A culinary school graduate, Sother Teague began his career working in restaurant kitchens before becoming a research and technical chef for Alton Brown’s Good Eats. Following a stint as an educator at the New England Culinary Institute, he moved to New York, where he found himself behind the bar as a member of the opening team at Dave Arnold’s Booker and Dax.

Sother Teague is known for working his magic with bitters, vermouth and all manner of amari. That’s what he does as the beverage director at Amor y Amargo, the acclaimed New York bar.There, the bartenders follow a strict ethos: They don’t use juices, syrups or shakers, opting to solely make stirred cocktails where the spirits are always the star of the show.

Today, Teague works as beverage director at Amor y Amargo, where he’s developed a distinctive style of bartending that draws on his culinary education and deep understanding of flavors; notably, the bar, which is labeled a “bitters tasting room,” forgoes juices and syrups in favor of showcasing stirred drinks relying on exacting combinations of spirits, amari, vermouth and bitters. Most recently, he helped open New York’s first charity-focused bar, Coup, with Amor y Amargo senior barman Maxwell Green and restaurateur Ravi DeRossi.

So what does Teague do in his down time, when he’s not drinking, or drink-making? Here, Teague takes a stab at our Lookbook Questionnaire to share his strangest hobbies, his go-to hangover recovery regime and the best thing he’s ever drank.

Current occupation:
Beverage director at Amor y Amargo. Partner at Coup. Founder of BATCH, a new app for spirits professionals and enthusiasts.

• Enjoy the USBG Tampa Repeal Day Seminar 'Pyschology of Bartending' presented by Sother Teague and sponsored by Jagermeister and covered by bartendbetternow.c.
• German Vacation. Need a little time off? Even if you can’t make it across the pond, a sip of this.
• A culinary school graduate, Sother Teague began his career working in restaurant kitchens before becoming a research and technical chef for Alton Brown’s Good Eats.

What do want to be when you grow up?
A sailor. I have a longing for the open sea.

Sother Teague Podcast

Best thing you ever drank:
I hope it doesn’t sound cliché, but, as drinking is such a social activity, the drink itself has never been too important to me. That said, my friend Colin invited me to have a Dukes Martini in London. It was expertly made with Bombay Sapphire and house vermouth by the legendary Alessandro Palazzi. There were four of us there for the table-side service and the experience as a whole will be memorable for a lifetime.

Worst thing you ever drank:
Russel Dillon recently “birded” me a shot of tequila at Basik. That springs immediately to mind. You’ll have to ask him what this means.

First time you ever got drunk:
My boss at that time was lamenting that his girlfriend had gone to Russia with the Peace Corps. In a move of solidarity, he decided to only drink vodka in her absence, neat. I joined him and we got crazy drunk. Many times. He and I are still friends, and they’re now married with children.

If you had to listen to one album on loop for the rest of your life, what would it be?
Though I’m a punk rocker at heart, if it was the rest of my life, I’d go with The Essential Brubeck. It centers me.

What’s the weirdest hobby you currently have or have had?
I used to make soap using goat’s milk. I’m trying to resurrect it by creating a soap and shampoo infused with the herbal liqueurs of Chartreuse. I’m going to call them “ShowerTreuse.”

What do you know now that you wish you’d known five years ago?
I wish I’d have known to be more diligent about entering people’s info into my contacts list. It’s so valuable to me now.

Weirdest cocktail experiment you’ve ever attempted:
I was on the opening team at Dave Arnold’s molecular bar, Booker and Dax, so that’d be a long list.

What’s your favorite thing to do when you’re not eating, drinking or drink-making?
I have a weekly radio show on Heritage Radio Network called The SpeakEasy that I love. My cohost, Damon Boelte, and I get to interview our peers, our heroes and the legends in our field. We don’t get paid to do it—we do it because we love it.

Weirdest drink request you’ve ever gotten:
Frankly, nothing shocks me anymore. If you like it and I have it, I’ll make whatever you request.

Your favorite bar, and why:
Here in NYC? It’s Bar Goto. They quietly kill the game. Fucking ninjas.

Best meal you’ve ever had:
I was a chef for 12 years. I love dining. But, similar to my favorite drink answer above, it’s all about who you’re with. I take friends to a tiny spot in the Lower East Side called Le French Diner. The entirety of the kitchen is a six-burner range and a small grill located behind the ten-seat bar. The chalkboard menu changes often. Getting to sit so close to the person who’s lovingly preparing your meal is transportive. It’s this level of connection that makes one fall in love with food. I hope everyone has a place like this to go.

What’s your go-to drink in a cocktail bar?
Daiquiri. It’s a litmus. If you can’t wrangle three simple ingredients, maybe it isn’t a cocktail bar after all.

Wine bar?
I’m a sucker for bubbly.

Dive bar?
A crisp, cold, lawnmower beer and an Old Overholt rye, neat.

