As editor of Imbibe magazine, Paul Clarke has spent years at the forefront of the drinks industry: spotlighting trends and sharing stories. But beyond the bylines, Paul is also a certified WSET spirits educator with a passion for the craft, culture, and complexity of distilled drinks. In this piece, he reflects on his journey from curious enthusiast to certified expert.
I became a professional drinks writer at a time when that career didn’t really exist. There are a couple of caveats, of course. Wine writers have been sharing stories of vineyards and cellars for generations, and many journalists before me have dabbled in drink to one degree or another.
But in the early years of the current century - when, as a budding freelance writer, I went searching for a subject area that resonated sufficiently to hold my personal and professional interest for decades - the decision to make cocktails (and later, spirits) my focus seemed reckless and short-sighted. Aside from the annual regurgitations in most newspapers and food magazines of stale ideas for summer refreshers or festive drinks for the holiday season, mainstream media largely ignored the cocktail realm.
Dumb luck was on my side, though. I made this career shift starting around 2003, just as the global cocktail renaissance was starting to gain altitude and velocity. Aided by a growing library of vintage bar manuals, information gleaned online from beverage professionals around the world, and a generous local bartender who freely shared his experience, I inadvertently got a head start on the booze beat shortly before seemingly everyone in the food world (and particularly in culinary media) grew curious about cocktails.
Cocktails, at their core, are easy to figure out. Measure your liquor, measure your vermouth (and put the bottle back in the fridge), dash in your bitters, give it all an emphatic but not-too-violent stir, and voila. As long as you pay attention and don’t screw up anything along the way, you’ll have something decent in your glass.
Listen to Paul's interview with Rob McCaughey, our Head of Business Development - Spirits.
Spirits are another story, though. My cocktail explorations gave me a decent foundational knowledge of whiskey, gin, and rum, but the deeper details remained a mystery. Various books and distillery tours helped answer many questions, as did guided tastings from different brands. But still, while I felt I had a good grasp of the fundamentals (bourbon versus scotch, rum from molasses versus fresh sugarcane juice, tequila versus mezcal) some of the more intricate underlying details eluded me. How are different distilleries in Scotland coaxing such wide-ranging aromas and flavors from essentially the same raw ingredients? What’s actually going on inside those chambers in a Jamaican double-retort pot still? And shochu has a distinctive set of aromas and flavors thanks to its use of koji—but what does that even mean?
The role of a journalist is, in some ways, to teach: to bring the reader fresh information, to explain how a process works, to share insights into a subject. When I first started as a drinks writer more than 20 years ago, it was relatively easy to stay ahead of the crowd since we were all basically beginning from zero. Here’s how rye whiskey is different from bourbon, and what that means for your cocktails. Here’s how rhum agricole is made, and why it tastes so different from other rums.
But as the baseline knowledge of spirits and cocktails has risen among an increasingly educated group of bartenders and curious drinkers, it’s become crucial to ferret out those deeper details in order to maintain that informed perspective. The growing interest in spirits and cocktails has also prompted producers and their publicists to open up the information firehose. This is helpful on many levels, but it also floods limited attention spans with skewed perspectives, thinly veiled marketing, an assortment of half-truths, and gallons and gallons of outright noise.
A distiller friend had long encouraged me to formalize my spirits education. Eventually, during the pandemic lockdown, when visits to distilleries (or anywhere, for that matter) were on long-term hold, I followed her advice and signed up for a WSET Spirits course. First, the Level 2 Award in Spirits, and then following into Level 3. “It will be challenging,” she’d said. “But in a good way.”
I’ll skip over the months of study sessions and flash-card drills, as well as the endless series of tastings in which I sanded down my callused layers of stubbornness (built up over two decades of drinks writing), and replaced it with a more studied methodology using WSET’s Systematic Approach to Tasting. Yes, it was challenging. Frightfully so, at times. But yes, it was challenging in a good way.
One role of a journalist, as I mentioned, is to teach. As a writer and editor, though, it’s difficult sometimes to determine how a particular article has been received, or how well a message has been conveyed. So over the past couple of years, I’ve removed that journalistic distance on occasion, and stepped directly into the classroom as a WSET educator. Much of the messaging is the same—here’s how rye whiskey is different from bourbon, here’s how tequila and mezcal are similar yet different—but in an educational environment, we can take the conversation several steps further.
Paul Clarke with a group of WSET Level 2 Award in Spirits students
Teaching a class, I’m able to draw upon much of the material I’ve learned over the past 20 years of writing about spirits and cocktails, and all of the experiences I’ve had during that time. And while walking through the tastings and talking through each aspect of the production of different spirits, I also have the opportunity to revisit all of this information for myself—with fresh eyes, and a better-informed perspective.
I initially became a drinks writer because cocktails are delicious, spirits are fascinating, bar culture is fun, and it seemed a grand daredevil move to see if I could turn my interests into a career. In hindsight, it worked out pretty well.
But even the most engaging and fulfilling of endeavors requires refreshment from time to time, lest it become stale and familiar. Teaching about spirits—both to experienced bartenders and distillers who have their own depth of knowledge to share, as well as to eager novices looking to learn more—requires me to revisit and revamp my own understanding of the world of distilled spirits. In doing so, it’s reminded me why I took this move in the first place, and why it’s worth taking again.
Teaching reminds me how distilled spirits can offer a glimpse into the delicate interplay of the world. A whiskey, a brandy, a rum can be the product of a deeply intricate intermingling of nature, agriculture, microbiology, chemistry, engineering, and human taste and ingenuity, all bearing the imprint of the cultures in which they’re made. Understanding spirits may also sometimes require picking through layers of technical complexity and deciphering reams of regulations, and that’s all part of the game. But at the end of the process—as long as you pay attention and don’t screw up anything along the way—you’ll still have something decent, and fascinating, in your glass.
