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  • Chartreuse Goes Through The Roof

    First, they came for our bitters. Then they outlawed our egg whites and our infusions. What more could go wrong for bartenders this year?

    I'll tell you what: Chartreuse now costs $11 more per bottle. 

    Chartreuse_Verte

    The wonderfully complex liqueur made by monks has been a favorite of bartenders who mix it into cocktails like the Chartreuse Swizzle and Laphroaig Project  at work and consume chilled shots of the stuff when not on the clock. Now those fancy cocktails are going to cost a little bit more.

    I spoke with Antoinnette Cattani of Cattani Imports, the Chartreuse broker for the California market. She said that the unannounced increase is national and will affect prices both at retail outlets and in bars. The VEP (high-end versions) are also increasing. The VEP Green will now cost $119 and the VEP Yellow $118, says Cattani. 

    But here's the good news: It doesn't look like all retailers have figured this out. While Beverages & More is now selling the Green Chartreuse for $62.99, a Google Shopping search revealed several online retailers still offering 750ml bottles of it for $40-$45.

    So if your bottles are running a little low or you just want to stock up, it might be time to do some online shopping. 

    *Breaking News Feb 23 1:51PM – It appears prices are being readjusted again. Still an increase, but perhaps a few dollars less than it was. I have also learned that because of retail mark-ups, the cost increase on retail bottles is likely to be even higher than it is to bars. Either way if you can still get it for cheap it's best to do it now.

    *Update Feb 23 3:44PM – I've learned that the price increase has been reduced from the approximately $11 increase per bottle on Green Chartreuse to about $7 as of today. Retail increases will likely be a little more. Look for the sky-high prices to drop a bit soon.

  • Curing Olives at Home, Part II

    This post is a continuation of this one on how to brine olives at home.

    My olives went from this:

    Raw-olives-bowl5s

    To this:

    Martiniglass4s

    To see the process, keep reading by selecting the link below.

    (more…)

  • Bars Inside Other Bars

    In my latest story for San Francisco Magazine, I talk about bars opening inside other bars.

    The-Hideout-4778.full

    Photograph by Chris Brennan

    Make it a double

    These bars within bars offer patrons a choice of drinking styles.
    By Camper English

    The hottest haute cocktails require a range of syrups, bitters, fresh herbs, several types of gin, a lot of storage space, and extra time to make every drink. One way in which bar owners are handling the demand is by dividing and conquering, opening two bars in a single venue—one to promote quick service, the other for slow sipping.

    Until recently, the back room at Dalva was a barren spot more suited for storage than for socializing, and it was often used by customers sneaking illegal indoor cigarettes. But with a fresh coat of paint and a bit of remodeling, including a custom-made bar and wrought-iron accents, this area has been rebranded as a boutique interior cocktail lounge called the Hideout. 

    Continue reading the story at the San Francisco Magazine website. 

  • The Great Debate Continues

    You may recall a few weeks ago I wrote a piece for the San Francisco Chronicle about bartenders being less snobby that proved a bit controversial.  Now a few others have taken up the conversation.

    My initial story had the following quote from Erick Castro of Rickhouse that touched a few nerves:

    "Three years ago it was OK to be rude. It used to be 'I'm not making a cosmo and you're a horrible person.' Now we say, 'I'm not making a cosmo, but I'm making you something better than a cosmo.' And if they like (the drink) they trust you for the whole night."

    So then I wrote a blog post called, "Why Can't I Get a McDonald's Hamburger at Chez Panisse?" and that gave birth to more discussion.

    The Paul Clarke picked up the topic at Serious Eats in a post called "Serious Cocktails: Is the Customer Always Right?" In it he asks:

    Just as it'd be ridiculous to enter a dive bar and ask for a Last Word, isn't there something at least slightly wrong with going to a bar with a spectacular selection of spirits—an ambitious and balanced cocktail menu and a carefully developed mixological aesthetic—and asking for the bibulous equivalent of a baloney sandwich?

    This story picked up another 67 comments so far. 

    Then Lauren Clark picked up the topic on DrinkBoston.com in a post called "We've Seen This Before" and adds a very good point- that this whole debate is nothing new and has been seen in food, beer, and wine.

    I experienced this kind of change first-hand during my brief stint in the craft brewing industry in the late ’90s. Even though craft beer had been proliferating for over a decade at that point, people would still walk into a brewpub and order a Miller Lite. The bartender would explain that there was no Miller Lite on tap, that the establishment sold only beer that was made on the premises, and he would suggest a golden ale — milder than the pub’s other beers but still way more flavorful than mass-produced light lager. The customer would either leave or try the golden ale. If he tried it and liked it enough, he might get adventuresome later on and order an IPA or a porter. It was a process, and it didn’t happen overnight.

    This is fun. I hope this discussion continues on and offline.

  • How to Make Clear Ice, The Hard Way

    Darcy over at ArtofDrink.com has taken up pursuit of clear ice. In his first post, he noted something that I did not consider and that could be very helpful.

    As the ice increases in thickness it begins to corral all of the impurities into the center of the block. Dissolved air and unfiltered water will cause a cloudy core, but impurities are not the main reason why ice cubes are rarely crystal clear.  

    This expansion pressure is what makes ice cloudy in the center, not minerals and other debris. The visual flaws are caused by fractures in the ice when the last remaining liquid water in the center of the cube freezes and exerts a massive amount of force on the surrounding ice. The cube is basically cracked from the inside out.

    This is in line with what I discovered when I tried all sorts of ways to get the air and impurities out of the ice- in the end it just didn't matter that much.

    So in his second experiment, Darcy set about making ice freeze from the bottom up, so that the last part to freeze would be the top. Thus there would be no pressure cracking of the ice. His equipment list was:

    • 6 ft of copper pipe
    • my wife's cookie sheet
    • tin-snips
    • a bag of nails
    • a garbage bag
    • an aquarium pump (powerhead)
    • a square garbage can
    • a coat hanger
    • two Canadian winter days and nights at roughly -10°C

    As he noted,

    The process works, but it isn’t very efficient nor is it practical.

    Anyway, there is still more work to be done. Icesperiments will continue! 

    An index of ice experiments on Alcademics can be found here.

  • Up in your Internet

    Oh hai. I've been writing a lot of stuff lately on this new fangled thing called the internet.

    Tt.logo.image.1 I did a few things for Tasting Table, like this piece on bartenders swapping out whisky in drinks for mezcal and this other one on where to get a good cocktail during the day in San Francisco. 

    For the national edition of Tasting Table I wrote about where you can buy a whole barrel of booze. There are a whole lot more places to buy a whole barrel listed at this Liquor.com article that came out a few days earlier. I didn't write that one (great minds drink alike), but I did write this other one on bitters for the same site a while back.  

    For CitySearch I wrote about single-spirit specialty bars, which is supposed to also include this review of Smuggler's Cove but doesn't, because the internet is full of bugs.

  • The Science of Sweet in the San Francisco Chronicle

    Here is my latest story in the San Francisco Chronicle.

    less sweet drink by darcy
    (A Gin-to-the-fire cocktail was photographed in the SF Chronicle studio on Wednesday, Dec. 30, 2009 in San Francisco, Calf. Photo: Mike Kepka / The Chronicle)

    Sweetening drinks can be a science

    Camper English, Special to The Chronicle

    Friday, January 8, 2010

    Gin that bruises, 500-year-old secret recipes and miracle hangover cures. The world of cocktails is rife with myths and misinformation. As we slowly move out of the Dark Ages and into the cocktail Enlightenment, bartenders are starting to use scientific methodology to disprove hearsay and improve drinks.

    Some of that science will be explained Jan. 20 at the Exploratorium. A one-night event (sold out, though the Web site promises to share details for home experiments) will include exhibits on the science behind layering a pousse-café, why absinthe turns white when water is added and how cocktails are affected by the shape of ice.

    Having experimented with ice in recent years, many bartenders have moved on to studying sugar. Simple syrup is used to balance acid in many cocktails, so several curious bar types have purchased refractometers and pH meters to measure exact levels of each.

    Read the whole story on the science of sweetening drinks here.

  • Brining Olives at Home

    For the past couple years I've been wanting to try curing my own olives after reading about it on a food blogger's website. Then when Karen Solomon's awesome book Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It
    came out I had instructions.

    I carefully searched the news for ripe olive time, and noticed that the Sonoma Valley Olive Festival runs in December through February. So I planned to hunt for olives in December at the farmer's markets.

    Raw-olives-bowl-tops

    But it turns out there was a problem with that logic. Smartly they throw an olive festival after all the olives have ripened and had weeks or months to cure in brine solution. So when I started looking around at farmer's markets in December the olives were already all gone. Curses!

    But wait!

    (more…)

  • Is Faster Frozen Ice Less Cloudy than Slower Frozen Ice?

    In the last installment of my ongoing adventures making clear ice at home in the freezer, I found that using a hard-sided Igloo cooler works pretty well to create large, mostly-clear blocks.

    I was curious to see if faster frozen blocks (with the freezer turned to its maximum cold setting) would come out more or less cloudy/clear than blocks frozen at the minimum cold setting.

    Of course, my freezer isn't exactly high-tech. According to my novelty jumping bass fish thermometer I picked up in Finland (thanks for the trip, Finlandia!), my freezer only ranges from -3.2 to 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit. 

    Anyway, as you can see below, there wasn't much difference at all. Here's the block set on the warmest freezer setting (slowest to freeze):

    Slow-frozen-block-ice-cloudy-lines

    And here at the coldest setting, which froze faster:

    Fast-frozen-block-ice-cloudy-lines

    My finger (I should be hand model, right?) indicates where I'd cut the block to get rid of the too-cloudy ice. One was 12 cm and the other 12.5. At that difference, you may as well turn the thing all the way up and have your ice sooner.

    More icesperiments to come!

    An index of all of the ice experiments on Alcademics can be found here.

  • Inside the Freezer of an Ice Nerd

     
    My-freezers

     

    Well I certainly wouldn't want any food in there spoiling the flavor of my ice that I spent so much time making.

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