Edinburgh Fringe Whisky Show Review: 2 Guys, 3 Drams, 1 Hell of a Show!

Max: Sláinte, you beautiful whisky misfits, and welcome to a very special fringe edition of WhiskyAngelz Cask Strength Chaos. ⁓ Max and I'm out and about in Edinburgh. ⁓ August the city becomes a madhouse of comedy, theatre and questionable life choices. ⁓ hidden among the flyers and the street performers are some truly magical shows, and the show we've got today ⁓ incredible with some great drams and stomping blues ⁓ absolutely zero pretentiousness. Today we're seeing a show with Felipe Schreiberg and Paul Archbold, better known as the Rhythm and Booze Project. The duo behind the sellout fringe phenomenon, Two Guys, Three Drams, the Ultimate Live Blues Whisky Experience. These two maniacs have a master's in distillation and a PhD in jazz drumming, and a combined total of five degrees that they use to get people absolutely merry while playing live music. So grab your best glass, pour yourself something with a bit of bite. And settle in. This is WhiskyAngelz, and today we're going full fringe. ⁓ to like, tell a friend, and subscribe.

Felipe Schrieberg: Some of them cries. Some of them die!

Max: Hello there Felipe, nice to meet you. How are you doing after that marvellous show?

Felipe Schrieberg: Max, thanks so much for coming to our show. Good. Essentially this is about taking our ideal night out and making a show out of it. So, you know, you saw, crowd seemed happy, we're

Max: Did seem very happy, I suspect. I mean obviously a lot of talent on display but also due to the whiskies as well.

Felipe Schrieberg: We we will only serve stuff that we like. Yeah. And we want to make sure in the lineup that we have a variety of aroma and flavours. So that anybody that comes to see the show, even if they don't like whisky, we hope that even if they don't like whisky, they'll go, but I liked that one. ⁓ and usually with us, the first one will be something quite light and easygoing, ⁓ fairly accessible. The second one will tend to be something Kookier or spicier or richer. And then the third one inevitably we're gonna sneak in some peat. Something, yeah. ⁓ to bring it on home.

Max: Absolutely. And I mean so the b so the basic format for the show is is to play music. You and Paul sit down, play some music, play some blues, have a chat with the audience. But I mean you're importing quite a lot of knowledge as well. Quite quite a quite a quite a slick amount of knowledge gets fed into the show. Yeah. So the ⁓ so the audience will come in, they chill. You're playing music as people are coming in, which is quite a nice vibe to set off, maximizing the time in a fringe venue 'cause this is This is not the first run in the fringe, is it? You've been here for quite a few times already.

Felipe Schrieberg: I've been doing the fringe every year since two thousand eleven. Mm-hmm. and then this whisky show we've done since two thousand nineteen. Yeah. We skipped twenty w twenty twenty and twenty one. For some reason the other We've done it every for some reason, yeah. But ⁓ every every year since we've done it. Yeah. And the idea is that we create and the you mentioned that we play as people come in, we want to create a sense of intimacy. Yeah. We very much want to make sh the crowd feel included and really as a performer, my goal is to essentially turn the crowd into one Happy entity. Yeah. And then being able to then harness the energy from turning them into one happy entity to create a really fun spectacle. Yeah. And whisky is a great way to help do that. Yeah. And then, you know, we really do believe that when you combine music and whisky, magical things happen. Blues is the genre that we picked to do this with. and then you can throw in, but people also want to know about whisky. Yeah. So you can throw in all kinds of things to help people learn more about whisky, start to conceptualise it, start to think about what they're perceiving. ⁓ so you know sometimes you have to throw up in your mouth a little bit when you hear the word multi-sensory experience. But it is actually, despite the fact that it's a a tired term, it is something that we are thinking about ⁓ on all fronts as holistically and as thoroughly as possible with how we craft the show.

Max: Yeah.