Your preferred hangover recovery regime:
Everyone I tell this to hates me: I’ve never suffered a hangover, never. I’ve looked it up, there’s a small percentage of people who metabolize in a different way. I do the crime but not the time.

The one thing you wish would disappear from drink lists forever:
Pretension.

The last text message you sent:
“Sorry we never ate together. I’ll just make us praline bacon back in NYC.”

Many a modern bar team professes its love for bitters. But Amor y Amargo, a bar in Manhattan’s East Village, truly walks the walk: the place has about 250 tincture (non-potable) bitters and 110 potable bitters on the shelves at any given time. At its helm is Sother Teague, the bar’s beverage director and a walking encyclopedia of all things bitters-related. Teague’s enthusiasm for all things amaro is contagious, and it’s clear that he knows his stuff all the way from Aperol to Zucca. So, we asked him to lead us on a guided tasting of six interesting amari: Amaro Montenegro, Vecchio del Capo, Cynar, Amaro dell’Erborista, Unicum and Jägermeister. Here are some of the highlights we learned along the way.

1. We’re hardwired to dislike bitter flavors.

“We’re born with a sweet palate; we come out of the womb looking for sugar because it’s calorically dense and probably not poisonous,” says Teague. “It’s good for our growth and survival as a species.” But bitterness is the only one of the five palate flavors that’s an acquired taste, because our brain are conditioned to perceive it as poison. “Even if we put it in our mouth and our mouth says, I think I like this, within a nanosecond the brain says, ‘no you don’t, that’s poison,’” Teague explains. Hence why amari requires a delicate touch when introducing novices.

2. When it comes to amari, there are no rules.

Unlike the way that European vermouth, for example, has to adhere to certain standards, this category has few requirements other than the bittersweet profile. “Amaro has become an umbrella term much in the same way that not all cotton swabs are Q-Tips,” says Teague. This anything-goes approach can make it tough to compare one amaro to the next. “As spirits professionals, we often think about things like bourbon, where you can compare and contrast one bourbon to the next because there’s a set of rules that define what bourbon is,” he says. “With amaro, there are no rules — the entire definition of amaro is ‘bittersweet liqueur.’ They can go in any direction they want to go.” This free-for-all approach makes it a bit tough to stack individual amari up against one another, in the apples-and-oranges way.

3. The range of flavor profiles — and, by default, the potential uses in a cocktail — is limitless.

Our first tasting sample, Montenegro, clocked in at a mere 23%, which makes it a very sessionable amaro — and, according to Teague, a handy ingredient for cocktails in a bar like his, where there is no juice. “This is one we reach for when we want a drink to be juicy and light; it’s a great substitute for juice,” he says. “It stirs into drinks really well and makes them lighter and brighter, but still brings a nice bitterness.” Plus, he adds, “it’s one of my favorites.” On the other end of the spectrum, Amaro Dell’Erborista’s smoky notes (which come from Varnelli’s open-pot distilling method) make it an ideal sidekick to Scotch, either to add smoke to blended Scotches or to back up the smoke in peated whiskies.

The Drinks

4. Artichokes change the way you perceive sweetness.

Teague references Amy Stewart’s “The Drunken Botanist,” which explains that artichokes have the ability to temporarily suspend our perception of sweetness. “This is why sommeliers have a real bear of a time pairing a dish of artichokes with a wine, because your perception of sweetness is impaired, which means everything else is out of whack as well,” he says. Teague uses this as an opportunity to experiment. He cites a drink on the menu at Amor y Amargo called the CIA, which combines Cynar and Applejack with Punt e Mes, apple bitters, and a bit of water, served neat. “The apple brandy, sweet vermouth and apple bitters all come off as sort of sweet, and the Cynar sneaks in there and limits your ability to perceive that sweetness, so the drink then becomes richer, darker,” Teague explains. “I like to pair Cynar with sweeter spirits or ingredients because, again, you can get a lot of sweet ingredients there with different mouthfeels and different textures, and the drink comes off as a little more bitter.”

5. Cynar developed a higher-proof version of their formula just for bartenders.

Cynar also has a 70-proof that Sother helped test out. The higher-octane amaro, which was released last year, came about entirely because of the cocktail movement. Age of empires 2 gold edition mac download. “Their entire goal was to create a more solid structure for the product to stand forward in cocktails,” says Teague. “All these guys who’ve never been concerned with cocktails are now becoming excited because it’s a revenue stream for them, and a point of recognition.” The resulting juice is similar in profile to the original formula, but higher-proof — “they wanted to make something that would stand out in cocktails but they wanted the flavor to remain the same,” Teague explains. “It’s warmer in the chest and a bit lighter on the palate because the evaporation rate is faster with a higher ABV.”

6. Amor y Amargo hides the goods from customers until they’ve been thoroughly vetted.

When new bottles arrive at Amor, the staff places them on the shelf with the labels facing backwards because, says Teague, “we don’t experiment on our guests.” Instead of putting a new bottle straight on the shelves for customers eager to try something new, Teague and his team spend time with each new product to make sure it’s fully vetted. “I get two bottles of anything brand-new and we drink those two bottles amongst ourselves before we start testing it on other people,” he says. “Until we’re secure in it, we don’t serve it. My joking thing I always say about that is that there’s no way I could expect my staff or myself to make chicken soup if we’ve never eaten chicken.”

