Category: Uncategorized

A fun list on Kottke.org of (mostly bad) martinis, including

Franklin-tini (for Ben Franklin’s 300th birthday)
Mex-tini (orange vodka + tequila)
Sex-tini (Asian sex tonic + x-rated vodka)
Flu-tini (vodka + cold medicine)
Red Lobster Butter-Tini (butterscotch schnapps + half and half + Bailey’s)
Bikini-tini (low calorie)
K-tini (sauerkraut)
Red Hot Santa-tini (chili peppers + whipped cream)
Insomnia-tini (energy drink)
Peep-tini (Peeps candy)

For a change, reading about drinks doesn’t make me thirsty at all.

Labels: funny

In Eric Felten’s most recent Wall Street Journal article, he takes on bad, and badly-named drinks. He goes into one particular drink but takes an extra sentence to describe the name.

Popular in Australia, it seems, is a shooter made of Baileys and butterscotch liqueur. The drink’s elaborate and unprintable title vividly describes a “cowboy” engaged in an activity the Supreme Court adjudicated in Bowers v. Hardwick. Frankly, I can’t decide which is more distasteful — the lewd logo, or a drink of Baileys and butterscotch liqueur.

That’s a long way of saying “cowboy socksucker.” (I’m replacing the ‘c’ with an ‘s’, as I don’t want to get this blog banned from too many more places.)

When I moved to San Francisco they made this drink (and I was quite fond of it at the time, but I was dumb and pretty then) but they just called it the socksucker.

Back in Boston we called it the butterball. I wondered how many other names there were for this drink containing all of two ingredients, so I turned to DrinksMixer.com. This database has so many repeated and wrong recipes that finding other names for drinks is about the only thing it’s good for.

It turns out the drink of Irish cream liqueur and butterscotch liqueur is also called:

Bit ‘o Honey
Butterbee
Butterscotch Bomb
Butterscotch Cookie Shot
Buttery Nipple
Buttery Nipple #2
Camel Hump
Socksucking Cowboy
Copper Camel
Cowboy Socksucker
Oatmeal Cookie #2
Slippery Nipple

Labels: funny, liqueurs, recipes

In a very surprising move, classic Italian restaurant Kuleto’s in SF’s Union Square launched the city’s first all-organic cocktail menu.

By me, in today’s SF Chronicle:

What is likely San Francisco’s first all-organic cocktail menu popped up in a very unlikely place – Kuleto’s, the Italian restaurant in Union Square. The seven drinks on the menu are made with organic vodka, rum, gin, Tequila and Scotch, mixers, fruits, juices, syrups and even garnishes. Most are familiar drinks – cosmos, mojitos, lemon drops and margaritas – but you won’t find a martini or Manhattan because nobody seems to make an organic vermouth. The bar does serve non-organic drinks aplenty, but you’ll have to order off the menu for those.

221 Powell St. (at O’Farrell), San Francisco; (415) 397-7720.

Labels: bars, camper_clips

By me, in today’s SF Chronicle:

All bar hands on deck

The problem with cocktail recipe books is they get all sticky when you bring them into the kitchen. The problem with fun-sized, plastic-coated cocktail recipes is that the recipes are usually overly sweet and taste terrible. Finally someone figured out a sensible solution- a cocktail card deck with recipes from one of the most respected books on the market: Dale DeGroff’s “The Craft of the Cocktail.” The 50 tabbed cards in “The Craft of the Cocktail Deck” ($14.95, Potter Style), feature a drink on the front and the recipe on the back and are divided into tabbed sections for Martinis, Inspired Classics, DeGroff’s Signature Classics and Frozen Cocktails. The margarita is unfortunately placed in the latter category but the cards are not laminated so cocktail snobs can black out the phrase, “Combine all ingredients in a blender.”

Labels: books, camper_clips

Here‘s a recent story I wrote for San Francisco Magazine about Latin cocktail bars, and in particular Cantina. I am known to spend some time drinking there on occasion.

