The Emperor’s New Bitters

The long line in which I waited to get into this sold-out seminar last Thursday was unsurprising. Bitters, as you’re undoubtedly aware, are a hot topic among bartenders and cocktail enthusiasts. We were hoping we’d taste things both new and old, and we weren’t disappointed. (As we waited and chatted amongst ourselves, we were offered [...]

H2O Cocktails

At Tales of the Cocktail, Kathy Casey and Tony Abou-Ganim gave a seminar on H2O cocktails. These are essentially low-calorie vodka cocktails where all the calories come from the booze. The other ingredient in each is flavored water, made by infusing (in one of two methods) water with fresh ingredients.
The concept is new and refreshing- [...]

Vinegar: The Other Acid

Vinegar beverages date back thousands of years, though they’ve recently become trendy in cocktails.
In the seminar Vinegar: The Other Acid, the moderators spoke about the history of vinegar in drinks, the shrubs that are popular today, and a new technique of using vinegar to make non-alcoholic tinctures.
To read all about, follow this link to Alcademics.com.

Who’s Your Daddy? A Mai Tai Paternity Test

The Mai Tai, though a later addition to the tiki pantheon than the famous Zombie, is undisputedly the most well-known tiki drink today. We’ve all tasted one–with varying degrees of success–be they made on Long Island or Oahu. But besides being popular, the Mai Tai is also one of the most hotly contested drinks in [...]

Barrel-Aged Cocktails: Patience, Grasshopper!

Why dump a perfectly good cocktail like a Negroni or Manhattan into a wood barrel for a couple of months?
1) It’s fun in an old-world mad-scientist kinda way.
2) It may make your cocktail luxuriously smooth and even add a bit of wood character.
For over an hour this afternoon, Jeffrey Morgenthaler, Gable Erenzo and Naren Young [...]

Tasting Spirits and Sipping Cocktails at Tales of the Cocktail

Steve Schul and Paul Zablocki (Cocktail Buzz) ply their love for cocktail and food pairings on their Web site, Cocktail Buzz, and their blog “Buzzings.”
While at Tales of the Cocktail, we end up sipping dozens of spirits, liqueurs, sodas, and new cocktails whipped up by the world’s greatest bartenders and mixologists (why do some people [...]

America’s New Distilleries

There are, as panelist Matthew Rowley pointed out, more American craft distilleries operating right now than at any time since Prohibition. Some estimates claim there is a new distillery every three days, concentrated largely on the coasts, with a particular concentration inland in Colorado.
Those lucky people who attended Friday’s seminar about craft distillers were treated [...]

Classic Hotel Bars: A Few Highlights

Being that I’m staying in a hotel and doing a fair amount of drinking in a nearby hotel containing a well-known bar (that’d be the Carousel bar at the Monteleone) I felt I’d be remiss if I didn’t attend the “Classic Hotel Bars” seminar.
The focus was mainly on the hotel bars of London, with occasional [...]

TOTC on the BBC

Writer Camper English was interviewed for the BBC radio program The World this morning. Here’s a short report from Tales of the Cocktail.

Amazing Seminar: “Brand Ambassadors,” sponsored by Belvedere Vodka

Steve Schul and Paul Zablocki (Cocktail Buzz) ply their love for cocktail and food pairings on their Web site, Cocktail Buzz, and their blog “Buzzings.”

Wednesday morning. It was time to wake up and smell the coffee. Thank god for the Kahlúa Coffee Bar to jumpstart our morning. Those red-eyes—a shot of espresso mixed with regular [...]

keep looking »