Alcademics.com

Tales website getting into shape

The Tales of the Cocktail 2008 website is finally shaping up, and now has a gallery of presenters and special guests. It is gallery of sexy, sexy people; most especially me. I am one of those presenters, giving a talk with Jeffrey Lindenmuth on "Regional American Cocktails." Are you coming to see me?

Here is my bio:

Camper English is a freelance cocktails and spirits writer for publications including the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Magazine, Wine & Spirits, and Best Life, as well as the cocktail blog Alcademics.com. He has covered everything from urban moonshiners to drinks with maple syrup. His work has taken him to places like Warsaw (vodka), Barbados (rum), and Mexico (tequila), though he most enjoys the cities where they can mix a mean drink at happy hour. He is oddly obsessed with distillery waste product recycling and cocktails with black pepper.

Labels: tales_of_the_cocktail

Caloric cocktails

Nutritional disclosures could be on the way for menus at S.F.'s chain eateries

Boo! I feel like I should support listing caloric information on food and drink menus because that would encourage healthy eating and drinking, but I just don't. It's not like (most) people are unaware that the mocha-choco-latte has more fat and calories than the caffeine-enhanced water. Food and drinks are more than calorie-nutrient-caffeine-alcohol delivery systems.

Requiring chains to have the information available on request? I think I'm okay with that. But when hotel bars have to list cocktail calories on their drink menus I have a feeling I'll opt to imbibe in other locations where I can get a drink without a garnish of guilt.

Labels: restaurants, SanFrancisco

San Francisco wine events

Courtney at Hip Tastes has scheduled a slew of new wine events in the days and evenings, with themes like "blind tasting boot camp," "salty and sweet," and "Austrian odyssey." Check 'em out.

Labels: events, wine

Video, audio, paper, and web whisky

I just discovered the many whisky videos- most of them appear to be interviews- on WhiskyGuild.com. Scroll down.

Also, if you're not listening to the WhiskyCast podcast, it's time to start. Last week they had an interview with Jonny McCormick, who wrote an article for Malt Advocate magazine about buying your own cask.

Malt Advocate's publisher and editor John Hansell also has a great blog, on which Feb 24th's entry says he's boycotting writing about Irish whiskey until after St. Patrick's Day.

I'll make no such promises.

Labels: video, whisky

Cheap booze from Esquire

Esquire Magazine is putting more of its articles online, and that means that once a month or so we get one from David Wondrich. Today they posted his roundup of a few $30ish whiskies.

Labels: whisky

Pisco sour and the mint julep of destiny

Guillermo Toro-Lira, author of the book Wings of Cherubs that searches for the origins and true recipe of the Pisco Punch, has turned his attention to the Pisco Sour. In this new post on his website he traces the family of Victor V. Morris, the drink's inventor. While it doesn't go too deep into the drink or the bar where it was made in Peru, there are some great anecdotes about mining, railroads, the Salt Lake-Peru connection, and how Victor's brother was killed over a girl and improperly-made mint juleps.

Labels: pisco

A shifty bunch

Those bartenders, they never stay put.

If you've been in Bourbon & Branch, surely you've noticed Eric Johnson from Eastside West toiling behind the bar, and recently Thad Vogler of Jardiniere has been seen there too. When last we spoke he was just doing a few shifts a week while consulting.

Speaking of consulting, Dominic Venegas from bacar, B&B, Range, etc. will be consulting on the forthcoming project Gitane- but you've got a long wait until it opens in May(ish).

You'll have to wait forever to see Alberta Straub behind the stick in SF: She's moved to Brooklyn. Boo! Her cocktail show on On Networks continues.

And Josh Harris from Palmetto is doing time at (I think) Pier 23, filling in shifts at Elixir, and I already overheard one bar manager talking to another saying, "You should hire that guy!" It's not easy being popular.

Labels: bartending, SanFrancisco

Orson and onward

Last night was the grand opening party for Orson, likely to be the only restaurant opening party this year to feature both a fashion show and a sword fight.

But I was there to joust with the cocktails, so that's what I did. I had three drinks: a celery gimlet that tastes exactly how you think it would, a bourbon-based drink with many other ingredients that I do not remember (it was fantastic), and a drink with cocoa bean-infused something, sherry, Batavia arrak, and a flamed orange peel, which was also layered and delicious.

Why don't I take better notes?

Afterward I hit the very end of Rye's cocktail competition featuring Charbay's green tea vodka, and had a tasty sweet drink with just the vodka and lemonade.

