Author: Camper English
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Make Easter Egg Ice for Easter
Check out this post from a few years back on making ice shaped like Easter eggs. Short answer: water balloons.
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A Visit to the Nordic Food Lab in Copenhagen
This February I was lucky to be invited to visit the Nordic Food Lab, which is located on a boat floating in a harbor off Copenhagen. It was formerly the research lab of the world's top-rated restaurant NOMA, and I believe they still have a close relationship and work together on projects. The lab is…
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A Tribute to Harry Craddock on the 50th Anniversary of his Death
In January I flew to London for an event to celebrate the life and career of Harry Craddock, author of the Savoy Cocktail Book. The event was sponsored by Plymouth Gin, which is mentioned by name many times throughout the Savoy. The tour was attended by Plymouth's distiller Sean Harrison, the top London bartenders, and…
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Transform Tap Water into Magical Alpine Fairy-Water (Book Excerpt)
Today's post is an excerpt from the new book Craft Cocktails at Home: Offbeat Techniques, Contemporary Crowd-Pleasers, and Classics Hacked with Science by Kevin Liu. The book is heavy on the science, which is awesome. And you can download the Kindle version for free Thursday, February 28 – Saturday, March 2. Liu gave me permission to…
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The Ice King of the Internet
I was interviewed recently for a story in a magazine for the iPad/iPhone called The Magazine. During the interview we were joking that I'm the Ice King of the Internet. The quote didn't make it into the story, but I've adopted that as an official title. Hail your new king! In the story, writer…
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The Wide World of the Ward Eight
In my latest column for FineCooking.com, I talk about how the Ward Eight cocktail is everywhere these days. You know how you learn the definition of a word and then suddenly you keep hearing that word everywhere? Over the past month it has been that way with me and the Ward Eight cocktail. I had…
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A Sampling of Sugars from Asia
Last year at Tales of the Cocktail I gave a talk along, with David Cid of Bacardi, about sugar, syrups, and rum. A detailed write-up of that talk is on the blog Commercial Free Cocktail. As part of that talk, I passed around a ton of samples of sugars to taste. Most of these sugars…
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2012: My Year in Boozy Travel
I decided to add up all the trips I took in 2012 and compare it to last year's travel, and it appears this year I was a total slacker. I took a mere 17 trips this year (22 last year), and flew only 90,000 miles in the air, compared with 150,000 last year. I visited…
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When Did Grenadine Become an Artificial Ingredient?
We all know that grenadine is supposed to be a syrup made of pomegranate juice and sugar, often with orange flower water added in. But most commercial grenadines are little more than red food coloring and sweetener. We might think that artificially-flavored cocktail ingredients like grenadine all came to be in the post-war 1940s and…