Category: cocktails

  • San Francisco Cocktail History Tour Dates for August and September

    I’ve added more dates to the calendar for my SF Bar and Cocktail History Tours. I’m doing the tour every Saturday. 

    Can’t make a Saturday afternoon? I can do private tours most anytime- reach out. 

    On the tour, which begins in San Francisco’s Financial District and end in North Beach, you’ll learn: 

    Learn about shanghaiing, sailors, bars inside boats, Emperor Norton and Barbary Coast saloons, the Bank Exchange and the Pisco Punch, earthquake whiskey and drag royalty, the influence of vermouth and grand hotel bars, Cocktail Bill Boothby and the House of Shields, The So Different and “pretty waiter girls,” slummers’ tours and tropical drinks. The tour ends at a 1907 saloon that upholds the traditions and décor of an earlier era of cocktails in San Francisco – and we’ll share a drink together there!

    Information and tickets are here.

    Cocktail History Tour SF Flyer aug sept

  • September 2025 Drink Book Releases

    Here are new cocktails and spirits books being released in September 2025.

    To see all the New Drink Books of 2025, visit this link

    September 2025 drink books

    • Savory and Sweet Shrubs: Tart Mixers for Delicious Cocktails and Mocktails
    • American Whiskey Master Class: The Ultimate Guide to Understanding Bourbon, Rye, and Other American Whiskeys

     

    • The Whiskey Bible: A Complete Guide to the World's Greatest Spirit

     

    • Get Lit: Cocktails That Bring Your Favorite Books to Life

     

     

    • Tequila, Mezcal & More: Discover, Sip & Mix the Best Agave Spirits
    • The Mixology Way: Classic cocktail recipes to master the art of mixology

     

    • The Japanese Way of Whisky: Japan's Whiskies and how to Enjoy them

     

    • Both Sides of the Glass: Paired Cocktails and Mocktails to Toast Any Taste

     

    • The Comic Book History of the Cocktail: Five Centuries of Mixing Drinks and Carrying On

     

    • The Whisky World Tour: A curated guide to unforgettable distilleries and their whiskies

     

    • Booze & Vinyl Country: 100+ Spirited Music-and-Drink Pairings

     

     

  • Bartender’s Ketchup is Back on the Menu in SF

    Bartenders ketcup

     

    I wrote a story for the SFStandard about elderflower liqueur making a huge comeback. It was so popular when the brand St. Germain first launched in 2007 that it was given the nickname “bartender’s ketchup.”  

    It’s so back, but now bartenders are using a wide range of products. Read the story here. 

     

    IMG_5857

  • All of the Olives’ Brine Time to Shine

    My latest story for the San Francisco Chronicle is about all the ways bartenders are liquifying olives in their Martinis – in the vermouth, gin, vodka, brine, leaf tinctures, oil-washing everything, and even an “olive turducken.”

     

    Here’s a gift link so you can read it

    CHRONICLE

     

  • How to Stretch a Lime – My Story in the SF Chronicle

    I wrote about oleo citrate and super juice for the San Francisco Chronicle.

    These are techniques for increasing the yield from citrus fruits by eight times or so, using a touch of citric and malic acid powder in a specific way to bump up the flavor and texture of citrus to extend it over a large volume. 

    Bartenders in the Bay Area have begun experimenting with the technique, not because our locals love high-tech processing of natural ingredients (our locals very much do not) but because threatened tariffs on imports from Mexico would make limes more expensive- as well as tequila and agave nectar. 

    The story may be paywalled, but check it out here

     

    Tariffs could make Bay Area cocktails more expensive. This ‘super juice’ may be a solution

    By Camper English

    Unless bartenders figure out something soon, margaritas could soon cause sticker shock on cocktail menus across the Bay Area. The tequila, limes and agave syrup used in them may all come from Mexico, and imports on them will face tariffs if President Trump follows through with his threats.

    Eric Ochoa, partner at the bar Dalva in San Francisco’s Mission District, has been weighing his options and not finding any great ones. He could increase the price of the drink, or take the “shrinkflation” route, reducing the quantity of tequila or mezcal from 2 ounces per drink to 1½. Or he could swap out fresh-squeezed lime juice for “super juice” to cut costs on one ingredient at least. A citrus juice preparation resulting in six to eight times the liquid of regular juice from the same amount of fruit, it’s a technique that bartenders around the region and the country are testing out to squeeze their fruit for all it’s worth.

    continue reading…

    Superjuice

  • Don’t Drink and Send Telegrams – and Other Advice from 100 Years of Cocktail Etiquette Books

    My first story for Food & Wine just went live. 

