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Fizzy and Sticky: The Carbonated Liqueur Trend on Details.com

In my latest story for Details.com I wrote about NUVO sparkling liqueur and a couple of its modern spin-offs, the Timbaland-fronted Le SUTRA and the organic Prevu.

Is Carbonated Liqueur the New Cristal?
By Camper English 

There was really no way to predict that NUVO and its imitators would be more than a passing fad in U.S. bars and clubs. Cristal, Hennessy, Dom: Those kind of made sense when they blew up in pop culture over the years. They're luxury brands with luxury prices. The whole aspirational thing. But pink bubbly liqueur with a $30 price tag? What's more, there are at least two more NUVO-like products hitting store shelves this season.

How did this bizarre trend come to be?

 

I cover a short history of the brands and how they're being served at bottle service spots. 

Go read it!

Blue Cocktails on Details.com

I attended an awesome seminar on blue drinks at Tales of the Cocktail this weekend, lead by Sebastian Reaburn, Jacob Briars, and Phil Duff. 

Then I wrote a piece about it for Details.com, the website of Details magazine. It's my first story for the website. 

I learned a lot more in the seminar than is in the story, which is more of a trend piece.

Fun facts:

• Phil Duff worked at the same bar Tom Cruise trained at to prepare for the movie Cocktail (not at the same time)
• The first known blue drink was a non-alcoholic soda called Soyer's Nectar, from 1851. It was created by Alexis Soyer, the first celebrity chef. 
• Blue cocktails were futuristic. "In the 1860s people were excited about the future; now we're merely afraid," said Jacob Briars.
• The first known blue cocktail was from 1908.
• Modern blue cocktails may start with the Blue Hawaiian from 1957 - at the end of the classic rum-heavy tiki drinks at the beginning of the silly ones.
• Blue cocktails are popular in countries that either never had a super serious classic cocktail phase (Asia) or in places and with people that have gotten beyond it, like New Zealand and the top cocktail bars mentioned in the story.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the story on Details.com!

 

Liquor Product Trends Seen at the WSWA Convention 2012

Last week was my third year attending the Wine & Spirits Wholesalers Association Meeting in Las Vegas. This event is where wine and spirits producers (brand owners) come to meet with their distributors.

It's also the place many new brands come to try to find distributors in the first place.

On the main floor is where much of the new or newly-imported brands show their wares in hopes of luring a distributor to pick up their products. And that's where you see what new spirits people think they can sell.

Many fall into categories: luxury bottlings of spirits (often just really nice bottles with wholesale vodka, tequila or other spirits inside), ethnic imports (strange spirits that are hugely popular in Bavaria or other places imported to please those countries immigrant populations in America), lower-cost copycat products of popular-selling spirits like Jagermeister and cake-flavored vodka. And then there are some entirely new flavors and products. 

Here are some product trends I noticed this year.

• Flavored whiskies and whisky liqueurs. I tried a couple of honey-based ones but there were several flavors. I think these are following the success of Jim Beam's Red Stag.
• Western and tattoo-themed bottles. Many of these bottles were holding the above-mentioned flavored whiskies.
• Tequila. There was a lot of tequila on the floor, divided into three different types for the most part. 1. Rustic bottlings right from Mexico, some in ceramic craft bottles, some in just plain glass with plain labels from the home country. 2. Americanized and/or hip-looking tequila brands. 3. Luxury tequila brands in very expensive bottles. 
• Interestingly, there weren't many mezcals there. 
• Luxury vodka. (Why??) Though I didn't look too closely, I didn't see any interesting gimmicks other than having nice bottles. 
•  Irish Whiskey. There were more brands than I remember seeing last time, but with the Cooley distillery being purchased by Jim Beam who knows how many will be around in a year? 
• Bai Jiu. There were only two brands that I saw this year but I've never tried Bai Ju (the top-selling spirit in the world, from China) before. It's incredibly stanky. 
• Cake/candy/cream flavored vodkas. We saw these last year also, but the year in between has seen the massive success of these flavors. In one of the later seminars, the speaker mentioned that sales of whipped cream flavored vodkas are over a million cases. 
• Not much pisco. I only saw Porton there. Surprising. 

