Alcoholist Yet another cocktail blog.

For EC: Science of Stirring notes

• converting ice @ 0 degC to water @ 0 degC requires 80 calories / mole
  • takes longer cool a drink with colder ice
• no temp difference between center and surface of a *dry* cube of ice (< 0.2 degC)
• speed of stirring works the way you’d expect (faster stir cools faster; disregard aeration in this context)
• “chilling only comes with dilution”
• spinning (in a lettuce spinner, say) water off ice removes 7-10% of weight (from ice in the well; ice from the freezer doesn’t have much melt on the surface)
• constant stirring is more efficient both in terms of temp and dilution
  • leaving a drink on ice doesn’t really lower the temperature notably as long as you’re likely to leave it to make the rest of the order: just stir it, then move to the shaken drinks
• chill mixing glasses in order to avoid their leeching calories (heat = energy) from your drink
  • less relevant for tins, as they’re far thinner and metal changes temp far more rapidly than glass
• cf quotes in prior post

Quotes from Tales of the Cocktail 2010

Last year I pretended that I was going to make my way through my notes and post a summary of every seminar I attended. I failed completely at that. I’m not going to pretend this year: instead, I’m just going to transcribe, with attribution, the humorous quotations from notable bartenders I jotted down. Given the blog, never mind traditional media, coverage of the event at this point, I feel this is my niche. So, here we go:

“The dry gin martini is the shortest distance between two points.” – Dave Wondrich

“If you can’t look cool stirring, your drink won’t have any deliciousness.” – Thomas Waugh

“… as long as that shit ice is consistently shit.” – Dave Arnold

“Never trust a skinny chef or a sober bartender.” – Danny Valdez

“You should have your own rockstar in mind [when tending bar].” – Dushan Zaric

“The government is not in the liquor or wine business.” – France, when asked by the US to police St. Pierre et Michelon during Prohibition [Somebody needs to tell the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania about that...]

“Martinis are like women’s breasts: they should be round and smooth. One is too few, three is too many.” – Henrik Hammer, Geranium Gin

“We’ve got a Dutchman, a South African, and a Dane: if we were any more laid back, we’d be horizontal.” – Andrew Nichols, of door74, presenting with Henrik Hammer and Timo Janse

Crescent Run, 2010: complete

Total time: call it 17 hours. (I think we left slightly after 20:00 Eastern Tuesday, but we’d have been at the Monteleone’s parking lot at 12:00 Central / 13:00 Eastern if we had known Wednesday’s NOPD blockade system.) So, that missed the mark, but I know where the time was lost.

Total distance: 1223 miles

Average speed: 71.94 mph

Top speed: 119 mph (fwiw, that’s the max at red-line on a flat surface that the 2010 Dodge Charger SXT, 3.5L V6, has to give… I did give it another quarter mile to nurse any little bit more out; measured via GPS, not analog speedo).

Pictures: http://eclipsed.net/~gr/Pictures/Crescent_Run-2010/

More words: http://forums.f1weekly.com/showthread.php?tid=4769

Driving (quickly) from PHL to Tales 2010

I’ve basically committed myself to driving from Philadelphia to New Orleans for Tales of the Cocktail 2010 at this point. I’ll be embarrassed if my car takes more than 20 hours to get there, and I’ll be pleased if it breaks 16 hours (meaning that the latter is our target).

Although I’ve some experience in this particular sort of rodeo, I’m no Alex Roy… especially including my not owning one, never mind several, BMW E90 M3s… or any car at all. I was happy to help flog a good friend’s ‘97 VW GTi from Long Island City to Detroit nearly a year ago, but I donated my very own ‘98 VW Jetta for the benefit of my local public radio station over a year ago, so I’m looking at the “rent a car for a week” market, and I’m seeing a lot of vehicles I don’t really want to drive for five minutes, let alone 1250 miles.

