For Bevvy.co, I wrote up Ice Tools for the Bar: Knives, Chisels, Saws, and More.
This story came out of my own curiosity as to which were the best type of tools to use for cutting and carving ice. So I asked a bunch of people who do it on the regular.
Since I wrote it I spend a whole lot of money on new tools, oops!
Read the story to learn of the most surprising – and cheapest- tool of all!
For AlcoholProfessor.com, I wrote up EcoSpirits, a company with a system for avoiding single-use glass bottles sold to bars. I've been following them for years and am psyched they've set up locations in the US now.
They fill from bulk shipping containers, put them into their custom-made and reusable "ecoTotes" and refill them as needed.
Read all about it at AlcoholProfessor.com. The full text of the post, which first appeared on Alcohol Professor, is below.
A Big Step Toward Sustainable Sipping: ecoSPIRITS
On one end, you have bartenders using paper straws, dehydrated citrus wheel garnishes, and recycled cardboard drink coasters in order to be more sustainable on premise. On the other end, some spirits distillers have been embracing lower-carbon practices such as using solar power, recycling heat, and reducing water use. But in between the distillery and the bar, producers ship fancy heavy designer glass bottles of their spirits all over the world. Those bottles are used a single time and then discarded or put into the recycling bin to be crushed up and reprocessed.
The Problem With Glass Bottles
Having a custom bottle is an important part of marketing for spirits brands, especially when those bottles are sold at retail. But at a busy nightclub where bartenders are slinging hundreds of Vodka Red Bulls every night, most customers never see the bottle, and all those bottles still end up in the bin at the end of the night. In other bars, cocktails are fully or partially batched to speed up service and again, the designer bottles are often not even visible to the customer.
A Solution
In the middle between the spirits producers and the bartenders, one company has found a very specific niche in which to make a big move in sustainability. ecoSPIRITS is a company that evolved out of a bar group in Singapore but has since gone global with a very good idea.
Ecospirits receives spirits in bulk containers at their facilities (ecoPLANTs), fills them into their custom-made reusable totes (ecoTOTES) and then a distributor brings them to on-premise accounts. The distributor also picks up empties for refill back at the Ecoplant. (We’ll write these words with typical capitalization going forward to make it easier on your eyes.) There is no single use glass in the process and none in the bin at the end of the night.
How It Works
The way it works is quite interesting. Spirits are not bottled at their source, let’s say in France for example, but shipped in bulk plastic totes to one of Ecospirits’ Ecoplants, let’s say in Florida. In most countries in which the company operates, the Ecototes are 4.5 liters (6, 750ml bottles’ worth), but due to US legal bottle sizes, they are 1.75-liter totes here. Ecototes are refillable glass bottles (as manufacturers prefer) inside a protective casing that also makes them stackable.
When those totes are empty, they are returned to the distributor and sent back to the Ecoplant to be thoroughly sterilized and refilled. The totes themselves are outfitted with monitors and tracking that helps both traceability, accountability, and with inventory. They also have automatic pour spouts that dispense in specific volumes- such as a few ounces or a 750ml bottle’s worth. They can be kept out of site in the stock room or made into conversation pieces with placement on the back bar.
While a few specific wine and spirits producers have attempted bottle refill initiatives around the US, these all rely on consumers or bars individually returning those bottles to the production facilities for refill or exchange. Thus, these systems are pretty limited in their geographical range, as well as in the range of products that can be refilled into any particular bottle.
Producers Using The System & Producers That Can’t (Yet)
Instead, Ecospirits works with many different brands from ones owned by huge companies like Pernod-Ricard’s Beefeater Gin, Havana Club Rum, and Absolut Vodka to smaller brands like Avallen Calvados, Compass Box Whisky and Roots Marlborough Gin. To be available in a particular market, a brand’s owner must agree to make the product available for distribution in this system and ship their liquid in bulk to the Ecoplant. Ecospirits partners with a local distributor that takes orders and delivers totes to accounts, as well as picks up empties to go back to the plant.
Not every type of spirit is a fit for this system at the moment. Single malt scotch whiskies and 100% agave tequilas, for example, must be bottled in their home countries, so they can’t be shipped in bulk and bottled on foreign ground.
Geographical Limitations
Another complexity is that the refill facilities are best located near shipping ports to receive the bulk liquids. Thus, most distribution of the Ecototes is limited to venues that are within driving range of the coastal refill plants, rather than throughout the entire country. In the United States, the first two Ecoplants are located in Los Angeles (and the distribution region includes all the way to Orange County and San Diego), and Miami. It might be a while before they get to Chicago, but it could happen. Ecospirits has plans to bring additional Ecoplants online in the United States in the second half of 2023.
