... or are you sick of all the Sex and the City cocktail tie-ins?
I don't deny the show's importance in kickstarting much of the current cocktail craze, but I think it's safe to say we've collectively moved far beyond the Cosmopolitan.
While trying to find the History Channel's Modern Marvels episode on whiskey on Netflix and iTunes (no luck), I stumbled across their sugar episode. I figured it would include some information on rum, which it did. Molasses is a byproduct of sugar production that can be fermented and distilled into rum. The show did not touch on rhum agricole.
I realize that I never posted about my trip to Martinique over a month ago. On Martinique, like many Caribbean islands, European settlers first planted tobacco, then switched to sugarcane when the market collapsed. On Martinique the sugar market also collapsed, so Homere Clement and other sugar producers turned their giant sugar factories into giant rum distilleries. They just skipped the middle step of making granular sugar.
Rum distilled from sugar cane juice instead of molasses on Martinique is called rhum agricole (they refer to other rums as "industrial"). The agricole distilleries take in sugarcane, smash it and shred it to get all the juice out, then ferment the juice and distill it into rhum. The leftover cane fibers are burned to generate steam, which in turn powers the distilleries. The steam engines are enormous machines at the front and center of each agricole distillery, which makes them some of the coolest to visit- they're loud with big spinning parts. Here's a video I took in Martinique:
The Modern Marvels video didn't touch on rhum agricole, but did mention sugar production in other areas. Hawaii produces a large amount of sugar from cane, but as far as I know no brands of American cane sugar rum are on the market. In Brazil, not only do they make cachaca from sugar cane, they fuel their cars with the distillate.
Something like 40% (I could be wrong on the number) of sugar now comes from sugar beets from colder climates instead of sugar cane from the tropics. But according to this discussion on the Ministry of Rum website, sugar beet molasses is high in salt and doesn't produce good spirit.
A lot of the sweetener used in the US since the 1980's is from corn, in the form of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). I think that with the corn ethanol poor government planning and HFCS/obesity epidemic bad press, the (mostly corn-based) bourbon industry had better start using organic corn if they're going to come out of this retaining their "traditional American heritage" image.
But corn is a different story. For that, you can watch the documentary King Corn, or the History Channel also has a Modern Marvels on that crop.
The New Yorker dedicates five pages to the hangover. Most of the information is not new, but there are some interesting cultural anecdotes:
Elsewhere on the international front, many people in Asia and the Near East take strong tea. The Italians and the French prefer strong coffee. (Italian informant: add lemon. French informant: add salt. Alcohol researchers: stay away from coffee—it’s a diuretic and will make you more dehydrated.) Germans eat pickled herring; the Japanese turn to pickled plums; the Vietnamese drink a wax-gourd juice. Moroccans say to chew cumin seeds; Andeans, coca leaves. Russians swear by pickle brine. An ex-Soviet ballet dancer told me, “Pickle juice or a shot of vodka or pickle juice with a shot of vodka.”
...and a bit of discussion on what cures may work and why. Many of them one researcher dismisses as distraction cures:
Many of the cures probably work, she said, on the same distraction principle as the hair of the dog: “Take the spicy foods, for example. They divert the body’s attention away from coping with the alcohol to coping with the spices, which are also a toxin. So you have new problems—with your stomach, with your esophagus, with your respiration—rather than the problem with the headache, or that you are going to the washroom every five minutes.” The high-fat and high-protein meals operate in the same way, she said. The body turns to the food and forgets about the alcohol for the time being, thus delaying the hangover and possibly alleviating it.
Milk thistle as a liver helper comes up again. That's the only thing this article made me consider changing about my lifestyle. Lately, I've hardly been experiencing any hangovers. I attribute this not so much to reduced alcohol intake, but to two factors:
1. Drinking in venues where they serve a glass water with drinks.
2. Not staying out too late. I've noticed that even when not drinking heavily I feel worse after a late night out than I do after an early one with many cocktails.
The New Yorker story mentions Kingsley Amis, the British writer of three books on drinking that were recently compiled into one volume called Everyday Drinking. I have the book, and it's a riot. The Wall Street Journal's Eric Felten also wrote about this book in a story last weekend called The Hangover Artist.
Esquire's David Wondrich also reviews the book in the June issue. He says, "Kingsley Amis’s drink writing is better than anybody else’s, ever -- even though there wasn’t a single cocktail or category of booze he could write about without making a grievous factual error."
Playboy takes on Amis as well, saying that in the book, "Many quaffs are more interesting in theory than in practice... but the old boy is charming enough to make you think about trying them anyway. " They include a recipe for the Salty Dog, a cocktail with gin, grapefruit juice, and salt.
May 22: Mr. Smith's Whisky Club holds a tasting of Bowmore 12, Achentoshan 18, and Glen Garioch 3 Wood, with Guest Speaker David Stoop.
