VinePair writer Tim McKirdy wrote a story on How to Create Perfectly Clear Ice, so naturally he included Directional Freezing, and the method I created way back in 2009 using a picnic cooler.
This is just a quick post to link to it so that I don't forget. Check it out here.
Men's Journal did a story on directional freezing highlighting my cooler method of 11 years ago. Spoiler: It still works.
I was interviewed for a story on ice that appeared in the Wall Street Journal this week.
Here's the story link if you have subscriber access.
The intro part that mentions me is below.
In this story in The Guardian, I'm mentioned as "perhaps the pre-eminent cocktail ice scholar," in the section about ice snobs.
I'll take it.
The story isn't about me at all, but it's a long read (no really, it's a very long read) about the packaged ice industry through the lens of one major ice provider, taking into account the history of ice in food in drink overall.
Writer George Reynolds did a great job with it and I've got it bookmarked to read again this weekend and chase down all the historical threads I didn't already know about.
Give it a read, I hope you enjoy nerding out on this stuff as I do.
Cognac has long been a category marketed as a luxury item like jewelry or precision watches: You don't need to know how it's made (they seem to be saying), just trust in the brand.
But over the years, particularly in the past couple years, I've been able to learn a bit more about the category. Like whisky and later gin (anyone remember when every brand's botanical mix was a secret?), cognac brands seem to be coming around to transparency. Consumers (nerds and otherwise) want to know where their food comes from, and their booze too.
Long story short, in this post I've pulled together some of my favorite previous cognac writing.
All About Cognac. This post, from 2009(!) is an intro to the category.
The Complicated Aging Process for Cognac, as Seen at Cognac Hardy. This (2015) was the first time I really got to know about how dynamic aging can be in cognac production.
What's the Difference Between Cognac and Armagnac? A charticle.
A Visit to Merlet Cognac and Liqueurs in France. I've been to a bunch of cognac distilleries (click the cognac tag at the bottom of this post to scroll through all the cognac posts) but this one was interesting because they also make liqueurs.
Between the Heart and the Tails, the 'Seconds'. A post dedicated to a narrow cut of cognac- and rum!
A Fascinating Interview with Remy Martin Cognac Cellarmaster Baptiste Loiseau. A really interesting (so says me) article that gets to the heart of what interests me about cognac: It is a directed exercise; cognac is crafted, not just blended from random barrels.
Ramping up Aromatics in Cognac: How Camus Does it. Camus cognac showing the numbers on how they try to make their cognac aromatic.
Cognac Hine series – A wrote a series of posts (sponsored by Hine importer Hotaling & Co) about how this brand of cognac is produced. I learned so much doing so, particularly around early landed cognac, aging conditions, and additives.
I hope my fellow cognac nerds will take time to read through some of these.
Hopefully if you're a regular reader of Alcademics you know all about how to make crystal clear ice in a variety of ways, so you're not going to learn anything from this post!
I just wanted to denote and share for posterity a mention of my clear ice process was in Cook's Illustrated in the January/February 2020 issue.
The section is online at this link.
Interestingly, they also reposted the Clarified Milk Punch article that I wrote with Cook's Illustrated editor-in-chief Dan Souza. The story originally went up in 2016 on Cook's Science (RIP). However, they also recently produced a video about the process that you can view below.
Over at Punch, Drew Lazor wrote a story about the Kold-Draft ice machine. He covers the role the big clear ice cube maker played in the cocktail renaissance (I didn't realize it was around so long), and how many bars are abandoning the machine today due to its problematic performance record.
Lazor quotes me in the story:
“I used to say at the time that the Venn diagram of America’s best cocktail bars and bars that owned Kold-Draft machines was a near-perfect circle,” recalls drinks journalist and ice enthusiast Camper English.
Check out the story on Punch.
THIS WAS FUN: I was paid to go to a pop-up live rat bar and review it for Eater.com.
I had a good time with it, of course. In describing the drink, I wrote
On my visit the cocktail was pre-poured at least a few minutes earlier, with ice melting on top of the drink, adding a watery welcome layer to the sickly sweet entry-level cocktail dying in the cup below. The drink’s garnish is perhaps the most exciting component, featuring the root-end of a beet intended to mimic a decapitated rat’s tail (so, de-butt-itated?), which to be fair, is awesome.
Please give it a read. More pictures from the Rat Bar are below.
I was first asked to help build out the voting panel globally by Lucy Britner, then an editor at Drinks International Magazine that was the creator and owner of the awards. I met Britner the previous year at a cocktail competition where she saw I had a large network of international bartenders. It was a good fit as they wanted to grow the list into what it eventually became.
Drinks International started the World's 50 Best Bars list two years earlier in 2009, and they had conducted their polling via telephone! The 2010 World's Best Bars list supplement in PDF is here. At the time the top bars were Milk & Honey London, PDT, Harry's Bar Venice, Milk & Honey NYC, Buddha Bar Paris, Pegu Club, Death & Co, Employees Only, Harry's New York Bar Paris, and The Academy (formerly LAB).
At first I was a global polling coordinator, reaching out to bartenders, brand ambassadors, cocktail journalists, and other cocktailian world travelers I knew in every country. To toot my own horn a bit, my selection of global contacts (in part, I was not the sole coordinator) helped grow the reputation of the W50BB list into the most respected list of its kind over the next few years. Not only was my reputation as an honest and thorough journalist good for the credibility of the list, the judges I chose brought the same qualities to the voting panel.
I still think that you can argue with the selection of bars that win, the voting procedures of one list versus another, and with ranking bars in lists like this in general, but it's impossible to deny that the voting panel is solid. (Actually it might be possible to deny it now – the list of voters used to be public but no longer is, in order to prevent any potential bribery. But I'm telling you as of 2018 the voters were the best of the industry.)
Later I was assigned the role as polling coordinator just of the US and Canada, which was still a ton of work to ensure we had voters from every region of the countries and not just 100 voters from New York. In my last year of the gig, I achieved just under 40% female voters (not perfect, but pretty good). The European poling coordinator was and still is Hamish Smith of Drinks International, and we both worked incredibly hard on the back end to ensure the list was always fairly executed. We had many wonky conversations about things like "can you vote for a bar inside another bar, or is that considered the same bar?"
The World's 50 Best Bars was purchased by William Reed Media, owners of the World's 50 Best Restaurants list, in 2017. The restaurant list works a bit differently, with unpaid regional polling coordinators. It seemed clear with the new management that they wanted to work differently, bringing the bar list more inline with the restaurant one, and that my time as US/Canada polling coordinator would eventually come to an end. It did, and the 2019 list will be handled by a new polling coordinator. I will leave it to that person to announce their involvement, as I'm not sure how they intend to move forward with choosing voters but the contact page is here if you have questions.
So for all my past voters, thank you for honesty and for meeting your voting deadlines, even if it took a few reminders for most of you 🙂
A few months after this year's Tales of the Cocktail, I received the feedback from my seminar Bitter Flavors, Taste the Rainbow. I did pretty good!
On the four categories: overall seminar, presenter quality, handouts quality, and amount learned, I received a rating of 9 out of 10 on all.
Positive comments that came in from attendees:
Of the negative feedback, most was that I covered too much material (always better than too little, my greatest fear is that people will complain they didn't learn anything), or that the pace was too fast/topic was too advanced for some people (same). One person was mad about the font size of my handout. Two people said some of the slides were hard to read, so that's something I'll work on for next year.
Feedback is always tough but luckily I had a ton of very positive responses to compensate for the negative ones. Go me.