Southern woman, I only followed in my chef's lead, and I did that with cocktails. I definitely intertwined some international flavors and, you know, trends inside of the cocktail menu, but we stayed Southern, and honestly, we stayed Black, you know, in between the both of us. And I just kept doing that and kept trying to figure out my niche or my style or what's my, you know, my way of things, and it just became a no-brainer. And it was soon after that, I met some other folks in the foodways department that were Black, and I was asked to make a drink, and I decided, is it too much to do a red drink? Will it be silly if I made a punch? And after that, it just, I look back at it in hindsight now, and I was like, I was making punch all the time. But, yeah, I just knew this is going to be my lane. I definitely know all the great things that my other bartender friends and community knew, but I knew I want to talk about Black history, and I want to talk about things, Black Southern history, in fact.
Paul Clarke
Right, right. And I want to follow up on that because we always like to talk about how, when we're talking about a drink, we can talk about the ingredients and its preparation and its flavor and all of that. But ultimately, at some point, we need to talk about much more than just what's in the glass. Why does that larger cultural connection to cocktails hold such interest to you and continues to kind of keep you driving on researching it and telling those stories?
Tiffanie Barriere
It's interesting that we talk about all those cocktails and flavors and we're talking about pre-prohibition cocktails or we're bringing cocktails forward from the past. All I think about the past was that my folks were enslaved. That's all I could think of. They were the ones bartending, they were the ones, you know, working in agriculture and they were the ones, you know, milling and tilling and distilling and all of that. And so that was the main part of when I started to become a bartender, I started to learn all the ups and downs and all arounds that there was, they were missing that story. So it's kind of like you know, the American school system. There's always this one part that we talked about in February. And I was like, why aren't we talking about, you know, like, who was actually bartending while these cocktails were being written and, and shared. And so that's where I was like, um, hello, what about what about the Black folks who were behind the bar, Black and brown at that point, and also like the heavier part of hospitality and what that looked like and how it wasn't just, but it was also, you know, this pinnacle time where it was like, cocktails were so magical and creative. And I'm like, there were Black people doing that as well. And so I just felt like that's, I still feel, and I always felt like that's super important.
Paul Clarke
And as you started down this path of exploring the history and culture related to certain individual cocktails, were there particular drinks and their stories that really kind of stood out to you and help push you in the direction of looking more expansively at these drinks? I mean, were there certain drinks that were kind of like building blocks for you that helped you build this up?
Tiffanie Barriere
A few. To the conversation of punch for sure. You know, our good friend Dave Wondrich wrote this Punch book and I was nerding out on that book specifically when it first came out. And I was thinking about the punch that I was having. And I was like, wait a minute, you know, like this is, this is everything that I know, but there's this, this extra nuance that I'm missing. So punch was a very big one that I thought was this, you know, extravagant, very majestic. And it still is a beverage to have in a bowl, but it was different where I come from. And then there was the mint julep, obviously, once I learned about the mint julep and who the hands and where it was located and the ingredients and the ice. And once I figured out who John Dabney was and Jim Cook and Bullock, I was like, wait, wait, wait a minute. And because I thought that the mint julep was just that this Southern mint tea kind of cocktail derby connected, but it had so much more. So that was kind of my stepping stone to dig in every single cocktail after that and figure out exactly where, where it could have possibly been first documented and who else could have been drinking it or possibly tweaking it.
Paul Clarke
And we've been talking about individual cocktails, but you also highlight entire components of the drinks world that have a special history or a special significance. For example, you get into citrus early in the book and its centrality to Black history. What did you come across that made you realize the significance of these fruits that we see every day and this category and to share that with the readers?
Tiffanie Barriere
It's a rabbit hole, Paul. This is a rabbit hole that I go down again. I think about the time period, like a time piece, the time period. And then I immediately go to where Black folks were in the US at that time, and what war or what arguments could have been happening. And as we start seeing citrus really come into the US and then obviously make its way to the west coast, I'm like, who was over there on the west coast? And at the time of these citrus farms really, really growing, it's around the time of the great migration. And I'm thinking, okay, great. This is making sense. We're coming from deep in the south and we're making our way, black folks are making our way north, also midwest. And they're really making their way towards the west coast. So I thought, and because the Black wasn't seen and respected as much yet they were seen as hard workers in labor and agriculture, I was like, wait, someone had to be working on these farms with all of this citrus. Someone, somebody, some family, some organization, some write up had to talk about Black farmers and citrus. And so that's where I start digging. You gotta start digging and looking for names. And it's not, it's not easy to find it. And in this book, I try to make sure that I tell you this is not it, because we're still archiving, not just only cultural history, but everyone's history because some things are buried or just not documented at all. So this is just the beginning.
