Alcademics.com

You too, can be a winner- WhiskyFest tickets!

Good news! The groovy folks at Malt Advocate's WhiskyFest have allowed me to give away two tickets to the San Francisco event, taking place October 10, 2008 at the San Francisco Marriott. That's a $220 value!

For a chance to win, register for my email list Alcademics A-Plus. One random subscriber will win entry for two to the event.

WhiskyFest is an annual event in its second year in SF but 11 years running in New York. Whisky lovers get a chance to sample hundreds of whiskies (though one doesn't usually make it to all of them), eat a terrific buffet to keep you sane and safe, and listen to educational seminars on topics like Japanese whisky, whisky barrel-aged beer, and how to blend whisky. It's a wonderful event that I'm happy to promote.

The contest winner will be announced October 1.

Alcademics A-Plus in a new email list for contests, giveaways, and other promotions. It's not a daily blog update (that link is here) so there won't be too much email. I won't sell your information, and you can leave the list at any time- no big whoop.

Sign up here!

Spilling over with commentary

Vodka spill staggers traffic on Highway 101

(08-28) 11:31 PDT SUNNYVALE -- Traffic on Highway 101 in Sunnyvale is slow because of an overturned big rig that spilled vodka over the roadway.

The crash happened about 7:50 a.m. on southbound Highway 101 at North Matilda Avenue. The California Highway Patrol shut down several lanes of traffic before reopening them at 11:20 a.m.

Caltrans crews are soaking up the vodka with absorbent.

As usual, the best parts about the story are the reader comments, which include:

"Uh, CalTrans? We're gonna need olives, lots of olives!!"

damn! I am always in the wrong traffic jam.

Dang why can't the N Judah do this??? A martini would make the ride so much more tolerable!

Absolut gridlock!

Busting out in Boston

Boston.com reports on Barbara Lynch of No. 9 Park's new venue Drink. The story has a few details that don't seem to align- classic drinks, 1950's food, molecular gastronomy, cocktail party vibe, vintage glassware, Funyuns- but all of the elements sound fun. Except I think she's saying there will be no cocktail menus. That could incite panic and inspire poor choices.

I lived in Boston for 7 years (ending 12 years ago) and don't get back there very often, but the number of great venues and great bartenders I keep hearing about is likely to inspire a longer visit next time I do.

Slow drinks

It turns out this Slow Food Nation event in San Francisco is kind of a big deal. I hadn't been paying attention because I generally think of food as the stuff that garnishes drinks. But it turns out there will be a lot of drinks there too. In the Taste Pavilion there is a booze section with a variety of slow-styled beer, wine, and spirits.

If you still want to go, tickets are only available for Sunday night. Because apparently, a heck of a lot of people want to get their slow drinks on.

To do: rum, rum, rum. To do: rum, rum.

Rum is a big, giant, looming category of spirits that's intimidating to newbies and more experienced drinkers alike. That's because the only thing that brings brands of rum together is that somewhere at some point sugar cane was involved. The thing that's distilled, how and where it's aged or not, and what you call it afterward are different depending on the place of origin/destination.

Last night on a discussion on Mixoloseum by Cocktailnerd, Matt of Rumdood was describing some of the different flavor profiles of molasses-based rum, grouping them into Jamaican, Bajan (Barbados), Demeraran (Guyana), and Latin American. At least I think the last category was Latin American- there are so many darn categories for rum I get lost.

Of your non-molasses-based rums, you have the two categories of cachaca and rhum agricole, each made from sugar cane syrup.

But oh, the outliers. There is 10 Cane, produced from fresh sugar cane but on Trinidad so it's not a rhum agricole. And Oronoco, made mostly from Brazilian sugar cane but it's labeled as rum not cachaca. And Zacapa, made in Guatemala from condensed sugar cane juice they're calling sugar cane honey. And then there are sugar-based spirits that are called vodka (if you distill it to high enough proof) or whiskey (if you're in India).

The good news is that I'm starting to understand all this, adding a new piece to the puzzle each week. I attended a Flor de Cana event last night lead by Ed Hamilton from Ministry of Rum. A couple weeks ago I went to a launch for Ron Zacapa. I've been to Martinique and Jamaica and Barbados to learn about rum.

And I still feel like an amateur. But at least I'm starting to get somewhere. Hang around here for another five years or so and you'll see I'll have it all down pat. 

