Category: eco-booze
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Turning Whiskey Into Gas
I wrote a story for Offrange about whiskey stillage. It is about how a couple of large distilleries – Jim Beam and Jack Daniels – are letting little critters eat their stillage and burp out methane, which is then cleaned up and used as renewable natural gas. The process of writing this one was a…
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Has Luxury Clear Cocktail Ice Gone Too Far?
I am quoted in this story about luxury ice (from Greenland, sold in Dubai) in which I manage to become an advocate for importing glacier ice for cocktails, lol. Most of what I talked about in the interview was that we all choose our battles when it comes to where and how we support…
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All About EcoSpirits
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. …
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An Alcademics Study of Liquor Bottle Weights
Since 2009 I have been weighing liquor bottles before recycling them. I was up to 1226 bottles weighed and decided it was about time for me to analyze the data. At the bottom of the post I'll include a link to my spreadsheets. Note that I dated when I weighed the bottles because bottles…
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The 2021 Best Drink Books Round-Up
For the past bunch of years, I've done a round-up of all the drink books (mostly cocktails and spirits) that have come out during the year, in consideration for gifting. I'm not doing that this year, as there are too many cocktail books, and if you want to see them all, you can visit these…
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Using Burrata Water in Place of Egg Whites in Cocktails
Last week I received a pitch about the cocktails at Oxalis in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. One drink ingredient stood out to me: Breakfast Martini, inspired by the classic cocktail and exclusively offered during brunch, this frothy cocktail features burrata water instead of egg white and gomme syrup instead of orange marmalade, in addition to bergamot,…
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DonQ Rum Visit to Puerto Rico
This summer I visited the Destileria Serralles Puerto Rico, the home of DonQ Rum. DonQ is distilled in the southern part of Puerto Rico, in Ponce. The distillery has been on the same site since 1865. As with most rum distilleries, it was once the site of a sugar refinery and the distillery was a…
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Sugarcane and the Environment
For the most part rum is made from molasses, the byproduct of sugar production. So when we study the issue of the environmental impact of sugarcane production we need to keep in mind that molasses is the waste product of sugar production. Rum is recycling! That said, we're studying not just sugar but sugarcane production…