May 24 and June 2: Uva Enoteca has begun hosting Introduction to Italian Wines classes. The first of the two dates is May 24. Join their mailing list for more info.
June 4th: the Mechanics Institute Library (almost my favorite place in San Francisco except they don't serve drinks) is hosting a talk by Benjamin Wallace, author of The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine.
It's over two weeks since I've been to Beretta, and I'm getting the shakes. I meet there last night for drinks and I find the menu lacking the cocktail I most want: the Rangoon Gin Cobbler. What to do, I ask Eric Johnson, my man behind the stick.
Relax, says he, mixing me one, we change the menu all the time depending on the ingredients in stock.
Fine, I go, and what else don't I see here?
He says we were recently between piscos, so the menu isn't packing Punch, but I'd whip one out for you if you wanted.
I say no thanks, buddy, but you've inspired me to keep this train off the tracks. I ask him for a Ti Punch since they've got rhum agricole laying around like bums in the park, and he makes me one like it's nothing. Thanks for keeping me steady, I say, and blow out of there until tomorrow.
Last night I helped judge the Hendrick's gin cocktail competition at Rye. Hendrick's likes to make things interesting in their events and marketing, so for this contest bartenders not only had to create a cocktail showcasing one of the botanicals in Hendrick's, they also had to recite a limerick to go along with it. The limericks were weighted heavily in the judging but luckily our top contenders were strong in both the poetic and taste categories.
The winner of the contest was Sierra Zimei of the Seasons Bar at the Four Seasons with her Secret Garden cocktail consisting of grapefruit, cucumber, lime, and cilantro syrup with a healthy dose of gin mixed in. She won a round-trip air ticket anywhere in the States, which unfortunately she's not using to join us at Tales of the Cocktail but opting for a baseball game with her husband instead. I believe that marriage should not get in the way of cocktailing, but then again that may be a reason I'm still single. I'll ponder that over drinks later.
After the contest, I went out to dinner with Julio Bermejo of Tommy's, Charlotte Voissey of Hendrick's, Rob Renteria of Martini House, Greg Lindgren of Rye, and some other friends of Julio. Joey and Eddie's (the former Moose's) has a short cocktail menu, from which I chose the Bronx Negroni, which is a regular Negroni with a touch of Averna. Very good.
I ran into Scott Beattie of Cyrus last night at Absinthe's SF Cocktail Week finale event. He had big news to share- as of last weekend, he's no longer be working behind the bar there. He'll still be running the show, though, so your drinks will be just as tasty as ever. So from now on, he'll be a backseat muddler.
In other news, his book Artisnal Cocktails: Drinks Inspired by the Seasons from the Bar at Cyrus, will be released in November. It's available for pre-order on Amazon.com here. He gave me a sneak peak at the contents and it looks like great stuff, with photos like the one below (stolen from his website). It makes me very, very thirsty.
Prepare yourselves. The wonderfully talented Jamie Boudreau will be guest bartending at Bourbon & Branch on May 28th and 29th in the library room, bringing along his own cocktail menu. Will make drinks with beer liqueur? Olive caviar? Blowtorch something? We shall see.
Boudreau was until recently behind the bar at Vessel in Seattle, is the author of the blog SpiritsandCocktails.com, and is also a hell of a photographer. He makes many of his own ingredients, designs dozens of cocktails, and is a fine writer to boot. He does so many things so very well that you kind of want to kick him, but I do not recommend that officially. Instead, go read his website and visit him next week at B&B.
Run screaming to your local newsstand to pick up the June issue of Wine & Spirits magazine, with the Top 100 Value Wines on the cover. Also on the cover is a mention of a story inside on Tequila Terroir, written by me. Hooray! My pal Jenn Farrington took the photos.
Here's the teaser:
This February, a new Tequila called Ocho launched in Europe with a small but significant difference from other brands: each bottling is labeled with the harvest year and name of the agave field from which it came. Tequila is a spirit unusually ripe for the study of terroir as its raw ingredient does not vary, it is grown in a specified region with diverse soils, and it does not need to be aged like whisky or Cognac so it can be appreciated without the influence of wood. Yet until now brands have provided consumers with only broad clues as to the origin of the agave in each bottle.
On the page after my story, you'll be treated to a tasting story on tequila written by David Wondrich, in which he explains terroir in spirits better in three paragraphs than I did in 1200 words.
While catching up on my reading and email from vacation, I'll likely be doing lots of linking to other stories rather than the deeply intellectual thought-provoking essays you've come to expect from Alcademics.com. So it goes.
I just discovered that the Wall Street Journal has a nice Food and Drink section page. On it right now, Eric Felten discusses the new Kingsley Amis compendium Everyday Drinking. I have the book at home but haven't had time to get into it. It's hilarious and deserves a thorough read.
