Blog

Three East Bay Drinking Itineraries in the July Issue of San Francisco Magazine
For my latest story in San Francisco Magazine, I wrote about three drinking itineraries in the East Bay. The five-page story is called The New Beverage Belt and it involves three tours:
- Cocktail bars in Uptown Oakland, including the just-opened Hello Stranger and forthcoming Here's How.
- Tasting Rooms of Alameda, with seven stops including the Hangar One and St. George Spirits distilleries.
- Day Drinking in Jack London Square, which was 100% an excuse to write about Heinold's First and Last Chance Saloon – and happily they took the photos of the bar to accompany the story.
I did a lot of drinking as research for the story, so out of respect for my liver go out and pick up a copy of the magazine or read it online!
June 29, 2018
More Ice Ball Shenanigans

If you're not following alcademics on Instagram… well you really should be. I've been having some fun over there freezing stuff into ice balls. I'm using the same technique you've seen here on Alcademics before – a thermos and an upside-down ice ball mold.

Lately I did a couple fun ones with money, which I'd never serve to a real person because money is filthy.

I did a few with jalapenos for one event, and some with mint for another event. (Also some blue ones for it.)

And for gay pride, I made some ones with rainbow flags. I printed out and laminated some rainbow flags, and then froze those inside the ice spheres.

If you're looking for more amazing ice projects, check out the Index of Ice Experiments.

Any suggestions on other things to freeze inside clear ice balls?

June 26, 2018
Once Always Almond, Orgeat Has Gone Nutty!

In my new story for SevenFifty Daily, I wrote about how orgeat, the French almond syrup famously in the Mai Tai, is now being made with a range of nuts, seeds, and other ingredients.

The story cites examples from around the country and we come up with a new working definition for orgeat.

Check it out!

April 9, 2018
Black Cocktail Alternatives to Activated Charcoal

In my latest story for SevenFifty Daily I wrote about how to turn cocktails black without using activated charcoal.

While black cocktails may be extremely Instagram-worthy, the activated charcoal often used to give the drinks their inky hue could have serious health consequences. Activated charcoal can adsorb oral medications (and poisons, in the case of drug overdoses, for which it’s commonly used by emergency room doctors) so that the drugs never reach the bloodstream. It’s an uncomfortable fact that the sexy obsidian-colored old-fashioned you serve to a customer may affect the medication that person has taken shortly before, or after, imbibing.

While one could add a medication-interaction warning about activated charcoal, like an allergen label on a drink menu, there are other ways to color a drink black that don’t require a scary-sounding note. SevenFifty Daily asked bartenders around the country for cocktail-darkening alternatives and learned that black sesame seeds, cuttlefish ink, and black food coloring are among the ingredients being used.

The full story is here.

March 23, 2018
The Future of San Francisco Cocktails (Predicted By Me) in San Francisco Magazine

It has been many years since I have contributed to San Francisco Magazine, but now I'm back! In the new February Bars & Nightlife issue, I have ten stories loosely themed around "Future proofing the cocktail: How Bay Area drink makers are reinventing our favorite alcoholic beverages."

Below is the intro with links to all ten stories and brief intros from me.

Two decades into the Bay Area’s cocktail awakening, you’d think that bars would have settled into a comfortable middle age—the imbibing equivalent of staying home to Netflix and chill. But you’d be wrong.

Creativity stirs all over the region, and drink makers and bar owners continue to spin out new ways to stay relevant and keep us guessing: with secret menus, popup concepts, and menu launch parties; with vibrant drinks, exotic ingredients, and bar-specific spirits; with quality concoctions served at double the speed, thanks to newfangled juices and outsourced ice. And to meet the expanding demand for quality, novelty, and expediency in booze consumption, new clusters of great bars have sprung up not just in the East Bay but also to the north and south. These changes are often nuanced but pervasive, taking place across many bars in many precincts throughout the ever-thirsty Bay Area.

Scanning the cocktail horizon, you can spot the big ideas and the small revisions that are changing the way we drink in 2018 and beyond. Here are 10 of them.

Bartenders Are Going Straight to the Source

How bartenders are directing spirits creation from distillers.

Forget The Simple Description: These Are Very Complicated Cocktails

A look into the mind of Adam Chapman from The Gibson.

