ABV in San Francisco won the Best New Cocktail Bar award at Tales of the Cocktail in 2015.
I decided to interview one of the owners, Ryan Fitzgerald, on what he feels they did right and wrong, and what changed from initial plans, when opening it.
There are some really good and interesting tips for other bar owners to consider; stuff about bar ergonomics and having bartenders working the floor.
I wrote a piece for Liquor.com on armagnac – not so much on armagnac generally, but on how bartenders might quickly describe to customers armagnac and how it's different from cognac.
I asked a bunch of people what language they use, and took the best responses.
In my latest story for PopularScience.com, I wrote about the new Hangar 1 Fog Point Vodka, which was diluted with fog-harvested water from San Francisco; most of it from beneath Sutro Tower on Twin Peaks.
In another deviation from their standard blend of grain spirit with grape, this product is distilled from 100% biodynamic wine from Bonny Doon – they actually purchased it in bottle, dumped the bottles and distilled.
Then the batch was diluted with 1000 liters of fog water that had been boiled and filtered through carbon.
Yesterday I visited Tilden Park in the East Bay, where a volunteer has two fog catchers hidden on the steep hills. It was unfortunately sunny, but our guide squirted water from a spray bottle to show us how the nets on the fog catcher pick up 50% of the water that passes through them – pretty impressive. The small fog catchers get from 1L per day, now up to 1.5L, and they expect them to pick up 3-5L per day in the foggiest season.
Anyway, check out the story on PopSci.com!
In a post for PopularScience.com I wrote about a technology being employed to toast wine and now whiskey barrels with infrared light.
Buffalo Trace released their latest Experimental Collection bourbon with 6.5 year old whisky aged in barrels treated with infrared light.
The technology replaces the toasting phase of barrel-making, not the charring stage, and can be used to toast wood without getting it all smoky.
The process imparts different flavors to the bourbon, as they found out.
Check out the story on PopSci.com!
I wrote a story for Popular Science on the science of barrel aging. The story was inspired by a trip to The Glenlivet where I tasted a 50-year-old whisky without any smoky qualities – but 50 years ago this and most whisky would have been at least lightly peated.
So I went into the article specifically looking for what happens with the smoke, but ended up writing about wood interactions as well.
To do the story, I read several wood science articles sent to me by Diageo whisky ambassador/smart-guy Ewan Morgan, spoke with Dr Bill Lumsden from Glenmorangie, interviewed Bryan Davis from Lost Spirits, and illustrated the story with a chart from Lew Bryson's excellent book Tasting Whisky.
Hopefully I didn't get anything wrong. Read it here.
While I was in Sydney for the Bacardi Legacy global cocktail competition earlier this year, I checked out a bunch of the bars.
Here is a write-up I wrote for Departures.com of several of them more or less in the Downtown areas closest to the Opera House.
…and I didn't even make drinks.
I gave two full-length seminars and one mini-seminar at Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans this year. For my seminar on Prehistoric Cocktail Technology, I went kinda big.
Here is my packing list, without multiples. 99 things, dayumn.
sugar
U-Fizz hoses
Plus I packed 200 baggies of dehydrated liqueur for my other seminar and some other stuff. Perhaps the greatest achievement was fitting it all into 3 suitcases.
Good times! Thanks to those who attended!
In my latest piece for Details.com I wrote about the history and current status of popcorn in drinks, be it fat-washed in or garnished atop.
It turns out that a million different places are doing it, and I mentioned about half of them and the various ways they're incorporating the movie food into the drinks.
Over the past year I've noticed the Gibson popping up on cocktail menus, so I decided to have a deeper look and write about it for Details.com.
Way back in 2010, I wrote a story for Mixology Magazine about Eggnog. The story was published in German (I wrote it in English and they translated) but this year they put the English version of the story online.
It covers what I could learn about eggnog at the time (keep in mind this is 4 years ago), including the history of the drink and its possible relation to British egg drinks like posset and wassail, along with other American drinks like Grog and the Tom & Jerry.
It also covers international egg drinks, including:
The story also includes a few eggnog recipes. Check it out here.