Alcademics

Category: San Francisco

  • Bartenders Hitting Their Hoes

    For some reason, the San Francisco Chronicle didn't choose the above title for my story that comes out Sunday August 30th. I can't think of why.

    More bars growing own cocktail ingredients

    Camper English, Special to The Chronicle

    Friday, August 28, 2009

     Victoria D'Amato-Moran grows tomatoes, Asian pears, Fuji apples, blackberries, roses and many herbs in her South San Francisco garden. Sooner or later, everything in it winds up in her cocktails.

    "Except the zucchinis," she says. "I haven't figured out how to use those yet."

    Gartenders2

    The Bay Area has long been home to the farm-forward cocktail movement – initially personified by Scott Beattie, then of Cyrus restaurant, who sourced produce from neighbors' fruit trees for his bar. Lately, more bartenders are doing the gardening work themselves, for the same reason that backyard gardeners seem to have appeared everywhere.

    The extra effort may not save money, and the drinks may not taste noticeably fresher to the customer, but you can bet they do to the proud garden tender who grew part of your gimlet from seed.

    Read the rest of my story in this Sunday's Chronicle about bartenders who also tend to gardens, including Duggan McDonnell, H. Joseph Ehrmann, Daniel Hyatt, Scott Stewart, Thad Vogler, and Lane Ford, and the bars Fairway Cocktail Lounge, Cyrus, Elixir, Alembic, Cantina, Fifth Floor, Bar Agricole, Starbelly, Sprcue, Brix, and Etoile. Gosh I'm thorough.

    Also: there's a recipe for Jacques Bezuidenhout's Sagerac, a version of the Sazerac made with fresh picked sage, and Scott Stewart's Lonsdale No. 3 made with fresh basil.

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  • The Ultimate Test of your Liquor Cabinet

    Not only is the Laphroaig Project delicious and surprisingly tropical for its ingredients, it's a test of your liquor
    cabinet. If you have all of these ingredients at home you are a huuuuge cocktail geek.

    The Laphroaig Project was created by Owen Westman at Bourbon & Branch and it's
    also available at Rickhouse, both in San Francisco. It contains:

    • Green
      Chartreuse
    • Yellow Chartreuse
    • Laphroaig Islay Single Malt Whisky
    • Luxardo Maraschino liqueur
    • Peach bitters
    • Lemon juice

    What? Yes. The recipe is here.

    And if you can make it without shopping, I think you are cool. 

  • Heirloom Tomatoes, Ripe for Drinking

    It's tomato season and all the local restaurants are rolling out the tomato carts and tomato specialty dinners. The bartenders are getting in on the action too.

    Zing At Range, Carlos Yturria's famous Sungold Zinger is back on the menu, made with Sungold Zinger cherry tomatoes, No. 209 gin, lemon, agave syrup, and salt.

    The bartenders at Range restaurant in San Francisco have started two blogs, by the way. Cocktail of the Day lists the daily cocktail served at the restaurant, and Inside the Blood Bank (from which I stole the picture) is a more general bartender and drink blog.

    Elsewhere in tomato drink news, Carneros Bistro & Wine Bar in Sonoma is serving a tomato basil martini with your choice of gin or vodka.

    And as part of the tomato dinner Sent Sovi in Saratoga greets guests with a Lemon Boy Bellini. Tomato Bellini? That sounds oddly delicious.

  • Ginger Beer Gives a Buck more Bang

    My latest story in the San Francisco Chronicle (from Sunday's paper) went online today. Read it here.

    Erickcastrorickhouse

    Ginger beer gives a buck more bang

    Camper English, Special to The Chronicle

    Friday, July 24, 2009

    When ginger ale or beer is mixed with citrus in a drink, it is – or more accurately, was – known as a buck.

    Early cocktail books list recipes for the gin buck or London buck cocktail, and variations of rum bucks were called the Shanghai buck, Jamaica buck or Barbados buck, depending on the type of rum used. If you squeeze your lime garnish into a Dark 'n' Stormy, you've got a rum buck.

    "The buck is one of those cocktails that works with every base spirit," says Erick Castro, beverage director at Rickhouse, the new Financial District bar. "Most cocktails don't work with gin and scotch and vodka and rum."

    Read more about bucks and mules and get the recipe for Erick Castro's Kentucky Buck here.

  • Drinks to Match the Dress

    San Francisco bartender pairs cocktail with cocktail dress

    Camper English, Special to The Chronicle

    Sunday, July 12, 2009

    Many cocktail contests now require bartenders to pair drinks with meals or invent them on the spot with a secret ingredient, but a recent competition challenged mixologists around the world with a new pairing: cocktails with cocktail dresses.

    Jacqueline Patterson, a bartender at Heaven's Dog in San Francisco, was the winning bartender from the United States. Accessorize 2009 was sponsored by Cherry Heering, a liqueur that the brand owners call an "accessory" in cocktails such as the Singapore Sling.

    Read the rest of my latest story in the San Francisco Chronicle here.

    Jackiesingapore
    Jackiesingaporedrink

  • Rickhouse: A First Look

    Yesterday I stopped in to Rickhouse, the new bar by the folks from Bourbon & Branch, Swig, Anu, and the liquor store Cask.

    The bar is located at 246 Kearny Street at the site of the long-time gay bar Ginger's Trois. (I believe Anu was built where Ginger's Too was once located.)  Ginger's was a small space with a sunken bar and a tiny seating area in the back, all with a unique art deco design.