    I took advice from 95 years of cocktail etiquette books, beginning in 1930 and ending with the publication of How to Be a Better Drinker last week [amazon] [bookshop]. 

    I had fun going through my cocktail book collection to find other etiquette books, including The Official Preppy Handbook, to cite. 

    Anyway, check out the story here!

    Screenshot 2025-03-08 at 2.22.55 PM

    IMG_4719

  • Esquire’s Best and Worst Cocktails of 1934

    Esquire magazine printed an article with the Ten Best Cocktails of 1934 – the year after Prohibition was repealed. They included at the end a list of the Worst cocktails as well. 

     

    Esquire Best Worst Cocktails of 1934_1

     

    Esquire’s link to the story is here, but it requires a subscription to view. 

    DiffordsGuide has the list of best and worst, but not the entire article it comes from. 

    Here’s the Worst list: 

    Esquire Best Worst Cocktails of 1934_5

     

    I’ve seen this list in a lot of places online, but never the full article, so I went to the San Francisco Public Library yesterday and took it out of the archives.

    I didn’t realize that not only was Esquire huge in size something like 11 x 17 back then, but also had a ton of pages. It was basically a book every month.

     

  • The Cocktail is the International Alcoholic Esperanto

    Here’s a fun excerpt: 

    The American Mercury 1924-09: Vol 3 Iss 9

    CLINICAL NOTES
    BY GEORGE JEAN NATHAN AND H. L. MENCKEN

    The cocktail, once observed George Ade, follows the American flag. That was twenty years ago. The flags of all nations today follow the cocktail. Its fame has spread over the globe, and justly. It has captured the English and the French, the Danes and the Italians. Five o'clock in Piccadilly brings its gin and vermouth and dash of bitters as five o'clock along the grand boulevards brings its iced brandy and gum syrup and dash of Byrth. It is the gift of smiling America to lackadaisical Europe. It is the international alcoholic Esperanto.

     

    Screenshot 2025-01-06 at 9.13.31 AM

  • New Drink Book Releases in 2025

    I keep a close eye on new books on drinks (mostly cocktails and spirits rather than beer/wine), and I read most of them that come out every year. 

    On this post I'll keep track of them. I probably won't include every cultural franchise tie-in cocktail book (Harry Potter, Star Wars, etc) but some. If you want to see books from 2024, check out: Fall 2024 Drink Books and Spring/Summer 2024 Drink Books

     

    September 2025 Drink Books:

     

    September 2025 drink books

    • Savory and Sweet Shrubs: Tart Mixers for Delicious Cocktails and Mocktails
    • American Whiskey Master Class: The Ultimate Guide to Understanding Bourbon, Rye, and Other American Whiskeys
    • The Whiskey Bible: A Complete Guide to the World's Greatest Spirit
    • Get Lit: Cocktails That Bring Your Favorite Books to Life
    • Tequila, Mezcal & More: Discover, Sip & Mix the Best Agave Spirits
    • The Mixology Way: Classic cocktail recipes to master the art of mixology
    • The Japanese Way of Whisky: Japan's Whiskies and how to Enjoy them
    • Both Sides of the Glass: Paired Cocktails and Mocktails to Toast Any Taste
    • The Comic Book History of the Cocktail: Five Centuries of Mixing Drinks and Carrying On
    • The Whisky World Tour: A curated guide to unforgettable distilleries and their whiskies
    • Booze & Vinyl Country: 100+ Spirited Music-and-Drink Pairings

     

    New Finds:

    • Kentucky Bourbon: The Essential Guide to the American Spirit

     

    • THE RUM NEVER SETS: 300 YEARS OF ROYAL NAVY & LONDON DOCK RUM
    • Bar Design-Principles, Practices, Dimensions

     

    • Mezcal in Oaxaca: A Craft Spirit for the Global Marketplace

     

    • Mother of Bourbon: The Greatest American Whiskey Story Never Told

     

    June, July, and August New Drink Book Releases 2025

     

