Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania · Armenian Family Distillery · Est. 2019
Spirits education, organic vodka deep dives, cocktail guides, and the story behind FLORENA — written from 10 McCoy Lane.
Featured Story
The Barrel
Walk the sangria shelf and you are looking at products that have almost nothing in common with each other. One is wine. One is a jug of table wine with fruit flavoring. One is a soft drink with no alcohol in it whatso...
Read the Full Story
The Barrel
The first time most people meet this plant, somebody squeezes a lemon into a blue drink and it turns purple in front of them. It reads as a party trick. It i...
The Barrel
Most sangria advice treats the color as a preference, like picking a shirt. It is closer to picking a tool. The two wines behave differently in a pitcher, an...
The Barrel
Ask which gin is best for a gin and tonic and you will get a list of bottles. The list is the wrong shape for the question, because the drink is roughly thre...
The Barrel
Three ingredients, no shaking, no citrus, no technique to speak of. The White Russian should be the easiest cocktail in any home bar, which makes it strange ...
The Barrel
Most mixer lists rank by taste, which is a matter of opinion and therefore useless as advice. There is a more useful axis, and once you see it you cannot uns...
The Barrel
Pomegranate cocktails work because the fruit brings three things at once: deep tart-sweet flavor, natural acidity that balances spirits, and a ruby color no ...
The Barrel
Grape wine is fermented from grapes. Fruit wine is fermented from nearly any other fruit, blackberries, apples, cherries, or pineapple among them. The winema...
The Barrel
Armenian brandy is grape brandy distilled in Armenia, most famously from white grapes grown in the Ararat valley, then aged in Caucasian oak. Commercial prod...
The Barrel
Spiked apple cider is fresh-pressed cider with a spirit added, usually 1.5 to 2 ounces per 6 to 8 ounces of cider, served hot with warm spices or cold over i...
The Barrel
Moscow mules are served in copper mugs for three reasons: a 1940s marketing partnership that created the tradition, copper's ability to pull heat away from y...
The Barrel
A gin martini and a vodka martini share the same build, spirit and dry vermouth stirred with ice and strained, but they taste worlds apart. Gin brings botani...
The Barrel
A chocolate martini is vodka, a real chocolate liqueur, and a little cream, shaken hard over ice and strained into a chilled coupe. It is a dessert cocktail,...
The Barrel
The perfect gin and tonic is one part gin to two or three parts tonic, built over plenty of ice in a chilled glass, with a garnish chosen to match the gin's ...
The Barrel
White chocolate liqueur is a sweetened spirit flavored with white chocolate, which means cocoa butter, sugar, and milk rather than the cocoa solids that make...
The Barrel
Armenia is home to hundreds of indigenous grape varieties, many of which grow almost nowhere else on earth. The two most important are Areni, the flagship re...
The Barrel
Armenian mulberry vodka, known at home as tuti oghi, is a clear spirit distilled from ripe mulberries rather than grain. Calling it vodka is a loose Western ...
The Barrel
The Negroni is equal parts gin, Campari, and sweet red vermouth, stirred over ice and served with an orange peel. The official build is one to one to one, wh...
The Barrel
Armenia holds one of the oldest winemaking traditions on earth. The Areni-1 cave in the country's Vayots Dzor region contains the oldest known winery, a comp...
The Barrel
Gin botanicals fall into four working families: pine and resin (juniper), seed (coriander, caraway, anise), root (angelica, orris, licorice), and citrus and ...
The Barrel
Cold compounding makes gin by mixing botanical flavoring into a neutral spirit with no second distillation. Vapor infusion makes it by passing alcohol vapor ...
The Barrel
Armenian spirits grew out of one of the world's oldest wine cultures and survived almost everything history threw at the region. From village fruit distillat...
The Barrel
The three core gin styles are London Dry, New Western, and Old Tom. London Dry is bone-dry and juniper-forward. New Western pulls the juniper back and lets c...
The Barrel
A spirit is distilled alcohol with nothing added for sweetness, like vodka, gin, or whiskey. A liqueur is a spirit that has been flavored and sweetened, and ...
