For Men’s Journal, I wrote about the choice of sparkling water for your whiskey highball.
Read it here.
Category: camper_clips
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How To Highball
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The Ice Book Gets a Four-Page Spread in Men’s Journal
I wrote up a relatively short article for Men’s Journal’s Fall 2025 issue but hadn’t seen the final copy until just now: turns out they gave it a four-page spread in the print magazine.
As always the photographs from Allison Webber are stunning. Here’s a preview.
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Speaking at the Museum of the Eye Dec 28
I’ll be giving a short talk at the event “Celebratory Bubbles, Not Eye Troubles” at the Museum of the Eye in San Francisco on December 28th. It’s an annual New Year event.
My talk (probably a short one of 20ish minutes) is “Eye-Openers, Corpse Revivers, and Anti-Fogmatics: The Medicinal Morning Cocktail.” It’s based on stuff from my book Doctors and Distillers, of course.
More info and link to tickets is here.
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Splitting Up My Instagram Account
My Alcademics Instagram account is looking a bit… scattered between my personal posts, promoting my cocktail history tours, books I’m reading, and stuff that comes in the mail. So I’ve decided to split it up:
@Alcademics is my business account where you’ll hear news and updates about my talks, tours, classes, books, and writing.
@Camper.English is my personal account; day-in-the-life type stuff where I’ll post about the books I’m reading, works-in-progress, what I’m up to, goofy stuff.
@SFDrinks will be for San Francisco drinks content – bars and cocktails in San Francisco, and the home of my Cocktail and Bar History Tour. I’ll share historical stuff as well as what’s going on around town now (if I can keep up with all that).
Or, if you just want to keep current with the basics, I have a monthly email list where I post recent articles and my talks and events, no need for a million pictures of everything.
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How the Quest for Quinine Led to the Creation of Chemotherapy
My latest for AlcoholProfessor.com is the story of how the scientific quest to produce artificial quinine led to the invention of chemotherapy. It’s a cool story IMO. Read it here.
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A Good Bar Needs Good Ice
I gave some quotes about ice for a story on the website Shortlist. They also interviewed other people who are correct in saying that better ice makes a better drink, and that attention to quality of ice signifies attention to quality of cocktails.
I have the final quote in the story, in response to the reporter’s question about the cost of fancy ice increasing the cost of cocktails:“Is it an extra cost? Yes. But really, it’s hard as a consumer to assess the individual costs of each ingredient in a cocktail. A bar could lower the price by serving it in a paper cup, too, but then it wouldn’t feel special. And that’s what this creativity with ice is about, too”.
As always, you can learn more about The Ice Book here. -
Camper English on the Curious Bartender Podcast
I was a guest on Tristan Stephenson’s The Curious Bartender Podcast last week, talking for nearly two hours about.. a lot of stuff.
You can find the podcast on your favorite service from The Curious Bartender website, or to go directly to the YouTube video of it click here.
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From Blocks to Rocks: How Fancy Ice Cubes Get Made
In my latest story for Food & Wine, I tell how those big clear ice cubes you find in cocktail bars are made. They don’t just pop out of a machine – every big clear cube you’ve had has been hand-harvested or hand-cut.
Check out the story at this link.
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David Wondrich & Me Nov 12 in SF
Cocktail historian David Wondrich’s latest book is the terrific Comic Book History of the Cocktail.
He’ll be in SF on Nov 12, in conversation with me at Omnivore Books on Food. Here are the details of the event. It’s free to attend.
If you haven’t picked up a copy of the book yet, order one from Omnivore, and join us either way.
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Turning Whiskey Into Gas
I wrote a story for Offrange about whiskey stillage. It is about how a couple of large distilleries – Jim Beam and Jack Daniels – are letting little critters eat their stillage and burp out methane, which is then cleaned up and used as renewable natural gas.
The process of writing this one was a doozy – I spent so long researching it that I made less than California minimum wage on it. I started looking at the Buffalo Trace/Meridian announcement, but when I tried to get more information, both companies refused to tell me anything.
I then started looking at corn fuel ethanol plants and how they process their stillage. They mostly make DDGS it seems, but are increasingly harvesting some other higher-value products like high-protein animal feed and corn oil.
I learned that, due in part to regionality (where the distilleries are located) and part due to the value of corn ethanol vs bourbon, the fuel distilleries see stillage as a coproduct while the distilleries see it is a byproduct – and many distillers give it away for free to farmers to use for animal feed or to apply it as fertilizer.
Then I further learned that in Scotland, having a renewable natural gas plant next to distilleries is pretty common, so we’re just lagging behind.