Alcademics

Category: Uncategorized

  • Studying Sugar: A Resource List

    SugarSpiritLogoSquare1 In the Sugar Spirit Project, I've had to use several sources to research material, so I figured I'd list them on this page should you want to read them yourself or check my work.

    I'll add to the list as I use more resources.  

    • Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History By Sidney W. Mintz (1985). This book traces the history of sugar but is primarily a sociological study of sugar consumption in England. It traces how sugar became so popular so fast. 
    • Sugar: A Bittersweet History By Elizabeth Abbott (2008). In-depth sugar history, spread of sugar, lasting effects of sugar production, finals notes on environmental concerns. Contains a lot of information on sugar and the slave trade. 
    • Sugar.org, the website of the Sugar Association. Some brief but good information in the Downloads section.
    • The Wikipedia entry for Sugar is surprisingly good. 
    • The sugarcane Wikipedia entry is not bad either. 
    • The USDA plants database entry is pretty cool. 

     

    The Sugar Spirit Project is sponsored by Bacardi Rum. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link. 

     

     

  • Sugar Spirit Project Index

    SugarSpiritLogoSquare1 The aim of the Sugar Spirit Project is to research sugar: its history, production, distribution, forms and use, and byproducts. 

    This page is the project index that will link to all the posts. Hot-linked posts have gone up already, text posts are yet to come. Feel free to suggest more aspects of sugar for me to study in the comments. 

    The Sugar Spirit Project is sponsored by Bacardi Rum. The project content is created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. 

    1. Announcing The Sugar Spirit Project 
    2. Some resources used.
    3. The History of Sugar
      1. What is sugarcane? 
      2. Sugar origins
      3. The spread of sugar to the West
      4. Early sugar processing
      5. Developing  a taste for sugar in England
      6. Sugar in early American history
      7. Sugar and slavery
      8. Enter the sugar beet 
      9. Sugarcane and the environment
      10. Big Sugar
    4. Sugar Today
      1. Modern sugar production
      2. Making sugar from cane and sugar beets
      3. Sugar from cane vs. beet
      4. More about cane vs. beet sugar
      5. Sugar cane distribution
      6. The sugar beet today
      7. Sugar byproducts 
      8. The molasses market
    5. Making Sugar Experiments
      1. Methods of juice extraction
      2. Soaking method
      3. Visit a sugar cane farm in California
      4. Visit a sugar factory 
      5. Making crystallized sugar from cane juice at home
    6. Types of Sugar
      1. Types of commercial sugar around the world- muscovado, demerara, molasses, golden syrup, treacle
      2. Other sweeteners – Honey, agave, palm sugar, date sugar, etc
    7. Uses for Sugar
      1. Five uses: medicine, spice-condiment, decorative material, sweetener, preservative.
    8. Sugar Around the World
      1. Italy
      2. Japan
      3. Mexico
    9. Sugar in Distilled Spirits
      1. All spirits from fermentable sugars, explain how each raw ingredient is converted from non-fermentable to fermentable sugars
      2. Where rum is made from raw cane
      3. Molasses changes in the global market 

     

  • Solid Liquids Project Index

    SolidLiquidsProjectSquareLogoThe aim of the Solid Liquids Project is to research the best way to dehydrate liqueurs and use the resulting flavored sugar in creative ways. This page is the project index that will link to all the posts. 

    The Solid Liquids Project

     

  • The Wide World of Pisco

    For years, the only piscos available were the single-grape quebranta and the blended acholado, often with quebranta at its core.

    Now we can find all eight approved Peruvian pisco varietals and several different acholado blends. In my latest story for the San Francisco Chronicle I talk about the wide range of piscos now available and a few cocktails in which to try them. 

    Fd-spirits24_pis_0503805957

    Pisco – so much to know, there's more to tell
    Camper English, Special to The Chronicle
    Sunday, July 24, 2011 

    Cocktail recipes that call for pisco almost never specify details on the spirit the way that whiskey might require. But as a slew of new piscos appear, with widely divergent flavors, bartenders and their customers are going to need to be more specific.