Paul Clarke
And talking about history and culture, of course, we're talking about people. And you take the opportunity in your book to talk about a few specific individuals, such as Frederick McKinley Jones and his influence on modern refrigeration. And Tom Bullock, of course, who you mentioned earlier, and who wrote The Ideal Bartender more than a hundred years ago. How are some of these stories central to the larger conversation about cocktails that you wanted to share in this book?
Tiffanie Barriere
Selfishly, Selfishly, I always want a cocktail to teach me something. Of course it's delicious. I definitely love the pageantry of my bartenders making me a great cocktail. I need to know a story, like, take me there, take me all the way through the rabbit hole. And so, sharing stories outside of the cocktail book, you know, I do believe that not one person created a cocktail. I believe that, you know, we all made a beverage similar, multicultural. And so when I'm adding these little tidbits of history, when we're even thinking about ice and bringing in, you know, McKinley did not create the freezer, but he definitely helped perfect what we know as, you know, great refrigeration for our freezer. So I'm, I'm, I'm again, selfishly looking for just a little extra bonus history when it comes to the ingredients that we use every single day, any equipment.
Paul Clarke
Right. And anytime you're putting together a body of work, whether it's a book or a magazine or a documentary or what have you, it always becomes an exercise in, in what to keep in and what to leave out because of space constraints or time constraints, because something's worth telling, but it needs to have its own moment apart from this work you're creating. We can see in the book, what went in, what got left out? Is there anything you had to, you had to leave on the shelf or in a folder on your computer thinking, this is going to have to wait for another opportunity?
Tiffanie Barriere
Triggered, but triggered in a good way. ha, ha, ha. Yes. So much is written. You know, there was many times, many weeks, many nights, many airplane rides where I thought I'm my, I'm not writing the book I think I'm supposed to be writing because I have constantly used the cocktail as the gateway to history. And I had to be reminded, wait, we're writing a cocktail book. We're not writing a history book. And so my, my blessing is that I'm able to make and raise that glass, you know, to the reason I cut a lot of things. I, a lot, a lot of things. I cut a lot of dates. I cut a lot of cocktails. I mean, I, I have 40 classics in this book. I could have went all classics. Um, but then I have some fun things that I've been involved in that I wanted to share and also take it around the world to some other bartenders that I knew. And I'm still sitting in the next book. Do I write a history book? Well, there's a lot of history to archive and it's a lot of work to find it. So I cut out a lot of history. I cut out a lot of details. I cut out a lot of Black folks as well that I missed putting in there, a lot of hospitality. I cut out a lot of things like that. And I, went to maybe the next book. Um, but I, I, I had to realize that we can only put so much, and this is my first book. And I was grateful to have, um, someone talk me off the cliff every day that I thought, wait, this is, is this it? And it's like, this is not it. This is the first one. It's hard to put all that crammed in my mind into one. And I, I had to, calculate and I'm not always the best with that.
Paul Clarke
Well, and, and you brought up a very good point in that you're writing a cocktail book and not a history book necessarily. And we spent a lot of time talking about the people in the culture and histories that fascinate you. But let's be absolutely clear to folks listening. There's a lot of good stuff in this book if you're just looking for a fun and tasty drink. What were your favorite cocktails or categories to call out in this book, whether it's classic cocktails or one of your own drinks? And what are some that really excited you? Like, I finally get to tell my story on this one.
