Alcademics.com

Snob versus Snob

Here's a great idea: Sam's Wine & Spirits in Chicago is sponsoring an "Ultimate Wine IQ Challenge" to see which consumer knows the most about wine. The winner of the multi-month contest earns a $1,000 shopping spree at the store.

I would love to see the final contest, and I would especially love to see it get really, really nasty.

Wait a minute, has anybody done a wine IQ challenge on the Food Network, or a wine snob reality show, or a show where people have to harvest, produce, and blend their own wine with the winner getting their name on the label?

Watching wine snobs pitted against each other would probably be the thing that finally inspires me to get cable.

Labels: contests, wine

Wet Wednesday

On Wednesday I stopped into Elixir for a Rhum Clement tasting. I tried five products- the white Premiere Canne rum, VSOP rum, the Cuvee Homere, XO, and Liqueur Creole, a rum-based orange liqueur. All the products were delicious, and I piggily asked for seconds of the XO because it was terrific (and I can't afford to buy any).

As I'd been recently studying cachaca that is also produced from sugar cane juice instead of traditional rum's molasses, I was curious to try the line. (Note: it tastes nothing like cachaca.) I spoke with Ben Jones, General Manager of Clement USA and a Clement family relation, and learned a ton about rhum agricole and their distillery.

Rhum agricole is produced on French-speaking Caribbean islands. Rhum Clement is from Martinique. It is subject to AOC restrictions, just like cognac. This means that only specific varieties of sugar cane may be used, and they have to test one out of every ten sugar cane stalks to ensure it has the appropriate sugar content.

The rum ages in barrels, but the temperature is so hot the barrels sweat rum and have to be sponged off. Thus, the angel's share losses are huge. After 35ish years in barrels the wood starts to overtake the rum, so sometimes it is moved into glass containers for storage after that.

The rums are kept as distinct vintages, so that in the X.O. product, for example, they can say it contains rum from vintages 1952, 1970, and 1976. They don't really sell individual vintages of rum, except through auction houses like Christies.

That was just some of the cool stuff I picked up. So when I'm done with the next 76 projects, I look forward to tackling rhum agricoles.

Labels: rum

We've got spirits fests, yes we do

Here is my comparative round-up in San Francisco Magazine of the three upcoming spirits festivals in San Francisco: the Independent Spirits Festival, Malt Advocate's WhiskyFest, and the Scotch Malt Whisky Society's Extravaganza.

I just found out I'll be out of town for the Independent Spirits Festival, which is too bad because they'll have all sorts of weird stuff there. But hopefully I can still hit the other two.

Labels: events, SanFrancisco, whisky

Finally!

I can't tell you how many hours I've sat around pining for a caffeinated schnapps, but luckily the wait is over. Available in Cherry Bomb, Mango Chili, and Pomegranate Spice flavor.

D00ds, let's get frickin' schnapped!

Labels: funny, liqueurs, products

Sock Suckers

In Eric Felten's most recent Wall Street Journal article, he takes on bad, and badly-named drinks. He goes into one particular drink but takes an extra sentence to describe the name.

Popular in Australia, it seems, is a shooter made of Baileys and butterscotch liqueur. The drink's elaborate and unprintable title vividly describes a "cowboy" engaged in an activity the Supreme Court adjudicated in Bowers v. Hardwick. Frankly, I can't decide which is more distasteful -- the lewd logo, or a drink of Baileys and butterscotch liqueur.

That's a long way of saying "cowboy socksucker." (I'm replacing the 'c' with an 's', as I don't want to get this blog banned from too many more places.)

When I moved to San Francisco they made this drink (and I was quite fond of it at the time, but I was dumb and pretty then) but they just called it the socksucker.

Back in Boston we called it the butterball. I wondered how many other names there were for this drink containing all of two ingredients, so I turned to DrinksMixer.com. This database has so many repeated and wrong recipes that finding other names for drinks is about the only thing it's good for.

It turns out the drink of Irish cream liqueur and butterscotch liqueur is also called:

Bit 'o Honey
Butterbee
Butterscotch Bomb
Butterscotch Cookie Shot
Buttery Nipple
Buttery Nipple #2
Camel Hump
Socksucking Cowboy
Copper Camel
Cowboy Socksucker
Oatmeal Cookie #2
Slippery Nipple

Labels: funny, liqueurs, recipes

Repo Man

Phew! I'm finally finishing up some intense weeks of writing assignments. I think I've been in touch with every cachaca brand on the market and crammed more obscure liquor history in my head than should actually fit (so if I forget who you are, it's because that place in my brain is filled with orgeat instead.)

Last night I hit Rye for the mixing competition, where Partida Reposado was the base spirit to use- and they provided free tequila for the crowd too, which was nice. Johnny Raglin of Absinthe took home first place, with Ryan Fitzgerald (Brick, Bourbon & Branch) and Victoria D'Amato (Monaghans) picking up the second and third place prizes.

Natalie, she of The Liquid Muse, was in town too in preparation for the Square One cocktail contest. H. Ehrmann of Elixir was busy pureeing watermelons and figs all day to make cocktails for the crowd. They said they've sold so many pre-sale tickets there are only 40 available at the door. Dang!

But before all that I'm going to a tasting of the winners of the SF World Spirits Competition earlier this year. Hopefully between the two events I'll find time to hit the gym, as my cocktail gut continues to grow unmitigated.

Labels: cachaca, events, SanFrancisco

One less single-barrel program

Via the Scotch Blog via Malt Advocate, we learn that Highland Park will be discontinuing their single-barrel whisky program that I just wrote about as of April 2008. Get one while you still can!

Labels: news, whisky

The value of overcharging

Here's a fun article on why Balvenie can charge $30,000 for a bottle of 50-year-old scotch. The best part:

Few consumer product purveyors dare to trumpet the exorbitance of their prices as an actual virtue. But this is the spirits world, where flavour nuances are as subtle as they are subjective, and where bragging rights can be more of a draw than the fleeting liquid in the bottle.

The past few years have seen a parade of "rare," bottles proudly promoted at stratospheric prices. In 2005, a bottle of The Macallan 1926 single malt was ceremoniously sold for $75,000 (U.S.) at a liquor store in Seoul, while a bottle of The Dalmore 62 Years recently changed hands for $51,000. And various spirit companies routinely stage similar publicity events with precious bottles from supposedly long-lost casks that are miraculously uncovered in a corner of the distillery by accident.

Curiously, most Scotches, if left in cask for 50 years, wouldn't be worth blending into a Rusty Nail. By that age, the wood tends to impart too much of a lumber flavour, turning the spirit into a syrupy goop with an aroma of stale church pew.

Labels: ads, news, whisky