The Barrel
Barrel-aged sangria is fruit wine that spends time resting in oak before bottling, rather than getting mixed fresh from wine and juice. The oak does three th...
The Barrel
Organic gin botanicals are juniper, citrus peel, coriander, and the rest of a gin's flavoring plants, all grown and certified without synthetic pesticides or...
The Barrel
Butterfly pea gin pours a deep indigo and shifts toward violet, then pink, the moment you add something acidic like tonic, citrus, or lemonade. The change is...
The Barrel
Chocolate liqueur is a sweetened spirit flavored with cacao or real chocolate, usually bottled somewhere between 15 and 25 percent alcohol by volume. Under f...
The Barrel
An espresso martini is 2 ounces of vodka, 1 ounce of coffee liqueur, a fresh shot of espresso, and a quarter ounce of simple syrup, shaken hard over ice for ...
The Barrel
Vodka proofing is the final dilution step, where the distiller drops cask-strength spirit, usually 80 to 95 percent ABV off the still, down to bottling stren...
The Barrel
Butterfly pea gin gets its color from anthocyanin pigments in the dried flowers of Clitoria ternatea, a Southeast Asian climbing vine. The pigments steep int...
The Barrel
Pittsburgh's craft spirits scene lives on three layers: independent Pennsylvania distilleries running from the Strip District out to Washington County, the s...
The Barrel
A column still strips congeners aggressively through repeated reflux on perforated plates inside a vertical column, producing a high-ABV, low-character spiri...
The Barrel
Terroir, the wine concept for how a place leaves its fingerprint on a finished bottle, applies to vodka in a quieter but real way. Grain genetics shaped by r...
The Barrel
Organic vodka means every grain in the bottle traces back to a farm certified under the USDA National Organic Program, with no synthetic pesticides, no GMO s...
The Barrel
Organic gin requires three things working together: a USDA-certified organic neutral base spirit, organic-certified botanicals (juniper, coriander, citrus pe...
red-white-wines
Somewhere along the way, it became a shorthand for serious, difficult, or acquired. People hear the word "dry" and picture a room full of sommeliers swirling...
organic-vodka
Most conversations about vodka quality start at the distillery. How many times was it distilled? What filtration system did they use? What kind of still? The...
vodka-ingredients
Vodka is, at its most reduced definition, ethanol and water. Every other variable, base ingredient, distillation method, filtration approach, is in service o...
vodka-ingredients
There is a strange invisibility to yeast in the public conversation about spirits. People know about base ingredients, corn, wheat, potato, rye. People know ...
red-white-wines
There is a question that comes up constantly at dinner tables, in wine shops, and on restaurant menus, and it is usually phrased in the simplest possible ter...
organic-vodka
Something has shifted in the way a meaningful portion of the drinking public thinks about alcohol. Not overnight, not dramatically — the way most real cultur...
red-white-wines
Wine has a reputation for being complicated. There are rules about glasses, temperatures, pairings, and vintages that can make the whole subject feel exclusi...
red-white-wines
Concord dry red and Niagara dry white are two classic American wine styles from upstate New York. Each has a distinct character shaped by the grape variety, ...
organic-vodka
The claim that organic vodka tastes cleaner and smoother than conventional alternatives is worth examining carefully. The answer involves the entire producti...
vodka-guide
Vodka pairing with food is less developed as a category than wine pairing, but the same underlying principles apply. The goal is to find combinations where t...
vodka-guide
Standing in front of a vodka shelf can feel overwhelming. Bottles carry claims, certifications, and descriptions that range from genuinely informative to ess...
vodka-ingredients
Distillation is the process by which alcohol is separated from a fermented liquid and concentrated. The number of distillation passes is frequently used as a...
vodka-ingredients
Aging is strongly associated with quality in the spirits world. Whiskey, rum, and brandy are evaluated partly by how long they spent in a barrel. Vodka works...
vodka-guide
Valentine's Day cocktails made with vodka offer a wide range of options, from simple and classic to more elaborate and visually striking. The right choice de...
