Alcademics.com

Look what's launched

It's Whiskipedia.org!

Labels: whisky

Molecular Mixology

Via Cocktails.About.com: Photomicrographic images of cocktails. The one on the left is a Sloe Gin Fizz. They have a whole page of them here, and you can order them in poster size. They'll make a lovely addition to your dorm room wall.

Labels: cocktails, news

Brunch drinks

By me, in today's SF Chronicle:

Daytime Cocktails for New Years Brunch Camper English, Special to the Chronicle

New Year's Day often arrives with one pondering the previous night's indulgences and the resulting aftereffects. On the upside, this can also be done with a cocktail in hand.

Whether consuming them to nurse the previous night's hangover or just to pass the lazy New Year's holiday, adults have a free pass to enjoy cocktails before noon on Tuesday.

Typical brunch cocktails include the bloody Mary, mimosa, screwdriver and Irish coffee, with fresh derivations of these standards now on morning menus throughout the Bay Area. Additionally, frothy Southern breakfast drinks like the Ramos gin fizz are coming back into vogue, though drinkers' aversions to raw eggs and the negative associations with imbibing in the morning may be obstacles to their popularity.

In "The Joy of Drinking," author Barbara Holland addresses the National Institutes of Health's "pompous treatise" against readministration of alcohol (more widely known as "the hair of the dog that bit you") to cure the hangover, for fear that it encourages alcoholism.

She writes, "I don't know what social circles the NIH travels in, but I myself have never seen any sufferer, after shakily sipping his bloody Mary, let out a whoop, grab the vodka bottle and chug it down."

Read the rest of the story here.

Labels: camper_clips, cocktails, SanFrancisco

Wine's carbon footprint

Neat article. I'm sure it's the same for beer and spirits, but at least you don't (often) drink a whole bottle of vodka in a night.

Labels: eco-booze, wine

Free crazy juice

Neyah of NOPA found this on Craigslist in the 'collectibles' section:

FREE St. George Absinthe Verte

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Reply to: sale-518688964@craigslist.org Date: 2007-12-24, 1:40PM PST

I waited in front of the door to St. George Distillery at the defunct Alameda Naval Station for 4 (count 'em F-O-U-R) days in the freezing wind and cold, waiting for the HISTORIC moment to arrive: the first U.S. distilled absinthe since 1912 available for legal purchase. Alas, the much awaited 11:00AM hour tolled on the 21st of December of the year 2007. The distillery doors flung open, smashing my frozen nose, but I was not deterred! My frost bitten fingers were shaking as I handed over my plastic currency and stuttered "T t t twelve b b b bottles p p p please". At $75.00 USD a pop I could hardly afford this expenditure on my part-time clown income, but I was determined to chase the green fairy until I found doG, or, at least got laid. I hobbled through the warm tasting room past professional drinkers parading themselves as Grey Uniformed Green Fairy Guardians. Bursting through the back door I elbowed my way through throngs of green eyed monkeys hungrily eyeing my clinking cache of TRUTH ELIXER. Out on the desolate, weed choked former jet fighter runway I slammed the trunk of my convertible Falcon Futura closed on 11 bottles. Looking across the bay at the almost sinister skyline of Little Gotham West I slither into the back seat, frozen limbs tingling, heart audibly pounding my rib cage. I pop the cork and release the green fairy. Eschewing proper absinthe preparation I tip my head back and gulp straight from the bottle. Pungent aromas of anise and fennel assault my nostrils as the holy green liquid tumbles down my throat. I feel like I am simultaneously ascending and descending as distilled wormwood wriggles into my brain. I returned to this body 48 hours later and there are no words to explain that I now understand everything. You cannot revisit the revelation, thus I have no need to imbibe the remaining liquid doorway. I am dispensing the opened bottle to strangers, and have randomly scattered the remaining 11 bottles near fairy symbols throughout the Bay Area.