I also tried a few things that were new and/or interesting to me. 

• Dzama Rum, from Madagascar. They have a few bottlings including a 104 proof.
• BonFun - A cognac/grape must blend; basically a pineau des charantes in a hipper bottle. 
• House Spirits new coffee liqueur is delicious.
• Dictator Rum from Columbia. Have 12 and 20 year old products (average age, not minimum).
• B Honey Cachaca. Nothing fancy but could take advantage of the expected cachaca boom over the next few years.

So there you have it. What spirit categories or flavors do you think will be popular in the next year? 

Vancouver Cocktail Trends

I mentioned some of these in my write-up of twelve bars in Vancouver, but I wanted to expand on what's happening in Vancouver's bar scene.

Bars Are Restaurants

Apparently licensing in Vancouver is very strict, so many bars are disguised as restaurants. There are seats for everyone and they look like restaurants with tables, but they just offer some small shared plates as food. In most cities we think of seating-required bars as fancy cocktail bars, but in Vancouver it's just the way you have to drink. 

 

 

Bartender's Choice

In at least half of the bars I was in, customers were ordering "bartender's choice" drinks, in which the customer just gives a few directives (choice of base spirit and a flavor profile like "spicy") and lets the bartender create a drink. Vancouver is very much a developing cocktail scence (creativity seems more valued than refinement for now) but consumers have great confidence in the local bartenders. This is great.  

Barrel Aged Cocktails

At probably ten or more bars in this one small city. 

Carbonated Cocktails

I saw the Perlini carbonator system in use at a couple bars. One bar was also serving bottled cocktails. 

 

 

Tea

I thought London bartenders used a lot of tea in their cocktails, but they have nothing on Vancouverites. I'd estimate the average cocktail bar has at least two tea drinks on the menu, but some have four or more. Usually the tea is used in the form of a homemade flavored syrup. 

 

 

Smoke and Tobacco

Smoke as we know is a huge flavor trend, but unlike other markets bartenders don't just throw mezcal into everything. (I get the impression that it's absurdly expensive up there.) Instead they more often use pu'er tea and tobacco tinctures.

Antique Glassware

It seems like a novelty in most cities for bars to serve drinks in antique glassware, but among the better cocktail bars of Vancouver this was almost the norm.  

 

 

Short Menu Descriptions

I noticed that several bars would have a lot of creative touches in their cocktails but not mention them on the menu. Bars didn't mention that cocktails were barrel-aged, that they were carbonated or bottled, or that they smoked a glass with a burnt barrel stave before serving the drink. These all seem like selling points that would drive interest, so it was a bit odd.

Cynar, Campari, Fernet-Branca

I don't know if I've ever had a drink with a Fernet float on top of it, but in Vancouver I had three or four. They use the stuff in cocktails more than they do in San Francisco. Additionally Cynar and Campari are everywhere, usually on multiple drinks on menus. I'm not sure if these drinks are more 'by bartenders for bartenders' as some bars do, or if the Vancouver palate skews bitter. 

 

 

All in all, Vancouver is a great cocktail town. 

The Weird Affinity Between ZU Vodka and Cocchi Americano

 

ZU vodka, known in the rest of the world as Zubrowka, is starting to appear in more serious drinks than just mixed with the usual apple juice.

 

Oddly enough, in each of these better drinks in which I've seen ZU used, it has been used in concert with Cocchi Americano. 

