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A very rich bartender, that is!
For $740, you can have this bag called the Meehan with which to transport your bartending tools just like PDT's Jim Meehan. Tools not included.
Meehan partnered with the leather goods company Moore and Giles to design the crazy expensive but pretty darn awesome looking toolbag. There's also an internal roll-up bag for barspoons, muddlers, and other long tools.
More info here.
The other week I went out to lunch with Scott Goldman of Cadre Noir, the importers of Combier liqueurs. Goldman discovered Combier while he was a professional hockey player in France. (Yes, you read the correctly.) The distillery makes many different liqueurs under it's own name, along with other products including Lucid absinthe. So these products aren't new, just new to the US market.
Lately Combier has been doing a big push with their L'Originale triple sec. This one has a sugar beet spirit base, and seems to taste just fine. Orange liqueurs are all in the use- I'd use it. Bartenders will likely try it and make their decision based on price.
Combier is a distillery founded nearly 175 years ago in France.The triple sec Goldman says was originaly a filling for chocolates but proved so popular they spun it off into its own drink. It's also an ingredient in Pimm's, according to Goldman. (It is said a Pimm's approximation can be made with triple sec, sweet vermouth, and gin.)
I was most interested in the other Combier products on the market. The Royal Combier is more like Grand Marnier or Cointreau Noir in that it adds cognac to the equation, and in this case, Delamain cognac. Also added to this product is an "elixir" of about 20 spices like aloe, nutmeg, cinnamon, and saffron. Goldman says Royal Combier is "softer than Grand Marnier, with a Yellow Chartreuse-like finish." They're likely to promote this one for sipping on its own, but as with GrandMa and Cointreau Noir I'd still mix with it.
The third product they've brought to market in the US in a cherry liqueur they're calling Roi Rene Rouge. It's got a nice bright cherry flavor akin to cherry pie filling. This one tastes lighter and less woody than Cherry Heering, and I'm excited to see how it acts in cocktails. Goldman suggests it mixed with Coke and I'm unlikely to try it like that, but I wonder how the Blood and Sand and Remember the Maine will taste with this stuff. We shall see.
The other week John Gakuru, jet-setting (seriously his Facebook updates are from a different country every couple days) international brand ambassador for Sagatiba cachaca, gave a talk at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.
Cachaca, as we know, is a type of rum (as defined by US laws anyway) made in Brazil from fermented sugarcane juice instead of from molasses, which is the by product of sugar production. The brand Sagatiba has been making a big marketing push internationally and seems to be in the top three high-end cachacas catering to mixologists, along with Leblon and Cabana.
Sagatiba has an unaged ("Pura") and an aged ("Velha") bottling on the market, in addition to an incredibly limited edition called "Preciosa." Each of these products is made completely different from the others, with the only common thread being the Sagatiba name.
The Pura is an example of high-tech distillation, and since I'm a nerd that seems cool to me. They take column-distilled cachaca made into a high-alcohol 'concentrate,' then water it down and redistill it again in another column still. This second still has four separate condensers on it, allowing for some of the resultant product to be pulled off and redistilled additional times. The finished cachaca comes off the still at bottle strength so they do not add water before bottling, and don't add any sugar to the product either though some is permitted.
The Velha is a more agricultural product, made from hand-harvested sugar cane and distilled in large copper pot stills with a natural "cracked corn" yeast. It's then aged for 2-3 years in ex-Jim Beam barrels before bottling. The Velha is a new product on the market so it may not be in all areas yet.
The Preciosa is a ridiculously rare and expensive bottling. A distiller put 10,000 liters of cachaca into five giant cognac mixing casks (2,500 liters each) in 1980 to see what would happen, but then died in 1982. Over 20 years later in 2006 the Sagatiba folks pulled it out, filtered, and bottled it. There were 3,300 liters remaining out of the 10,000 and once it's gone it's gone forever.
In the seminar we had a bunch of drinks ranging from the awfully simple (also: awful) Sagatiba and Sprite to the more sophisticated Pumpkin Batida. Gakuru was emphasizing the range of drinks that can be made with cachaca, specifically that you can make more than a Caipirinha with it. He said, "It's not just about lime and sugar anymore."
The exclusive sponsor of Alcademics.com this month is Mount Gay Rum. Mount Gay has been distilled on Barbados since 1703, and today is a flavorful combination of column and pot distilled rum. They offer four bottlings: Eclipse Silver, Eclipse, Extra Old, and 1703.
In 2007 I visited Barbados and Mount Gay (pictures here).
This year I met with brand ambassador Chesterfield Browne in San Francisco, and saw him again at Tales of the Cocktail.
And in last week's SF Chronicle someone wrote about the food (and rum) on Barbados.
Learn more about Mount Gay on the brand's website.
Hey, did y'all see the new Adam Lambert video "For Your Entertainment"? I sure did. As you'd expect, he dresses in all black with sparkly studded accessories and sings while people writhe around him. He also holds a snake.
