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  • Wait, Kuleto’s?

    In a very surprising move, classic Italian restaurant Kuleto’s in SF’s Union Square launched the city’s first all-organic cocktail menu.

    By me, in today’s SF Chronicle:

    What is likely San Francisco’s first all-organic cocktail menu popped up in a very unlikely place – Kuleto’s, the Italian restaurant in Union Square. The seven drinks on the menu are made with organic vodka, rum, gin, Tequila and Scotch, mixers, fruits, juices, syrups and even garnishes. Most are familiar drinks – cosmos, mojitos, lemon drops and margaritas – but you won’t find a martini or Manhattan because nobody seems to make an organic vermouth. The bar does serve non-organic drinks aplenty, but you’ll have to order off the menu for those.

    221 Powell St. (at O’Farrell), San Francisco; (415) 397-7720.

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  • All bar hands on deck

    By me, in today’s SF Chronicle:

    All bar hands on deck

    The problem with cocktail recipe books is they get all sticky when you bring them into the kitchen. The problem with fun-sized, plastic-coated cocktail recipes is that the recipes are usually overly sweet and taste terrible. Finally someone figured out a sensible solution- a cocktail card deck with recipes from one of the most respected books on the market: Dale DeGroff’s “The Craft of the Cocktail.” The 50 tabbed cards in “The Craft of the Cocktail Deck” ($14.95, Potter Style), feature a drink on the front and the recipe on the back and are divided into tabbed sections for Martinis, Inspired Classics, DeGroff’s Signature Classics and Frozen Cocktails. The margarita is unfortunately placed in the latter category but the cards are not laminated so cocktail snobs can black out the phrase, “Combine all ingredients in a blender.”

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  • Caliente Cocktails

    Here‘s a recent story I wrote for San Francisco Magazine about Latin cocktail bars, and in particular Cantina. I am known to spend some time drinking there on occasion.

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  • Champagne drinking tips

    1. Do not drink champagne. It is evil.
    2. Do not not drink champagne at Jardiniere‘s relaunch party, where Thad Vogler made seven kinds of punch, all of them with champagne. The punches may taste magnificent and restore your faith in the entire punch category, but you should not try them. They will tempt you to continue drinking them because they are so light and refreshing. It is a slippery slope.
    3. Do not do this starting at 6PM for the next three to four hours. You may note that Tracy Chapman, who is also at the party, looks not a day older than she did in 1988. Do not tell her.
    4. Do eat something if you are going to be drinking champagne, which you should not do. Why do you have to be such a vegetarian snob when appetizers are all meaty and delicious?
    5. Do not continue on to the “after-hours,” the hour being 10PM. If you do, it is likely they will serve you champagne.
    6. Remember, champagne is evil. Do not continue to drink the champagne.
    7. Do remember how you got home. It was probably not on a magic toboggan sliding along rainbows. It was probably not before 11PM.
    8. Do treat each champagne drinking session as a learning experience. Reflect on why you chose to drink champagne for the next 14 hours in bed with your pounding head under the covers.
    9. Do not get out of bed only to attend a tasting of 300 sakes.

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  • Popular Singles

    Roll out the single-barrel
    Bay Area watering holes snap up bottlings of exclusive whiskeys

    Camper English, Special to The Chronicle
    Friday, September 7, 2007

    The Cigar Bar & Grill in Jackson Square in San Francisco serves a Manhattan you can’t get anywhere else, as it’s made with the restaurant’s exclusive 10-year-old bourbon. Harris’ Restaurant and Nopa have exclusive bourbon, too, as does T-Rex Barbecue in Berkeley. None of these watering holes have stills in their backyards to produce their own spirits, but they each serve a different barrel of whiskey.

    Most whiskeys are blends of dozens of different barrels, sometimes fewer if they’re “small batch” whiskeys. The distillery’s master blender mixes barrels together to achieve the desired flavor profile consistent with previous batches.

    In the past few years, the master blender has had slightly less work to do, as single-barrel bottlings have become popular. In these bottlings, a barrel of exceptionally high quality (or an exceptionally old one) is put into bottles and labeled on its own. The resultant bottles are usually sold to multiple liquor stores, bars and restaurants, but increasingly, distilleries have begun promoting single-barrel bottlings to individual customers.


    Read the rest of my story in today’s Chronicle here.

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  • Caliente Cocktails

    In September’s San Francisco Magazine I have a story on Cantina, a bar I may have mentioned here once or two hundred times already, as part of the Latin cocktail trend. The story isn’t online, so run screaming to your local newsstand to pick up the new issue.

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  • Moonshine By the Bay

    Bay Area home distillers make modern-day moonshine
    Camper English, Special to The Chronicle
    Friday, August 24, 2007

    Moonshiners live among us. By day they appear to be respectable members of society, perhaps writing software to make your Internet experience run smoothly. But at night and on weekends, after a visit to the farmers’ market or a nice brunch, they work in secret, sterilizing equipment, taking specific gravity and temperature measurements, and waiting impatiently as their illegal hooch drip, drip, drips out of tiny stills.