Wine Country Has An Unofficial Cocktail AVA

Drinks at the fantastic Duke's and other Healdsburg cocktail bars.

The Future (and Present, Actually) Is Female

Who runs the bars? Girls. A sampling of ten women running things in Bay Area Bars.

Asian Restaurants Are the Center of Cocktail Innovation

Once the home of sake bombs and soju immitations of real drinks, now Asian restaurants are some of the most forward-looking.

Viking Drinks Are So Hot Right Now

Aquivit will be everywhere in 2018.

You'll Be Spending the Night in San Jose

Paper Plane and other great bars in San Jose.

Your Highball Intake Is About to Increase Dramatically

Whiskey and other highballs are happening.

Outsourcing Is In

Blind Tiger Ice and Super Jugoso are going to have a major impact on prep work in SF bars.

The Mission Has Only Just Begun

So, so many new bars are opening in the Mission District.

I've already got my next assignment for San Francisco Magazine, so hopefully this will be a regular thing.

February 3, 2018
Allergy Labelling Approaches on Cocktail Bar Menus in the US and Abroad

In an era when customers are more and more attuned to their allergies, aversions, and dietary restrictions, and as bartenders are using evermore exotic ingredients in their drinks, it may be time to consider adding warning labels to the cocktail menu.

In a story I wrote for SevenFifty Daily, I took a look at some bars’ philosophies on the matter and the labeling schemes they’re employing to warn customers about potential dangers in their drinks.

We looked at labelling for nuts, seafood, soy, gluten, vegan/vegetarian, how these are listed on various menus or handled only in person, and look at a few unusual things that need to be labelled in UK bars.

Bars I spoke to include Trick Dog, the Proper Hotel, and the Tonga Room in San Francisco, Bar Clacson in LA, Bresca in DC, Saint Ellie in Denver, Bar Fiori in NYC, The Aviary in Chicago and New York, and The Hide Bar in London.

I hope you get a lot out of the story, I had a great time researching it. Read it here.

January 26, 2018
Directional Freezing, Freeze Distillation, and an 1890 Story About Ice Purity

Ice nerds will recall that directional freezing is a method for making clear ice by forcing the water to freeze in one direction, rather than from the outside-in as in a typical ice cube tray.

It's also pretty similar to, if not the same thing as, freeze distillation – using freezing to separate liquids. Freeze distillation is the method by which early American applejack was made: take a cider and freeze it, scoop off the frozen ice, and then you have a more concentrated cider, higher in alcohol. Keep doing this and eventually you get something pretty high proof.

This was also the process used by BrewDog to make their high-proof Tactical Nuclear Penguin beer.

Experimenting with directional freezing shows that when using the process, the clear ice freezes first and the air and any minerals in the water are treated as impurities, pushed away from the point of freezing. But as many people have found out, it treats everything not pure water in the same way – when you try to add food coloring or a flavoring to the cooler in a directional freezing system, unless you put a ton of it in the color is treated as an impurity and your ice still comes out clear. (The bottom/last part to freeze will be gooped up with the color/flavor. )

Jim Blakey of the ClearlyFrozen ice cube tray found a story in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, that talks about how clear ice less polluted than the lake water from which its formed. I'd assume this is for the same reason.

“clear ice from polluted sources may contain so small a percentage of the impurities of the source, that it may not be regarded as injurious to the health."

Here's the story.

The original reference in Google Books is here.

January 9, 2018
Directional Freezing, as a Patent Law Exam Question
As readers of this site know, I figured out "directional freezing" – the process of making clear ice by controlling the direction in which water freezes – in 2009 and first posted it here on Alcademics.

I had always assumed that I couldn't patent the process because it's something that happens naturally (like how ponds and lakes freeze), but perhaps could have patented a device for producing clear ice cubes had I been entrepreneurial enough. (As you know, many such devices now exist.)

Well, this question became an exam question from Jason Rantanen, Professor at the University of Iowa College of Law.

On this post on the website Patentlyo.com, he talked about the test as he proposed a hypothetical:
Camper English was the first person to discover that clear ice could be produced in a home freezer by freezing the ice in a directional manner. English published these findings on a weblog on December 28, 2009, a copy of which you were provided in Appendix A. English immediately filed a patent application that contained the following claim.