After that, I headed over to NOPA for some food and drinks, because lord knows I hadn't had enough drinks. NOPA has been doing something cool with their menu for a while now that I haven't seen other places. They have a section of the menu devoted to a class of spirits, such as calvados or cachaca, in addition to the regular cocktails. This time its rhum agricole from Rhum Clement (check out the menu here), with five cocktails featuring expressions from the brand. It's a nice way to get acquainted with a category of spirits- and I especially need to get familiar with Clement, because I'm going to Martinique in April to drink it from the tap. Wahoo!

Labels: restaurants, rum, SanFrancisco, travel, vodka

Hot bottle

Check out this $1.9 million dollar bottle of cognac on Bill Dowd's site. I can only get into bottle design so much, but that thing is freaktastic.

Labels: cognac

Juiced up

Via BevNet, Ocean Spray is introducing an energy juice drink called Cranergy, "to help fight America's energy crisis." I'm not sure if that slogan comes from BevNet or Ocean Spray directly, but it's pretty ridiculous. The drinks are juice with Splenda, fortified with B vitamins and green tea extract. This provides drinkers with "a natural energy lift they can feel good about."

Sure. From the Splenda website:

The process selectively replaces three hydrogen-oxygen groups on the sugar molecule with three chlorine atoms. Chlorine is present naturally in many of the foods and beverages that we eat and drink every day ranging from lettuce, mushrooms and table salt. In the case of sucralose, its addition converts sucrose to sucralose, which is essentially inert. The result is an exceptionally stable sweetener that tastes like sugar, but without sugar's calories. After consumption, sucralose passes through the body without being broken down for energy, so it has no calories, and the body does not recognize it as a carbohydrate.

Refreshing! I can't wait to try this delicious drink that's "the first ever energy beverage to hit the juice aisles."

Labels: funny, mixer

Cocktails at Epic

On Thursday I visited Epic Roasthouse, and not for the roast. I was there to try Camber Lay's cocktails.

The menu is divided into classics and Epic Originals, but even the classics have been upgraded with touches like key lime sugar on the rim of the Sidecar and gigantic house pickled cippolini onions in the Gibson.

In the original drinks section, my two favorites were the Copper Pot with Partida blanco, calvados, and apple juice, with a spiced pecan dust rim, and the surprisingly bright and aromatic Conversos, made with white pear tea-infused gin, Lillet, Chartreuse, and a lemon twist. The recipe was printed in the Chronicle a couple weeks ago.

I also had the old-world-esque Prohibition and the Fennel Gimlet (with fennel and citrus infused vodka). And though I didn't try it, there is almost no way to go wrong with the Farewell to Arms, made with Oronoco rum, grapefruit, vanilla, and key lime.

The drinks were delicious, but I caution people not to go between 6 and 10PM unless you're interested in big crowds and long waits behind people ordering "a dirty Grey Goose martini on the rocks." Ack. I got there at 4:30 and was the first person in the bar before happy hour rush. It was nice and breezy up until about 5:30. But then the crush came and it was difficult to squeeze through the room at all and the bartenders were so swamped it was painful to watch. So blow off work early or go for late night drinks because the comfy seats and beautiful views in the pictures are blocked by too many people during prime time.

Labels: bars, SanFrancisco

All about rum

Here's a nice history and summary of rum on Slashfood, with an introduction to several styles including rhum agricole.

Labels: rum

A different kind of grog

Eco-friendly French to ship their wine under sail 60,000 bottles on a 19th-century barque from Bordeaux to Dublin is just the start

Interesting tactic, and a great PR move. Coincidentally, I'm reading Scotch on the Rocks, a book about a ship full of scotch that crashed off the coast of a small Scottish island and lead to looting and police chasing after looters and then a movie about it all. Let's hope the wine suffers not the same fate.

Labels: eco-booze, scotch, wine

Flora drinks

Michael Bauer, food critic for the SF Chronicle, gave Flora in Oakland three stars this week, and also made special mention of the cocktails. (This rarely happens.)

There's nothing wrong with the wine list at Flora. It's very good, with 82 diverse selections, but on my three visits, I couldn't pass up the cocktails, which made ordering a bottle of wine impossible if I wanted to keep my wits about me.

This restaurant is serious about its spirits, especially when you see the absinthe apparatus on the bar, which is lined with premium pours.

The cocktails are credited with their place of origin in small type below the description. The Corpse Reviver No. 2 made with Lillet Blanc, Cointreau, lemon and absinthe ($9), for example, is from the American Bar in London.

The drink program was developed by Erik Adkins from the Slanted Door, so that's why it's so tasty. When I was there (order the Carter Beats the Devil) Erik wasn't working but the execution was still terrific.

