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SF Bar Crawl for Haiti Relief on January 19

What:

Cocktail Fundraiser Benefiting the Red Cross and Earthquake Victims in Haiti. Each bar will have special cocktails for the night with all proceeds from those cocktails going to the Red Cross.

When:

Tuesday January 19, 2010

5 to 7 p.m. at Rickhouse

7 to 9 p.m. at Cantina

9 to closing at Rye

Where:

Rickhouse (246 Kearney St. at Bush St., 415-398-2827)

Cantina (580 Sutter St. at Mason St., 415-398-0195)

Rye (688 Geary at Leavenworth, 415-474-4448)

Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/event.php?eid=253580102871

How to Make Clear Ice, The Hard Way

Darcy over at ArtofDrink.com has taken up pursuit of clear ice. In his first post, he noted something that I did not consider and that could be very helpful.

As the ice increases in thickness it begins to corral all of the impurities into the center of the block. Dissolved air and unfiltered water will cause a cloudy core, but impurities are not the main reason why ice cubes are rarely crystal clear.  

This expansion pressure is what makes ice cloudy in the center, not minerals and other debris. The visual flaws are caused by fractures in the ice when the last remaining liquid water in the center of the cube freezes and exerts a massive amount of force on the surrounding ice. The cube is basically cracked from the inside out.

This is in line with what I discovered when I tried all sorts of ways to get the air and impurities out of the ice- in the end it just didn't matter that much.

So in his second experiment, Darcy set about making ice freeze from the bottom up, so that the last part to freeze would be the top. Thus there would be no pressure cracking of the ice. His equipment list was:

• 6 ft of copper pipe
• my wife's cookie sheet
• tin-snips
• a bag of nails
• a garbage bag
• an aquarium pump (powerhead)
• a square garbage can
• a coat hanger
• two Canadian winter days and nights at roughly -10°C

As he noted,

The process works, but it isn’t very efficient nor is it practical.

Anyway, there is still more work to be done. Icesperiments will continue!

Up in your Internet

Oh hai. I've been writing a lot of stuff lately on this new fangled thing called the internet.

I did a few things for Tasting Table, like this piece on bartenders swapping out whisky in drinks for mezcal and this other one on where to get a good cocktail during the day in San Francisco. 

For the national edition of Tasting Table I wrote about where you can buy a whole barrel of booze. There are a whole lot more places to buy a whole barrel listed at this Liquor.com article that came out a few days earlier. I didn't write that one (great minds drink alike), but I did write this other one on bitters for the same site a while back.  

For CitySearch I wrote about single-spirit specialty bars, which is supposed to also include this review of Smuggler's Cove but doesn't, because the internet is full of bugs.

A Two-Bar Opening Weekend in San Francisco, and a Restaurant with Cocktails on Monday

Two bars will open in San Francisco on Saturday January 16th.

One is The Residence, on the site of Amber (and Zodiac before that). I don't have too much information about it, but the clues so far are classic drinks and cocktails with tea.

The Residence. 718 14th Street at Church.

The other is John Collins Lounge, which is closing in its old location and moving to another. I don't have any information about the new space other than its address, which is below.

John Collins. 138 Minna Street at New Montgomery.

Bonus opening! On Monday January 18th, Credo opens in the Financial District with drinks by bar manager Victoria D'amato-Moran.

Credo. 360 Pine Street at Montgomery.

Bloody Revenge (Tomato Juice Cocktail Recipes)

The Bloody Mary is not just a popular tomato juice drink, it's one of the only tomato juice drinks. Now the Red Gold tomato products company has a few suggestions for some new tomato juice cocktails.

The National Peanut Board got in on the cocktail trend with peanut cocktail recipes to help sell their wares, and now this tomato company is following suit. I think it's a good idea, and am just waiting for the Milk Processing Board to join in.

Anyway, the drinks sound interesting, if in need of improvements for Rose's lime and "sour mix." 

[Link via Jack Robertiello at Nightclub.com.]

SF Bar Preview: Bar Agricole

Bar Agricole, the South of Market bar and restaurant by Thad Vogler, looks like it's on track to open in May after many months of delays. Vogler is behind many bar programs and consulting projects including the Slanted Door and Beretta in San Francisco, Bardessono in the wine country, and Camino in Oakland. Vogler and collaborator Eric Johnson (currently bartending at Delarosa) gave me a tour this weekend.

