I should have made this claim 6 months ago, but whatevs.

Ginger beer is the new soda water.

Who uses a splash of soda anymore? Nobody in San Francisco, it appears. It's all about the GB.

Reading material

- The LA Times story reporting on the closing of some of SF's old-time watering holes was reprinted in the Baltimore Sun. I'm so glad word on the street is we don't have any good old bars left. That's not entirely true, of course. Katy St. Clair, who was quoted in the LA Times story, writes about them in the SF Weekly all the time.

- Eric Felten in the Wall Street Journal taste tests mass-market bourbons and finds Evan Williams his favorite. As usual, he has some great cultural anecdotes in the story as well.

- The NYTimes has a story on a $10,000 home still that efficiently converts sugar into ethanol. Unfortunately, it's for car fuel.

- Jeff Mortgenthaler (Morty) gives a simple recipe for ginger beer. Marleigh at Sloshed! reviews some commercial brands without high-fructose corn syrup.

- Jamie Boudreau describes his individual component method for making any type of bitters. And I thought I was crafty for using my Chia herb garden to make tinctures.

- Alder at Vinography has the complete list of wine blogs- in several languages!

- Esquire's molecular Whiskyburger's recipe is now online.

Juiced up

Via BevNet, Ocean Spray is introducing an energy juice drink called Cranergy, "to help fight America's energy crisis." I'm not sure if that slogan comes from BevNet or Ocean Spray directly, but it's pretty ridiculous. The drinks are juice with Splenda, fortified with B vitamins and green tea extract. This provides drinkers with "a natural energy lift they can feel good about."

Sure. From the Splenda website:

The process selectively replaces three hydrogen-oxygen groups on the sugar molecule with three chlorine atoms. Chlorine is present naturally in many of the foods and beverages that we eat and drink every day ranging from lettuce, mushrooms and table salt. In the case of sucralose, its addition converts sucrose to sucralose, which is essentially inert. The result is an exceptionally stable sweetener that tastes like sugar, but without sugar's calories. After consumption, sucralose passes through the body without being broken down for energy, so it has no calories, and the body does not recognize it as a carbohydrate.

Refreshing! I can't wait to try this delicious drink that's "the first ever energy beverage to hit the juice aisles."

EcOJ

Slate has a thorough article on the carbon footprint of orange juice, in a story on deciding whether frozen or fresh from the carton juice is more eco-friendly.

In the end, not-from-concentrate orange juice sold by the carton comes out slightly ahead of frozen OJ sold by the canister in terms of energy use. As a green consumer, your worst choice would be to buy juice that's been rehydrated by the supplier, then placed in cartons (such as Minute Maid Original). If you prefer juice from concentrate, whether for the lower price or more Tang-y taste, it's better to rehydrate it yourself.

What about squeezing your own OJ? Keep in mind that, unless you live in Florida or California (the nation's No. 2 orange producer), chances are those Valencias traveled a long, long way to get to your grocery aisle. And transporting enough oranges to yield six servings of juice requires nine times more cardboard waste than transporting a 12-ounce canister of FCOJ.

The juice industry also claims that its manufacturing process is much more efficient than drinking squeeze-your-own, since factories waste no part of the orange: The rinds are turned into cattle feed, the oils into food flavorings.

The conclusions are that the production of orange juice has a bigger impact/cost more than the transportation of it. In that case, you should be drinking the stuff that tastes best. Refreshing!

I buy frozen orange juice because it has less of an impact- on my arms when I'm trying to cart it home from the store on the bus.

At the end of the day I wouldn't be sweating my orange juice consumption unless I was drinking a gallon a day. It's fine to consider the eco-impact of everything you use, but when you start stressing about it you've gone too far.

Pepsi in the raw

Via YumSugar, Pepsi is releasing a natural version of their soda in a few places in the UK with cane sugar and other natural ingredients. Let's hope this is a turning point- down with corn, up with cane!

Hey Pepsi- bring it to the US, please.

Fly to Brazil

Stirrings came out with a Caipirinha mixer. When I made a joke about what a great scam Caipirinha mixers would be a month ago, I had no idea so many brands were rushing to fill this niche. But I guess it shows that a lot of people are banking on the Caipirinha to be the next Mojito and building drink accessories around it.

Yesterday I was flipping through New York magazine to see a two-page spread for Delta that promotes nothing but their cocktail program. The in-flight cocktails are all made with Stirrings mixers, so maybe next year we'll able to get Caipirinhas in the air.

Complicating things

I saw two similarly industrial-strength home drinking solutions today. The first is a carbonation system that uses a 20lb CO2 tank and makes enough seltzer for a year. The experimenter wanted to avoid using proprietary Soda Club CO2 tanks so he/she developed this system that only took ten minutes to put together after buying a ton of big parts on eBay. Clever, but kinda ugly.


Not so ugly, but much bigger is a self-contained brewery that cost a mere $4,315 to build. Damn!

Don't have a cow

Here's the downer antidote to all the upper energy drinks on the market: Blue Cow Relaxation Drink.

What's in Blue Cow that will help me relax?
Our proprietary blend of safe, relaxation-inducing ingredients includes Chamomile, Hops, Passion Flower, Hawthorne Berry, Lemon Balm and most importantly, Suntheanine®.

What is Suntheanine®?*
Suntheanine® is Taiyo International's patented brand of pure L-Theanine, the primary amino acid found in green tea.

I think it's only distributed in southern California right now, but I'll try it when it gets here. As I'm a total stress-case, a non-alcoholic relaxant sounds good to me- and to my liver.

In the mix

I was joking around at the Leblon dinner last night when one of the other journalists, new to cachaca, was asking a million questions about how to make caipirinhas.