They also have a story on tips for wine tasting rooms, which is a follow up to tips for visitors to those rooms, and a very short review of some organic spirits.
On other sites, Chow.com has a story on the history and return of punch. They mention that at Hawksmoor in London they serve punch at tables instead of bottle service. I think this sounds like a great idea, especially for all the new high-end cocktail bars. And the big shiny silver punch bowls would look better on a table in these places than a stupid light-up ice bucket for vodka.
A communications consultant for Ask.com sent me a list of the top cocktail recipe searches on the site over the past two weeks. I think this is probably a good indication of what drinks people are trying to make at home. Are the bloody mary and cosmo influenced by Mother's Day and the Sex and the City movie? People need recipes for the mimosa? People still drink pina coladas? Interesting stuff.
1. Bloody Mary
2. Cosmopolitan
3. Sex on the Beach
4. Margarita
5. Martini
6. Manhattan
7. Sangria
8. Pina Colada
9. Mimosa
10. Daiquiri
We had a nearly four hour drive from Speyside to Edinburgh for our last day on the trip, but it wasn't drama-free by any means. Once again, the back door of the van popped open while we were going down the highway and two peoples' luggage fell out. I watched as one tumbled behind our bus and was run over by the truck behind us. The suitcase was ruined and the guy's laptop's screen was cracked, but the bottle of Pimm's No. 3 and the Linn House bottling of 35 year-old scotch survived intact. Hooray!
We stayed at the huge and impressive Balmoral hotel in Edinburgh, but I didn't spend more than 20 minutes awake in the room. I had bars to see! My drinking pal for the day was Bill Dowd, and we stopped into about 7 venues in three hours. Not bad. I'll have to reserve the write-up on those for a future story, but I loved Oloroso and Tonic most of all.
Back in the room for a quick change into the first suit jacket I've owned since First Communion (50 bucks at H&M), I was ready for a private dinner in Edinburgh Castle. Several of the distillers and blenders from earlier in the week joined us, and it was like everything else in the week: ultra-fancy. The people at Old Pulteney were kind enough to contribute some 31 year-old scotch for us to drink at dinner and at the after-party at the Balmoral Hotel.
It was almost a beautiful ending to a fantastic (and educational) trip, but alas, the trip home was not-so-fab. The combination of Delta and JFK airport caused delays, a missed connection, a night in New York, sleeping on a friend's floor, and an early next-day flight 15 hours later than I was supposed to be home.
Luckily when I arrived there, there was a bottle of scotch that had been delivered waiting for me.
This was our final distillery day in Scotland, but it was a double-header. We started off the morning with a tour of the Glenlivet distillery. By this time distillery tours were old hat, so we just stopped off at the points that deviate from other brands. The we had lunch and a demo of an old still that they set up on the driveway. It produced some pretty good new make spirit, as far as I can tell.
After a tasting, we headed off on one of the new Smuggler's Trails. These were set up as nature walks meant to be historically accurate trails that smugglers would take to get the whisky out in the days when distilling was illegal (without paying taxes, anyway). And due to our three hour walk, I actually came home from Scotland with a sunburn!
We drove over to our hotel for the night, the Linn House. It's the property of Pernod-Ricard, owners of Chivas, and it's pretty darn fabulous. After a quick walk around the grounds and building, it was time for dinner. We walked over to the Strathisla Distillery, where the Chivas visitor center is. The distillery itself is gorgeous with the double pagoda roof and stone front. Inside, the visitor's center is themed like an old grocery store, which is how the Chivas brothers started off.
We were treated to access to the Chivas archives, where there were some great old product catalogs, then treated to dinner in a modern part of the distillery where they hold corporate meetings. For the afterparty, we returned to the Linn House's Garden Bar, which is like a little club house in the gardens behind the house equipped with a pool table, jukebox, and a fully stocked bar. I stayed up to a sensible 2AM, unlike some of the less responsible writers who tried to re-rouse me for the after-after party in the living room.
Yesterday at Glenlivet and Strathisla were amazing, but I've no time or Internet with which to post. The picture is of my hotel from last night, at which we were at the bar in the garden until the wee hours of the morning.
5/1/08 update: Fish and Farm has a great homemade cocktail ingredient program, but alas, nowhere to hang your jacket at the bar. They've been added to the Hall of Shame.
--
Every bar top should have coat hooks beneath it. That way you don't have to try to hang your jacket off your bar stool under your butt, having it slip off half the time and getting dirty when you put your feet up.
Bar hooks seem like such a simple and necessary bar element, like toilet paper in the bathrooms or lemons in the garnish tray, yet there are many places that have not installed them. I'm constantly running my hands along the underside of bars feeling for the hooks and getting nothing but gum and boogers. This has to end!
