After the New York Times quoted me for this story:
The Height of Domestic Luxury? Designer Ice.
A few other publications have picked up the beat. The Specialty Food Association (they put on the Fancy Food Show) published this piece Specialty Ice is Trending.
And Deseret News published an explainer called Here’s everything you need to know about the designer ice trend you see on TikTok.
I probably wouldn't have noticed but both these stories quoted me and my Google news alert picked it up.
I wrote a story for Eater San Francisco on a trend of purple drinks with coconut cream and usually ube as a flavoring.
You should probably go read it.
Here is a list of non-alcoholic spirits brands. There are a lot more of them out than I realized!
Did I miss any? Please let me know and thanks to everyone who has been writing in.
List of Non-Alcoholic Distilled Spirits
Note I recently added links to purchase products on Amazon (look for "buy" links) if available in the US. Most of these products are not.
Seedlip (UK) / Aecorn /NoGroni [buy]
Monte Rosso Non-Alcoholic Aperitif (still in production?)
Abstinence (South Africa)
Monday Booze-Free Gin (San Diego) [buy]
Adam & Eve Innocent Spirit (Belgium)
Damrak Virgin 0.0 [Amsterdam]
Flora Hemp Spirits "The World’s First Non Alcoholic Hemp Spirit" (CBD) [US]
Gordon's 0.0% [UK] press release
Rasasvada "spirit restorative" [USA]
Crossip Drinks [UK]
The Pathfinder
Possibly No Longer Produced Non-Alcoholic Spirits
Low-ABV Versions of Spirits
Some Sources where I found these:
In my new story for SevenFifty Daily, I wrote about how orgeat, the French almond syrup famously in the Mai Tai, is now being made with a range of nuts, seeds, and other ingredients.
The story cites examples from around the country and we come up with a new working definition for orgeat.
It has been many years since I have contributed to San Francisco Magazine, but now I'm back! In the new February Bars & Nightlife issue, I have ten stories loosely themed around "Future proofing the cocktail: How Bay Area drink makers are reinventing our favorite alcoholic beverages."
Below is the intro with links to all ten stories and brief intros from me.
Two decades into the Bay Area’s cocktail awakening, you’d think that bars would have settled into a comfortable middle age—the imbibing equivalent of staying home to Netflix and chill. But you’d be wrong.
Creativity stirs all over the region, and drink makers and bar owners continue to spin out new ways to stay relevant and keep us guessing: with secret menus, popup concepts, and menu launch parties; with vibrant drinks, exotic ingredients, and bar-specific spirits; with quality concoctions served at double the speed, thanks to newfangled juices and outsourced ice. And to meet the expanding demand for quality, novelty, and expediency in booze consumption, new clusters of great bars have sprung up not just in the East Bay but also to the north and south. These changes are often nuanced but pervasive, taking place across many bars in many precincts throughout the ever-thirsty Bay Area.
Scanning the cocktail horizon, you can spot the big ideas and the small revisions that are changing the way we drink in 2018 and beyond. Here are 10 of them.
Bartenders Are Going Straight to the Source
How bartenders are directing spirits creation from distillers.
Forget The Simple Description: These Are Very Complicated Cocktails
A look into the mind of Adam Chapman from The Gibson.
Wine Country Has An Unofficial Cocktail AVA
Drinks at the fantastic Duke's and other Healdsburg cocktail bars.
The Future (and Present, Actually) Is Female
Who runs the bars? Girls. A sampling of ten women running things in Bay Area Bars.
Asian Restaurants Are the Center of Cocktail Innovation
Once the home of sake bombs and soju immitations of real drinks, now Asian restaurants are some of the most forward-looking.
Viking Drinks Are So Hot Right Now
Aquivit will be everywhere in 2018.
You'll Be Spending the Night in San Jose
Paper Plane and other great bars in San Jose.
Your Highball Intake Is About to Increase Dramatically
Whiskey and other highballs are happening.
Blind Tiger Ice and Super Jugoso are going to have a major impact on prep work in SF bars.
