Episode 229

The Art of the Barrel Pick with OJ Lima

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The Art of the Barrel Pick with OJ Lima

Episode 229

What’s shakin’, cocktail fans?

Welcome to Episode 229 of The Modern Bar Cart Podcast!

This time around, I chat with spirits expert OJ Lima (@neatrockscocktail), one of the co-founders of Taste Select Repeat – a modern liquor store that’s bringing more people into the fold with a focus on diversity and transparency, as well as a heavy emphasis on special barrel picks.

In this single-barrel conversation with entrepreneur and spirits educator OJ Lima, co-founder of Taste Select Repeat, some of the topics we cover include:

How OJ and his business partner Pierre battled a pandemic and a notoriously thorny government bureaucracy to found and scale their modern liquor store concept.
The historical and social forces that contribute to an unwelcoming culture for women and people of color within American Whiskey, and how Taste Select Repeat is working to open things up by emphasizing transparency and healthy discourse.
Then we dig into OJ’s bread and butter: single barrel picks. Many of you have heard this term, and for some of you, it may be new territory. We give you the basic rundown and then talk about how OJ and his team partner with different distilleries to select these barrels from a warehouse full of options.
Along the way, we cover some of the new spirits categories TSR is beginning to explore, how a single barrel whiskey is like a performance of a Shakespeare play, what to drink on a beach with Bob Marley, and much, much more.

This is one of those episodes where you kind of need to think of the American whiskey world as a microcosm that can be used to examine the larger world we inhabit. OJ and the team at Taste Select Repeat are completely dedicated to giving you an excellent experience in the glass, but a lot of the real work they’re doing involves directly addressing systemic problems derived from power structures embedded both in the three-tier system and in our own minds. Fortunately, these and so many other problems are always easier to contend with when you’ve got a lovingly selected single-barrel dram in your glass!

In this single-barrel conversation with entrepreneur and spirits educator OJ Lima, co-founder of Taste Select Repeat, some of the topics we cover include:

How OJ and his business partner Pierre battled a pandemic and a notoriously thorny government bureaucracy to found and scale their modern liquor store concept.
The historical and social forces that contribute to an unwelcoming culture for women and people of color within American Whiskey, and how Taste Select Repeat is working to open things up by emphasizing transparency and healthy discourse.
Then we dig into OJ’s bread and butter: single barrel picks. Many of you have heard this term, and for some of you, it may be new territory. We give you the basic rundown and then talk about how OJ and his team partner with different distilleries to select these barrels from a warehouse full of options.
Along the way, we cover some of the new spirits categories TSR is beginning to explore, how a single barrel whiskey is like a performance of a Shakespeare play, what to drink on a beach with Bob Marley, and much, much more.

Featured Cocktail: The Brooklyn

This episode’s featured cocktail is the Brooklyn Cocktail. To make it, you’ll need:

2 oz rye whiskey
1/2 oz dry vermouth
1/2 oz of your favorite amaro
¼ oz (or 2 generous bar spoons) maraschino liqueur

Combine these ingredients in a mixing beaker with ice, stir until everything is properly diluted and well chilled, then strain into a stemmed cocktail glass, garnish with a brandied cherry, and enjoy.

One interesting thing to note about the Brooklyn cocktail is that the dry vermouth is allegedly an artifact of a misprint. Originally, this Manhattan riff was said to have called for sweet vermouth, which is more on-brand.

Here’s the thing, though: do you want authenticity, or do you want a balanced drink? In this case, I think the misprint was a benevolent error because it avoids overloading this particular cocktail with three moderately-to-very sweet modifiers. As it currently stands, the Brooklyn cocktail is a really fun formulation to play around with if you’re trying to understand how to dial in tastes like bitterness and acidity in a cocktail format that’s as popular, yet flexible, as the Manhattan.

This episode was made possible with editing and sound design by Samantha Reed and single barrel whiskey insights courtesy of OJ Lima, co-founder of Taste Select Repeat. This has been a Modern Bar Cart production, copyright 2022.

This episode is also brought to you by Near Country Provisions. If you live in the Mid-Atlantic and want to enjoy ethically raised (and delicious) meat from local farmers delivered to your door every month, then you need Near Country in your life.

Head over to NearCountry.com and enter the code BARCART when you sign up for your subscription to receive 2 free pounds of bacon or ground beef in your first delivery.

The Art of the Barrel Pick with OJ Lima

Featured Cocktail: The Brooklyn

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