    "In Peru there are five different pisco growing regions, there are 42 valleys, there are eight approved (grape) varietals and there are 500 producers. So with that you can see the gamut of what you're going to get," says James Schenk, owner of Pisco Latin Lounge in San Francisco.

    Go here to read the rest of the story. 

     

  • The Humble Potato and the Dangers of Monoculture

    Recently I watch the documentary The Botany of Desire on Netflix, based on the Michael Pollan book of the same name. Of the four plants they focussed on, one was the potato. And as I was planning a trip to visit a potato vodka distillery, I decided to take notes.

    Chopin Distillery Trip Paris and Warsaw 236

    The Origin of the Potato

    Potatoes originate in the Andes mountain in South America and were first domesticated 8000 years ago. There are more than 5000 potato varieties in the Andes region.

    The potato in the wild is poisonous, but over time people bred out the more poisonous ones. Early Peruvians grew many varieties of potatoes depending on the altitude/direction of the hill.

    Potatoes were grown by Incas. Spanish conquistadores brought them back to Europe.

    The Potato in Europe

    In Europe potatoes grew well in poor soils in northern countries, wet areas where grains were hit or miss. The potato provides an immense amount of food per acre. It may have helped the industrial revolution to happen, as less people were needed in the fields to grow it.

    The Irish planted almost exclusively one strain of potato. In 1845 a wind-spread fungal spore brought by a ship spread across the whole country and turned the potatoes black within weeks. The Irish potato famine lasted for 3 years and killed many people. Monoculture = bad.

    Chopin Distillery Trip Paris and Warsaw 241

    The Potato in America

    Each year Americans consumer 7.5 billion pounds of French fries. Russett-Burbank is the potato variety used to make those fries everywhere in the world- and in particular by McDonald's. Pollan says “Monocultures on the plate lead to monocultures on the land.”

    When you have a monoculture it essentially stops evolution of that plant, while the pests who want to prey on the plants continue to evolve. And once one finds a way to get one plant, it have access to all of them.

    Monsanto has genetically engineered potatoes to kill the potato beetle, its main pest. People started planting them, and McDonald’s used them in the late 1990s but after consumer pressure and a potential PR problem, they phased them out. This effectively killed the genetically engineered potato. That said, corn, soybeans, and cotton are all genetically engineered by Monsanto.

    But when growing a monoculture, you have to choose between using lots of pesticides or using genetically engineered crops. The solution, says Pollan, is not to grow monocultures.

    I fear for agave.

    Mexico with Julio Bermejo 049

  • Dashing Don Lee and Greg Boehm’s Old Tools

    On Monday April 5th, Greg Boehm of Cocktail Kingdom and Don Lee of Momofuko Ssam Bar gave a talk at Rickhouse in San Francisco.

    Gregboehmtoolsession

    Boehm's plane was delayed so Lee gave an impromptu talk on one of his bar science projects. (When I last spoke with him, he was measuring the BRIX count of sugar syrup in all the bars in New York.) Recently he's been trying to determine how much is a "dash" of bitters in a drink.

    Lee noted that different bottles of bitters release different amounts of liquid in a dash; not only just between brands but also between different-sized bottles of the same brand, and within one bottle when it is very full or very empty. (I currently have a jumbo sized Angostura bottle and the darn thing spits out a dash before I can tip it over far enough to get it in the glass.)

    As a starting point of his experiment, he measured the average size dash (in weight) from the middle 80% of a ten-ounce Angostura bottle, a Regan's Orange Bitters bottle, and Angostura in a Japanese dasher bottle. He found that Angostura released a smaller amount on average than Regan's. He also found that the 90 ml Japanese bitters dasher bottle delivered extremely consistent results (but only 1/4 of the size of a Regan's dash), probably because the long neck allowed for a consistent launching distance for the liquid.

    Future experiments might include testing how sensitive the palate is to these minute differences in dash size, so that we'll know how much difference a dash makes.