    ” ‘Illegal’ is such a judgmental word,” jokes Doug (not his real name), who makes moonshine along with his friend Ron (also not his real name) at Ron’s house in the Upper Haight.

    The two have been distilling for less than a year. “We started home brewing, then we got into ‘advanced brewing,’ as we like to say to the neighbors,” Ron says.

    read the story here.

    The book I refer to in the story is this one- Moonshine! by Matthew Rowley. It combines moonshine lore and history with tons of practical advice for building your own still and making your own booze.

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  • Speakeasy’s hootenanny

    By me, in today’s SF Chronicle:

    Help celebrate Speakeasy Ales and Lagers’ 10-year anniversary Saturday with a “rousing, riveting, and spine-tingling blowout hullabaloo” party at the Bayview brewery. The free admission event features live music by Brittany Shane, Crosstops and other bands, a barbecue, and of course, beer. They’ll be debuting White Lightning Wheat Beer on tap, made with wheat, oats, orange peel and spices, that you can try in the 10-year commemorative tasting glass. The family-friendly (but 21 to drink) event runs from 2 to 7 p.m. at 1195 Evans Ave. (at Keith), San Francisco; (415) 642-3371.

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  • Getting to know you, and by “you” I mean “your drinks”

    Last week at the Rye cocktail competition, Dominic Venegas was one of the judges. Dominic set up the bar program at Range, bartends at Bourbon & Branch and Cantina, and has designed/revamped cocktail menus for several restaurants around town. Oh, and also he’s the spirits buyer for John Walker & Sons liquor store. In other words, he gets around.

    The competition was to make a Campari-based cocktail. The judges are seated in a separate area so they are blind as to which bartender has prepared each drink. After the judging I asked Dominic how the cocktails were. “The problem with it,” he said, “is that I know all of these guys and their styles already, so I could tell whose cocktail was whose.”

    I’m starting to know the feeling. If the drink has a pepper plus a fresh ingredient muddled together, it was likely created by Todd Smith of Bourbon & Branch. If the cocktail has wine when it seems completely unintuitive, check with Duggan McDonnell of Cantina. If it has maple syrup, it was almost definitely made by Jacques Bezuidenhout of the Starlight Room.

    Today I was reading the Tablehopper newsletter and heard of a new restaurant called Laiola. I checked the website to look at the drink menu. (Am I the only person who reads food blogs for the drinks? I just don’t care about food all that much.) This is the menu:

    OLD WORLD
    Sangria de la Dia, wine, sherry & seasonal fruit 7
    Tinto de Verano, Laïola tinto & Lemonaide over ice 6
    NEW WORLD
    Colada, Sanctuary tea infused vodka, coconut cream, pineapple & bitters 8
    Cuba Libre, Plantation grand reserve rum, cola & lime 8
    Mojo, flor de caña limon rum, mint, apricot liquor, lime, and soda 8
    Picasso Sour, Pisco, orange blossom water, lemon bitters, lime & egg whites 8
    The Sun Also Rises, Orinoco rum, vanilla, grapefruit & lime 8
    Toro de Fuego, Tequila, triple sec, lime and red pepper vinegar 8
    Valentia, Vodka, sherry and caramelized orange 8

    I hadn’t heard of this restaurant or who was behind it, and the prices don’t scream “celebrity mixologist,” but I said to myself, I THINK THIS PERSON REALLY KNOWS WHAT THEY’RE DOING. (I always talk to myself in capslock.)

    Back to the Tablehopper newsletter, I found that I was right- the menu was designed by Camber Lay, formerly of Frisson and Range. The clues I should have picked up were tea-infused vodka, and lime and red pepper vinegar. While other mixologists put together ingredients in new and fascinating ways, Camber is always creating weird new ingredients and techniques.

    Last week I sat next to Deborah Parker-Wong, who writes for Tasting Panel Magazine (as do I now) at the El Tesoro Anniversario dinner at Slanted Door. Deborah has an amazing palate that I’ve witnessed at multiple tasting events. She was talking about blind tasting. “If you taste it when it’s hot, when it’s cold, in different glasses, when you’re hungry, with food, in the morning- eventually, you just get it. So THAT’s what [some brand of wine I’d never heard of] is all about.”

    I drink enough of these guys’ cocktails in enough different situations that blind tasting cocktails sounds like a really fun challenge. Of course, it will involve much more “training of the palate,” but luckily it’s happy hour soon.

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  • So, so many muddlers

    If you have anything to do with the booze industry, you’re probably drowning in muddlers right now. I brought home seven from Tales of the Cocktail, and over the past month I’ve been averaging one new muddler every week. Not on purpose.

    With so many muddlers (and so few friends to give them to) one needs to find other uses for them. Here are some suggestions:

    Muddler Dominoes

    Muddler Toe Separators for Pedicures


    Muddler Jenga!

    Muddler Faux-Native Jewelry

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