About this episode

Daniele Biondi discusses his extensive work and expertise in the rum category, focusing on lesser-known distilleries and spirits from Haiti and Colombia.

Daniele Biondi is one of the world's leading experts on the rum category. Working with Luca Gargano at Velier, he is one of the key figures behind the international rediscovery of Haitian clairin, the new wave of Colombian sugarcane spirits, and a driving force behind the Hampden Estate story. He's been working with rum since the 90's but over the last 15 years particularly, Daniele has spent much of his time travelling to the world's least-documented rum-producing regions — Haiti, Colombia, the Philippines, and more — searching out distilleries that, in his words, "aren't on Google." These distilleries are often so numerous and geographically dispersed that it bodes the question - have we actually seen or tasted much of the world's rums? Daniele began his career bartending in Milan in the late 1990s, and found there was almost no reliable information on the category available anywhere so he began researching obsessively. That personal research project became, in February 2007, one of the first rum blogs in Europe: not just a blog, but a functioning reference work, a "kind of Wikipedia" for rum at a time when the internet had almost nothing on the subject. It…

People in this episode

Host: Tristan Stephenson

Guest: Daniele Biondi

Topics covered

• rum
• clairin
• Haitian spirits
• Colombian sugarcane
• distillation
• bartending
• rum history

Keywords

• rum
• clairin
• Haiti
• Colombia
• distilleries
• Luca Gargano
• Velier
• Hampden Estate
• bartending
• spirits

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Velier, Italy's Rum Club, EU

Books & works: The Curious Bartender Podcast

Places: Haiti, Colombia, Milan, Philippines

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