    Rickhouse couldn't be more different. They completely remodeled the space and annexed the old storage room and some unused restrooms in the back. Now you enter on a long vertical room with a bar running down one side. In the back of the front room is a small balcony beneath a newly-installed skylight that apparently gets direct overhead light for just an hour or so per day. The balcony is open on either side, facing the front and back rooms.

    Rickhouse2

    The back room is situated like a "T" to the front room, and can be partitioned off with large sliding wood doors. The bar for this room is on the back left, and it smaller than the one in the front.

    When the space is open, there will be low seats and small tables throughout both rooms and the balcony. However, unlike B&B there will not be reserved seating. (There will be cocktail servers though to take the crush off the front bar.) The furniture is all pretty mobile, so depending on the number of people and the time of the day, they'll move the furniture around to accommodate everyone.

    The walls, ceilings, and floors are all made of wood. I think it's nearly all reclaimed wood- most of it from barrel staves used in layers on the ceiling (similar to the ceiling at Cask), some of it from a construction project next door, and some from a former nunnery where they distilled whiskey during prohibition. Former bourbon barrels are also used as decoration in the space, and the chandeliers are made from the metal bands that bind barrels together. One exposed brick wall opposite the front bar apparently has some of the char left from the 1906 fire.

    Rickhouse1

    The  cocktail menu I've been asked not to say too much about just yet, but it has very little overlap with the drink menu from Bourbon & Branch.

    The bar is not yet open to the public and won't be fully open for about three weeks after they finish final construction touches, then allow a healthy soft-opening period for the bartenders and servers to become familiar with the new menu.

    Rickhouse is looking really, really good.

    Rickhousefront

  • The Intercontinental Cocktails of Charles H. Baker

    I wrote a story in this weekend's San Francisco Chronicle about Charles H. Baker's cocktails and their popularity, centering around the program at Heaven's Dog in San Francisco.

    "A hazy memory of a night in Havana during the unpleasantnesses of
    1933, when each swallow was punctuated with bombs going off on the
    Prado…"

    erik adkins read charles h baker's the gentlemans' companion at heaven's dog in san francisco This line by Charles H. Baker Jr. introduces not an account of Cuban
    rebellion but the cocktail Remember the Maine, which he was drinking
    there while it took place. Baker wrote about drinks from his travels
    around the world in the early 1900s, mostly during Prohibition, when
    the drinking in the United States wasn't legal – or very good.

    Other drinks in Baker's two-volume "The Gentleman's Companion" are
    introduced from such ports of call as Beijing, Monte Carlo and Bombay
    (now Mumbai), ripe with mentions of princes, peacocks, cruises up the
    Nile and hanging out with Hemingway.

    Bartenders in particular have latched on to Baker as a patron saint
    of good living, and his cocktails and quotes from his writings are both
    appearing on drink menus.

    "I've always thought that when you have a drink there's so much that
    comes with it: your friends, who you're with, the time of the day,"
    says Erik Adkins, general manager of Heaven's Dog in SoMa. "And (Baker)
    captured all that.."

    But for all the excitement about Baker's cocktails, they share an unfortunate common trait.

    "I think the recipes mostly need a lot of work," says Adkins.

    read the rest of the story here.

    In the story I also mentioned the forthcoming coffee/cocktail bar Fort Defiance, in Brooklyn, that should be opening later this month. But that's not the only bar to put Baker back on the menu:

    The Brooklyn bar Clover Club dedicated a small section of the menu to what owner Julie Reiner says are Baker’s best cocktails this winter, including the Remember the Maine.

    In Portland, Ore., the bar Beaker and Flask, named for the subtitle of one volume of “Gentleman’s Companion,” is set to open. Owner Kevin Ludwig says he’ll be featuring Baker drinks on the menu, though not exclusively.

    In Amsterdam, speakeasy-style bar door 74 recently offered several pages of Baker drinks, with the menu letterhead mimicking the Baker’s own.

    Baker's globe-hopping cocktail book is now helping those cocktails hop back around the world.

    Bakerbookfromchron

  • San Francisco Cocktails, Past and Present

    It's unusual for me to miss days of blogging, but I've been busy writing up some stuff for SF Cocktail Week. Check out these pieces I wrote and let me know if I'm missing anything big (or am completely full of beans).

    San Francisco's Historic Cocktails and Barbary Coast Saloons

    Connecting the Past to the Present: Modern Cocktails in San Francisco

  • How Sweetened It Is

    Here's the second of my two stories in the San Francisco Chronicle this weekend.

    Codydrink


    Spirits: Bartenders find new ways to sweeten the deal

    Camper English, Special to The Chronicle
    Friday, April 10, 2009

    Nearly all cocktails contain a sweetening agent, the simplest of which is raw sugar or simple syrup. Other, newer options include ginger, elderflower, and blood orange liqueurs, floral sugar syrups, fresh grenadine, flavored honey, and syrups made from ingredients like agave and gum Arabic.

    As usual, San Francisco bartenders are not satisfied with the selection.

    Read the story here.

  • Here is that Drink I was Talking About

    You know how I was blogging about that great new drink that's unavailable because there wasn't enough Hangar One chipotle vodka to put it on the menu?

    Well, they heard the outcry, they delivered more chipotle, and now the Escondido Romano is on the menu at Nopa for all to enjoy as of yesterday. Hooray! Now go order 70 of them so I don't look like a jerk.

    Alcademics: Bringing positive change to drink menus since 2009.