In a slideshow for Popular Science, I wrote about ten pieces of bar equipment you not know about as they're hidden behind the scenes.
The story includes equipment used by some of the world's most innovate bartenders and includes equipment including rotovaps, machine-engraved ice, sous-vide cooking, and many others.
In my latest post for Details.com, I took a look at the multitude of ways that people are using breakfast cereal in cocktails.
Initially I thought I'd only find it in a few places but I think there are more than a dozen mentioned in the story and they're located everwhere from London to Bordeaux to Miami to San Diego. Some folks are serving them up in bowls with a spoon, while others are infusing cereal into milk or directly into liquor.
Check it out over at Details.com.
If you're using barrels or wood chips to make barrel-aged cocktails, be aware that they can develop 246-TCA, better known as "cork taint."
Cork taint doesn't only come from corks, it turns out; it can come from barrels. One way that it forms (in part) is when chlorine bleach is used to clean corks (or barrels).
Wikipedia says, "Chlorinated phenols can form chemically when hypochlorous acid (HOCl-, one of the active forms of chlorine) or chlorine radicals come in contact with wood (untreated, such as barrels or pallets.) The use of chlorine or other halogen-based sanitizing agents is being phased out of the wine industry in favor of peroxide or peracetic acid preparations."
Much tap water contains chlorine or chloramine, so don't clean out your barrels with untreated tap water.
Depending on whether your water is treated with chlorine or chloramine you may take a different approach to getting rid of that in the water (as opposed to buying gallons and gallons of distilled water). Chlorine and chloramine require different filters or amount of time boiling the water or time to leave it to fizz off.
A little bit of research gives widely different answers as to how long you'd have to boil water to eliminate chloramine (that's what's in San Francisco's drinking water). The answers are everywhere from 20 minutes to 2 hours to 2 days of boiling. Carbon filters also remove chloramine, but they have to be really good/fresh filters. Some detailed information from a brewing perspective is here.
This was first brought to my attention by Carl Sutton of Sutton Cellars. I asked him what a good cleaner for barrels would be and he recommended Proxycarb. Some research tells me that has the same active ingredient (Sodium Percarbonate) as OxyClean (though I don't know if OxyClean is food-safe so you should probably buy it from a wine/beer store).
Have fun with your barrel aged cocktails, and remember to avoid chlorine when cleaning them out.
In my latest post for Details.com, I talk about the interesting trend of leafy green salad vegetables making their way into cocktails.
Shut Up and Drink Your Salad: Cocktails Embrace Spinach, Kale, and Arugula
By Camper English
The West Coast style of cocktail in which bartenders muddle a cornucopia of fruits and herbs in their drinks has long been known as a "salad in a glass," but that term is taking on a whole new meaning as mixologists move to mashing leafy greens like spinach, kale, and arugula into drinks this spring.
My latest post for the Details.com Daily Blog is about acid phosphate and its popularity in cocktails.
I mention Darcy O'Neil's Fix the Pumps book, of course, as well as his line of acid phosphate and lactart.
I name-check a few bars serving acid phosphate drinks as well, including:
Anyway, check out the post on acid phosphate over at Details.com!
In my latest story for Details.com, I wrote a list of five trends for cocktails in 2013.
The include low-alcohol cocktails, the butcher and bartender connection, carbonated cocktails, bulk cocktails (punches, bottles, and cocktails on tap), and new molecular techniques.
In my latest post for Details.com, I talk about the Negroni. That poor cocktail is less famous than the Martini and Manhattan, yet suffers more at the hand of bartenders.
"Everywhere you look, the Negroni is being deconstructed, smoked, solidified, gelatinized, flamed, dehydrated, foamed, carbonated, frozen, clarified, and subjected to other forms of mixological torture."
The story then goes on to describe some bars in which the Negroni is currently being tortured.
My most recent story for Details.com is about flips: drinks made with whole eggs.
In the piece I talk about silver and golden fizzes, noggs, and a few places to find flips around the country.
I attended an awesome seminar on blue drinks at Tales of the Cocktail this weekend, lead by Sebastian Reaburn, Jacob Briars, and Phil Duff.
Then I wrote a piece about it for Details.com, the website of Details magazine. It's my first story for the website.
I learned a lot more in the seminar than is in the story, which is more of a trend piece.
Fun facts:
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the story on Details.com!
My editor at SilverKris, the inflight magazine for Singapore Airlines, emailed me something like, "I hear craft beer is becoming popular. Can you do a story on that?"
"Sure," I said, knowing that boiling down everything going on with craft beer into even a feature-length story was going to be incredibly difficult.
The story kind of kicked my ass but taught me a lot about beer. I have a feeling for the trends but not a lot of knowledge of the technical details behind the beer styles so this involved a lot of research.
Anyway, I mushed things into categories like Belgian, barleywine, saison, session, flavored, high-alcohol, sparkling, canned, and casked.
The story is online in one of those online magazine reader formats at this link.
