Entries tagged with 'liquor'
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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/YinYang Eric Felten, the drinks columnist for the Wall Street Journal, seems to think so. He cites this year’s edition of Food & Wine’s annual cocktail compilation, Cocktails ’09, as proof of vodka’s demotion in the cocktail world. This year’s book has only ten vodka-based drinks, Felten notes, whereas the 2005 edition had 60. He openly celebrates the decline of all kinds of -tinis in favor of drinks based on gin, brandy, and other intensely flavored spirits. “As a way to inject unobtrusive alcoholic content into sugary drinks,” he writes of vodka, “the spirit is unsurpassed…But vodka's neutrality and uniformity would seem to be at odds with the slow-food crowd's embrace of robust flavors reflecting specific locales.” Is vodka...
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"Ancestral relatives of the Manhattan and the martini often follow this formula, and it’s amazingly versatile." Back in 5th grade, when my math teacher, Mr. Kimball, was trying to impress a bunch of 10-year-olds with all the essential and, he asserted, fascinating ways that math would play a role in our lives and careers, he probably didn’t anticipate that one of those functions would be related to booze. ©iStockphoto.com/filonmar Mixing a good drink takes craft and attention, but it also requires a basic understanding of ratios and proportions. While you can always improvise your way into a half-decent gin and tonic or even a martini (assuming you don’t mind a little variation in your drinks), cocktails that require more than...
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©iStockphoto.com/Scukrov It’s sometimes difficult to explain to casual observers, but as with enjoying many other parts of the culinary world, there’s a certain aspect of drinking well-made cocktails that borders on rapture. And as with anything that brings such pronounced joy, many fans can trace their enthusiasm to a particular “aha!” moment, when the proverbial clouds parted and the light came down, and all of a sudden their perspective on what’s good permanently changed. But how to share that excitement with others? What’s a good way to try to create that sense of sudden wonder in a mixological virgin? This was the question posed to the larger online cocktail community for the most recent round of Mixology Monday; using...
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"... If you know how to distill, it makes drinking a much more interesting experience." A big part of being an adventurous eater is the experience of DIY—of starting with basic ingredients and utilizing heat, time, a deft hand and a little salt to come up with culinary brilliance. (At least, that’s the way it’s supposed to work.) As it goes with food, so it goes with drink. Home brewers got things rolling a few decades back, working with malt syrup and mail-order kits to undercut the hegemony of the big brewers with craft-brewed beers that went on to spark a microbrew revolution. Garagistes and other small-scale winemakers followed soon thereafter, and in the process helped inject creative talent into...
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In last week's Washington Post, longtime drinks correspondent Jason Wilson reiterated an admission that had long had whiskey—er, make that whisky—drinkers peppering him with emails: the fact that he didn't love scotch "as much as some think I should." I know the feeling. I've been covering spirits and cocktails for the better part of five years, and while I've plumbed deep on rum, American whiskey, absinthe, and other spirits, scotch has long eluded me as a subject of fascination. Wait—did you hear that sound? That was a thousand scotch-lovers banging their desks in frustration before beginning to pepper away at their keyboards with angry, or helpful, or disbelieving comments. Every spirit has those who love it beyond all others, and...
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"When you’re trying to buy a bottle for less than what you used to spend on coffee every day, there are some things you need to be prepared to live without." ©iStockphoto.com/monkeyphoto Oh, those heady, innocent days of early 2008. Sure, the economy was losing parts as it wheezed down the road and the real estate market was looking pretty sour, but how bad could it really get, right? Around last year’s tax day I put up a post called Cheap(er) Drinks: Tips for Enjoyable Drinking Without Going Broke. Well, compared to now, April '08 was downright rosy, and in this post-Madoff era, "drink cheap" has become the imbiber’s new mantra. The most recent round of the Mixology Monday drink-blog...
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Editor's note: On Wednesday afternoons, Paul Clarke (The Cocktail Chronicles) stops by with his weekly cocktail column. Today, rum. "While it's hard for many rum drinkers to get too excited about mass-market spiced rums, the beauty of the situation is that spiced rum is so easy to make at home." Captain Henry Morgan. Wikimedia Commons Despite the fact that Henry Morgan was a notorious brigand—with all the vicious unpleasantness that comes along with the job—many rum drinkers find it hard to consider the spirit named after him as much more than a joke. As Eric Felten noted in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal, the popular Captain Morgan’s Original Spiced Rum has typically been associated with imbibing more for quantity than...
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Where do you go when your local liquor store won't do? Photograph from shortfatkid on Flickr In January, I vented about the difficulty of finding and purchasing various types of spirits, thanks in no small part to the bewildering system of state liquor laws that govern the trade in alcoholic beverages. Now, just as you’re trying to find that great bourbon you’ve been searching for in time for Father’s Day, Eric Felten at the Wall Street Journal is letting loose, too. After running a recipe that called for the somewhat hard-to-find maraschino liqueur, Felten writes of the experiences his readers encountered, epitomized by the liquor store owner who insisted that the complex Italian or Croatian liqueur was the same thing...
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In today’s New York Times, Eric Asimov steps into the bizarre and confusing world of U.S. liquor laws. This topic’s been setting parts of the online wine world ablaze in the aftermath of a recent operation in which representatives of Wine.com gathered evidence of rival wine retailers illegally shipping wines to certain states (including New York), and reported those retailers to state authorities. While Wine.com representatives say they’re out to change these rules, the event has turned attention to the Byzantine tangle of state laws that came out of the repeal of Prohibition, more than 75 years ago. Asimov writes: “The attention illuminates the tensions inherent in an Internet economy bound by post-Prohibition laws that created the three-tier system of...
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