Alcademics reader Andy L commented on the post about how to Make Clear Ice Balls Using a Thermos with an idea: Fill the ice ball with water and set the thermos upside-down on top of it like a dunce cap. This way the ice ball mold would still be insulated... Read more →
I get questions, a lot of questions. Questions in email, from Facebook, from Twitter, from Instagram, via text. I usually answer them, when I can! But, I am finally asking myself, why don't I at least paste the questions and answers into blog posts, as similar questions tend to come... Read more →
It's a welcome exception to the hundreds of National Mimosa Day and other generic pitches about liquor I receive to get an email from someone who wants to talk technical details of production, and this post comes from one of them. Gerald Rowland of Rowland Cellars and more relevantly Coit... Read more →
Today's post comes from the work of reader Richard Newell. We'll call it the "canned water" technique for improving ice clarity. We know that the cloudiness in ice comes mostly from trapped air and impurities, which usually are pushed to the center of an ice cube when it freezes. The... Read more →
This came out great! Using this technique with the Thermos Funtainer and ice ball molds I put some cherries inside ice ball molds atop the Thermos and froze them. Nothing complicated, these looked awesome. For all the clear ice projects on Alcademics, check out the Index of Ice Experiments page. Read more →
A little global pandemic won't stop cocktail books from coming out this summer! In this posting we have books coming out in June 2020 or before (along with a couple I missed from the end of 2019/beginning of 2020). They star some of the big names in bartending: Eric Alperin,... Read more →
A year ago I was researching natural food coloring for cocktails and stumbled across an instagram post that used blue spirulina in a cocktail. I added it to my Tales of the Cocktail talk on color in cocktails and spirits and have been seeing it creep into various food and... Read more →
I didn't see this one coming: distilleries as Las Vegas tourist attractions. The town is already host to the Las Vegas Distillery, but it's actually located in nearby Henderson. More recently the Mob Museum in Downtown Las Vegas added a distillery - it looks like there is a single still... Read more →
Sour mashing, typically used in whiskey making, is adding some of the yeasty liquid still waste (stillage) from one distillation to the next batch's cooking/fermentation. I previously wrote (from a post about souring at Jack Daniel's): "Souring" is not like sourdough starter in that the process' job is to remain... Read more →
While sheltering-in-place at home, I've taken to doing some (more) silly ice projects. For these I used the basic Igloo cooler method and placing objects near the top of the water line so that they'd freeze into the clear part of the ice after freezing. For the sunglasses, I rested... Read more →