Felipe Schrieberg: That's great. Alright gang. So one of the things that's very important to us is that we want everybody that comes to see us at the fringe and in any event that This is our promise.

Max: Part of the magic of it is having that blend of music which you know carries the show along, as well as the kind of the interjections, the humour and a bit of the audience getting a chance to speak as well. It's a lovely blend. How did this whole piece come together between you and Paul?

Felipe Schrieberg: It started from I ⁓ 2012. So we all Paul and I already loved our whisky. I'd ⁓ done my or I was doing my master's thesis on sustainable whisky distillation as well. But that was I'd started that project then, but I'd not finished it back then, 2012. We decided to do a tour of ILA because we love Isla whiskies and we do it because and we do it, we go out there, but we didn't want money. We just wanted a place to stay, food, a place to sleep. whisky. Yeah. ⁓ so we go out there, we do this tour and it honestly is just one of those life-changing experiences. We went spent a week out on the island and we got to meet the whole community almost. Yeah. ⁓ just from playing all the local places. And we drank some absurdly good whiskies. Yeah. And then one gig we do, this very merry lady comes up and she goes, Boys, I'm the distillery manager of Lagavoli. Tomorrow you're coming into my office and I'm gonna mess you up. And we're like lady You need to go home and you're not the distillery manager of Lagaborn. ⁓ and that was Georgie Crawford. So the people that know their whisky will know Georgie is an incredible, incredible person. ⁓ and yeah, it turns out Georgie Crawford was, at the time, the distillery manager of Lagavorn. We go to the distillery the next day. Yeah, she locks us in her office for two hours, starts by pouring us three fingers worth of no make. ⁓ my god. Start there. Yeah, yeah. Two hours later we're pretty much crawling out of her office. But during that session with her, she's telling us, You boys are great, you need to come play during the fay shield and we're like the what what and then the next year in two thousand thirteen we go and we play the Vaish.

Max: Yeah. Besides the big whisky festival neither.

Felipe Schrieberg: Exactly. So we started with that and we loved it. It blew us away and we were going every year for a while and then and these are some of the best things we'd ever done. Yeah. And so then the then it's like, wait, why don't we do this for the rest of the year? Yeah. So how do we take the magic that we were experiencing at the beige and apply it in everything else that we do? Yeah. And then that has evolved over time and eventually culminated in a theater show. Yeah. But that's kind of the direction. So it's so the Genesis was two thousand twelve, but we formalised it as the Rhythm and Booze project in two thousand eighteen.

Max: Yeah, yeah. When people drink whisky, as as ⁓ at least in kind of Scotland, you tend to drink it at the end of the night. It'll be the the nip of whisky once you've had some beers and stuff. Whereas when you're actually doing a show where you're actually tasting a number of whiskies, that just becomes the drink that you're having. It's like having some glasses of ⁓ kind of wine or whatever. Yeah. ⁓ but most people don't drink it like that. ⁓ so I I it's just an interesting way to consume whisky and try whisky rather than just having the occasional nip at the end of the night.

Felipe Schrieberg: For sure. I mean it's it's about I something that I think is useful is We should be making whisky more accessible. One of my pet peeves in the industry is we're seeing more and more limited edition releases at high prices with lots of marketing behind them. We don't need that. What we need as an industry is much more accessibility. Find ways of making whisky. Yeah, it's a luxury product, but it's also accessible. So I really do believe that whisky should be the world's most accessible club. Emphasis on the word accessible and club. The price of entry is a drag or a nib.

Max: Listen Philippe, it's been fantastic to chat to you and thank you so much for letting me come along and see the show tonight. Yeah of course. Absolute pleasure and ⁓ hopefully we'll have another chat again in the future.

Felipe Schrieberg: Brilliant. Max, thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Thank you.

Max: Okay. So thanks for joining WhiskyAngelz. Please do subscribe, tell your mates about it, get them to come along and join us for some cast strength chaos. ⁓ ⁓