Tiffanie Barriere
Yes. Oh man. Yeah. I'm whimsy in there. I'm, I'm really whimsy, you know, talking about classics and giving classics in my POV was something that I can't change, you know, so I'm grateful for. I am a bartender. I do know how to bartend. I am certified. I definitely have the cues to be a fantastic bartender. The storytelling part of bartending is where I found my superpower. And so there's some fun stories in there. I mean, things that people have seen on social media from Stanley Tucci to, um, to things that we had, we did at One Flew South to cocktails that I would have maybe with just a group of friends. There's some really boozy drinks in there that folks may turn their nose up to and go, wait a minute. Is that a cocktail? Yeah, damn right. It's a cocktail. That we like to drink. If we're drinking a boiler maker, then maybe we're drinking wine and tequila back to back. Like that's the conversations that I'm going to have. That's the joy of drinking that I have. I've broken this book down in category of mood. I'm a moody girl and moody is a positive thing. I believe that we also drink cocktails because of the feeling and I want to make sure that we raise that glass for that ritual, that joy feeling, that, um, tropical feeling that, you know, stirred and boozy feeling that bubbly feeling. Uh, so that I, I make sure that I, I share my energy with that cause I'm all of those feelings. I'm, I'm so bubbly. I'm so stirred and boozy. I love the water and so we kind of goof off with that and in between that I'm able to give you a really fun story, whether it's my story or someone else's story. And then I get to throw in that bartender side of me. I get to tell you about ratio and how to chill something and, you know, shake it how you please. Because I've been raised by chefs and home cooks from scratch kitchens. I'm able to tell you to like a chef would say, salt to taste. I'm able to tell you the sugar to taste, sweetened to taste, sour to taste. I'm kind of trying to be up in your kitchen. I'm really just being in your kitchen and allowing you to goof off. I do a blue motherfucker and I get to say motherfucker in a book and online a billion times because we know that drink up and down inside and out.
Paul Clarke
This is a family podcast.
Tiffanie Barriere
Come on! A family podcast about drinks?
Paul Clarke
Yes, this is a family drinks podcast.
Tiffanie Barriere
But I get to talk about like, you know, drinks that have really just been whimsy just about everywhere and they're not all crafty, you know, super tight cocktails. These are drinks that you probably just threw together in the pantry and shared it with a neighbor, a friend or a partner. So it's, it's goofy in there along with serious and, and, and some education.
Paul Clarke
And I, you brought up the, the way that you broke down the book and I wanted to call that out because I thought it was really engaging both because the reason you said, I mean, yes, you have classic cocktails, you have some things broken out by like gin and whiskey and cognac and so on. You also go into different drink styles, but also this gives you this, this, this avenue to talk about flavor as well. And like the sources of flavors, the way different flavors work together, because I think the important thing that I saw about this is it gives you a way to approach familiar cocktails sometimes and really think about them. We're encouraged readers to think about them in a very flavor oriented direction, as well as all of this history and culture and stuff that we've been talking about.
Tiffanie Barriere
Yeah, it's my, it's the beginning of my TED talk to everyone. It's the conversation around literally the joy of cocktails and how simple they can be. Again, being a bartender and being around nothing but bartenders, pretty much my whole adult life. We can get a bit nerdy, but we also can be very, very simple. And I really want to break down sweet and sour, spicy and sour, you know, just how science really works and how flavor really builds from the most simple, simple, simple ingredients. I approach it like, like cooking, honestly, every time I want to just talk about the base of it. I don't do a lot of talk on zero proof unless you want it. If you want it, you will see it. But I don't spend a lot of time there on zero proof because I believe most of what we're sipping is about the flavor, not about the feeling, even though I talked about mood, but mood is different than feeling. And that's another conversation. We'll have another podcast, Paul, but it's about flavor and balancing out that flavor first and then adding that alcohol. So it's all over the place.
Paul Clarke
We're coming up to the finish line here. Any final thoughts on the book you'd like to share with us?
Tiffanie Barriere
I'm over the moon right now with the fact that I can put me on paper and that's not easy. I have to say there is more to come. I'm so excited about the industry and what we're doing and while we're drinking, but I'm even more excited to make drinking fun. Again, not that it wasn't, but this is for the consumer as well. You know, my community, we know how to make cocktails amazing. We know how to get creative. We know how to serve it. But for those that are not bartenders, this is, hey, welcome to the party. This is how you do it. I'm just excited to see how happy you're going to get on making
Paul Clarke
Fantastic. Tiffanie, it is always such a delight to talk to you and thanks so much for coming on the podcast. And I'm thrilled to see your book out there in the world. Congratulations.
Tiffanie Barriere
Thank you so much, Paul.
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Paul Clarke
You can find Tiffanie Barriere online at thedrinkingcoach.com. And her new book, written with David Joachim, Good Spirits, The Joy of Cocktails and the Stories Behind Them, comes out September 29th. Pre-orders are available now. We've got a link for all of that in this episode's notes.
And that's it for this episode. Subscribe to Radio Imbibe on your favorite podcast app to keep up with all our future episodes. We've got tons of recipes and articles for you online at our website imbibemagazine.com. Follow us on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Threads for all our day-to-day coverage. And if you're not already a subscriber to the print and or digital issues of Imbibe, then here's your opportunity to get 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.