This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Hi, and welcome back to the Carol Markowitz show on IHartRadio.

My guest today is Peter Souterman.

Peter is the features editor at Reason Magazine and the host of the Reason Roundtable podcast.

He also writes the newsletter, Cocktails with Souterman on Substack. So nice to have you on, Peter.

Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

I'm a longtime fan of yours, especially when you veered into the cocktails with Souterman existence,

how did you move from writing about kind of politics and world affairs to alcohol?

Well, journalists, you may have heard, especially in D.C., like to drink.

There's a fair amount of that that goes on.

You took it to the next level. It wasn't like, you weren't like, I pour whiskey in a glass. Here's how I do that. You were like, I make my own bitters, you know. This is true. And there's, there's a variety of ways. It's, it's a bit of a long shaggy dog story, but maybe the short version is that around 2010 or so, I went to DC's,

sort of the bar that really helped establish DC as a great cocktail destination. It was a place

called the Columbia Room. At the time, it was actually sort of hidden in the back of another bar.

Oh, perfect. Not just like a speakeasy off of an alley, but like you went into a kind of a dive bar place. And then there was a wall that was, oh, there's a door in the wall, right? A bar within a bar. Yeah. And this was early in the cocktail renaissance back when this sort of thing was quite new. And I had never had, you know, a properly made Manhattan or anything like that before.

I grew up in Florida. I worked in a beach bar where, like, we served a lot of things that were blue,

right? And what was in it? It was probably, I now know, it's probably like mostly very bad

blue cura cell, but you never saw a bartender, like, look at a recipe or measure anything out. And in fact,

the, you know, the, the customers would talk about or the, and the bartenders, too,

a good drink was one in which the bartender just poured you more, right? Like it was a stronger

drink. That was what defined a better drink. And so I didn't love cocktails. I was a bit of a

beer guy, you know,

...