Sean Evans

A few things you learn within minutes of video chatting with actor William H. Macy: he prefers to be called Bill, he’s extremely articulate, he's inquisitive, especially about the art in your home, and he’s positively and utterly enamored with rye.
That wasn’t always his preferential spirit, though it was his first exposure to whiskey. “My parents drank rye,” he recalls. “They kept it under the kitchen sink, for some reason, and they’d take a shot of it, followed by a shot of water. It looked...

“Every day, I’m paranoid someone will open a bottle of something I’ve picked and call me a hack,” says co-founder and co-owner of Rare Character Whiskey Company Pablo Moix. The 49 year old entrepreneur still struggles to wrap his head around the exploding success of Rare Character bottles; all of which are personally selected by him. “Selling bottles at $99, knowing they’ll hit resale markets for $400 or more, and having it not drink like a $400 and the buyer is upset—that pressure is intense...

As more labels backed by famous faces enter our whiskey aisles, it’s easy to roll your eyes and presume they’re all cash grabs. What can this celebrity actually know about distillation, maturation, and blending? Very little, right? And that’s true for some.
Not Ian Somerhalder and Paul Wesley, founders of Brother’s Bond whiskey.
“We’re meticulously laying barrels down in certain places of the ricks based on when they’re distilled,” Somerhalder tells us. “We’re able to pinpoint flavor profiles...

Ask Chris Stapleton about his palate and the country icon laughs. “I’m not one of those folks who can pick out distinct flavors,” he says. “I’ve got a “Gladiator” approach: thumbs up or down. I don’t consider myself a whiskey expert—other than in consumption.”
The “Tennessee Whiskey” singer always issues a thumbs up to Buffalo Trace Distillery products, particularly E.H. Taylor. “Someone brought a bottle into the studio in 2013 and I loved it,” Stapleton tells us during a video chat from a Fl...

High-end British car makers adore a whisky tipple. In recent years, there’s been a surge in luxury automakers—Bentley, Aston Martin, Rolls-Royce, McLaren, and Morgan—partnering with top whisky distillers to introduce special limited-run offerings. The most recent entry? The Macallan Horizon, a stunning $50,000 single malt scotch crafted in conjunction with Bentley Motors.

Driving down the road, you pass Rob Cameron’s work every day. The 39 year old is a design manager for a major Detroit automotive manufacturer, overseeing a team of five designers and a sculpting group to develop future automobiles. While his impressive designs may be parked in your very own driveway, you’ll definitely be interested in displaying his stunning side hustle in your bar.
At the height of the pandemic, while on paternity leave for the birth of his second daughter, Cameron needed a ...

Drinkable Doritos? In hard liquor form? An interesting concept from the folks at Empirical Spirits, one that raises additional questions. How does nacho cheese-flavored liquor taste? Is it worth $65 per bottle? And, of course, how the hell did they make it?
We’ll get into all that in a second, but first, a little primer on Empirical Spirits, the company behind the Doritos liquor. Founded in 2017 by Lars Williams and Mark Emil Hermansen, Empirical Spirits focuses on flavor first, and spirit ca...

Just after 12 a.m. on December 2nd, as temperatures dip below 25 degrees, the biting winter air hasn’t dampened the party in Stranahan’s Distillery parking lots in Denver. Dubbed “Snowflake Village,” it’s where more than 1,000 people have set up post in tents and RVs. All the revelers are here to purchase a bottle of the limited-edition 2023 Snowflake single malt release, a distillery-only offering that will go on sale first thing the next morning.
In this frigid setting, pockets of Stranahan...

Pat Fallon’s health was rapidly deteriorating when he reached out to Francisco Melendez in 2022.
The 52 year old former Marine was in full kidney failure following a series of medical misfortunes stemming from a lung injury. With dialysis as his lifeline, “The only solution was a new kidney,” Fallon recounts, “but no one I knew was a viable donor.” To amplify his plea, Fallon tapped Melendez, founder of a Texas nonprofit and The Sinner’s Club, a whiskey group on Facebook of which Fallon was a...

Sorry, Russell’s Reserve 13 fans; there won’t be a release of that acclaimed expression this year. That’s because master distiller Eddie Russell and the Wild Turkey crew are instead giving you Russell’s Reserve 15 year old. (Spoiler: we got a taste and it’s quite good.)
For the uninitiated, Russell had been blending some 13 year old Russell’s Reserve into its 10 year old expression.

It started as a warehouse joke. “Everyone does a cigar batch or a cigar blend,” says Macaulay Minton, president and chief alchemist at Dark Arts Whiskey House in Lexington, Kentucky. “I’m a cannabis consumer, so I said, ‘Let’s make a blunt blend.’” Minton’s crew chuckled, then got serious, yanking some barrels for a blend of straight rye whiskeys that would be ideal to pair with marijuana.

Dusty bourbon is having a moment. The hunt for vintage whiskeys and the cocktails created with them is on the rise, and more bars are offering well-preserved, authenticated older bottles, affectionately known as “dusties” to their fans. Iconic venues like New York City’s Brandy Library and Flatiron Room, Delilah’s in Chicago, and Washington D.C.’s Jack Rose have long offered coveted pours from these bottles from yesteryear.

Last summer, when Aston Martin unveiled the Valour—a $1 million-plus V-12 model with a manual transmission and limited to 110 examples—Aston’s Formula 1 driver Fernando Alonso was intrigued. Yet the former F1 World Champion challenged the British automaker’s bespoke division, Q by Aston Martin, with a commission that called for the Valour’s comely design but would be built as a lighter, more muscular, and more track-focused expression. The result was the extremely lithe and powerful Valiant.
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Following a nearly two-decade stint with Red Bull’s Formula 1 team, famed race-car designer Adrian Newey is stepping down from his role as the squad’s chief technical officer in the first quarter of next year. The 65-year-old Newey is an absolute unicorn when it comes to designing vehicles responsible for winning championships and spanning series that include IndyCar, IMSA, and Formula 1. Over his 40-year career, Newey has developed cars that have won more than 150 grand prix races, 13 World ...

After notching 23 world records for speed and performance in a single day in 2023, the all-electric Rimac Nevera hypercar is often described by numbers, by its other-worldly specs. 1,914 horsepower. Zero to 60 in 1.74 seconds. 100 in 3.21. 249 mph in 29.93, 1.5 seconds quicker than the Koenigsegg Regera. And, of course, it’s $2.5 million price tag. However, Rimac is more than a company that wants to dazzle you with impressive digits around ...