The Mission Has Only Just Begun
So, so many new bars are opening in the Mission District.
I've already got my next assignment for San Francisco Magazine, so hopefully this will be a regular thing.
In an era when customers are more and more attuned to their allergies, aversions, and dietary restrictions, and as bartenders are using evermore exotic ingredients in their drinks, it may be time to consider adding warning labels to the cocktail menu.
In a story I wrote for SevenFifty Daily, I took a look at some bars’ philosophies on the matter and the labeling schemes they’re employing to warn customers about potential dangers in their drinks.
We looked at labelling for nuts, seafood, soy, gluten, vegan/vegetarian, how these are listed on various menus or handled only in person, and look at a few unusual things that need to be labelled in UK bars.
Bars I spoke to include Trick Dog, the Proper Hotel, and the Tonga Room in San Francisco, Bar Clacson in LA, Bresca in DC, Saint Ellie in Denver, Bar Fiori in NYC, The Aviary in Chicago and New York, and The Hide Bar in London.
I hope you get a lot out of the story, I had a great time researching it. Read it here.
People are all excited about blue drinks these days, but I first wrote about their return in 2012. Since Details magazine went away and the story is no longer online, I rescued this story from the Internet Archives.
Memories….
After years of worshiping brown spirits and classic drinks, booze fans at this year's Tales of the Cocktail convention in New Orleans turned the spotlight on a new color: blue. In particular, the sometimes-neon liqueur blue curaçao—often reviled as the antithesis of all things vintage and authentic—is back.
Blue drinks have long been a mixologists' in-joke. When bartenders were getting serious about pre-Prohibition cocktails about five years ago, jet-setting New Zealand bartender Jacob Briars invented the Corpse Reviver Number Blue, a piss-take on the sacrosanct classic Corpse Reviver #2 that was enjoying a major comeback.
Since then, he and other bartenders have been practicing "sabluetage"—spiking the drinks of unwitting victims with blue curaçao when no one is looking. The forbidden liqueur can now be found on the menus of a few of the world's best cocktail bars, including Jasper's Corner Tap in San Francisco, PDT in New York City (where it's mixed with other unfashionable ingredients, such as Frangelico and cream), and London's Artesian Bar (winner of the World's Best Hotel Bar award this week), where a new blue drink—called Blue Lagoon—also features Sprite and bubble tea.
What has spawned this artistic blue period? According to a panel discussion on the topic this weekend, blue-curaçao-cocktail recipes date back as far as 1908 (predating the margarita and even the original Corpse Reviver #2), but the reappearance of the ingredient is likely more an elitists' embracing of the down-market and absurd—the mixological equivalent of trucker hats among fashion's hipoisie several years ago.
There is also a consensus that perhaps everyone is taking all this classic-cocktail stuff a bit too seriously. Today's top bartenders may be walking encyclopedias of cocktail knowledge, but they're also aware that no one goes to a bar to hear an encyclopedia reading. Blue drinks are a reminder that drinking is supposed to be fun.
"At the end of the day, people want to have a good time," says Artesian's head barman, Alex Kratena, as he demonstrated making his drink for the Tales of the Cocktail audience. Of course, his cheeky blue bubble-tea drink will run you about $23 back in London. If you're willing to sacrifice the cool factor, you could always join the hordes of partying tourists on Bourbon Street, one block away from the convention, gulping down blue drinks that are served in souvenir plastic cups—for half the price. Irony, as always, costs extra.
—Camper English is an international cocktails and spirits writer and the publisher of alcademics.com.
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.
In a new story for Details.com I wrote about bartenders using salt in cocktails.
The first time I ever heard of such a thing (besides around the rim of a Margarita glass) was from Duggan McDonnell of Cantina. That was probably four years ago.
Now it seems that everybody is in on the secret and is using salt in their cocktails – whether they tell you about it or not.
Check out the story on Details.com about how and why and where bartenders are using salt in their drinks.
In my latest story for Details.com, I wrote about the return of apples in cocktails and spirits.
The story mentions the return to drinks after the great Appletini shame and lists a ton of mostly-new apple products.
