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A Bar Contest You Don’t Want to Win

Eater SF hosted a "Douchiest Bar in San Francisco" contest. The winner, unfortunately for them, was Medjool, the rooftop bar in the Mission. Filling out the Top 5 were Matrix Fillmore, Bar None, Americano, and Zeitgeist.

The comments on the original post are priceless.

"It's as if the marina suddenly puked up it's best and brightest in the
fields of self-absorption, douchbaggery and cougardom into one
consolidated spot… and then poured 1,000 cosmos into the mix."

Oof.

November 27, 2008
Wild Tofurkey
It's almost Thanksgiving, and that means all the booze news is full of stories on what to pair with your turkey. Phooey.

As you know, the entire staff here at Alcademics HQ (me) is vegetarian, so I don't play that game. But I do like Thanksgiving, as it's a holiday centered around pigging out and drinking, followed by loafing around until your stomach stops hurting.

I like to participate in my own special way, by enjoying a healthy vegetarian meal of Wild Turkey bourbon. And this year, I thought I would pair it with food, and then I thought, why not enjoy it as food?

I made three styles of Wild Turkey marinade for tofu, then cooked them all.

Marinade 1: A Bourbon Sazerac, dumped into a bowl
- 3 ounces Wild Turkey 101
- 1 sugar cube
- dash of Pernod Absinthe
- 3 dashes Peychaud's bitters
Marinade 2: An Old-Fashioned, dumped into a bowl
- 1 tsp orange marmalade
- 2 maraschino cherries, muddled
- 1 sugar cube
- 2 dashes Angostura bitters
- 3 ounces Wild Turkey 101
Marinade 3: Bourbon Marinade
- 1/2 cup Wild Turkey 101
- 1 tbsp powdered ginger
- 1 tbsp vegetarian Worcestershire sauce
- 1/2 tsp garlic powder
- 1/4 cup soy sauce (next time I'd go lighter on this)
- pinch black pepper
- 1/2 tsp sesame seeds
Marinate pressed (water squeezed out) tofu overnight. Bake on lightly oiled cookie sheet at 300 degrees for 30-40 minutes, turning at least once. Remove from oven before it starts to look crispy or charred. If I had to do it again, I would make thicker slices and cook it on the lighter side, as the less it's cooked inside the more bourbon flavor is retained.

Results

The Sazerac Tofurkey was not so great. I didn't like the baked minty-ness that I think came from the absinthe. The Old Fashioned Tofurkey was delicious, as was the regular Bourbon Marinated Tofurkey.

I'd make this again in a heartbeat- and probably will tomorrow for actual Thanksgiving. I may also experiment with a Manhattan Marinade and a Bourbon Sour Marinade. Why not? The best part about this is that after you're finished, you can drink the leftover sauce.
November 26, 2008
The Craziest New Cocktail Menu in San Francisco

DOSA Fillmore opens on Friday, but the drink menu for the restaurant has been released. The cocktails were created by Jonny Raglin of Absinthe, and they look insane. I can't wait to try them.

Batsman
Martin Miller’s Gin, Darjeeling tea cordial, lemon juice & ginger beer, served over ice with a mint sprig 9

Bowler
Marian Farms bio-dynamic Pisco, mango gastrique, “hell flower” tincture, served up with a lime twist 9

Juhu
Palm DH Krahn Gin, coconut milk, lime juice, Kaffir lime leaf, bird’s eye chili served up with a spanked curry leaf 10

Bollywood Hills
Sub Rosa Saffron Vodka, orgeat syrup, lime juice, allspice dram, served up with pickled mango 10

Elephant Parade
No. 209 Gin, pineapple gomme, ginger, cilantro, seltzer water, served long over ice with a pineapple flag 11

Bengali Gimlet
Tanqueray Rangpur Gin, ‘curried’ nectar, Kaffir lime leaf and lime juice, served up with a wedge of lime 10

Laughing Lassi
Bols Genever, Strauss yogurt, cucumber, grains of paradise, agave nectar, Angostura, served chilled with mint 12

Faux Swizzle
El Dorado Rum, St. Germain Elderflower, chicory bitters, served over crushed ice with a sugar-dusted mint sprig 9

Mood Indigo
Buffalo Trace Bourbon, jackfruit marmalade, Angostura bitters, chilled, topped with Champagne 10

Smoked Cup
Benesin Organic Mezcal, Pimm’s, black cardamon tincture, ginger beer, cucumber & smoked sea salt, over ice 11

November 26, 2008
Whisky + Shipwreck = Awesome

I have a fondness for booze, as you may have realized, but also for shipwrecks and pirates. (Old pirates, not Somali pirates.)

So I am particularly thrilled by the story of the SS Politician, a ship carrying 260,000 bottles of whisky that sank off the Outer Hebrides (islands off Scotland) in 1941. The local islanders rowed out to the partially-submerged wreck at night and stole all the whisky they could get their hands on. But the government was not happy about that so they searched peoples' homes and jailed some of them, even though they were just going to let the whisky sink with the ship. For years, hidden bottles from the wreck would turn up when someone cleaned out their attic or dug up a shed.

The tale was made into the book Whisky Galore
by Compton Mackenzie, then a later books Scotch on the Rocks: The True Story Behind Whisky Galore and Polly: The True Story Behind Whisky Galore, retracing the story of that book. It was also made into the movie Whisky Galore, sometimes known as Tight Little Island.

In 1970, the newspaper The Mirror led a diving expedition to the ship to find any bottles that were still on it. They did find them, and rewarded a diver Bob Pert with a few bottles for his efforts. He's auctioning off one of those (unopened but evaporating through the cork) bottles December 3rd. [Props to Lyke 2 Drink for finding news of the auction.]

This bottle would make an excellent holiday gift for someone obsessed with booze. Or shipwrecks. Or both.

November 26, 2008
Alcademics on Epicurious on Absinthe

Hey Look! It's my first story for Epicurious.com! Wahoo!

The Top Five Absinthe Cocktails

Now that absinthe is legal in America, what are you going to do with it?

I share some information about absinthe and suggest the five best cocktails in which to use it.

November 18, 2008
Hotel Wine MacGuyver

Say you find yourself in a hotel room on a cold London night, caught in a bout of sleep-free jetlag, but prepared to take the edge off with a bottle of wine. Unfortunately, you forget to bring a corkscrew. You don't have any cash to tip room service for bringing one up. What do you do? WHAT DO YOU DO?

I can tell you what I did tonight. First, I paid the 20 dollar wi-fi fee (note to Cumberland Hotel- screw you!) and looked up a solution. The suggestions included banging it on a tree and using a hammer/screw. Having neither a tree nor a screw loose, I gathered materials from around the room.

I tried the banging method in several ways- held in my knees with a shoe, against the wall with a pillow, against the floor, an unturned chair, using the hotel bible. None of them worked. Then I moved on to stabbing at it. The cork was synthetic, and seemed designed specifically to thwart me. I did get a paper clip through the cork, but that didn't accomplish much. Various methods of bending it and trying to create a hook were failures as well. Then I tried to make a two-pronged wine key out of… two keys, but I couldn't get them into the sides of the cork at all. Neither could I get the handle of the coffee spoon into the side of the cork.

I looked around the room for another time (this was an hour long process) and found something that I'd overlooked- the coat hangers! Without a moment to spare (I was really thirsty) I grabbed a hanger and bent it at the neck, so that the spiral part separated- a natural corkscrew! I plunged it into the cork, but was having a difficult time getting it all through. But in doing so, I must have loosed it up, because the cork began to slip into the bottle. I removed the hanger, grabbed the spoon, and banged in the cork using the hotel bible. The cork plunged into the wine, spraying only enough of it out of the bottle to make it dramatic.

The victory was delicious! If I only I could say that for the wine.

So all you need to open wine without a corkscrew is a hanger, a spoon, and a bible. If this information helps just one person get his or her drink on in equally dire circumstances, it will all have been worth it.

October 30, 2008
Clearly a Failure
There are various methods people use to make the clearer ice. To remove the air bubbles that make ice cloudy, people suggest boiling or refreezing the water. I decided to give a few options a try to see what worked best. But as we'll see, my results are less than conclusive.

Using individual sized apple sauce cups (these are great large cubes for drinking whisky, as you don't want the ice to melt too rapidly and water it down) I froze the following into ice:
- Control ice- regular ice poured from the Britta filter, probably two days old
- Re-frozen- above style ice cubes, melted and refrozen
- Boiled in pot for about 10 minutes
- Microwaved for about three minutes of boiling
Then I lined up all the ice in order of most clear to least. I had two of each style of ice, and my results were: Control, Control, Boiled, Microwaved, Refrozen, Microwaved, Refrozen, Boiled. None of the ice was totally clear. And the control should have been the least clear, not the most.

So… that didn't work at all. I will need to repeat this experiment. Any ideas on what I did wrong? the cups in the picture are upside down, so the most air/cloudiness was on the bottom of the container. Perhaps I need to pour it slowly into the tray to avoid adding air at that point? Drip it through a filter? Use a colder temperature? Suggestions gladly welcomed.

An index of all of the ice experiments on Alcademics can be found here.
October 29, 2008
A day with Charbay

The other week I sat down on the patio behind Swirl on Castro with Marko Karakasevic and Jenni soon-to-be Karakasevic of Charbay and tasted through their line of products.

Charbay is a family-run winery and distillery in Napa Valley. And boy do these people like to play with the still- in addition to wine, they make flavored vodka, rum, whiskey, walnut liqueur, grappa, pastis, port, and now some aperitifs. It's hard to keep up with them.

The aperitifs are neither eau de vie nor typical liqueurs, but flavored fortified wines. Currently they produce a pomegranate and a green tea flavor, which they like to think of as cocktails-in-a-glass. Importantly for retailers, these can be served at beer and wine-only venues.

We then tasted through the vodka line. When they make vodka at Charbay, really they're making extractions that are added to plain vodka to flavor it. (Most flavored vodkas are vodka plus flavors purchased from flavor companies.) Not only is this unique, they make their extractions using whole fruit- not just the peel or juice. They throw the entire fruit (okay, not the pomegranate, but the citrus) into a leaf shredder and into the tanks, then distill the mixture to extract the flavor components they're looking for. Marko told me he was able to get the Meyer lemon flavor less bitter than before (emphasizing the pith less and peel more). The grapefruit flavor is as bitter as it should be.

The Tahitian vanilla rum is triple pot distilled and made from concentrated sugar cane juice (not molasses) from Hawaii. All rums are made from sugar cane products. Rhum agricole and cachaca are made from sugar cane juice. Most rums are made from molasses (the leftovers after sugar is extracted from sugar cane juice). Ron Zacapa is made from a form of concentrated sugar cane juice without the sugar taken out. The sugar cane juice used by Charbay is flash dehydrated under a vaccuum to remove the water and concentrate the liquid. I want to research how this is different from what Zacapa uses. Project!

I think they should just call their whiskey "weed-lovers-whiskey", because it really tastes like marijuana. This is the second release of the product that was pot distilled from pilsner beer with three kinds of hops (this is probably where the weed aromas come in) and aged six years in new barrels. The first release was after three years in barrels.

Finally, they're going to release a pomegranate dessert wine (they really like the pomegranate over there) that smells like it's going to be ultra-syrupy, but is just pleasantly sweet. A nice way to end a meal, or a tasting session.

To sample the products in person, check out the early happy hour at Tra Vigna in Napa Valley, during the weekly Charbay tasting. Hopefully Jenni and Marko will be there, because they're really fun people with whom to share a drink. Or ten.

October 24, 2008
Icefusions

Gourmet.com has a story about a bartender making ice infused with herbs and spices like dried cherry, cardamom, and clove, which open up in cocktails and add new flavors to the drink as they melt.

I've had ice made from coconut water and bitters-infused ice before, but this is a new idea to me. Think of the possibilities!

No seriously, bartenders- go think of the possibilities and I'll be happy to sample your experiments.

October 18, 2008
Look at me, err, at what I wrote

I have a story in the latest issue of Malt Advocate– my first one for them. Hooray!

It's a round-up of whisky events at Tales of the Cocktail and the increased presence of whisky at the event in general. Run screaming to your local newsstand and read it.

You'll find my story right beneath the picture of Lew Bryson.

October 14, 2008