Nico de Soto of Mace in New York has visited 49 out of the World's 50 Best Bars 2016 list. He'll hit the last one shortly, and if his predictions are correct, also finish the 2017 list (announced October 5th in London) soon afterward.
I interviewed him for SevenFifty Daily.
In my latest story for SevenFifty Daily, I wrote about new temperature and humidity sensors installed in warehouses at Buffalo Trace, and what those could mean for studying aging of spirits and adjusting future blends.
In my latest piece for SevenFifty Daily, I asked a bunch of people about the return on investment of Tales of the Cocktail: How they measure it and how they maximize it. I also interviewed Tales' founder Ann Tuennerman to get her advice on how to maximize the event as an attendee or small brand sponsor, and addressing the question, "Is Tales too big?"
I think there's some really good information and insight throughout the story, especially for people and brands experiencing some growing pains as Tales seems to grow ever larger.
Please check it out.
Large format cocktail ice providers have been around for a while, but now big cube/sphere/spear providers are branching out into new shapes, sizes, making machines, and pushing into retail.
In a story for SevenFifty Daily, based in part on my talk at Tales of the Cocktail, I wrote about what several companies are doing to bring more larger clear ice to more people.
My second story for the new industry-facing site Daily.SevenFifty.com is up!
For this one, I covered a Tales of the Cocktail seminar called Intellectual Property Law Issues in Cocktail Land. It was lead by Trademark Attorney and Hemingway enthusiast Philip Greene, along with John Mason, a lawyer with Copyright Counselors, Steffin Oghene of Absolut Elyx, and Andrew Friedman of Liberty in Seattle.
It clarified the basic definitions of copyright, trademark, and patents, and there were tons of interesting examples – including the Curious Case of the Copper Pineapple!
The seminar description was:
If I make a Dark ‘n’ Stormy, do I have to use Gosling’s Black Seal Rum? What about the Painkiller, will Pusser’s Rum sue me if I use another brand? What about those iconic (and sometimes poorly made) New Orleans classics, the Sazerac, Hurricane and the Hand Grenade, will I get a cease and desist letter from anyone if I make them at my bar claiming trademark infringement? I keep hearing about Havana Club becoming available again from Cuba, but didn’t I also hear that Bacardi is planning to market their own Havana Club? What’s up with that? And speaking of Bacardi, didn’t they sue bars and restaurants back in the 1930s because those establishments failed to use Bacardi Rum in the drink? Is that true, and how did that turn out? Did I hear correctly that Peychaud's Bitters was the center of a trademark dispute way back in the 1890s, with the same family that founded Commander's Palace? And if I create a great drink and give it an awesome name, can I patent or copyright the recipe, and trademark the name? What if I get hired by a bar or restaurant to develop their beverage program, will they own the rights to the drinks that I invented or can I retain ownership rights in the recipes and names? Join the one veteran Tales presenter who is uniquely qualified to moderate this topic, Philip Greene, intellectual property and Internet attorney by day Trademark Counsel for the U.S. Marine Corps) and cocktail historian on the side (co-founder of the Museum of the American Cocktail and author of two cocktail books, To Have and Have Another: A Hemingway Cocktail Companion and The Manhattan: The Story of the First Modern Cocktail, in an in-depth, informative and fun seminar, and learn how to make (and enjoy samples of) some of these contentious classics while discussing this highly intellectual topic!
I'm contributing to a new website called SevenFifty Daily. It's an offshoot of SevenFifty, a site/tool to make ordering alcohol for bars from distributors easier.
Thus, the site's content is positioned mostly for the industry- bartenders, managers, distributors, and brands. My first assignment (out of four!) was to cover a seminar at Tales of the Cocktail called Better Drinking Through Chemistry.
The topic was the science of barrel aging spirits – what we know about, and how brands use that information to develop topics with specific flavor profiles.
The seminar was pretty geeky, but the hardest part was getting up the next morning at 7AM to write it up after a full day at Tales. (If you've been, I'm sure you can sympathize.)
Anyway, please give the story a read and check out the other content on Daily SevenFifty as they've already got quite a bit of good stuff.
In my latest article for CooksScience.com, I wrote about bartenders using isolated acids like citric, malic, tartaric, and succinic to amplify flavors and acidity in cocktails.
They're doing this for a number of reasons – to make batched cocktails with non-spoiling citrus flavors, to add a generic citrus flavor to cocktails without specific lemon/lime notes to get in the way, to re-acidify cocktail ingredients that have been centrifuged-clarified, and to make use of tons of leftover orange juice created because uber-popular Old Fashioneds only need orange peels.
My part of the story is the investigation into how and why bartenders are playing with isolated acids; then the team from America's Test Kitchen played around with the actual acids, and creating a couple of cocktails with added acids you can try at home.
I recently recorded a video with Cocktail Chemistry's Nick Fisher. Fisher has probably done more to raise awareness of my Directional Freezing technique to make clear ice than anyone, with a slick video he made last year showing the process that's now at nearly 1.5 million views.
Watch or just listen to his video interview with me below, in which I talk about bar trends, how I got into cocktail journalism, the Gin & Tonic book, and of course, big clear ice.
I guess M Carrie Allan is becoming my personal biographer, because in addition to the story I posted yesterday on dangerous drink ingredients in Imbibe Magazine, her story with quotes from me about ice also went live in the Washington Post.
The story is called, You’ve made a good drink. It deserves the perfect ice.
It's an examination of different types of ice and my Directional Freezing technique that makes ice clear. It's good stuff.
Maybe in the future Carrie will write about tonic water history, and then all my pet projects will be covered 🙂
In the new issue of Imbibe (US), M Carrie Allan has a story about dangerous cocktail ingredients in which I'm quoted.
She covers things like tobacco, homemade tonic water, and marijuana; and has a sidebar of other potentially-dangerous ingredients worth knowing about.
As you may know, that's been something I've been writing about for a few years. Here's the original post about the potential danger of homemade tonic water dating back to 2014, and here is Darcy O'Neil's post about the dangers of tobacco infusions from 2011.
Last summer, Avery Glasser of Bittermens Bitters and I gave a talk about dangerous cocktail ingredients. Avery is also quoted extensively in this story. For that talk Avery and I wrote up a Danger Guide that we're considering publishing in some form (probably an ebook) to have more information out there.
Though Avery and I have been talking about this extensively, I didn't realize how many people have not heard about these issues, so I'm very grateful to Carrie and Imbibe for putting dangerous cocktail ingredients front and center in front of a new and larger audience. The reaction I've been seeing has been great.
