Slate has a terrific and entertaining story on the life and death of Zima, the malternative beverage that was finally retired this year.
Hilarious.
Ludacris shares some thoughts about loving (or rather, making love to) different types of people in this touching video, "One More Drink."
Wise words from a wise man.
Eater SF hosted a "Douchiest Bar in San Francisco" contest. The winner, unfortunately for them, was Medjool, the rooftop bar in the Mission. Filling out the Top 5 were Matrix Fillmore, Bar None, Americano, and Zeitgeist.
The comments on the original post are priceless.
Oof.
And you thought my Photoshop skills were challenged.
Nirvino, which is a drink finding and rating website, hosts cocktail contests about every other week in San Francisco. The bartenders make enough drinks for the crowd, and the crowd votes for the winner on web-enabled cell phones. It's all good fun.
Or at least it was. The image on the invitation for the next contest makes it clear drinks will be served by a Gigantic Terrifying Bartender who is standing on the basement floor to fit behind the bar at Bourbon & Branch. Order a Cosmopolitan in here and he will smash you into pieces with his six-foot muddler.
Or perhaps this is a regular sized bartender and the contest will take place inside a scale miniature of B&B. How would everybody fit?
Last week I went to a trend talk at the J.W. Marriott hotel. The panel was made up of a hospitality space designer, a marketing firm head, an environmental style specialist, and a beverage specialist. But I internally translated all information into cocktail trends, since that's all I care about. I'll spare you the details, except this one:
Zem Joaquin from EcoFabulous shared this trend:
Get it while it's hot!
When you need an expert to rate your science-fiction themed cocktails, you call up writer/bartender St. John Frizell... and Miss Saturn, who rates drinks in numbers of hula hoops.
Check out this fun video taken at the theme restaurant/bar Mars 2112. If it doesn't start playing automatically, click on the "Happy Hour" link.
It's fair to say I am pretty stressed out about the test tomorrow (I CANNOT FAIL), but I just came to a realization that I actually *can* harvest my nerd powers in this circumstance.
The test is being given by the B.A.R. guys, all of whom should be getting into town tonight. I'm going to Dale Degroff (one of the examiners)'s book party, and should probably see the rest of the crew there. And I am fully prepared to do what nerds to best: BROWNNOSE.
I posted about the new legal definition of the Caipirinha demanding real sugar, but luckily for these folks, no such legislation exists for the Margarita.
Yes, it is a box of aspartame-sweetened portable Margarita packets that you can take to the bar. From the press release:
Tequila and water on the rocks? YES. Order that in a Margarita glass with a spoon for stirring and watch the bartender's head explode.
Say you find yourself in a hotel room on a cold London night, caught in a bout of sleep-free jetlag, but prepared to take the edge off with a bottle of wine. Unfortunately, you forget to bring a corkscrew. You don't have any cash to tip room service for bringing one up. What do you do? WHAT DO YOU DO?
I can tell you what I did tonight. First, I paid the 20 dollar wi-fi fee (note to Cumberland Hotel- screw you!) and looked up a solution. The suggestions included banging it on a tree and using a hammer/screw. Having neither a tree nor a screw loose, I gathered materials from around the room.
I tried the banging method in several ways- held in my knees with a shoe, against the wall with a pillow, against the floor, an unturned chair, using the hotel bible. None of them worked. Then I moved on to stabbing at it. The cork was synthetic, and seemed designed specifically to thwart me. I did get a paper clip through the cork, but that didn't accomplish much. Various methods of bending it and trying to create a hook were failures as well. Then I tried to make a two-pronged wine key out of... two keys, but I couldn't get them into the sides of the cork at all. Neither could I get the handle of the coffee spoon into the side of the cork.
I looked around the room for another time (this was an hour long process) and found something that I'd overlooked- the coat hangers! Without a moment to spare (I was really thirsty) I grabbed a hanger and bent it at the neck, so that the spiral part separated- a natural corkscrew! I plunged it into the cork, but was having a difficult time getting it all through. But in doing so, I must have loosed it up, because the cork began to slip into the bottle. I removed the hanger, grabbed the spoon, and banged in the cork using the hotel bible. The cork plunged into the wine, spraying only enough of it out of the bottle to make it dramatic.