It is up to us to shame these establishments into installing coat hooks. Together we can make a difference! Thus I present to you:
The Bar Hook Hall of Shame
(add your nominees in the comments and I'll expand the list here)
Fish and Farm (added 4/18/08)
The Transfer
The Pilsner Inn
Colibri Mexican Bistro
9/25/06 Congratulations to Bourbon & Branch, the first bar to be removed from the Bar Coat Hook Hall of Shame by finally installing their hooks.
5/1/07 I went to check out Etiquette Lounge where they had no coat hooks, and they admitted to not having them at their other venue Element Lounge either.
5/15/07 Congratulations to Rye, where they finally installed coat hooks and made the bar a more comfortable experience for us all.
5/1/07 I have decided to drop Etiquette and Element Lounge from the Hall of Shame, as they're not really venues where you sit at the bar. Nightclubs do not need coat hooks.
I was on a roll there with two bagpipe days back to back, but alas, the trend didn't continue. On our sixth distillery day, we drove from Inverness to Craigellachie. On the way there, we stopped in Elgin to visit Johnston's cashmere center, a huge wool and cashmere factory where they sew scarves for Burberry, Chanel, and other brands, in addition to their own. The tour was surprisingly cool and I even found things to purchase in the large gift shop- books.
Then we popped in to a supermarket and I headed straight for the liquor aisle. I found Pimm's Winter, a.k.a. Pimm's No. 3 Cup with the brandy base. Wahoo!
Off we went to Macallan for a tour. At each distillery, there is a combination of old and new technology present since most of them have been around for at least a hundred years. Much of the equipment lasts for up to five decades, so what's been replaced lately is rather variable. I was surprised to find Macallan a very modern distillery. I guess I believed the brand messaging story a bit too much.
Macallan has an incredible "wood expreience" exhibit as part of the tour. It's not like a museum where there is a lot of text and you lead yourself through it, but rather the tour guide takes you through and tells you what you're about to learn at each point. There is information on types of wood, sizes of barrels, color in whisky, a smell area with different substances in jars to identify, and other stuff. Interestingly, despite this nice big exhibit they try to keep the number of tour visitors down, not accepting large busses, and only doing about 6, 10-person tours a day in the high season.
For dinner and overnight, we stayed at the Easter Elchies house. It's the house on the Macallan label, built in 1700. I stayed in the room on the top right on the label, so now every time I drink Macallan it will be like looking at a postcard from my trip. Score.
We have just one distillery left to visit, and I'm already feeling separation anxiety from Scotland. I freaking love this place.
Here's another ad equating cocktails with relaxation and vacation. It's not the first time we've seen an airline promote cocktails, and the cruise lines are into it also. And blue seems to be a popular cocktail color in ads these days.
I suppose the cocktail has undergone a symbolic status change. In the 2000 Sex in the City cosmopolitan era, cocktails symbolized going out and having fun. Nowadays, they seem promoted more like a luxury relaxation symbol, akin to the "woman in a spa with a hair wrap" or "dude on a lush golf course" image in ads.
On the fifth day of our trip, we headed to the Glenmorangie distillery. They use the tallest stills in Scotland, as the original one was a former gin still. The taller the stills, the lighter the particles have to be to reach the top during distillation, and the resulting scotch has a lighter, more floral character than the heavier, oilier ones from lower stills.
We had a lovely barrel tasting of some Glenmorangie that was first aged ten years in an ex-bourbon cask, then an additional seven in a sherry cask. (The finished whisky line by Glenmorangie is ten years in bourbon plus two extra in a sherry, port, etc. cask.) The stuff came out a dark vermouth color, and tastes like pecan walnut maple ice cream-yummers.
After that we headed to the Culloden Battlefield Visitor's Center, a new museum on the site of Bonnie Prince Charlie's last stand. It was built in the modern museum style, with high-tech displays interspersed with historical photographs, maps, and artifacts from the time. Cool stuff.
Then it was off to the Culloden House Hotel, where I am currently typing this. They have a bag pipe player wander around the front lawn of the estate before dinner time, so that brings our Pipercount up to three! As you can see from the picture, the place is incredible. I tried to convince the trip's sponsors that I "didn't get the right material for my story" so I'd need to stay on a few extra days here, but it didn't work.
Usually when people say that their hotel room is bigger than their apartment they're exaggerating, but in this case it's true. Walking back and forth between the rooms to pack is wearing me out. But then again, I'm still tired from the midnight croquet game on the front lawn of the estate. Ahh, country life.
- A vacuum tumbler to speed up the booze infusion process.
. I have the book, and it's a riot. The Wall Street Journal's Eric Felten also wrote about this book in a story last weekend called 