    New books june july august 2025

     

     

    • Behind the Home Bar: The Essential Guide to Making Cocktails

     

    • Spooky Cocktails: 100+ Spirited and Wickedly Delicious Drinks

     

     

    • The Cocktail Bar: Perfectly mixed drinks from London's iconic hotel bars

     

    • The Eras Pour: The Unofficial, Ultimate Taylor Swift Cocktail Book

     

     

     

    • Be a Beverage Expert: A Guide to Understanding Wine, Beer, Spirits, and Cocktails

     

     

    Additional April and May Books

    • Drink and Democracy: Alcohol and the Political Imaginary in Colonial Australia

     

     

    April through May 2025 Drink Book Releases

     

    Aprilmay2025drinkbooks

     

    • The Official Barbie Cocktail Book: 50 Dreamy Recipes for Inspired Entertaining

     

    • Mood Drinks: Alcohol-Free Cocktails to Create the Perfect Mood

     

    • Hard Seltzer, Iced Tea, Kombucha, and Cider: How to Make Your Own Boozy Fermented Drinks

     

    • Tequila Wars: José Cuervo and the Bloody Struggle for the Spirit of Mexico

     

    • The Curious Bartender's Agave Safari: Discovering and appreciating Mexico's tequilas, mezcals & more

     

     

    • The Unauthorized Court of Cocktails: Recipes for your Romantasies

     

     

    • The Unofficial A Court of Thorns and Roses Cocktail Book

     

     

    January Through March 2025 Drink Book Releases 

     

     

    2025 Cocktail Books Jan - March

     

     

    • Spirited Women: Makers, Shakers, and Trailblazers in the World of Cocktails
    • Lessons in Mixology: A graphic guide to making the perfect cocktail
    • MockTales: 50+ Literary Mocktails Inspired by Classic Works, Banned Books, and More
    • How to Be a Better Drinker: Cocktail Recipes and Boozy Etiquette
    • Tokyo Bar: 65 recipes for Japanese-style cocktails and izakaya snacks
    • Tiny Cocktails: The Art of Miniature Mixology: A Cocktail Recipe Book
    • Pour Together: A Cocktail Recipe Book: 2-Ingredient Cocktails to Meet Every Mood
    • Margarita Time: 60+ Tequila & Mezcal Cocktails, Served Up, Over & Blended
    • Sleepless in Sangria: 60 Rom-Com Cocktails for Movie Night
    • Drink Your Garden: Recipes, Stories and Tips from the Simple Goodness Cocktail Farm
    • The Art of Cocktails: By the Legendary Bartender at the Ritz
    • The Forgotten Sense: The New Science of Smell―and the Extraordinary Power of the Nose
    • Sours: A History of the World's Most Storied Cocktail Style
    • This is a Cocktail Book
    • Citrus: A World History
    • Guide to Tropical Potions & Exotic Elixirs

     

     

     

    Note: As indicated on my About page, all purchase links on Alcademics may take you to a page where I earn a small commission. 

  • From Salad in a Glass to Centrifuge: A Cocktail Evolution

    This story was originally published on AlcoholProfessor.com


    Screenshot 2024-10-10 at 8.52.29 AM

    From Salad in a Glass to Centrifuge: A Cocktail Evolution

    Recently I was thinking about the early years of the craft cocktail renaissance, and how many of the drinks were quite… chunky. And I realized that we can track a lot of the progression in bartending via the various techniques for pulverizing, liquifying, and clarifying ingredients.

    Bartenders in California (more than on the East Coast, at first) embraced farmers market produce and seasonality, but in the early 2000s there were only a few techniques they knew for getting those fresh solid ingredients into drinks. One was infusing things like citrus peels or porous fruit into vodka or other spirits directly. This worked well for some ingredients, and the late 1990s was full of pepper-infused vodka in Bloody Marys and strawberry-infused rum in Mojitos, for example.

    Muddling

    The other main tool for getting solid fruits, citrus, and other produce into liquid form was by using a big stick: the muddler. Ingredients like tomatoes, kiwi, and every form of herb (those Mojitos were everywhere) were pummeled with muddlers, shaken with ice, then dumped into glasses. The resulting cocktails were often a quarter solid, with mashed up produce in the bottom of the cup.