"But how much lime juice? How much sugar? What is muddling? Where do I buy these limes?"

I was being sassy as usual. "You chuck a lime in a glass, add a tablespoon of sugar, smash it all up, then add ice and pour cachaca over the top. How much? To taste!"

Then I announced that I'm going to get rich by inventing a pre-made caipirinha mix to take advantage of the ignorance of the masses who can't put three ingredients in a glass.

Then the market manager leaned over and said, "Actually Leblon is developing a caipirinha mix."

I'm always just a little bit too late with my grand get-rich schemes. Then a quick search on the internet turned up this tidbit, "51 brand [Pirassununga] cachaça distributes a packaged powdered caipirinha mix consisting of sugar and freeze dried lime juice that they claim produces a "natural taste"."

So I missed the boat on that one. But maybe there is room for more obvious mixes on the market. Help me with some brainstorming.

• Martini mix- prepackaged ice cubes you freeze at home with a single drop of vermouth in each one so you can just add them to the shaker.
  
• Manhattan mix- sweet vermouth with bitters already added.
  
• Gin and tonic mix- lime-flavored tonic water.
• Negroni mix- all three ingredients mixed together, with a dried orange peel taped to the side of the bottle.
• Gimlet mix- Rose's Lime Juice with a new label slapped on top
  

Mystery Drink

I think this is awesome.

Singapore beverage company Out of the Box caters to consumers who respond to "What would you like to drink?" with a non-committal "anything" or "whatever". Two weeks ago, the company launched two complementary brands: Anything and Whatever. Anything is fizzy and comes in six flavours (Cola with Lemon, Apple, Fizz Up, Cloudy Lemon and Root Beer) and Whatever is non-carbonated (Ice Lemon Tea, Peach Tea, Jasmine Green Tea, White Grape Tea, Apple Tea, Chrysanthemum Tea).The surprise part? Consumers don't know which flavour they're getting until they take a sip.

Tonic, Part II of XXIVIXDMXIV

In an effort to improve on the tonic water I made, which was barky, I tried a couple of things. First I re-filtered it through another coffee filter. This didn't seem to make a difference on either the flavor of the tonic or the resulting barky coating of my tongue.

Then, since I had a Britta filter that needed changing anyway, I used it to filter some of my tonic syrup. The resultant liquid was thinner (less syrupy), lighter in quinine taste (in a good way), but also losing most of the citrus flavor and sugar (in a bad way). So that was a failure as well.

Should I try again, I think the recipe could use less powdered cinchona bark, and perhaps I should try making a tea bag with it in the first place rather than putting it in raw. I also think it could use a few other flavors to make it more interesting. I've spoken with the Fever Tree people, the Q Tonic Water people, Todd Smith of Bourbon and Branch, and Jeffrey Morgenthaler about their versions so I have some ideas.

For now I have to go finish my story on what the pros are doing before I continue my amateur experimentation.

Tonic, Part I of XXIVIXDMXIV

I'm doing the tonic water research that everyone else is doing right now, and as part of the experiment I decided to make my own. I followed the recipe from Kevin Ludwig from Park Kitchen in Portland as published in Imbibe Magazine.Luckily, my bag of powdered cinchona bark did not break open like it did for "Food Dude", nor did I spill syrup all over my kitchen. Nor did I cut myself while chopping lemongrass nor burn myself on the oven. So all in all, it was a better cooking experience than when I do it with food.
I also followed suggestions in the comments for that article: allowing the mixture to sit overnight before filtering out the cinchona bark, and not adding the sugar until after the filtering.


But how does it taste? Just okay, I'd say. The initial sip is terrific, with a good balance of sweetness and bitter quinine with a little lingering sharpness. However it doesn't linger for as long as I want it to, and after the second sip my tongue feels like it's coated with bark dust. This "barky tongue" then dominates the flavor in subsequent sips with or without added gin.


I think I'm going to try to filter it a second time and see if it improves but that's going to be harder now with the sugar in it.Quest for tonic continues!

Show us the love

Right now all the food bloggers are doing this exhibitionist meme where they display the unedited contents of their refrigerators. I thought it would be fun to join in to show how the other half lives. Anyone viewing this could tell that I'm
a) single
b) male
since my refrigerator contains almost nothing but condiments and mixers. Then you look in the door and it appears I'm a drag queen.

Here's the breakdown:

Main Door:

• Two jars of raspberry preserves
• soda water
• soy milk
• iced tea (behind)
• homemade lemonade in pitcher
• pasta sauce
• sparkling apple cider
• (next level) Parmesan cheese
• gourmet mustard (one of 9 kinds currently in fridge)
• relish
• tofu dogs
• eggs
• (bottom level) homemade tonic water syrup
• chocolate sauce (nearly 10 years old)
• orange flower water
• Xuxu vodka/strawberry (behind)
  
• apple sauce
• more homemade tonic in jar
• salsa (behind)
  
• more iced tea
• salad dressing
• simple syrup

Door of refrigerator:

• nail polish (from dot-com era when it was hip for about 3 weeks for dudes match their shiny shirts with nail polish. I guess I should throw this out since it's all 9 years old and I can't envision an occasion calling for nail polish in the near future)
• condiments
• grenadine, red vermouth, dry vermouth

So basically, your tofu dog omelet can come with anything you want on it, but instead how about a drink?

Open Source Soda

Color me clueless- I didn't know about OpenCola, a copyright-free recipe for Coke or Pepsi-like soda. Here's the recipe.

I'm not a fan of traditional sodas, but maybe you crafty barfolk can add this to your DIY selection of bar ingredients along with grenadine, bitters, tonic water, and limoncello.

Also on WikiHow, they have recipes for cherry soda, ginger ale, and root beer.