    When Greg Boehm arrived he was mostly playing show-and-tell with his vintage barware. Boehm collects functional barware, imports barware from Japan and other countries to sell, and is now beginning to make recreations of vintage barware when nothing as good is being made today. I learned a few things:

    • Patents on cocktail shakers seem to start around 1880
    • Brazil and Argentina are the only two countries that use uniquely-shaped shakers; Brazil's with a built-in strainer that seems pretty handy until you start bashing it with large Kold-Draft ice cubes and Argentina's a conical shaker that's really hard to separate.
    • All of those fancy-shaped shakers (penguins, bells, zeppelins) were launched at the end of Prohibition in the 1930's
    • Japanese barspoons are not really meant for measuring, but for stirring and pulling out a drop of liquid from the glass. I noticed this in Japanese bars in Singapore- that instead of the bartender tasting the drink using a straw, they taste it by putting a drop of the drink on the back of their hand then licking it off.
    • The reason many barspoons (like this one) have the flat end is that they're based on apothecary spoons that were used to crush pills.

  • Don’t Forget the Wild Tofurkey

    When you're out shopping for your liquor-loving vegetarian guests for Thanksgiving this year, don't forget to pick up some tofu and booze to make my special Wild Tofurkey dish. It's tofu marinated in a cocktail and baked. Mmm.

    Wildtofurkey

  • On ice

    When Alembic bartender Josey Packard talked about moving from San Francisco back to Boston, she was worried about getting the right job. "There's a place opening in the fall that will have a Kold Draft  machine, and I think I need to work there," she said. "Otherwise I'll have to make ice at home and bring it in my backpack on my bike to work."Iceorchid

    The statement was ridiculous and made in all seriousness. And I know how she feels- I'm not a bartender but I, too, cringe when forced to use the wrong ice in a drink. I keep three sizes in my refrigerator at home at all times. For a bartender, it must be like being a bike messenger forced to install training wheels.

    The New York Times covered the issue of ice last week from the consumer's perspective, and mostly focused on store-bought ice.

    Recently, I found this May New York Magazine slideshow on the best ice in New York, and it made me seethe with jealousy. Ice orchids? WANT. 

    At Tales of the Cocktail this July, Kold-Draft supplied the ice for the convention and it made me very happy. I spoke with some Kold-Draft people there and found out that the machines are really not all that expensive, at a little more than $3,000 each. (Please correct me if I'm wrong, barfolk.) If that's the case, why don't more places have them? Once I took a friend on a bar tour of San Francisco and realized we hit every venue that has a Kold-Draft in the city- you know, all five of them.

    Looking on the website, it appears that you can buy a Kold-Draft machine for your house for $1800 that fits under the sink. That doesn't seem that expensive (my perspective may be skewed on this) though still not affordable for a poor writer like myself. But I can imagine how glorious it would be, lounging around with those big, clear cubes like some sort of celebrity. I would have people over and they'd be all, "My, what big ice you have!" and I'd act nonchalant about it.

    Then again, it would only foster ice snobbery in me, and I'd end up bringing a load of them to ice-challenged bars in my backpack. Can you use this good ice instead?

  • The second annual Tales of the Cocktail swag awards!

    Times change, swag changes. This year at Tales of the Cocktail, my swag haul was quite different than last year, but perhaps the presenters’ bag o’ swag was different than for the media. (Can’t I be both?)

    This year I brought home 3 t-shirts, 4 drinking vessels, 3 types of garnish, 2 absinthe spoons, 8 mini bottles (I drank two in the room), and 2 keychains. Amazingly, I didn’t get a single muddler, compared with last year’s seven.

    For last year’s awards, click here.

    Second Annual Tales of the Cocktail Swag Awards

    Oddest promotional tie-in: Rain Vodka’s emery board (last year they gave an umbrella, which made more sense given the brand name)

    Best t-shirt: Hangar One

    Most useful: Kegworks’ citrus peeler (from the garnish seminar)

    Best (and only) Book: The Soul of Brasil by Anistatia Miller and Jared Brown (Sagatiba seminar)

    Best Coupon Code: 10% off Mud Puddle Books (Charles H. Baker seminar)

    Best Garnish: Wild Hibiscus Flowers in Syrup

    Weirdest/Most Expensive/Best Overall Swag: Hendrick’s gin’s metal croquet mallet stir stick, mar-tea-ni glass, and handheld cell phone extension were odd on their own, let alone combined. Hendrick’s continues to live up to their “unusual gin” campaign with unusual events, swag, and their website, without looking like they’re trying to hard. Congratulations on winning this year’s Swag Awards!

