Entries tagged with 'alcohol'
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If you can't make it to Germany this year for Oktoberfest festivities, you can at least drink in solidarity. We tasted twelve beers—a few traditional German märzen beers head-to-head with some American interpretations from craft brewers.
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Serious Eats contributor Paul Clarke calls upon mixologists to make cocktails with vodka in his blog The Cocktail Chronicles. He says vodka works well "as a vehicle and softener for bold flavors, rather than simply as an alcohol-delivery device."...
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Nothing like a good ol' sporting goods store kegger to get the party started! Photograph from Keggers of Yore. I've never been to a kegger, but now I don't have to; I can just browse through the photos at Keggers of Yore and live vicariously through these nameless intoxicated partygoers! (Waning: some photos NSFW.) [via conky]...
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Photograph from Danielle Scott on Flickr Last night around 11 p.m., after the heat had nibbled at the 100-degree mark in Seattle and while my house was still in the toasty mid-80s (we’re not much on air conditioning here in the Pacific Northwest), I decided that while the fan was doing the best job it could in keeping me from melting into a puddle on the couch, stronger action was needed. Fortunately I’d had the foresight to stock up on ice to take the edge off the heat wave we’re experiencing, so I broke out the crusher and prepared a nuclear-gauge heat buster: a Queen’s Park Swizzle. I wrote about the drink last fall, to coincide with a story...
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Artisanal spirits are the new micro-brew. It seems as if small-scale liquor dudes are rivaling celebrity deaths in number these days. Unfortunately, I’ve found that most of these booze-artisans are pretty much snake-oil salesman capitalizing on the human penchant for the little guy while passing off bad-to-mediocre vodka. I pretty much expected the same thing when I toured Wisconsin’s Death’s Door Spirits last week. (My apologies to owner Brian Ellison and his team for the assumption.) But I was pleasantly surprised. Ellison is one of those dudes who reminds you of the great chefs, a guy who works according to a personal standard that exceeds most, essentially competing against himself. From his website to his marketing materials to the quality...
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©iStockphoto.com/jsberry For a spirit that’s earned a reputation over the decades as a skull-thumping, inhibition-be-gone, regret-inducing, everyone-gone-wild kind of drink, tequila is getting a lot of respectable love nowadays. And as Jonathan Miles wrote in last weekend’s New York Times, and as I wrote in the August issue of Wine & Spirits, bartenders are increasingly turning to tequila in their pursuit of new frontiers for mixological exploration. It's been a long time coming. Mostly absent from American bars until the second half of the 20th-century, tequila quickly became a hard-partying kind of drink, and all sorts of alcoholic indiscretions have been blamed on the fiery spirit. As Miles describes it, until recently, "Tequila specials were like petri dishes for...
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While I dutifully made my way through the original Star Wars franchise during my preteen years and I managed a few rounds of Dungeons & Dragons before adolescence got in the way, I’ve never gotten very deep into comic books, hobbits, or many of the other things that many folks of my generation have embraced at a level that is, dare I say it, geekish. But as Derek Brown wrote recently on the Atlantic Food Channel, cocktails are an aspect of the culinary world that not only inspire their own level of geekery but even have their own equivalent of a Star Trek convention: Tales of the Cocktail. Now in its seventh year, Tales of the Cocktail attracts thousands of...
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"A great Negroni makes you want to munch like you just smoked a Snoop Dogg's bong worth of hash." What do you get when President Obama's favorite chef (Tony Mantuano of Spiaggia) decides to do a restaurant side project at an art museum? Based on my first visit to Chicago's Terzo Piano in the Art Institute of Chicago's new modern wing, pretty much the usual second-rate food at usually ridiculously marked-up prices ($17 salads anyone?). That said, while my first visit was punctuated by disappearing waitresses and clumpy, grainy-sauced, overcooked pasta with 2.5 morels in it and an uninspired trio of $19 sliders, Chicago food-writing vets like Phil Vettel of the Chicago Tribune and Penny Pollack of Chicago Magazine were...
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Photograph from Tambako the Jaguar on Flickr If you're content drinking beer out of a can or bottle, or think the foam at the top of a glass of beer is wasted space, you're doing it wrong. Adam Jadhav of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch explains how to pour beer so you get the most head (foam) and why you should do it—because pouring and foam release the beer's aroma. "Our tongues are far more limited than our noses in sensory perception," Jadhav says. Make sure you use a clean, room temperature glass, and don't tilt it when you pour in the beer. Related How to Introduce Craft Beers to New Beer Drinkers Best Destinations for Beer Lovers...
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Plum wine a-steepin'. Photograph from Umamimart Fermentation is no easy feat, and at-home alcohol projects tend to be pretty tricky. But since these fruit liqueurs start with an alcoholic base such as vodka or soju, they’re a cinch to make yourself. Learn how to make umeshu (plum wine) at Delicious Coma, or try your hand at biwashu (loquat liqueur) with these instructions from Umamimart....
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