Obviously, not every single spirit and liqueur from every part of the world is a good fit for this system. Spirits used most often at bars – the “well” spirits – make the most sense as they’re reached for the most often, and don’t sit on the back bar shelves as displays. Just think of how many Aviations you’d have to serve each week to make a 1.75 liter tote of creme de violette worthwhile!
Deconstructing Cocktails
But thinking about specific cocktails and their ingredients is a specialty of the company. For example, the Raffles in Singapore serves up to 1200 Singapore Slings to tourists each day, so Ecospirits worked to ensure that all of the alcoholic ingredients in the drink were available in Ecototes. These include Widges London Dry Gin, Luxardo Sangue Morlacco Cherry Liqueur, and Pierre Ferrand Dry Curaçao. Ecospirits says that in the first year in 2018, they were able to save tens of thousands of glass bottles just for this one drink at this one bar.
They have their eyes on a few other famous drinks too. Zdenek Kastanek, Managing Director for Ecospirits USA, named the Irish Coffee at The Buena Vista in San Francisco and the Miami Vice at the Fontainebleau Miami as drinks on his future wish list.
Spirits brands available with the system can vary by country, and Ecospirits frequently issues press releases about new brands signing up for their system. Diageo, Pernod-Ricard, and Remy Cointreau brands are available in different markets. For the United States, brands who’ve already signed up include Tried & True Vodka, Los Arcos Destilado de Agave, La Travesia Mezcal, Widges Gin, Mackintosh Whisky, and Candela Rum.
Sustainability initiatives are needed at the bar and at spirits manufacturing plants, and Ecospirits has found an innovative sweet spot to make a further positive impact in between the two.
I hadn’t noticed just how many different ways bartenders were incorporating the same basic shape until I saw them all together on the menu at the bistro Causwells in San Francisco. “This whole menu I just gravitated to circles,” says Elmer Mejicanos, beverage director and managing partner. “I should have called it the circle menu.”
I wrote about dots and spots in cocktails for Vinepair. Read it here!
Punch editor-in-chief Talia Baiocchi writes about another ice trend on TikTok, that of teeny tiny ice cubes.
It's a fun story and she asked me to share my thoughts.
In an interview on Forbes.com with fellow ice nerd Jonathan Baker of Portland, Maine, I get a shout-out as the originator of the directional freezing system.
The article is interesting all around and the pictures, taken by Baker, are great. You can see more on his Instagram account here.
I'm quoted in this article about fancy ice cubes in the New York Times.
The Height of Domestic Luxury? Designer Ice.
Join me in my obsession, preorder The Ice Book today!
In the February issue of Wine Enthusiast magazine, I was quoted on one page about the medicinal history of sparkling water and my book Doctors and Distillers was cited.
On the next page, my forthcoming The Ice Book was cited and I provided quotes for a story on ice. That story just went up online and you can read it here.
That's pretty awesome, IMO!
I spoke with Martini and Rossi’s Master Blender, Giuseppe “Beppe” Musso, and Senior Master Herbalist Ivano Tonutti to learn how they made their new nonalcoholic vermouths.
It was fascinating!
The story is now live at AlcoholProfessor.com.
In my first story for Vinepair.com, I wrote about patterned ice – the history and the trend.
I'm pretty proud of this one! Read it here.
I reviewed 5 books for Alcohol Professor. The reviews are here. I've also pasted the post below, which originally appeared on AlcoholProfessor.com.
The books are (links are to Amazon)
Boozy Book Reviews: Late Summer 2022
New cocktail books are hitting the market at a faster rate than any normal person can review them, and yet we persist! Here is the latest round of new books to stimulate your brain about whetting your whistle.
Cocktails of Asia: Regional Recipes and the Spirited Stories Behind Them by Holly Graham
This book comes from editor of DRiNK Magazine Asia Holly Graham, who is based in Hong Kong but travels extensively, as is evident from her Instagram account @hollygrahamdrinks. Much like that snapshot of her life, the book is a snapshot of the most important cocktails, bars, and bartenders in Asia. The book features recipes of course, and they tend to be the type of drinks found at hotel bars on the World’s 50 Best Bars list with unique regional ingredients and molecular mixology techniques used to prepare them. The first ingredient in the first cocktail in the book, A Moveable Feast by Agung Prabowo of Hong Kong bar Penicillin, is vodka distilled with clams and seawater.