    This style of cocktail with everything muddled together took on the nickname of “salad in a glass,” for every drink came with a full serving of fruits or veggies in the mix. They were sometimes challenging to consume, for all those solids often blocked the hole in drinking straws. One bar even manufactured a “stork” – a straw with a fork on the end- so that people could pick out the chunks and eat them after they were done drinking.

    Semi-Solids and shrubs

    Obviously, solids are hard to drink, and it didn’t take too long for top mixologists to start experimenting with other methods for transforming these ingredients into longer-lasting liquids. Crafty bartenders learned skills known to cooks and homemakers for millennia – the art of preserving seasonal produce. (While this may sound obvious today, keep in mind that in the 1990s nearly all drink ingredients came in shelf-stable bottled form; a lime wedge was as fresh as it got even in the “good” bars of the day.) Bartenders learned to cook fruit and spices into syrups; they canned jams and jellies; they pickled produce and preserved cherries in brandy.

    At one point, bartenders relearned the lost art of making shrubs – vinegar-based fruit syrups. Shrubs were a form of preserved liquids that could flavor nonalcoholic cocktails as well as boozy ones, and for a while the best virgin drinks came with a dose of vinegar. Read how to tart up your cocktails using vinegar.

    Old and New Methods

    Other old-school techniques used in the early 2000s included the freeze-thaw method used to extract tomato water from tomatoes (for clear Bloody Mary variations), candying with sugar, and making oleo-saccharum from citrus peels. Some bartenders used dehydrators to concentrate the flavors of solid ingredients to use for subsequent infusions, long before the current trend of dehydrating citrus wheels for garnishes to reduce waste. Yet others took on fermentation as a form of preservation and flavor creation.

    One technique that bartenders started experimenting with in the early 2010s (that continues to be popular today) is milk clarification. This technique for using milk to clarify and preserve cocktails dates to the 1700s, but was further explored and explained by people like Dave Arnold in his 2014 book Liquid Intelligence.

    Clarified milk punches can last at refrigerator/cellar temperature for months or longer. This makes them suitable for batching, which speeds up service at the bar compared with all that á la minute muddling of the previous decade.

    Clarified cocktails have very few solid particulates in the liquid, as those solids oxidize and spoil, and clog up tap lines if kegged. Knowing this encouraged bartenders to experiment with other methods of removing solids from even faintly cloudy liquids. Also in Liquid Intelligence, Arnold revealed several methods for clarification. One method was gelatin or agar agar clarification, which is similar to the milk punch method but using a different medium for filtration. Another method borrowed from winemaking is using fining agents that help particulates settle in a liquid.

    The Future… Is the Past?

    In recent years, the tools and technology have grown more sophisticated. Many bartenders now use a centrifuge to clarify cocktails and cocktail ingredients, often in combination with fining agents mentioned above. Sous vide equipment is often used to speed up flavor integration as well as promote consistency of the resulting syrups and infusions. In countries where it is legal, low-temperature distillation in rotovaps also allows for better flavor integration than cold or warm infusions. And bartenders are reaching for isolated acids (citric, malic, tartaric, phosphoric, etc) to replicate the flavor, and enhance, or extend the volume of citrus juices.

    The increasing sophistication of processing methods may or may not have reached a high point, and in many ways we’re now reinventing the wheel. In the 1990s and earlier one could purchase powdered drink mixes made of flavors, sugar, and acids, or bottled “juices” that were essential oils with citrus acids. Rather than serving a guest a Zima or wine cooler, today’s bartender may pump out a clarified low-ABV cocktail from the soda gun or pop open a bottled or canned carbonated drink they assembled the previous month.

    Whereas once you’d find bar menus bragging about house syrups and infusions, now those homemade ingredients look a lot like commercially-available bottled lime cordial and sour mix. And while the dedication to lowering waste by using these techniques at the bar is admirable, often it comes at the cost of fresh flavor. Some bars’ drinks now taste like beverage versions of Sweet Tarts or sour Nerds candy as all the ingredients have been isolated and reconfigured into nearly shelf-stable forms.

    At some point we’ll need to ask ourselves if our increasingly sophisticated techniques and technology for improving cocktails are making them taste worse than they were in the 1990s. I, for one, would prefer that fresh-from-the-farmer’s-market flavor of 2006-era cocktails. But on the other hand, I don’t miss the chunks at all.