Entries tagged with 'beverages'
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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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I'll admit that my initial reason for watching this video was because it features a wacky-looking dude with a massive fake mustache, but it has the additional plus of being educational—if you're interested in learning how to make your own soda, at least. Combine yeast, water, sugar, and flavoring for your homebrewed soda. Watch the video after the jump....
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Photograph of Cocchi Americano from bava.com It's three days after Tales of the Cocktail wrapped up in New Orleans, and I’m still recovering from the annual five-day gathering that’s become a significant event in the spirits and& cocktails world. While it may still take me several more days to catch up on missed sleep—and I don’t even want to think about what it’s going to take to shed the extra pounds from all the jambalaya, gumbo and oysters I inhaled—the things I saw and tasted at Tales will take me well into the next year of liquid exploration. While sessions with titles such as "Big Trends" tried to address some of the shifts in the drinks world—mescal, cachaca and sherry...
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Illustration by Matt Armendariz Photographer and food blogger Matt Armendariz recently illustrated the most prominent liquids in his life over at his blog, Matt Bites. No. 1 is red wine (86 percent, roughly), and at the bottom is water (0.6 percent; "Risk of personal dehydration: moderate to extreme") with coffee, nuoc cham, and soda chanh muoi in between. It's not just what liquids he ingests that's interesting, though, but the charming illustrations and commentary that go with them. Naturally, his post made me think about what my life in liquids would be. I'd pretty much just switch Matt's percentages for water and wine; I drink little else aside from water (don't have a taste for coffee or alcohol), along with...
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I visited Iceland from April 18 to 24. Although this sparsely populated country may not be known for its cuisine, there was plenty of interesting food to report on. This week I'll share some food-related bits with you. Aluminum, plastic, and glass; it's all here. The 24-hour supermarket 10-11 in downtown Reykjavik is a small shop—perhaps the size of a 7-11—but seemed to devote a disproportionately large area of refrigerator space to Coca-Cola. A bit of googling tells me that Iceland and Mexico have the highest consumption rates of Coca-Cola per capita. (Iceland doesn't appear on it, but Coca-Cola has this handy website with per capita consumption data.) One of my travel partners insisted that Icelandic Coke tasted better than...
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The blog Oddee has a roundup of the ten most bizarre soft drinks out there. My favorite: Diet Water: "Isn't that an oxymoron? Meet the Diet Water: all the flavor of regular water, only half the calories." Also on the list: gau jal, a soft drink made with cow urine (India); a Japanese drink with pig placenta as an ingredient; and an old favorite of ours, Kidsbeer (also from Japan), which we blogged about in summer 2007....
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Would you like a nice, steamy liquid to go with your cold? Yes. Anahad O'Connor of the New York Times addresses whether or not hot liquids ease symptoms of a cold or flu. In a study done by researchers at the Common Cold Center at Cardiff University in Britain, hot drinks provided "immediate and sustained relief from symptoms of runny nose, cough, sneezing, sore throat, chilliness and tiredness," while the same drinks at room temperature provided relief for less symptoms. I have unknowingly been testing this theory on myself all week, as my throat feels like a cat crawled in and scratched at it and my voice sounds more like Scarlett Johanssen as a toad with each passing day....
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The New Yorker: "If you think of Red Bull, with its glorified but dubious ingredient, taurine, as in some ways emblematic of the housing boom, then here, perhaps, was something grounding to take a day trader's eye off the relentlessly correcting ticker. The canned version, which is billed as an 'anti-energy drink' and an 'extreme relaxation beverage,' will do nothing for your congestion; its active ingredients are melatonin, rose hips, and valerian root. (The homespun stuff works best with codeine and promethazine.) 'Eight ounces really puts you to sleep,' a publicist said. Each can contains sixteen ounces: a Rip Van Winkle special. It tastes like a faintly carbonated grape Kool-Aid, with hints of Dimetapp."...
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The AP sayeth: "Chief marketing officer Andy England says the decision was due to weakness in the "malternative" segment and declining consumer interest. He says distributors can get remaining Zima inventories most likely through December." I had no idea it was still being brewed."Malternative." Ha....
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If the meager choices at a standard soda fountain aren't enough for you, there's hope in sight. Coca-Cola is testing a fountain system that can dispense more than 100 beverages from the same machine. [via Engadget]...
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