SeanMike over at Scofflaw's Den is making cocktails for mixologists, bloggers, and other folks, and naming them for those people.
And now he's made one named The Camper, made with blanco tequila, grenadine, lemon juice, pineapple grapefruit soda, and Peychaud's bitters. Sounds tasty- I can't wait to try me.
I wrote a story in this weekend's San Francisco Chronicle about Charles H. Baker's cocktails and their popularity, centering around the program at Heaven's Dog in San Francisco.
This line by Charles H. Baker Jr. introduces not an account of Cuban
rebellion but the cocktail Remember the Maine, which he was drinking
there while it took place. Baker wrote about drinks from his travels
around the world in the early 1900s, mostly during Prohibition, when
the drinking in the United States wasn't legal – or very good.
Other drinks in Baker's two-volume "The Gentleman's Companion" are
introduced from such ports of call as Beijing, Monte Carlo and Bombay
(now Mumbai), ripe with mentions of princes, peacocks, cruises up the
Nile and hanging out with Hemingway.
Bartenders in particular have latched on to Baker as a patron saint
of good living, and his cocktails and quotes from his writings are both
appearing on drink menus.
"I've always thought that when you have a drink there's so much that
comes with it: your friends, who you're with, the time of the day,"
says Erik Adkins, general manager of Heaven's Dog in SoMa. "And (Baker)
captured all that.."
But for all the excitement about Baker's cocktails, they share an unfortunate common trait.
read the rest of the story here.
In the story I also mentioned the forthcoming coffee/cocktail bar Fort Defiance, in Brooklyn, that should be opening later this month. But that's not the only bar to put Baker back on the menu:
The Brooklyn bar Clover Club dedicated a small section of the menu to what owner Julie Reiner says are Baker’s best cocktails this winter, including the Remember the Maine.
In Portland, Ore., the bar Beaker and Flask, named for the subtitle of one volume of “Gentleman’s Companion,” is set to open. Owner Kevin Ludwig says he’ll be featuring Baker drinks on the menu, though not exclusively.
In Amsterdam, speakeasy-style bar door 74 recently offered several pages of Baker drinks, with the menu letterhead mimicking the Baker’s own.
Baker's globe-hopping cocktail book is now helping those cocktails hop back around the world.
Recently in the news, a 16 year old kid apparently died of excessive alcohol consumption at a party. (The autopsy is not complete, could have been other things in his system.) First the police locked up the party host who threw the event while his parents were away. Now they're trying to find who purchased the alcohol to prosecute that person as well.
While I agree the alcohol-purchasing person should probably be fined, chances are he or she will be charged with involuntary manslaughter or something else awful. Personal responsibility be damned, let's blame someone else.
I think that the current state of alcohol education encourages binge drinking, and is the equivalent of abstinence-only education for sex. It doesn't work because it creates an all-or-nothing model of a pleasant act. After you turn 21, or after you get married, booze and sex is awesome! Before, you are not allowed to even learn about it. It's great, but we can't tell you anything about it.
I am particularly perturbed by alcohol brand websites. All of them require you to enter your birth date or click to prove you're 21 years of age. That means in order to learn about, say, the history of a brand or person behind a brand, you need to be old enough to drink alcohol. Why? These sites already promote responsible drinking within the site- it's not like you click through and they instruct you how to drive a car with a six-pack in your lap. And how would reading drink recipes on these sites encourage underage drinking? I can read about how to drive a backhoe, but since nobody will give me a backhoe there's no danger of me scooping irresponsibly.
I understand that these age restricted sites and alcohol abstinence education in general are what everyone has to do to avoid being sued. (Websites are basically ads for the brand, and ads showing people having fun with the addition of alcohol are against the current industry advertising policy.) But I also think that these policies prevent people from learning about alcohol and its role in history and culture- things that would make it seem a lot less glamorous and exotic.
It's unusual for me to miss days of blogging, but I've been busy writing up some stuff for SF Cocktail Week. Check out these pieces I wrote and let me know if I'm missing anything big (or am completely full of beans).
San Francisco's Historic Cocktails and Barbary Coast Saloons
Connecting the Past to the Present: Modern Cocktails in San Francisco
Alcademics was mentioned in The Telegraph, a newspaper in Calcutta, India, in a big story on cocktail blogging. Also mentioned were CocktailChronicles, TheLiquidMuse, KaiserPenguin, SpiritsAndCocktails, MyAchingHead, IntoxicatedZodiac, and Cocktailians.
The global takeover continues!
The Alcademics global onslaught continues! This time the site has been mentioned in the Spanish magazine Vinos y Restaurantes.
My Spanish translation skills aren't what they used to be, but I'm pretty sure it says, "Alcademics is the most awesome cocktail blog in the universe, and everyone knows it."
In the April/May issue of Mutineer magazine, there is a 12-question survey with a bunch of cocktail bloggers, including your pal Camper of Alcademics.
It's fun to see how different answers are on some topics (making your own ingredients, ingredients we'd like to see used more) and how similar on others (absinthe, vodka vs. gin).
The magazine, while still finding itself editorially, seems to be coming together rapidly. This issue is a big improvement over the others I've seen. They've got a more equal distribution of writing on wine, beer, and spirits, and have expanded into coffee as well.
A subscription is ten bucks for one year (six issues)- less than the price of a cocktail in many bars.
Hey look, I wrote another story for Epicurious.com!
It's the Top 5 Beer Cocktails, including ones you know like the Shandy and Black Velvet, plus ones that are probably new to you:
My previous story for Epicurious was the Top 5 Absinthe Cocktails.
Here's the second of my two stories in the San Francisco Chronicle this weekend.
Spirits: Bartenders find new ways to sweeten the deal
Nearly all cocktails contain a sweetening agent, the simplest of which is raw sugar or simple syrup. Other, newer options include ginger, elderflower, and blood orange liqueurs, floral sugar syrups, fresh grenadine, flavored honey, and syrups made from ingredients like agave and gum Arabic.
As usual, San Francisco bartenders are not satisfied with the selection.
I have two stories in this Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle. The first one is on bartender style, with man-on-the-street shots taken at the St. George Spirits distillery during the American Distilling Institute conference last weekend.
Camper English, Special to The Chronicle
Friday, April 10, 2009
Bartenders' outfits are largely dictated by the venues in which they work: dapper attire in hotel bars, uniforms in chain restaurants, trendier fashions in nightclubs and rumpled T-shirts in dive bars. And one gets the impression that bartenders choose their employers based on their personal style, rather than the other way around.
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