The victory was delicious! If I only I could say that for the wine.
So all you need to open wine without a corkscrew is a hanger, a spoon, and a bible. If this information helps just one person get his or her drink on in equally dire circumstances, it will all have been worth it.
Tales of the Cocktail is an annual convention in New Orleans for bartenders and drink nerds. There are seminars and panels on various drink topics (all with drinks served) that are proposed and given by industry notables.
A month or two ago I was talking about panel ideas with a small group of jive turkeys who would be submitting proposals for next year's Tales, including David Wondrich
They could get sponsors to reserve a seat for them in the bar and just hang out. And when someone asked what they were drinking, they would say, "A Manhattan made with fine Sazerac rye whiskey!" (or whatever) and then everyone would be happy. I think it's a brilliant idea, but then again I think all my ideas are great.
This is a sad, sad day for America. The most wonderful of malternative beverages, the wine cooler of the nineties, Zima, will be no more.
I had a particularly messy and public love for Zima in the early 1990's right after college. In fact, Zima was there for me when I received my physics GRE scores in the mail and realized I wasn't going to get into grad school anywhere I had already applied. What a night that was! I think several people have an image of me crawling across the dancefloor of the Axis nightclub permanently seared into their retinas. Poor fools.
While it may have it may have taken 15 years for Zima- and it's upscale sister, Zima Gold- to leave the market, for me, this delicious malt beverage will always be associated with FAIL.
According to this video, different types of women prefer different alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages. The proper host prepares for all types of guests.
(Language is likely NSFW. Link via WOWReport)
More reading material from the internet:
A travel story on seeking the best vodka in Warsaw.
Ayyyy.com has a quiz on the lady lushes of television. (Answer is here.)
Lauren Clark writes about breaking up with your favorite beer. I've had that happen with booze. I love St. Germain but I'm no longer in love with it.
Le Mixeur lists a whole bunch of recipes with my favorite ingredient: Vinegar! VinegarWatch continues...
The Underhill Lounge geeks out on why Savoy Cocktail Book drinks aren't very bitter.
Chuck Cowdery gets all up in your grill about micro-distillers who are not craft distillers.
Matt Rowley lists about a zillion synonyms for "drunk." I like "tangle-footed," because it would be impossible to enunciate while still in that condition.
In today's Washington Post, Jason Wilson discusses celebrity booze- brands by Willie Nelson, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dog, Danny DeVito, Donald Trump, Sammy Hagar, Vince Neil, Marilyn Manson, and Lil John. He also talks about cocktails named after celebrities, like the not-so-delicious Paris Hilton, MC Hammer, and Flava Flav. As usual, a fun read.
I still think a bar or crafty manager at Planet Hollywood should rotate their drink menu to match the celebrity news of the day. So one day you might get the LoSam Kiss made with vanilla vodka, ginger ale, and two cherries, and another day you'd get the DWI Hate Mel Gibson, a shot made with Jaegermeister and
Manischewitz.
All these great ideas are yours for the taking. I'm here for you, people.
As usual, the best parts about the story are the reader comments, which include:
Surprisingly, this was not a quote about journalists on press trips:
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.
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.
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.
In last week's Wall Street Journal story on the Planter's Punch, Eric Felten wrote of the accolades it received in the press. One such quote was:
In July 1906, the Washington Post recommended Planter's Punch as "something cool, something novel enough to excite interest, and above all something that will quench thirst."
In my insomniatic state, I read that as "something novel enough to excite incest," which would be one heck of an endorsement.
I love how tiki bar menus usually come with a description like, "The Monkey Cooler will have you swinging from the trees- have two and you'll go bananas!" It would be funny (in the how-to-run-your-bar-into-the-ground sort of way) if a place labeled their menu along the lines of my misreading of the Planter's Punch recipe, like :
This post may not seem as funny when I wake up in the morning.