Labels: bars, SanFrancisco

Video Bartender: On the Irish Whiskey Trail (2006)

This is part of an ongoing project reviewing every booze DVD on Netflix. Wow! Who knew whiskey could be so boring? On the Irish Whiskey Trail leads us through Irish and Irish whiskey history and production, and takes us to visit the Jameson, Bushmills, Middleton, and Locke's whiskey distilleries. On the way there are three full musical interludes during which we're treated to a traditional Irish song at a much higher volume than the rest of the video, while being shown countryside slides.

While the Scotch Whisky Trail DVD was pretty entertaining and got me psyched for my upcoming visit to Scotland, this one was painful to watch and got my psyched for the ending.

Going with the theme, I next watched Great Irish Drinks (2003), a DVD that purported to visit the same distilleries as On the Irish Whiskey Trail.

As it turns out, it not only visited the same distilleries, it used the same footage, and in some places the same voice-over narration. But either it was a better and more lively edit or I was just in a better mood, because I enjoyed this one more than the first.

Labels: irish_whiskey, video, whisky

Naturally fermented sake

W. Blake Gray has a story on Yamahai sakes in the Chron, those naturally fermented in an old-school style that produces robust flavors. I'll have to give them a try.

Labels: sake

Great timing

You know how I was just talking about the vodka-and-pickle thing? Well I just opened the latest copy of Imbibe magazine to find a story on Warsaw written by the wondrous Chantal Martineau, with a picture of the vodka-and-pickle combo.

Labels: vodka

Russian Vodka

The LA Times has a great story on Russian vodka. It mentions how it's traditionally served cold and neat, out of a thin shot-sized glass, and consumed with salty foods like smoked fish and pickles.

When I was in Poland, we ran out of time to visit a dive bar in Warsaw where they serve you a shot and a pickle as a package deal. Apparently you hold the shot between your thumb and index finger, and the the pickle between your ring finger and pinkie in the same hand, biting off the pickle as you go.

I think I'm going to start drinking vodka this way (I love pickles). Despite earlier posts that may lead people to believe I'm a vodka hater, I have no problem with it. It's the competition to be the most expensive for no reason that bugs me. I have tons of vodka around the house- maybe I should relocate it to the freezer.

Labels: vodka

Likeable

Robert Simonson wrestles with the question: Is Canton Ginger Liqueur too easy to like?

As I sipped it and mixed it and enjoyed it, I started thinking: this is too unproblematic. It began to remind me of the reaction I get when I drink St. Germain, the wonderful elderflower liqueur that is also quite new on the market and which I adore. But I'm always a bit suspicious about how utterly appealing it is to my and all other palates, and I feel the same about Canton. It's like that old line: Never trust anyone who doesn't have any enemies. St. Germain and Canton appear to have no detractors.

I haven't tried Canton yet, but I too have seen the universally positive reviews of the product and comparison with St. Germain. I've also been thinking about St. Germain a lot. When it was first introduced, every cocktail competition was littered with entries including the product. Bars that rotate cocktail menus regularly instantly put up to three drinks with St. Germain on the menu. I've come to expect to see one out of every ten drinks on a cocktail menu list include it. I've seen it mixed with champagne, vodka, gin, tequila, bourbon, and pisco. It makes everything better! Let's put it in the water supply!

Like everyone else, I couldn't get enough of the stuff- until I did. Burnout, I guess. I've stopped ordering those drinks in favor of trying new flavors. (Aside: has anyone else noticed that the cocktail with St. Germain is usually the first one on the cocktail list?) St. Germain is still a very popular (and delicious) product, and I hope it will continue to do well.

On the other hand, it's starting to fall off a few cocktail menus. Other bartenders and drinkers are probably experiencing the same flavor fatigue. (Note: Not in Texas- poor Robert Heugel just got it.) Will St. Germain be the peach schnapps of 2007, a product so popular in its era that it will seem dated when used thereafter?

I hope not. St. Germain and I probably just need a little space right now.

Labels: liqueurs

The Drammies

Kevin Erskine's Scotch Blog has the results of his annual Drammie Awards. Particularly worth seeking out for folks like me are the winners of the Bang for the Buck and Most Under-Rated Whisky categories.

I was surprised to see how much people hated the Canadian Club "Damn right your dad drank it" campaign. I kinda like it, and am wondering if people are just calling it misogynistic because they don't like the brand. (P.S. Did you see Clontarf's new ads? Pandering, but also hot. Let's see if they make next year's list.)

I thought the Glenmorangie repackaging was a shoe-in for the Worst Marketing Campaign. I was out drinking the other night and saw they had the pre-change line of Glenmorangie wood finishes. It was nice to ask which ones they had and get answers like "port" and "sherry" instead of "Lasanta" and "Quinta Ruban." Say what?

Labels: scotch