Labels: bars, cachaca, camper_clips, SanFrancisco

1. Do not drink champagne. It is evil.
2. Do not not drink champagne at Jardiniere‘s relaunch party, where Thad Vogler made seven kinds of punch, all of them with champagne. The punches may taste magnificent and restore your faith in the entire punch category, but you should not try them. They will tempt you to continue drinking them because they are so light and refreshing. It is a slippery slope.
3. Do not do this starting at 6PM for the next three to four hours. You may note that Tracy Chapman, who is also at the party, looks not a day older than she did in 1988. Do not tell her.
4. Do eat something if you are going to be drinking champagne, which you should not do. Why do you have to be such a vegetarian snob when appetizers are all meaty and delicious?
5. Do not continue on to the “after-hours,” the hour being 10PM. If you do, it is likely they will serve you champagne.
6. Remember, champagne is evil. Do not continue to drink the champagne.
7. Do remember how you got home. It was probably not on a magic toboggan sliding along rainbows. It was probably not before 11PM.
8. Do treat each champagne drinking session as a learning experience. Reflect on why you chose to drink champagne for the next 14 hours in bed with your pounding head under the covers.
9. Do not get out of bed only to attend a tasting of 300 sakes.

Labels: champagne

Roll out the single-barrel
Bay Area watering holes snap up bottlings of exclusive whiskeys
Camper English, Special to The Chronicle
Friday, September 7, 2007

The Cigar Bar & Grill in Jackson Square in San Francisco serves a Manhattan you can’t get anywhere else, as it’s made with the restaurant’s exclusive 10-year-old bourbon. Harris’ Restaurant and Nopa have exclusive bourbon, too, as does T-Rex Barbecue in Berkeley. None of these watering holes have stills in their backyards to produce their own spirits, but they each serve a different barrel of whiskey.

Most whiskeys are blends of dozens of different barrels, sometimes fewer if they’re “small batch” whiskeys. The distillery’s master blender mixes barrels together to achieve the desired flavor profile consistent with previous batches.

In the past few years, the master blender has had slightly less work to do, as single-barrel bottlings have become popular. In these bottlings, a barrel of exceptionally high quality (or an exceptionally old one) is put into bottles and labeled on its own. The resultant bottles are usually sold to multiple liquor stores, bars and restaurants, but increasingly, distilleries have begun promoting single-barrel bottlings to individual customers.

Read the rest of my story in today’s Chronicle here.

Labels: bourbon, camper_clips, scotch, whisky

In September’s San Francisco Magazine I have a story on Cantina, a bar I may have mentioned here once or two hundred times already, as part of the Latin cocktail trend. The story isn’t online, so run screaming to your local newsstand to pick up the new issue.

Labels: bars, camper_clips, SanFrancisco

Bay Area home distillers make modern-day moonshine
Camper English, Special to The Chronicle
Friday, August 24, 2007

Moonshiners live among us. By day they appear to be respectable members of society, perhaps writing software to make your Internet experience run smoothly. But at night and on weekends, after a visit to the farmers’ market or a nice brunch, they work in secret, sterilizing equipment, taking specific gravity and temperature measurements, and waiting impatiently as their illegal hooch drip, drip, drips out of tiny stills.

” ‘Illegal’ is such a judgmental word,” jokes Doug (not his real name), who makes moonshine along with his friend Ron (also not his real name) at Ron’s house in the Upper Haight.

The two have been distilling for less than a year. “We started home brewing, then we got into ‘advanced brewing,’ as we like to say to the neighbors,” Ron says.

read the story here.

The book I refer to in the story is this one- Moonshine! by Matthew Rowley. It combines moonshine lore and history with tons of practical advice for building your own still and making your own booze.

Labels: books, camper_clips, homemade

By me, in today’s SF Chronicle:

Help celebrate Speakeasy Ales and Lagers’ 10-year anniversary Saturday with a “rousing, riveting, and spine-tingling blowout hullabaloo” party at the Bayview brewery. The free admission event features live music by Brittany Shane, Crosstops and other bands, a barbecue, and of course, beer. They’ll be debuting White Lightning Wheat Beer on tap, made with wheat, oats, orange peel and spices, that you can try in the 10-year commemorative tasting glass. The family-friendly (but 21 to drink) event runs from 2 to 7 p.m. at 1195 Evans Ave. (at Keith), San Francisco; (415) 642-3371.

Labels: beer, events, SanFrancisco