Less expected is the new symbol of rock star stature: an absinthe fountain. RISKY! You'll notice that the pouring absinthe fountain doesn't appear to have ice in it, and that given its color it looks like they put absinthe in the fountain instead of ice water, and that the other fountain appears to be filled with sugar cubes.
No matter! What is important is that Lambert is thrusting his bloodlust for absinthe on impressionable American teenagers who comprise his primary audience.
My first question to myself was "WHAT BRAND OF ABSINTHE?" (I always speak to myself in capslock.) But alas, I could not find any evidence of product placement.
Wouldn't it have been awesome if they were drinking Marilyn Manson's product Mansinthe?
Or maybe he should come out with his own brand: LAMSINTHE.
Yeah, I know. Cream liqueurs. You never want to drink them but when you do you realize they are *so* *damn* *tasty*. Then you store them in the back of the refrigerator and forget about them until your refrigerator is overflowing with cream liqueurs then you being to wonder about the shelf life of them but then say "Heck with this, it's an Amarula night!"
The last thing I need is another cream liqueur taking up the space in the refrigerator that in theory I'd use for fruits and vegetables, but yet, there is another cream liqueur on the market, and yes it's worth getting scurvy for.
Kahlua Coffee Cream is a limited edition (note: why? It's not like they have to age this stuff) cream liqueur made with Arabica coffee bean flavor. It reminds me of buttery caramel cream liqueur mixed with chocolate-covered espresso beans. And I like it very much.
So I will store it in my refrigerator and try to pretend it doesn't exist and then binge on it later. If your life isn't complicated with these issues, you may want to get a bottle.
My favorite of the Glenlivet single-malt scotch range is the Nadurra, the non-chill-filtered, natural cask strength, 16-year-old expression. It has a nose of Dole fruit cocktail spilled onto a bed a straw and on the palate tastes like tropical trail mix, complete with the dried coconut, apricot, and other fruits on top of honey and whatever grain granola is made out of. I fell in love with it at first sip.
The new booze is the limited-edition The Glenlivet Nadurra Triumph, which is 18 years old, distilled in 1991 from Triumph barley that is no longer used in the production of range. The nose of this is more buttery and apricots-in-sryup instead of the whole fruit cocktail (with an overall flavor reminiscent of peach cobbler with whipped cream), with a palate more woody (old hay) spicy (red pepper, pimento) and nutty (almonds, pecans) and less alive and fruity than the 16-year-old.
While the Nadurra 16-year-old may falter on being a little too sweet-tasting (or young) on the palate, the Triumph to me is a little past its prime. (I mixed the two together as an experiment and let's just say that is not the right answer to the question.) Overall I enjoy the standard Nadurra 16-year more than the Triumph, but let's not consider this a bad review of the Triumph but a reminder of how tasty the standard Glenlivet Nadurra is.
Once upon a time, premium vodkas were premium enough. Then along came a little brand called Grey Goose that convinced everyone that they should pay more for vodka. It took several years for other brands to react to this, but eventually they did, releasing new and more expensive versions of their vodkas. From this era we received Stolichnaya Elit, Level vodka from Absolut, Skyy 90, and I just read about something called Belvedere Intense.
Several of these vodkas have an increased alcohol percentage that helps explain their price increases. Others have taller bottles.
Now Van Gogh Vodka has launched a second unflavored vodka. What's interesting here is that it's hardly more expensive than the regular one. The Classic vodka uses "natural grains" but doesn't specify further what those grains are. Let's guess corn or sugar beets. It has a $27 suggested retail price for a 750 ml 40% alcohol bottle.
The new release is called Blue and it's also known as Triple Wheat as it's made from a "blend of premium European wheat sourced from Holland, Germany and France." It sell for a suggested $29 for a 750 ml 40% alcohol bottle- only two dollars more than the Classic.
I tasted each to compare the two bottlings. The Classic smells more of neutral alcohol than the Blue, which does have a touch of wheaty grain smell. The Classic tastes rather like neutral alcohol with a very sweet finish, while the Blue has a much softer body and tastes creamier in texture, closer in flavor to Absolut in breadiness but less yeasty. The finish has a touch of grain but is dominated by a granite-style minerality. It's good stuff.
Long story short: If you like the unflavored Van Gogh vodka, you'll probably like the new Blue triple wheat bottling even more. And for two bucks more per bottle, it's well worth the upgrade.
When you're out shopping for your liquor-loving vegetarian guests for Thanksgiving this year, don't forget to pick up some tofu and booze to make my special Wild Tofurkey dish. It's tofu marinated in a cocktail and baked. Mmm.
Vodka is getting weirder, which makes it more interesting in my book.
Vodka can be distilled from anything that ferments and is already made from wheat, rye, corn, sugar beets, molasses, potatoes, maple syrup, and other ingredients. Now it's also made from oranges. 4 Orange Vodka is "distilled from 100% orange spirits derived from four unique Florida orange varieties - the Hamlin, Parson Brown, Temple and Valencia."