Bad barhavior

Surprisingly, this was not a quote about journalists on press trips:

"They scream, they sing, they fall down, they take their clothes off, they cross-dress, they vomit," Malia's mayor, Konstantinos Lagoudakis, said in an interview.

It's a story about ill-behaved Brits on vacation.

I've certainly seen my share of alcohol-introduced nudity, but alcohol-fueled cross-dressing? Must be a British thing.

Items: National edition

Eric Felten disses the gun and takes on boutique tonic and Italian sodas. Also,  a history of drinking and the Olympics. 

Darcy at The Art of Drink finds an early historical reference to falernum- and a recipe.

A New York bar opens that serves only absinthe and beer. 

Oh Gosh manages to find four Old Tom gins to compare. One is from a brand called "Secret Treasures." Sounds dirty.

Fermentarium has 8 drunk driving lessons we can learn from beer nuts.

Vodka for dinner

Last night I went to the Square One Vodka and summer barbecue pairing dinner at Orson in San Francisco. I've been to many cocktail pairing dinners before, but this one worked especially well. Why? Because it's vodka. Unlike stronger flavored booze like tequila or scotch, vodka is more adaptable to the ingredients surrounding it- both in drinks and pairing it with food.

We had a drunken watermelon ball (served on a spoon) to pair with smokey oysters, a crisp sparkling wine and vodka drink to pair with pork belly over a watermelon and fruit salad, a simple and light peach shandy to go with some BBQ meats, and an orange-infused vodka and espresso drink with dessert. (Or, in my case, a vegetarian version of those dishes.) Bar manager Jackie Patterson was able to adapt sour to sweet, soothing to spicy, sweet to smoky, and then make a bitter drink for dessert.

I forgot to take pictures, so my illustration of the meal is below. As you can see, Jackie (exhibiting shakerface) mixes up a drink, and then I open my mouth to drink it. That is pretty much what happened.

iPhone app showdown: Beer vs. Wine vs. Cocktails

I wanted to see what booze applications were available for the iPhone so I searched for beer, wine, and cocktails. Under cocktails, a whopping four applications came up. They all list recipes, and that's it. The coolest looking one with pictures of the drinks is in German.

It's a fairly disappointing selection. There should be virtual cocktail shakers and lime squeezers and conversion calculators between metric and standard just pretty pictures of drinks. Alas.

But the wine section is worse. Most of the items that came up in the search aren't actually wine applications. The ones that are are all versions of rating and tasting notes systems. Some come with the notes and others are applications for you to add them all. The advantages these have is for most of them you can take a picture of the label with your camera and add it to the review.

The beer people, on the other hand, are crafty. There are tasting/rating notes systems just like for the wine snobs, but much, much more. There are a few versions of virtual beer- one a foamy beer that you can "shake;" another a 40-ouncer that you can pour out in tribute to your fallen homies.

 

Also mostly in the beer section are all sorts of counters and calculators to track how much you've been drinking. My favorite is literally just a number counter that you increment for each beer you've consumed. Other ones are more complicated and try to compute your blood alcohol level based on your body weight and what specifically you've been drinking.

 

In any case, for the iPhone alcohol application creativity, this round goes to the beer drinkers.

 

Items: San Francisco edition

Chow.com has a round-up of San Francisco dive and cocktail bars in the Tenderloin neighborhood.

The SF Chronicle has a story on frozen drinks and outdoor bars.

Scott Beattie of Cyrus and hotels and farmers of Sonoma are doing Sonoma Locavore Experience weekend travel packages. 

Glossy Booze: late-August edition

944 Magazine (August, SF edition) has a story on the Press Club and biodynamic wine.

Playboy (September) has a recipe for The Democrat, which they say is the "house cocktail at San Francisco's Bourbon & Branch."

Details praises the "Obscure cocktail" including the Last Word (from the Hotel Delmano in NYC), Jack Rose (from the Eastern Standard in Boston), Old Pal (from the Zig Zag Cafe in Seattle), and Vieux Carre (from the Alembic in San Francisco).

7X7  (August) not only has Jordan Mackay's bartender story, they also have a graphic on the Anatomy of a Dive Bar.

SF new cocktail menus

I love that every new restaurant comes with a new cocktail menu to try out. Here are three of them that just have or are just about to open, with their full drink menus listed after the jump.

Miss Pearl's Jamhouse. The restaurant once located at the Phoenix Hotel (now Bambuddah Lounge, previously Backflip) will reopen in Jack London Square in Oakland in mid-August. The menu is rum, rum, and more rum in fun tropical drinks like the Bushwacker, Pusser's Painkiller, and even Jell-O shots.