7. There isn’t really a good definition for what makes a fernet a fernet.

“Overwhelmingly, people — even industry professionals — will come into my bar where I have 11 fernets on the bar right now and they’ll say, oh, I didn’t even realize there was another Fernet,” says Teague. “I would liken that to someone coming in and thinking that Elijah Craig is the only bourbon.”

But what makes a fernet a fernet? “For a time, everyone had a consensus that they agreed on, but then we found that many fernets broke that, too,” says Teague. The consensus (which he still mostly abides by, for simplicity’s sake) is about beets. “Fernets use beet molasses as a sweetener, they use beet molasses as the original distillate, or they use a combination thereof,” says Teague. Admittedly, it isn’t perfect — and the vast range of variations in the fernet category make things even trickier. “I have fernets that range from highly mentholated from Fernet Branca to fernets with juicy mouthfeels full of baking spices, like Jelinek Fernet from the Czech Republic,” he says. “Then there’s the woody, dry, super viscous ones from Mexico from the Vallets. There’s Leatherbee from Chicago, which is really pointy and eucalyptus-y and sharp in your mouth.” It’s sort of a free-for-all, with the underlying understanding that most (but not all) of them utilize beets, somehow. It isn’t perfect, and as Teague says, that frustration simply comes down to “the inherent human desire to categorize things — and the impossibility of doing so in this particular arena.”

8. Flavors can be manipulated through temperatures.

Consider this scenario, via Teague: “if you’re in a meadow on a sunny afternoon and you pluck a rose, that rose will smell floral and herbaceous and bright and alive. If you then put it in your freezer for three hours, and you smell it again, there’s kind of nothing.” That’s because the volatility of aroma is compressed in cold temperatures. And since aroma is responsible for 90% of what we perceive as “flavor,” extreme cold will essentially erase spirits’ flavors almost entirely. Pair that with the fact that a shot of freezing-cold liquid will numb the tastebuds, and you’re further muting any potential nuance of flavor. “90% of its flavors are being erased by not having an aroma, the other 10% are definitely being interfered with because it’s so cold,” he says. But thanks to our brain equating bitter flavors with poison, bitterness will still come through, even in a freezing-cold shot of Jager. “So when you see that frat boy with his hat on backwards taking that ice-cold shot of Jagermeister, and he makes that terrible face, it’s because all he got was a big mouthful of bitter,” says Teague. “The system eliminated his ability to taste those 56 ingredients that they have, and it gets whittled down to just bitter.” Knowing the way that temperature can affect aroma — and, by extension, flavor — is crucial to anyone in the culinary or spirits professions, Teague says.

9. …but that doesn’t mean all cocktails should be served neat.

Just because cold temps make for more muted flavors doesn’t mean all drinks should be served room-temperature. “Dilution is great for cocktails,” Teague adds. “It opens up water-soluble esters, which release more aromatic compounds. Water also softens the mouthfeel and makes it less rich.”

Atmel studio mac download. 10. Citrus is almost always a safe bet for garnishing amaro cocktails.

At Amor y Amargo, garnishes are kept simple. “The only garnish we use is citrus: grapefruit, orange, and lemon,” says Teague. “Most amari have a big burst of citrus in them, so it’s an easy go to back that up.” But, he adds, it’s simple to enhance the flavor of an individual amaro just by picking out some of the notes inherent to each bottle — a stick of cinnamon in the Del Capo; a bit of ginger with your Jagermeister.

11. The most aggressively bitter amaro Sother’s ever had is…

Elisir Novasalus, he says. That bit he mentioned before about all amari using sweeteners? “This one uses a sap from one of the trees where they get the bark to make the amaro,” he says. It’s technically not a sweetener, but it adds some inherent sweetness. “It is sharply bitter, powerfully drying to the palate,” says Teague. “This is by far the bitterest of all the potable bitters I carry at Amor y Amargo, and maybe that I’ve ever had in my life.” The wine-based amaro only clocks in at 16% ABV, but it is very dark, full of pine and juniper notes, and “wickedly bitter,” as he says.

12. Bitter is great, but what about salty?

We’ve talked through spirits and liqueurs that appeal to most of our palate, from sweet to bitter. But has anyone developed a liqueur that hits the salty notes? Yes, and unsurprisingly, Teague’s tried it: he cites an Icelandic amaro called Opal, and likens it to “salted mouthwash.” “It’s highly mentholated, very bright and refreshing in that way, but very salty,” he says. So salty that, when guests come in to Amor y Amargo and ask for a dirty martini (which isn’t something the bar can make since they don’t have olives or olive brine), Teague makes them a riff on a martini using that.

Check out the full tasting in the video below: