Episode #42 - Wayne Curtis, The Daily Beast, Imbibe, Garden & Gun

 Hanna (3:25) Can you tell us what you need to know about your publications from the audience to the subjects you cover? 

Michael (3:28) Let’s start with the Daily Beast, where you are the half full columnist. 

Wayne (3:33) I am a half full columnist. Also, David Wondrich and Lew Bryson contribute regularly. Noah Rothbaum, the editor, has a stable of good freelancers there. I’m part of a team there. The Daily Beast is very much a general interest publication. Half Full is within The Daily Beast covers food and drink, mostly drink and all different aspects of it, mostly news and the industry to pop culture to history. David Wondrich particularly has been doing some great dives into history there. I feel like the goal in writing for The Daily Beast is to get somebody who may not be necessarily interested in drink and to bring them in. I don’t feel that I’m writing for the drinker at The Daily Beast, I feel like I’m writing for the general reader who might just be interested in what’s out there and the types of stories that are out there and these just happen to be related to drink. 

Hanna (4:35): Let’s talk about Imbibe. I think they just won the best spirits award. Can you tell us what we need to know about this publication? 

Wayne (4:56): It's not The Daily Beast where you can assume much more knowledge among the reader about spirits and cocktails. It’s a more educated group of people who are reading Imbibe. So, it's not a matter of bringing people in. It’s a matter of providing information that they might not already have and they probably have a lot of information, but it's consumer targeted, but is very consumer targeted when it comes to cocktails. Almost every story I do, I can write a three ways for almost every story I do for three different audiences, and Imbibe is the middle range for the connoisseur consumer. 

Hanna (5:38): I love the connoisseur consumer. That’s the perfect description. How about Garden & Gun? 

Wayne (5:43): Garden & Gun is a whole other thing. For those who don’t know Garden & Gun, it’s a southern magazine which covers the south, the lifestyle. The title is a little bit facetious. It was named after a bar that appeared in a novel, but it's also pretty brilliant, in that so many lifestyle magazines are targeted at either men, like GQ or Esquire, or they’re targeted at women, like Vogue or Cosmopolitan. Garden & Gun seems to hit them both. They cover hunting, they cover sports, they cover the arts, they cover crafts. It has a very devoted following and it seems to be across the spectrum in gender. And for them, the assumption that I bring to Garden & Gun is that they like to drink. They’re mostly pretty knowledgeable, but they want to try something that they haven't tried yet. In some ways with Garden & Gun, we have a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but it also has to be pretty high quality. They’re always looking for the off beat, fairly sophisticated, fairly affluent readership that likes to drink. 

Michael (7:00): In general, how do you choose the topics you like to write about? What’s your criteria? 

Wayne (7:05): My criteria is very simple. Does it interest me? Is this something I want to spend a week pursuing? Does this fascinate me? Is there something that doesn’t really line up right here that seems a little bit off? Like I said with the post office story, It’s just one question. Why can’t you mail a bottle of liqueur? How did that come to happen? I wrote for a while for the Atlantic Monthly, and I did a drinks column for them, and I did travel for them for quite a while, and one story I pitched them on travel, which was what happened with the no vacancy sign on motels, they used to be, all motels used to have a no vacancy sign on them and then they disappeared. I pitched it to the editor. I just said, what happened to the no vacancy sign? She said, I don’t know. What happened? I said, I don’t know. Pay me and I’ll go find out. It’s just simple question. Most questions that I’m intrigued by start with a simple question. Why can’t you do something and why do you do something in the way you do? The one I’m interested in now, everyone talks about Christmas spices, which now is conflated with pumpkin spice. Why did those spices become associated with Christmas? I don’t know if I’ve seen anything on that. I would like to do some research on that. Maybe that will be a story. So, it’s just simple questions that draw me in. 

Hanna (8:32): For the rest of the year, what types of stories interest you? 

Wayne (8:37): It’s a mish mash of stuff. I’m looking for different types of stories that are coming down the line. I’m working on a piece now on a nutmeg liquor, speaking of Christmas spices. I have another piece on the history on Cafe Brulot which is pretty fascinating. The New Orleans drink. We’ve been working with distillers that have been working with wine makers that have their grapes ruined by smoke tank because of their wild fires because we make vodka and brandy out of the grapes, there’s a salvage. That’s interesting. Another story I’m working on now is a bar in Chat Mew that came up with a variation of the Thunderbird, which is also fascinating that Chat Mew has a great bar scene going on right now, so those are some of the things that are in my pipeline right now. I’m in Maine now. I’ll be driving back to New Orleans in a couple of weeks and usually I plot my route so that I could wind through the south and hit bars that aren't familiar to me and talk to bartenders and by the time I get back to New Orleans, I’ll have a list of a half another half dozen stories that I would like to work on. 

Hanna (9:50): How do you choose people to interview so that I do have a specific criteria or like, how do you go about finding this fascinating folks to feature in your stories?

Wayne (10:00): It's just throwing a wide net and pulling in the interesting ones. I may end up talking to three or four people, but find that one has the most interesting story. Occasionally those come in through press releases. Not a lot of stories come off with press releases that I do not at least right off the bat. But what does happen, is that I don't delete press releases. I have the extra beef Gmail accounts, so I can just fill up my Gmail inbox over the course of what, 10 years now. I've been hoarding press releases in there. When I go to work on a topic, I can just type it in there and call up all the press releases or sometimes articles and often, Mark Brown newsletters that refer to either a certain brand or a trend or whatever's happening. And then I can follow up. I think a lot of my emails begin with hello, four years ago, you sent me this press release. Are you still representing this brand?

So that's one way of finding people. Obviously, Google turns up all sorts of interesting people. The other way is that whenever I interview somebody, usually at the end of an interview, I finish off by saying, is there anybody else you think I should talk to? And they often will say, yeah, you should talk to my friend, Jimmy who's out there in Spokane. And they'll connect me with email and then I'll call them. So it's a mix of ways to find people who have stories to tell. 

Hanna (11:27): I love that. 

Michael (11:28): For our listener’s benefit, besides knowing the kinds of stories that you write, what are some do's and don'ts for pitching you?

Wayne (11:36): I’ll start with a don't. I am an agnostic when it comes to secular holidays like national beer and a shot day, national Vodka day, national Margarita day. If somebody sends me a press release that involves one of those, it's pretty much a guarantee it's gone directly into the archives at Gmail. I mean, those days don't exist. I know there are publications that are starved, particularly websites that are starved for content, like our interest in the national peanut butter day and here's the peanut-butter Whiskey recipe. I am not one of those. And if by sending those to me, you're sort of acknowledging that you've never read anything that I've done, or you're not calling your list and paying attention. So, I think that's one of the main don'ts and I guess the main deal is to know your writer and to make a connection.

I think some of the PR people that I've come to rely on and bring value to what I do are those who will send me story ideas that aren't their clients. It doesn't take much to impress me, but when I get something from a PR person that says, ‘Hey, I saw this story. I thought this is really interesting, that this is sort of fit up your alley.’ They're not my client. That impresses me. I'm going to say. And so when they send me a pitch down the line for one of their clients, I'm going to be more inclined to take it seriously because I know that they're paying attention to what I'm doing and that they're not going to waste my time with the national peanut butter pitch.  

Hanna (13:17): Let’s move on to something that we all love. Rum. Other than tasting it, are there any other reason that you find it so fascinating? 

Wayne (13:25): It continues to be the history that fascinates me and also the politics of rum. In a lot of ways, its a very immature spirit and the way it's developed and people's imagination. Like very few people go into a bar and say, let me have a whiskey. They say, let me have a scotch, or let me have a bourbon or a rye or Canadian whiskey. And those are all considered different categories, where rum, even though it's made in all different places, people will go and say, I just want some run. People don’t say I want a Martinique Agricole rum or I want a Jamaican high Ester rum or I want a Puerto Rican light room. All could be different separate categories in the same way Scotch is different from Irish whiskey. So rum is still sort of finding its way and it's made in so many different jurisdictions and it's so confusing to so many people. But that to me is fascinating. 

And the fact that you can go try a ramen, you got a funky Jamaican rum from Hamden estates. It's not going to be even in the same category as a light, Puerto Rican rum, people who taste some balls, who aren't familiar with it, I guess there are two completely different spirits and throw in a, a white agricul from Martin acre Guadalupe, and its rums all over the place. So I liked that aspect of rum, that the flavors vary so much.

And as a writer, I like the fact that this confuses the public so much. And nobody can quite figure it out. And there's all these fighting over how to define rum and how to make it more palatable and more streamlined to the market. And I don't think that's ever going to get resolved. So, that makes it fun. Rum appeals to me on all different levels from history to politics to taste. 

Michael (15:07): So, speaking of from your book and a bottle of rum is a must read for any rum, fancier, or anyone who wants to gain a deeper appreciation of our nation's history through a boozy lens. So what made you decide to write it? 

Wayne (15:21): Well, as I said earlier, it was really the history that drew me in. I wanted to find out what role that rum played in the evolution of American history. Why was it part of the American revolution? Why was it a part of the slave trade? That just drew me in. And once I got into it, it sort of had its own interior life, which fascinated me and how it was made and where it traveled and how it, you know, and I, I started writing the book. I had no idea that there were like 160 rum distilleries in New England prior to the American revolution. Things like that just became more and more fascinating to me. So, it just pulled me along and it continues to pull me along. And still, I think I'm learning things about rum that I didn’t know. 

Hanna (16:15): In our industry, um, a lot of bartenders and  a lot of people will not write a book. What, why do you think people should write up or who should write a book? 

Michael (16:28): Who shouldn't? 

Wayne (16:39): I said most people shouldn't. The people who shouldn't do it, shouldn't do it for ego or to create a calling card. People who should do it, is someone that has something that they want to say that they have something that fascinates them. And that basically that they can live with for three to four years between thinking about it, writing it, revising it and marketing it. It's a long-term partner. People that have genuinely interesting and deep questions should write books. People that want to have had written a book, should not write books.

That said, I'm seeing a lot of, I think this is a separate category, is the cocktail books from bars. I like most of those because they sort of are a snapshot in time. And I think that 50 to 100 years from now they'll be valuable. The bartenders tend to not only have all the recipes that they may have been serving there for the last five to 10 years, but also a little bit about their philosophy and their approach and some anecdotes about their bars. So I think those are valuable. I encourage bar owners to keep doing those, as long as they don't have any super high expectations on sales and retirement. 

Michael (17:48): So we, we call our podcast hospitality forward. So we're, we're curious if there are any individuals or organizations that you think have been really innovating and moving hospitality forward?

Wayne (18:07): Where to start. Particularly now, there's been so much happening with the pandemic and people have had to take on different roles. It’s not so much about moving hospitality forward the last few years, it has been keeping hospitality from sliding off backwards off a cliff. And I've been seeing a lot of good activity across the board on that. I've been impressed overall by the creativity and the bar scene over the last 18 months, as people have been figuring out ways to survive in ways to support their staff. I'm not talking to a couple of bar owners that own more than one bar. 

Right after, you know, March or April, 2020 and asking them how things were going. And they were saying, well, my job has changed. I've gone from being someone who, you know, unclogs toilets and overseas people losing their temper with customers, to someone filling out paperwork and having to learn all this government talk and to ensure that all my employees have gotten unemployment, that they're getting taken care of, that they're getting the loans that they need.

And there's a lot of that, which I saw across the board, which really impressed me. 

Hanna (19:26): I think people in our industry are most creative, but also resilient and watching them surviving and, and, and, and being so creative. It just makes us feel so grateful to be in our industry and being part of that community. So we agree with you a hundred percent.

Michael (19:44): All right. Now let's get to something close to our hearts. Uh, we believe that, uh, your favorite cocktail is the Sazerac.  So if you have to choose a historical figure to share one with who would that be and why?

Hanna (19:58): But also, how about if you have to choose one person from our industry, who would that be?

Wayne (20:06): Let's see here, a historic figure. I love to meet up with E.B White, a writer for the New Yorker who had a farm here in Maine and whose writing has never gone out of date. This stuff is just stays so current. And I think a lot of people know about him from his children's books, Charlotte's Web and and others, but his New Yorker writing is extraordinary. And it just impresses me so much. It always feels current. If he’s writing about world war II, he could be writing about the Iraq war and the Americans response to it. So he'd be the one. I would just love to have a drink with him. And for an industry person, I would have to say Mark Brown at the Sazerac company who also fascinates me. I think he's one of the brightest people in the industry and he's funny. He's got a good 30,000 foot view of what's going on. And I'd love to pick his brain a little bit more about what, where he sees things evolving and where things are headed. So maybe someday the three, four of us can get together for that.

Hanna (21:17): Wouldn’t that be great?

Michael (21:18): In New Orleans preferable.

Hanna (21:20): Speaking of New Orleans and travels, if you have to choose one country, uh, international destination, where would that be? And why? 

Wayne (21:29): Not so much the country as a city, but I hate to admit this, but I've never been to Mexico City. I've transferred through the airport there. I've been to Oaxaca. I've been to Baja. I’ve been to Guadalajara. I’ve never spent any time in Mexico City and I have so many friends who go down there and come back completely mesmerized by the place. By its food, its drink, the culture there. So that's high on my list. That’s not a big lift for me from New Orleans. I should leave in the morning and be there by lunch. So I'm trying. I'm working on trying to make that happen in the next six months or so. So that's probably first on my list and then maybe Edinburgh, there you go. Get back to Scotland to see what's happening with the drinks there as well. One of our favorite places, I mean.

Hanna (22:22): Mexico City is just absolutely beautiful. And the cocktail scene there is just, it's fascinating, you know, and drinking Tequila and Mezcal. Isn't that a bad thing. 

Wayne (22:32): Not a bad thing. And rum and whiskey. They're making all sorts of interesting stuff in Mexico. 

Hanna (22:38) : Absolutely. Now they're making gin as well. So you can drink gin in Mexico.

Michael (22:45): We have to ask this question. We do have all of our interviewees and that's, what's the best way to reach you to pitch a story idea?

Wayne (22:48): Email is probably the easiest and they could get to me through my webpage, which has waynecurtis.com. And there a thing you click on for contact and the form will come up, I'll get your email and I will answer it.

Hanna (23:12): Great. Well, thank you so much. And what a treat to have you on our show.

Wayne (23:12) Oh, it's been a pleasure. Thanks for inviting me.