At Providence in Los Angeles:

Ellis Island
ZU Bison Grass Vodka, Cocchi Americano, Gruner Vetliner wine, and celery bitters

At AQ restaurant in San Francisco:

 

Bison Rose
Zubroska Bison Grass Vodka, Cocchi Americano, Meyer Lemon, Rosemary Shrub

At Blackbird in San Francisco:

Golden Glove
Zu vodka, Cocchi Americano, Apple Juice, Celery Bitters

Weird.

Trends in Craft Beer in SilverKris Magazine

My editor at SilverKris, the inflight magazine for Singapore Airlines, emailed me something like, "I hear craft beer is becoming popular. Can you do a story on that?"

"Sure," I said, knowing that boiling down everything going on with craft beer into even a feature-length story was going to be incredibly difficult. 

The story kind of kicked my ass but taught me a lot about beer. I have a feeling for the trends but not a lot of knowledge of the technical details behind the beer styles so this involved a lot of research.

Anyway, I mushed things into categories like Belgian, barleywine, saison, session, flavored, high-alcohol, sparkling, canned, and casked. 

The story is online in one of those online magazine reader formats at this link.

An Unexpected Flavor Trend in Copenhagen

When I visited Copenhagen twice this summer, I was surprised to find one flavor all over the drink menus: eucalyptus. 

At 1105, they serve a drink called the Lady Eucalyptus, made with eucalyptus syrup, gin, lemon, Cointreau, and egg whites. 

At Salon 39, a very creative neighborhood bar/restaurant, they make their own line of bitters. Their eucalyptus bitters I saw all over town, helping drive this trend. 

They use them in their Gin & It, as well as in their version of Sam Ross' Penicillin. 

At the bar Rouge at the Skt. Petri Hotel, the bar program changed literally between me visiting it in the afternoon and the same evening. (Rumor has it they've changed over and over in the past few years.) But the menu that they showed me during the day also had the Penicillin with eucalytpus bitters. By nighttime, it was a short menu of about eight classic cocktails.

At Umami, they also have a eucalyptus drink on the menu. I thought I stole a copy of the menu but I can't seem to find it now. 

At MASH, they use eucalyptus syrup in their Signature Margarita.  

Now I'm wishing I brought some eucalyptus bitters as a souvenir; and odd taste that unites the great bars of Copenhagen.

Stockholm Bar Scene Report

While on a trip with Purity vodka, we were given a talk by Mathin Lundgren about the Swedish bar scene, specifically in Stockholm. This was great because I had just been to Stockholm two months earlier with Karlsson's vodka and had seen a few of the bars first-hand. 

Lundgren says the Swedish bar scene really kicked off about twn years ago, after a few Swedish bartenders moved to london and worked at LAB and other bars, then came home with new skills. More recently, other bartenders have been influenced by working at Milk & Honey and thus Sasha Petraske's influence reaches even to Sweden.

In talking about trends and developments in the Stockholm bar scene, Lundgren identified:

• A return to the respect of the career of bartending
• Hand-crafted cocktails
• Better ice (and the recognition that spirit-forward cocktails with fewer ingredients require better ice)
• Knowledge of spirits
• Better training (As of 3 years ago they have a government-sponsored, year-long education program somewhere outside of Stockholm.)
• Travel - Bartenders are traveling a lot, getting inspired by other scenes, and bringing ideas home. (And as a good example, I've now met Mathin in Sweden, Denmark, and New Orleans within three months.)
• The mixologist trend (bartenders with their heads down cranking out only one drink every five minutes while customers wait) is starting to fade
• The science/molecular trend came and went
• As modern bartenders refocus on both drinks and customer service again, a newfound respect for the older generation of working bartenders
• Bars with standards. Previously drink quality depended on who was working at the bar at the moment, whereas now bars are enforcing better training and standards so that every drink tastes good no matter who makes it.
• The return of flair, but just little flourishes of it rather than juggling.
• Connectedness of bartenders thanks to social media and good bar events. 

Other than a government-sponsored bartender training program, he could be talking about New York or San Francisco. It's a small, small world.