The website say 4 Orange Vodka it's initially only available in Florida, retailing for $24.99.
360 Vodka, an organic vodka made in the midwest, has launched a new flavor: Cola. The company suggests mixing their cola-flavored (and colored) vodka with lemonade, cucumber slices, and soda water in a cocktail called the Ecolade, or (get this) mixed with Sprite.
A soda-flavored vodka sounds odd to me, but I suppose it shouldn't. The biggest trend across vodka flavors is mocking the flavor of other beverages. Sweet tea vodka was all the rage last year, Three Olives released a root beer flavored vodka, and Burnett's launched a pink lemonade flavor as well.
It seems to me the division between pre-mixed cocktails and flavored vodkas is getting smaller. You can probably just pour most of these over ice or into an up glass and call it a cocktail.
Lastly, there is a new protein-infused vodka, Devotion Vodka, hitting the market. This solves the problem that so, so many vodka drinkers have: you want to drink your protein powder to gain ultimate muscle power, yet you also want a vodka cocktail. Until recently you'd have to mix them. No longer! According to the website:
The protein used in the Devotion Vodka blend is PeptoPro® and casein, PeptoPro® , which was developed by DSM Food Specialties with the Dutch Olympic Committee is a recovery ingredient for fast muscle refueling. The target was to give the Dutch Olympic athletes a competitive advantage at the Olympic Games in Athens in 2004. PeptoPro® is a casein hydrolysate (a protein cut into fragments), which is the same protein found in dairy products.
So it's also good as a post-workout cocktail ingredient while your muscles are recovering. Sure.
But actually I want to try the product because I wonder what the protein will do to the texture of the vodka. If it makes it thick and silky, that could be interesting in cocktails. And it would be nice to bulk up my drink muscles.
Here's a new edition in my ongoing ice experiments. So far, there experiments have been:
So far my conclusions have been that (at least with my San Francisco water), temperature and filtering have less of an effect than trapped air that migrates to the center of the freezing cube. Thus I am trying to minimize this effect.
In this experiment I froze ice in layers in small lasagna pans to see if we had a maximized surface area, hopefully no air would get trapped in the ice and form cloudy parts. Apparently some commercial ice machines such as Kold Draft spray an upside-down mist of water in layers, so this would be the home approximation of that.
I tried this experiments with tiny layers, medium layers, and large layers in the same sized pan, the difference being that I added more water per layer. I let the water freeze before adding another layer.
As you can see, none of the layers turned out clear:
(Tiny layers, medium layers, and large layers left to right.)
The small sized layers were made only adding a couple of ounces of water at a time, so I can't get much smaller layers than these unless I use a spray bottle.
We'll have to call this one a failure. Freezing water in layers does not appear to make clear ice, just ice with smaller layers of trapped air.
Below is a closeup of the layers for your ice ogling enjoyment.
Smuggler's Cove, the new San Francisco tiki bar in the former Jade bar space, run by "Shoeless" Martin Cate formerly of Forbidden Island, will open December 8th to much fanfare.
The word on the scene is that the rum selection is going to be ridiculously large. The staff are in training now to make the probably very long menu of undoubtedly complicated and delicious tiki drinks. They've already announced they have a rum, and wine, and a beer made exclusively for the bar. And it keeps getting better- I just got word on the staff.
The Smuggler's Cove rumshakers will be:
The other folks in the picture are barbacks and a door person. Aloha! See you in December.
Hey, there's another 100% agave tequila on the market. El Grado tequila is available in California, Arizona, and Texas so far. The tequila is made at Productos Regionales de Atotonilco, a distillery where they also produce brands El Rincon, Los Kikirikis, and Sol De Mexico, according to Tequila.net. Atotonilco is the town where they make Don Julio and Siete Leguas, so lots of good stuff comes from there.
The press release is rather vague on production details. The agave is from the Highlands,they use ex-Tennessee whiskey barrels for aging, and the picture of the still looks like it's tiny and made of stainless steel, but other than that we don't know anything about the treatment of the agave: autoclave, stone ovens, diffuser, tahona, etc..
So we'll just have to go on taste. I received samples of the reposado and anejo. The reposado is aged 6 months and the anejo for a minimum of 15 months.At first sniff, the buttery wood notes are pleasant with the baked mango yam and black pepper notes typical of agave following. On the reposado I get a lot of unbaked vegetal notes like wet spinach and olive brine with a mouth that suggests peeled sticks (not in a bad way). On the anejo, caramel pickled mango chutney on the nose gives way to a thin texture in the mouth with dominating shallow spices on the palate.
Of the two I like the reposado better as the anejo seems a bit clumsy, but I'd like to try the blanco sometime to see what I think about that.
Also, I like the caps on these bottles- not just style-wise, but because they work like a cork but are made of plastic and super easy to remove and replace. I wish more brands used them.
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