Alcoholist » Pictures

Buying Booze on Sunday in Ohio

gr — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 13:02:21 +0000

Ohio, as do many states, has some holdover Blue Laws. It used to have a state monopoly on liqour and wine sales, as Pennsylvania still does, and certainly had the “not on Sundays” provision (still seen in New York’s service industry as “no hard alcohol before noon”, and various other states’ “before noon” policies). In Ohio, Sunday sales evolved somewhat (completely?) uniquely: there’s an ABV limit of 21%.

For most practical purposes, this means you can buy beer, but neither wine nor spirits, but several enterprising spirits vendors are chasing this market with diluted spirits. Here are several on a grocery store shelf. (There are also whiskeys and gins.)

Tiki drinks for the Fourth

gr — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 21:00:25 +0000

As I’m already down in New Orleans for the Tales of the Cocktail conference, I won’t go into too many verbal details here, but here are some photographs from Rodolphe’s annual Fourth of July party, at which he, I, and anybody who wandered behind the stick were mostly making tiki drinks (some recipes, so far as I recall we were making them, appended):

Mai Tai
1 oz dark rum (we used both Meyer’s and Gosling’s, at least until the latter ran dry)
1 oz light or añejo rum (there was definitely some Bacardi… the rest is foggy)
1 oz Orgeat or, when it came from the bar-left station, Orzata.
½ oz triple sec / Cointreau / blue curaçao (yes, I used each of those at least once)

Shake, strain into an ice-filled red or blue plastic cup.

Trinidad Sour
As before, but replacing the rye with either Scotch (we had about 3 oz of bourbon, but plenty of single malt…) or (my preference) pisco.

Piña Colada
2 oz white or añejo rum (we used each)
2 oz coconut cream
4 oz pineapple juice

Shake and strain over an ice-filled red or blue plastic cup. For bonus points, hit it with a splash of Averna for aromatics and appearance.

(Noticing a trend on the “glass”ware?)

We also did several punches on Saturday afternoon:

Fish House Punch
As before.

Planter’s Punch
(Rodolphe did this one to someone else’s recipe, so I need to check with him and update this later.)

Margarita
As before.

Pisco Punch
I did this vaguely approximating the recipe Dave Wondrich has in Imbibe! (note that there’s a Kindle version of that, which I have on the iPhone: very handy), and it seemed to be the hit of the three. I didn’t have the fore-thought to marinade pineapple in simple or gum syrup the night before, so I went with pineapple juice instead.
6 oz simple syrup
4 oz pineapple juice
12 oz lemon juice
24 oz pisco (roughly 12 of which was Capel and the other 12 something much nicer whose name I don’t recall without some help from Ro)

Photographs from the 13 June, 2009 cocktail party.

gr — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 01:18:13 +0000

I have posted some of these to Facebook already, but since I just threw up my hands in disgust at Gallery2 and went with something simple and clean, I figured I might as well actually present the whole massive pile of them: