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  • Brunch drinks

    By me, in today’s SF Chronicle:

    Daytime Cocktails for New Years Brunch
    Camper English, Special to the Chronicle

    New Year’s Day often arrives with one pondering the previous night’s indulgences and the resulting aftereffects. On the upside, this can also be done with a cocktail in hand.

    Whether consuming them to nurse the previous night’s hangover or just to pass the lazy New Year’s holiday, adults have a free pass to enjoy cocktails before noon on Tuesday.

    Typical brunch cocktails include the bloody Mary, mimosa, screwdriver and Irish coffee, with fresh derivations of these standards now on morning menus throughout the Bay Area. Additionally, frothy Southern breakfast drinks like the Ramos gin fizz are coming back into vogue, though drinkers’ aversions to raw eggs and the negative associations with imbibing in the morning may be obstacles to their popularity.

    In “The Joy of Drinking,” author Barbara Holland addresses the National Institutes of Health’s “pompous treatise” against readministration of alcohol (more widely known as “the hair of the dog that bit you”) to cure the hangover, for fear that it encourages alcoholism.

    She writes, “I don’t know what social circles the NIH travels in, but I myself have never seen any sufferer, after shakily sipping his bloody Mary, let out a whoop, grab the vodka bottle and chug it down.”

    Read the rest of the story here.

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  • Lalique- So Chic!

    By me, in today’s SF Chromicle:

    Splurge on a $12,000 bottle of scotch
    Though the product isn’t available until January, the whiskey lover in your life probably won’t mind the IOU for this $12,000 Macallan 55-year-old single-malt Scotch packaged in a custom Lalique crystal bottle. The spirit inside is unusual for Macallan as it has more of an earthy, peaty profile than their younger whiskies, and the funky bottle on the outside is unusual in that there are only 420 of them on the market. (To get one, inquire at Macallan55@remyusa.com.)

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  • Boozeless Cocktails

    By me, in today’s SF Chronicle:

    Drink Menus Explore Virgin Territory with Alcohol-Free Cocktails
    Camper English, Special to the Chronicle

    Bay Area restaurants and bars are increasingly devoting space on their menus to alcohol-free drinks. These concoctions are more complicated than simple sodas and juices, involving the same glassware, seasonal ingredients and fresh garnishes as drinks with the hard stuff.

    This trend of enticing consumers with nonalcoholic cocktails, rather than leaving it to them to request a virgin version of another drink, owes much to the current emphasis in better cocktail bars on creating drinks with seasonal ingredients. These fresh drinks can be translated fairly easily into alcohol-free versions, whereas in other bars, a nonalcoholic Jack and Coke is just a Coke.

    Josh Harris, bar manager of Palmetto on Union Street in Cow Hollow, says that in the first month or so of being open, the menu listed only drinks with alcohol, but patrons would see the fresh cocktails being made and request alcohol-free versions.

    “Some of them translated (to nonalcoholic drinks) very well, and some of them not well at all,” he says.

    Read the rest of the story here.

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  • New bars in the Bay Guardian

    I contributed this round-up of new drinking venues to the San Francisco Bay Guardian. As I was taking notes on the venues that opened in the past year, I realized that there are way to many of them to list. The final article has 32 new venues listed, and it doesn’t include a third of the wine bars that opened, nor several of the venues that renovated their whole schtick, such as bacar and Jardinière, nor many of the new restaurants with good cocktail programs even though I included a bunch.

    No wonder I’ve been so busy.

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  • ChocoCaberYoga

    By me, in today’s SF Chronicle:

    Raise a Glass to Yoga Class

    A sense of relaxation, the loss of calories and increased flexibility are some of the benefits that come with yoga practice, but the just-opened Cocoon Urban Day Spa and Local Kitchen and Wine Merchant have teamed up with some rewards that are a bit more tangible. On Dec. 20, from 7 to 9 p.m., they’ll be running their “Yoga, Wine, Chocolate and Cheese” workshop. (So much for that loss of calories.) It begins with a 90-minute yoga flow class lead by the spa’s yoga coordinator Danielle Marie Giovanello and attended by Local’s sommelier Mark Bright, followed by a session of decadent gluttony, or as they put it, “delve deep into your visual, auditory, kinesthetic, gustatory and olfactory senses.” Either way, it’s a tasting of two kinds of wine plus organic cheese and chocolate pairings after class. $95. 330 First St. (at Folsom), San Francisco; (415) 777-0100.

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  • Genevieve

    By me, in today’s SF Chronicle:

    Fritz Maytag and the team at Anchor Distilling are so far ahead of the curve they must get bored waiting for us to catch up. They’ve just released Genevieve, a genever-style gin they began developing in 1996, which has been sitting in a tank ever since. Genever is an old type of gin (before the modern London dry style came into being) that was used in some of the earliest published cocktail recipes currently in vogue.

    New gins (including Anchor’s Junipero) are column-distilled into a neutral spirit then infused with botanicals including juniper berries and redistilled. Genevieve, on the other hand, is first distilled from malted grains in a pot still, similar to whiskey, before being flavored and redistilled in another custom-built pot still. The result is a gin with the added flavor and texture of an unaged whiskey.

    The first release was only 700 bottles sold mostly to cocktailian bars and a few liquor stores in order to avoid confusion with Anchor’s other gin. They’re currently producing more of the product for when the rest of us figure it out.

    Reading this now I’m uncomfortable with the phrase, “pot still, similar to whiskey.” I actually wrote “whisky,” meaning scotch, and it was copy-edited to “whiskey,” but this could also be incorrect as blended scotch whisky has column distilled whisky mixed in. Bourbon whiskey is mostly column distilled. On the other hand, the phrase “malted grains” does make it similar to (some) whisk(e)y, and it’s certainly what people think of when you say “malted grains”.

    So I’m just going to declare that phrase as ambiguously incorrect. I’m also going to declare that writing about whisk(e)y is a big pain in the ass.

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  • Breaking News

    So Lance Winters of St. George Spirits let the cat out of the bag that his absinthe was approved at the end of last week. Well, local booze news doesn’t get any bigger than that so I told my editors at the Chronicle it shouldn’t wait until Friday’s Wine Section and they agreed. Stacy Finz wrote the story with my contributions mushed in here are there (it was my scoop though- just saying). We were in a race to at least tie with the NYTimes story that also came out today.

    But in any case, by all accounts the St. George Absinthe Verte rocks. But cool your jets for a minute. The stuff written about in the stories is not even in bottles yet, people. The labels will be made the end of next week (Lance said he bribed the label people with booze to do a rush order.)

    I don’t know if either story mentioned it, but it should be on sale beginning Friday Dec 21rst at the distillery in Alameda. The distillery will be open at least regular hours 12-7 Friday and Saturday and 12-6 Sunday. I think initially you’ll only be able to buy it at the source until its distributed.

    Field trip, anyone?

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  • Bourbon, Bourbon, Bourbon

    Great NYTimes article on bourbon, with ratings of their top pics. I tend to agree with the reviews (though I haven’t tried all the brands), though I might switch the Knob Creek and Woodford Reserve (two of the most available at bars) ratings. Woodford Reserve has become my airline liquor of choice- usually available, great on the rocks (it tastes like straw to me), and the little mini bottle is so damn cute.

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  • Black (Out) Friday


    The SF Chronicle’s Wine Section comes out with the now-annual gift guide today. To read the intro and all of the items, start here, then follow the links in the box on the right.

    I listed some suggestions for gift books (Felten, Wondrich, In the Land of Cocktails), Gary Regan tells us must-have bottles of each kind of booze for your liquor cabinet, Jay Brooks tells us his ideal beer imports, I give a list of essential glassware for the home bar, and in this list of miscellany I pick some whiskies and a calendar.

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  • Hidden bars in Time


    Hey look, I wrote a little thing in Time magazine’s Style and Design issue on hidden cocktail bars as a national trend. Here it is online, and here is the scan.

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