Zare at Fly Trap. The classic restaurant has reopened with food that "reflects the culinary traditions of Spain, Greece, Italy and Zaré’s native Iran." Reza Esmali's cocktail menu does too- it's half "Barbary Coast Era" classics like the Martinez and Trader Vic' Original Mai Tai, and half "Mediterranean Style" drinks that include ingredients like figs, cardamom, and pistachio. I have a really good feeling about these drinks.

Urban Tavern. The small selection of cocktails at this place are mainly vodka, gin, and sparkling/still wine-based. But then they stick a Sazerac at the end to make you go: Huh? It seems a bit unfocused to me but I'll reserve judgment until I try them out.

See the full menus, after the jump.

He blended me with science

Blair from GoodSpiritsNews (a great place for booze links, cocktail contests, and events, by the way) was inspired by a post on Alcademics to test out an ultra-sonic cocktail shaker.

So he busted out the jewelry cleaner and loaded it with gin, vodka, bitters, and even ice made from purified water.

 

The conclusion? "It doesn't do a thing. Apparently you need physical movement to blend gin and vermouth. "

Well, at least now we know.

Anybody need to mail some booze?

Offer for SFers: I have a lot of wine/liquor bottle mailers I would love to give away. (Booze only flows into my apartment, not out.) They are cardboard boxes with styrofoam or cardboard bottle-shaped inserts. If anyone needs some, please drop me a note. I have enough to mail 18 bottles right now.

Vermouth

Paul Clarke has a big article in the SF Chronicle about vermouth. My favorite part was the history, most of which I didn't know:

Vermouth's commercial origins date to 1786, when Antonio Benedetto Carpano began marketing the aromatized wine he produced in Turin, but the consumption of vermouth and its precursors stretches back centuries. Typically made from neutral-character dry white wines that have been flavored with herbs, roots and barks - typically including cardamom, cinnamon, marjoram and chamomile - and then fortified with a neutral grape spirit, vermouth is classically made - and named - for another botanical: wormwood (the plant's name in Old High German is Wermud).

Used as a treatment against intestinal worms, wormwood has been added to wine and ale since at least the time of Greek mathematician Pythagoras, and wine infused with herbs including wormwood was utilized as a tonic and medical treatment by Hippocrates.

By the late 17th century, homemade vermouths were commonly made in the Piedmont region of Italy. In the decades following Carpano's commercial debut, other vermouth makers began production in Turin: The Cinzano family opened their facility in 1816. Martini & Rossi, now the largest manufacturer of vermouth, started production in 1863.

In 1813, Joseph Noilly created the style that came to be known as dry vermouth or French vermouth. By 1855, Noilly's son, Louis, and his brother-in-law, Claudius Prat, were producing Noilly Prat dry vermouth in the southern French village of Marseillan. Like the Italian firms, Noilly uses white grapes, specifically Clairette and Picpoul grapes grown in the Languedoc region of France, but doesn't color the wine. 

Starting with the aptly named Vermouth Cocktail, which debuted in print in 1869 and is composed of chilled vermouth with a twist of lemon peel, occasionally accented with dashes of bitters and maraschino liqueur - ample quantities of vermouth were consumed in cocktails in the decades that followed its mixological debut.

SF trend: Happy hour is back

Just a couple of months ago I wrote in San Francisco Magazine that very few high-end cocktail venues offered any happy hour discounts at all. (Here is my list of them that do.) Now venues are launching discount programs left and right, though mostly on food. Here are some that I've noticed:

- Level III to in Union Square launched a new happy hour program, offered Monday through Friday, from 4pm7pm.  Guests can order a choice of three reds, three whites, three cocktails and three bar nibbles at 50% off.

[next three via UrbanDaddy]

Jack Falstaff
Five is the magic number at this SoMa happy hour. Start with a $5 basil gimlet or a $5 martini, then throw back a few $5 spiced lamb meatballs, $5 fries topped with cheddar or crispy $5 pork belly. Give us five.
411: Wednesdays through Fridays, 5-7pm, Jack Falstaff, 300 Brannan St (at 2nd), 415-836-9239

Terzo
The secret to a successful happy hour is going one for one—one bite for every sip. So Terzo's giving away a daily app—think: spice toasted nuts, cured meat, homemade hummus and pita—for every beer, wine or aperitif you order. Stay balanced.
411: Weekdays now through Labor Day, 5:30-6:30pm, Terzo, 3011 Steiner St (at Union), 415-441-3200

Candybar
Despite its name and the fact it's SF's first "dessert lounge," you'll find daily deals on savory bites like beef cheeks and pork belly. Or pair your $3 Peroni or Fat Tire with a chocolate parfait with pralined cornnuts. That's our kind of dessert.
411: Daily from 6-7:30pm (closed Tuesdays), Candybar, 1335 Fulton St (at Divisadero), 415-673-7078

And I wrote a few weeks ago about the free meat at Morton's.

Sherry everywherey

I really thought I was going to be ahead of the curve on studying sherry in cocktails. I went to Jerez, I read books, I wrote a story for Men's Book by San Francisco Magazine that will be out soon. I was going to own sherry.

But no. Sherry is this year's vermouth. All the drink writers had the same idea at the same time as (okay, probably before) I did. And now the stories are popping up everywhere.

I noticed that this year's Sherry Vinos de Jerez competition is getting more press than ever. Just the other night I was out at Bourbon & Branch having a sherry cocktail that won the Sherries of Spain competition a few years ago, Jacques Bezuidenhout's magnificent La Perla, made with Manzanilla sherry, reposado tequila, and pear liqueur. While looking up the recipe, I see that Paul Clarke wrote about it for Imbibe more than a year ago.

Jordan Mackay, who is usually months ahead of me on his story ideas, just wrote about Manzanilla sherry on CHOW.com, though not for use in cocktails (phew!).

Then David Wondrich knocked it out of the park with a cultural history of sherry's popularity in this month's Saveur Magazine, and includes tasting notes, and recipes for the Sherry Cobbler, SanRu Cocktail, and Bamboo Cocktail.

Eventually I'll learn that I can't compete for good ideas with smarter people than I, but for now at least I'm in good company.

Itemizing

John Hansell has the lowdown on a new rye whiskey coming to market in October.

Siobhan Crosby of Imbibe Magazine is growing hops in her back yard.

Bill Dowd has the info on the "Urban Bourbon Trail" in Louisville, Kentucky.  I'm heading there next month for the Kentucky Bourbon Festival so maybe I'll see some of these spots.

Hendrick's Gin is giving away a theramin.

David Wondrich's Five Best Absinthes story from Esquire is online.

Happy ads

In cachaca ads, Leblon is celebrating Brazil and beaches, Cabana is selling sex, and I'm not sure what these Sagatiba  ads are selling but I like them because they're pretty and happy.

Tasting tequila terroir

Two of the tequilas I wrote about in my June story in Wine & Spirits about tequila terroir are just now available in the United States. Ocho, which is imported by Altamar Brands (Kubler absinthe, Right gin), was given a packaging facelift from the modern look it has in Europe where it was first launched to one emphasizing the terroir- "Single Estate" is right on the bottle and "terroir" and "vintage" all over the press release. The bottles are labeled with the name of the estate and year of harvest of the agave. (Click for a larger image.)

The other brand is Maestro Dobel, which they're calling "diamond tequila" I guess because it's clear. That product is a blend of blanco, reposado, and anejo tequilas that is then filtered to give the final clear color. I think the slogan should be, "Looks like a blanco, tastes like a repo." They also label the bottle with the estate, bottle number, ranch and blender of the product.

"Vintage" is an odd word to use for tequila, as the agave harvested in one year may not have been planted in the same year. Agave grows for 6-12 years usually, depending on location and how soon the distiller wants to harvest it to achieve a certain flavor profile. Fields are planted at the same time, but fields aren't miles wide (the ones I've seen, anyway) and look more like plots- there are many of them visible from one spot. Industrial tequila harvesters may take every plant in a field, whereas the boutique brands will select individual plants to harvest over the course of a three years before scrapping the rest and replanting. There was a frost in the Highlands one year, and that one year's weather caused variations in several years' harvests, according to a couple of distillers I spoke with.

One person in Europe and one in the US told me they each preferred the 2008 versions of Ocho to the 2007 line. (You can find Ocho at Zare at Fly Trap, and I'm pretty sure they'll have it at Tres Agaves as well as Tommy's Mexican.)

In any case, consumers of tequila have heard about Highland and Lowland differences in tequila for a while, though only the Highland brands have been promoting their terroir. In these new products, they're going a little deeper- telling us the estate, the year of harvest, and a few people who helped put the final product together. I like where all this is going.