It's a treasure hunt! But seeking fairies in San Francisco is going to be like looking for hay in a haystack.

Labels: absinthe, funny

Hangovers

Chow.com has an informative and actually useful story on hangover helpers. Most articles on this subject suck, but the Traci Vogel pulls the science together with the urban legends.

Personally, I think Alka-Seltzer's Morning Relief is an excellent product, combining stomach-settling fizziness with headache-reducing aspirin and caffeine. I have a hard time tolerating coffee if I'm hungover but I'll have the caffeine headache without it. I do several of those other things too (greasy food, mostly) and I'm glad to see many of the cures I've improvised scientifically justified.

Obviously, prevention is the best cure. It's surprising how many people in the comments to the article say, "I tried drinking water the night before and it really helps!" I didn't realize this wasn't common knowledge. Maybe some liquor companies should mention this on their websites rather than the now-generic 'enjoy our product responsibly' tagline they all use.

Also, one thing very few articles mention (it's unseemly, I guess) is that having an orgasm really helps soothe a hangover. There, I said it.

Labels: hangovers

Video Bartender: The Entertainer

A long time ago, I decided to add every bartending and liquor DVD available to my Netflix queue. Well, they all finally hit the top of the line and I'm getting them in the mail. I did the same thing with wine DVDs about six months back, thinking I'd get a story out of it (no sale so far...) to great success.

But as I don't think anyone will want to buy reviews of cocktail DVDs, I'll post them here instead. Project! Here is the first.

The Entertainer, 2004

Kyle Branch, who writes a recipe column for Tasting Panel Magazine, hosts this video with a name that couldn't be any more misleading. It's not about flair or technique, it's just instruction.

The 50+ cocktails he demos are divided into sections based on the type of cocktails made. Branch stands behind a fake bar that looks like rented office furniture while fake cocktail lounge crowd noises and elevator jazz play in the background. High-production it ain't. Most of the cocktails ain't things I would drink either- the Blade Runner (a type of pousse cafe) in the Classics section, sour apple and chocolate martinis in the section of that name, strange drinks like the Pink Floyd in the Premium Quenchers section, and a whole bunch of drinks in the Shooters and Long Island Teas section too terrible to name. More than being horrible drinks, I think they're just quite dated- consider how much we've all learned about drinks between 2003 and today.

All those bad things said, this isn't a bad video. Branch clearly knows what he's doing (he's obsessive about wiping liquid off the bar top) and has made these drinks many, many times before. (I spent the whole time wondering where he works- high-end college bar? Upscale nightclub? Poolside bar? Vegas?) He even uses a wide variety of good bar glasses and about ten different vintage shakers. The segments are him narrating while making each drink, with occasional bits of extra advice like how to core an apple and crack ice. Heck, if you memorized all these drinks and how to make them you might be able to bluff your way into a job at the average bar.

It's not a bar I'd want to drink in, though. Amateur and home bartenders may learn quite a few tips or improvements to their techniques. College students will learn a ton. Drink nerds will get less out of the video, recoil at every use of blue curacao, and bemoan the lack of explanation in some areas. These days, it's not so much about how, it's about why.

Labels: video

The bounced booze email Hall of Shame

For the third time in a week, the email address on a spirit company's website bounced back as an invalid address. As I contact a lot of brands, this happens a lot. Boy it's frustrating.

Note to PR people- please check the email address on your clients' websites. If it doesn't work, you're missing press opportunities. And if you're afraid of spam, just set up one of those graphic identifier thingies (I use it for the comments for this blog) to weed it out.

I'll keep adding to (and hopefully subtracting from) this list as time goes on, but here is:

The Bounced Booze Email Hall of Shame

12/26/07 Right Gin from RightGin.com

12/18/07 Milagro Tequila from MilagroTequila.com

12/18/07 jnixon@wgrantusa.com from the William Grant USA website (this may be the address the general email or press email forwards to)

Feel free to send me others or put them in the comments.

Labels: writing_life