I claim:
1. A method of producing ice comprising freezing water in a directional manner in a home freezer.
Analyze the patentability of the claim under current patent eligible subject matter law.
The rest of the test question involved the Wintersmith's clear ice maker. Keep reading the post for more info an an image from the patent application. It's pretty interesting.

Rantanen didn't provide the answer on the Patentlyo website, but he did give me permission to post a rough technical explanation of the answer, with the understanding that the below does not constitute legal advice:

The full answer involves application of an analytical framework that the U.S. Supreme Court articulated a few years ago in a case called Alice v. CLS Bank. Basically, you first ask whether the patent claim is "directed to" an unpatentable concept like a law of nature or physical phenomena. If it is, you then ask whether the patent claim adds an "inventive concept": basically, something that transforms the claim into something more than just a claim to natural law itself. A formalistic addition isn't enough: saying "I claim the process of risk-hedging, done on a computer" or limiting it to a particular technological field, such as ice-making, isn't enough.

In this case, claiming the concept of directional freezing would fail the eligible subject matter requirement since it's a natural law or physical phenomena. Even limiting it to being done in a home freezer is very unlikely to be enough of an inventive concept. However, claiming a specific process for making clear ice could be sufficient. For example, a claim to "a method of producing clear ice by placing water in vessel that is insulated on every side except the top and placing that ice into a home freezer" would likely be enough to satisfy the patent eligible subject matter requirement. There's a neat recent case that my students would have been aware of called Rapid Litigation Management v. CellzDirect that involved a process of freezing and unfreezing liver cells. The Federal Circuit (the Federal appeals course that hears appeals in patent cases) held that that particular method did constitute patent eligible subject matter.

The Wintersmith device on the other hand strikes me as a pretty clear application of natural principles. I doubt anyone would be able to mount a serious patent eligible subject matter challenge to that patent.

All that said, there's still the issue of whether or not the invention is new. If someone else described the same process then the process wouldn't be patentable. But newness is a different issue that's governed by a different set of rules.

Got all that? Sure you do. Me too :)

In any case it's awesome that after all these years I got an answer for a lingering question about The Blog Post That Launched A Hundred Ice Cube Trays.
January 8, 2018
Making Clear Ice with the Clearly Frozen Ice Cube Tray
While I'm not going to get in the habit of testing out every clear ice cube maker on the market, I decided to try out the Clearly Frozen tray because they sent me one.

This ice cube tray uses directional freezing, the process to make clear ice first described here on Alcademics back in 2009. This particular system is pretty much the same as in this blog post about poking holes in silicone ice cube trays and using directional freezing to ensure the part inside the tray is clear. The difference is that in the Clearly Frozen device, the shape of the 'cooler' is custom made to fit the ice cube tray and retaining tray.

The device is just three parts: a 10-cube silicone ice cube tray (makes 10 2-inch cubes at a time), a plastic retaining tray to hold the cloudy ice beneath the tray, and the foam insulated box that enforces directional freezing. You put it together, fill it with water, and leave it to freeze. My timing was perfect at a little over 12 hours of freezing – there was still plenty of unfrozen water in the plastic tray so it was easy to separate.

Pros:
- Makes more cubes than most clear ice cube trays on the market – ten 2" cubes
- More space-efficient relatively than others – it takes up a bunch of space, but you get more ice out of it than with other clear ice makers
- Costs less than others- $25 including shipping
Cons:
- I have no complaints for my first attempt, but I do have some doubts about its long-term durability. The interior clear tray is quite thin and I could see it cracking. 2019 update: They have updated the interior tray with a much thicker and more durable plastic, so it seems this tray will last a long time.
Personally I will probably continue to to make my ice one big Igloo cooler at a time, because I enjoy the process of breaking up an ice block and don't care that much about having super-square ice cubes. But of the commercial products I've tried, this one has a low price and some nice features.
December 26, 2017
Ice Tips in Southwest Airlines Magazine

If you're traveling in December on Southwest, you may notice an illustration of an ice ball with a strawberry in it. That's based on a real strawberry inside a real ice ball, that you may have seen here on Alcademics.

I don't see the story online, so I'll post it below.

For more information on how to make awesome ice balls with stuff inside them, check out this post and this post, and of course the Index of Ice Experiments here on Alcademics.

Thanks to writer Michael Cook for writing the story and thanks to my friends who spotted it in magazine and snapped pictures for me!

December 13, 2017