Bar agricole will be located at 355 11th Street, right next door to the live music venue Slim's. The building is sheathed in corrugated metal, and designed and updated by  Matarozzi/Pelsinger Builders. The metallic outside is perforated with increasingly large holes, and at night looks almost clear (picture here). The building and Bar Agricole's build-out are all LEED-certified to high levels.

Bar Agricole is to the right side of the building in the above picture. The front of the building holds a fenced-in patio that currently is a plain courtyard, but they will install a biodynamic garden with trees and such so that it feels "peaceful and overgrown" according to Vogler. Interestingly, the gardener is also choosing the wine list for the restaurant.

Running through the patio will be long communal tables, which I imagine will be a great place to sit in summer- because there will also be heat lamps.

The picture below looks from the building entrance out towards the street. The garden will be along the sides and the street view will be mostly blocked by vegetation.

Inside, the 4,000 square foot space is divided into two halves. The lower level, accessed by ramps off to the left of the main space, houses the kitchen and private dining room that should seat about 24 people and have its own bar and AV set-ups.

The lower level is shown below with its freshly-installed plumbing.

The main level will feature two bars: one focusing on people sitting at it and the other a high-volume service bar for the rest of the restaurant. There will be many booths facing the bar going down the rectangular room. 

They partnered with concrete, glass, and ironworks artisans so we should expect to see touches like the bar made from poured concrete and a large light sculpture descending from the skylight that looked like an extended piece of ribbon candy in the mock-up I saw. The back of the room will have more windows out to the alley, so between the front, back, and skylights this could be a really bright space for its size.

Vogler says he's a fan of hot beverages and will have a Slayer espresso machine, one of only a few in the country so far. He's developed a relationship with a Guatemalan coffee farm and is bringing in a biodynamic tea from India. That could be good for business, as I recall from earlier conversations that the restaurant will be open for lunch with a casual vibe.

Other beverage touches will include a single beer on tap to ensure it is served as fresh as possible, and a selection of spirits with an emphasis on local, organic, and biodynamic products from some of our favorite local distillers.

Soon they'll start pouring the concrete for the floors and the space will start to look more like a restaurant than the empty shell here. It seems they're really going all-out on this project and I came away from the visit impressed with the scale of the operation and very much looking forward to getting in there in May.

The Science of Sweet in the San Francisco Chronicle

Here is my latest story in the San Francisco Chronicle.

(A Gin-to-the-fire cocktail was photographed in the SF Chronicle studio on Wednesday, Dec. 30, 2009 in San Francisco, Calf. Photo: Mike Kepka / The Chronicle)

Sweetening drinks can be a science

Camper English, Special to The Chronicle

Friday, January 8, 2010

Gin that bruises, 500-year-old secret recipes and miracle hangover cures. The world of cocktails is rife with myths and misinformation. As we slowly move out of the Dark Ages and into the cocktail Enlightenment, bartenders are starting to use scientific methodology to disprove hearsay and improve drinks.

Some of that science will be explained Jan. 20 at the Exploratorium. A one-night event (sold out, though the Web site promises to share details for home experiments) will include exhibits on the science behind layering a pousse-café, why absinthe turns white when water is added and how cocktails are affected by the shape of ice.

Having experimented with ice in recent years, many bartenders have moved on to studying sugar. Simple syrup is used to balance acid in many cocktails, so several curious bar types have purchased refractometers and pH meters to measure exact levels of each.

Read the whole story on the science of sweetening drinks here.

Brining Olives at Home

For the past couple years I've been wanting to try curing my own olives after reading about it on a food blogger's website. Then when Karen Solomon's awesome book Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It came out I had instructions.

I carefully searched the news for ripe olive time, and noticed that the Sonoma Valley Olive Festival runs in December through February. So I planned to hunt for olives in December at the farmer's markets.

But it turns out there was a problem with that logic. Smartly they throw an olive festival after all the olives have ripened and had weeks or months to cure in brine solution. So when I started looking around at farmer's markets in December the olives were already all gone. Curses!

But wait!