    I heard there was a gift bag cocktail contest up at the pool, where people had to make drinks using only the items in their swag bags. Those bartenders, they’re a crafty (and thirsty) bunch.

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  • The curious case of the Clock Bar

    Clock Bar, the hyped Michael Mina cocktail lounge opening July 15 in San Francisco, is becoming a lesson in OOPS I FORGOT ABOUT THE COCKTAILS.

    Early on the project was announced- historic space, famous chef, tasty bar snacks, high-end drinks, yadda, yadda, yadda- and nobody listed as being in charge of the cocktail program.

    Curious. The restaurant Gitane won’t be open for another two months and they’ve had a beverage manager and a cocktail consultant on retainer since the beginning of the year. But things were happening on the back end. Several people involved with the project were interviewed for a story in 944 magazine that just came out. The story is marvelous.

    In order to create the drink menu, Mina brought in legendary Las Vegas cocktail specialist Noah Ellis to help with the launch…. As the group’s beverage director, Ellis promises to ensure quality by creating a menu that features fresh-squeezed juices, house-made tonic and seltzer bottled sodas to complement the high-end alcohol. Additionally each drink will contain jagged wedges of ice, hand-cut from frozen blocks of mineral water…

    It sounds okay so far, right? Good, even. And then (cue sound of bomb dropping):

    “The lounge’s signature drink, the Clock Martini, will include frozen Ketel One Vodka shaken tableside and served with traditional garnishes.”

    Oooh, Ketel One! Don’t hurt your arm reaching so high up on the shelf! And traditional garnishes? Stop spoiling us! It seems they hired a guy to do their cocktail menu and he came up with a signature drink of a standard vodka martini. Refund!

    Now, before I read this I’d heard that Marco Dionysos got a job working there. Marco works at Tres Agaves, used to work at Absinthe, and is a huge cocktail nerd who often corrects brand representatives on factual errors about their own products. He’s invented at least one cocktail so good it’s on drink menus in New York. Oddly enough, Marco told me a while back that he wasn’t hired to be in charge but just on staff.

    That’s curious. Don’t they know who they’ve got? Of course they must- the article points out that they did their research. Just listen to Patric Yumul, VP of Operations for the Mina Group in the 944 Magazine story:

    “It’s about hitting on all cylinders,” he says. “None of the bars I saw were doing it though. Even in ones with great drinks, I didn’t want to actually sit down because I was afraid of getting hepatitis.“

    Curiouser. I wouldn’t think that suggesting your competitors’ venues teem with disease often spread by fecal-oral contact would be a good way to ingratiate yourself within the local cocktail community. But then again, the hepatitis prevents me from thinking clearly.

    Today I received the updated press release for the venue. There’s no mention of hand-cut ice or house-made tonic- or Noah Ellis and the signature vodka martini for that matter. And how’s this for not-a-raise:

    Lead by a veteran hospitality team of GM Matthew Meidinger, reputable San Francisco bartender Marco Dionysos (formerly of Tres Agaves) and seasoned bar team Ray Cortez Brown, Estanislado Orona and Maren West, the opening of CLOCK BAR marks the return of San Francisco tradition to the heart of Union Square.

    Well at least Marco is reputable now and singled out- though it doesn’t appear he’s been given a title/position such as Bar Manager or Head Bartender. Make that happen, Michael Mina people, and we’ll have our first clue that you might know what the heck you’re doing bragging about your super awesome new cocktail bar.

    Anyway, mistakes have been made, but they’re fixable. I hope everything turns out delicious and that they bring success and additional great cocktails to San Francisco- they’re just going to have to work a bit harder at it.

    [10:18 update: spelling of Ketel One corrected.]

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