While many of the cocktails may serve more as inspiration rather than direct instruction to the home bartender, the drinks provide a window into both the theory and techniques of modern mixology in Asia. Before each recipe, Graham introduces the bar and bartender from whence it came, putting into perspective the city’s bar scene and the bartender’s history and role within it. Several photos of each bar accompany each recipe, providing a helpful visual image of where we’d be enjoying that cocktail; not just what is in it.
In addition to the cocktails attached to specific bars, included are several classics of Asia (including the Bamboo and Pegu Club). Other short sections include the aromas in baijiu, the history of Batavia arrack, and information about Japanese bartending beyond what we know about the hard shake and ice diamond carving. Cocktails of Asia provides a great deal of information about the best bars in a large part of the world; after all, a snapshot is worth a thousand words.
Black Mixcellence by Tamika Hall with Colin Asare-Appiah
This recipe collection comes from Kingston Imperial, the publisher that issued T-Pain’s Can I Mix You a Drink? book in 2021, featuring the same dramatic style of drink photography of bright drinks set against dark backgrounds. It is a collection of 70 recipes, mostly originals, from Black bartenders. A majority of those recipes come from Asare-Appiah, a globally known long-time brand advocate at Bacardi. The recipes are all relatively easy to execute at home, with a few infused syrups and other homemade ingredients, but nothing that requires a centrifuge.
The book is introduced with some brief but interesting history of Black mixology and traditions, including the history of Caribbean rum, the tradition of “pouring one out” for lost friends and family, the tale of Nearest Green who taught Jack Daniel to distill, and the Black Mixologists Club dating to 1898. Other featured players in Black drink history introduced in the book include bartenders Cato Alexander of New York and Dick Francis of DC, moonshiner Bertie “Birdie” Brown, and three mixologists of old famous for their Mint Juleps.
The Bartender’s Cure: A Novel by Wesley Straton
As the narrator Samantha learns about craft cocktail bartending in this novel, so too will you, down to the tiny details. You’ll learn about cocktail history, shaking versus stirring, how bartenders live and behave and talk about their regulars, building rounds and the order of adding ingredients to the shaker, the “bartender’s handshake,” and so much more. The Bartender’s Cure will give the reader a crash course in mixology without ever having to get sticky in the process.
This backseat bartending is wrapped inside a plot of a young woman killing a year in New York before starting grad school but falling in love with the profession and a fellow bartender. The book is categorized as fiction but it’s the true-life story of so many mixologists who abandoned their well-made plans and followed their passions.
The Little Book of Whiskey Cocktails by Bryan Paiement
As advertised, this is a little book containing whiskey cocktails: 40 vintage and modern cocktails (drinks like the Paper Plane, Penicillin, and Kentucky Buck along with the Mint Julep and Irish Coffee), plus ten originals from the author that all sound good too. Each cocktail is introduced with a paragraph or two on its history (for the classics) or inspiration (for the originals). The front of the book is filled out with a brief introduction to whiskey history and global whiskey styles. It is all pretty simple, and all packaged in a cute little book with a silver shaker on the cover, and it should fulfill its role perfectly as a second item in the gift bag when buying someone a bottle of whiskey as a present.
Cocktails, A Still Life by Todd M. Casey, Christine Sismondo, and James Waller
In the last couple of years there have been a slew of cocktail books paired with a concept: witchcraft, fashion design, puns, Star Wars, movies, books, and more. The problem with many of them is that the author may succeed in coming up with great drink names to pair with the concept in their area of expertise but fail at coming up with good-tasting drinks; or the drink descriptions are filled with since-disproven cocktail myths rather than accurate facts. In Cocktails, A Still Life, the text of the book was mostly written by noted cocktail and spirits author/journalist Christine Sismondo, so the text is of equal quality to the concept.
As for the drinks, the sixty cocktails are all classics or modern classics, organized into occasions for drinking like aperitivo hour and after dinner. It’s a solid selection with few surprises. But this is a cocktail book of art; the oil paintings that accompany each drink are the focus. They seem very well done (to this cocktail writer) and as noted by coauthor James Waller, artist Todd M. Casey is, “especially adept at painting the transparent glass and shiny surfaces that appear in any realistically rendered picture of cocktails, wine, or beer.” It is a celebration of art in the glass and on the canvas.