Said vehicles hit the opposite ends of the relevant bell curve: I’ve no more or less interest in a Pontiac G60 or a Ford Fusion than I do in Bentley Continental or a Lambo Murciélago: I’m going to hate every second of driving any of those over the roads that get me to NOLA in a timely manner, and, as many laughs as I’d get rolling along Rampart in a Lambo, the shiny ones aren’t worth the cost of my having to replace every single leaf spring in the damn thing.

Somewhere in there, there’s a middle ground. Surely, there exists someone in the vague Philadelphia neighborhood who will rent me a late ’90s BMW M3, Audi RS4/6, or at least a Japanese sedan of recent vintage with something resembling a manual shift.

(Please don’t make me lean on a friend to let me borrow his family’s mid-’60s Facel Vega II. Never mind the irony’s being rather too sharp, I probably can’t get my head around asking to borrow a car worth six figures.)

Help?

Manhattan Cocktail Classic 2010 schedule, in a useable form.

I think I’ll probably go ahead and introduce myself to Lesley Townsend and ask why she didn’t do something similar to this on the official site, but, so that I could figure out what I could attend without conflicts, I created a Google calendar for the currently-posted MCC events, which I’ll try to keep up to date as things get added between now and the Ides of May. Here it is:

Regrettably, I’m ignorant of the ways to go about offsetting the start date or the presentation method when embedding a Google calendar. You definitely want that in at least weekly, if not daily, view, and you want to bounce forward (or backward, although I’m not sure why you’d come to this later and need to do that) to 14 May or so.

San Francisco bars, part 1

I’ll skip the details, I’m here for a dayjob conference followed by a friend’s wedding. I just got in tonight, so I stayed close to the hotel. I visited:

Farmer Brown
The restaurant/bar attached to my hotel, which sources its food from local farms, preferring those run by non-white farmers. It actually has a pretty interesting cocktail program, and tonight’s bartender, Daniel, did a good job, but somebody needs to introduce them to the double-strain, or at least using a strainer at all.

Swig
Definitely a good selection, but they were mobbed by a very mixed (pick your metric: racial, gender, gender-preference, socio-economic: all apply) group while I was there. One part of that group was there for the live blues (which was very good), to which they were dancing, and the other part was stripey shirt boys clearly more irritated by the gender imbalance (heavily hetero male, meaning Them) than I (there to sample the cocktail menu) was. My Gin Gin Mule, listed on the menu with Martin Miller’s but poured with Tanqueray, was obviously rushed by the circumstances, so I’ll have to come back on a slower night.

Rye
I can’t say enough good things. Hannah’d previously given me the ingredients, but not the proportions, for their Dogpatch, and I tried it with what I thought made sense and found it too dark and heavy, but the genuine article is much better than my guestimate was. I dealt mostly with Lauren (who may or may not remember the Attention and Red Hook after I taught them to her), who seems a bit unsure of herself unnecessarily, didn’t catch the name of the senior bartender on duty, met Marco (formerly of Clock Bar, now consulting, so far as I could gather) and Erick (Bourbon & Branch and (?) Rickhouse), each on my side of the bar, each probably turning up for the Cocktail Classic, and had a pleasant chat. I’ll be back, especially as it’s stumbling distance from the hotel.

Name this drink!

A friend described something that Rye is doing with Averna, rosso vermouth, and (she remembers / presumes) rye as “brown and grown-up … the kind of thing drunk by crusty British professor types in the 1930s – you know, one glass of claret with dinner (roast beef), one glass of spirits afterward, and to bed at 9:30pm.” I got so far as the rye and the Averna, and knew I’d agree: too much brown, heavy stuff, not enough balance. So here’s what I’m actually having as my last drink before bed, which I like very much and would like to serve to other people, which probably means it needs a Name, on which I’m coming up blank:

2 oz rye (I used Old Overholt)
¾ oz Averna amaro
¾ oz Cinzano bianco (note: not dry, the sweet, white type of vermouth)

Stir in a mixing glass on ice, strain over cubes in a Collins, top with soda, garnish with a flamed orange peel (and discard the peel).