bacchant036

we pair a PX at work with icecream, the strong flav tends to get a bit to much if you add it to other rich desserts. i love px and have started using it in cocktails of late, works great in a sidecar vs the cointreau, or as a sweetner to a old fashioned vs the sugar.

we use it in a foam on top of an apple daiquiri, lavender seems to go very well with apple and pears. also great with gin, the lav goes great with juniper and the other botanicals usually found nesting within. on that note would try an aviation with it, a little 'a la duffy' w his creme yvette i guess? if you could make a 'water' vs a syrup, maybe a tea? then it would be excellent in a martini, especiually a tanq 10 martini? bon chance

well can confirm the kensingto aged has a great mellowness to it, the aing seems to take the sharp white spirit edge of it woithout effecting the actual taste to much, have started drinking the stuff as a wet martini (theres not enough vermouth being used in the world these days!) with a orange zest instead of a lemon, great drink, think it may become our volstead martini. if you can get your hands on a bottle, and raj of specialty drinks does it in the uk, then i would rally reccomend it, just for a change suspect embury was right...............

bar will be called volstead, and the gins made by kensington, although i've heard recently that another brand is experimenting.......

opening a bar in london next week and have managed to get my sticky little (actually short and stubby) fingers on some great gin, including a 1930's and 40's bottlings of london dry, one thing i have been trying to get for ages is some 'aged gin' embury raves about it in his drink, anyone have some good recipes? not afraid for some road testing - actually kind of looking forward to it but was wondering if someone could give me a head start? cheers

for christs sake have a frickin beer!

mojito is about as taxing as a seabreeze these days, for no real reason bloody mary's tend to piss me off the most, anything with archers, malibu, midori or baileys as a close second.....................

thats funny i just bought a 1913 whiskey, are we quibbling over an 'e' again?

yeah, shopuld have schecked the soft drinks link, thanks for the refresher, in the process of designing a bar/club in london which will be called 'volstead' and wanted to pick some americana style ingredients for the cocktail list - yes that was me thinking about booze again, pretty exciting as i get to find great old drinks with cool prohibition sounding names and try and make them palatable for our current fruity sweet palate. challenging but enjoyable. thanks for the help

anyone know anything about this? how to make it? where to buy it from (in the uk)? thanks

what a cop out. it being new years day and all i thought it the perfect opportunity to test a new idea, and i can only marvel at its success. hot buttered rum, followed by a nice bottle californian red and risotto but the key was the hot buttered rum happy new year

the worst rum i've ever tried was an agricole from mauritious, not green parrot ort parrot bay but there younger newer agricole. it tasted like burnt rubber initially then left a lasting taste of fish. never tasted anything like it, its almost worth trying for interests sake, although remember drinking it in front of the rep at the time and trying incredibly hard not to spit the thing back out again.

friend of mine bought a bottle back from st lucia for me, anyone know anything about it? its a damn fine rum.

i had a 1792 'solera' bacardi which was from mexico, not sure on where the date comes from - and it didn't last long which is usually a good sign

amusingly malacca (although the spellings quite different) means something fairly offensive in greek

i suspect that unfortunately vodka will be the new vodka, for at least another 7-9 years, rum seems to be making a strong case for attention at the moment, especially on the back of the now ubiquitous mojito (how long must i wait for mojito flavoured jellybeans damn it!), and i can only hope that it does a moscow mule on rum sales, and not of the clear bat studded variety. i do see rum as a kind of bridgeing point between white and dark spirits, i think that if we keep pushing this on people then it may mature there taste buds a little and get them to diversify, i can only hope. my favourite tasting flight goes something like....... mojito - mint julep - whiskey sour - manhatten doesn't work with everyone though.

i was even under the impression that pernod got a heads up from the french govt (didn't want to lose out on all that tax) about the ban so surprised about the time lag. think that anis flavoured spirits have to be about the most popular in the med basin, every country seems to have there own version, raki, ouzu, sambuca etc etc etc so i'm sure that these do pre-date those brands. however i suspect that the style of drink came to prominance (ie water and absinthe ah la absinthe drip) during the absinthe years, so that when the absinthe was suppressed people wanted to drink a similar style of drink (ie switching from boston bobs finest homemade vodka and tonics to stoli and tonics cause he went out of production) and when the larger brands with the advertising hit the ground everyone started drinking them instead. pastis itself refers almost to a way of drinking these products vs an actual brand, although there is a 'pastis' brand, ie i often drink absinthe pastis in summer which is effectively an absinthe drip. pernod itself was allegedly also one of the earlier absinthe brands (depending on how much marketing you believe) http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/187398294...=books&v=glance is a great book for more info

want to make money start growing the things cause they cost a fortune in the uk, great flavour, some more digging around asian foodmarkets and hassling reps for liqueurs will unravel a list of citrus fruits longer than my arm (and i get scuff marks on my knuckles walking up stairs), some good, some that taste like, citrus. surprisingly. the yuzu, or the stuff i can get, goes great with sake and a dash of honey to sweeten, you'll need to play around with the amounts depending on which sake or yuzu, you can then try different sweetners, tend to find yuzu as versatile as lemon or lime. cheers.

just had to post this, my father sent it over and it put a smile on my face www.bigad.com.au

oh, and ben just picked up 1st in the international sputnik comp in russia. love the grass on inn the park!

same drink, although what i've got reads... "what was known as draque, drak, or drac derived its name from richard drake, to whom in 1593 queen elisabeth I granted the first monopoly license for the production of aqua-composita, aqua vitae, vinegar, alegar and other spirits, as a reward for his services under sir francis drake, to whom he was not related"

don't dispute that the first use in print was the above, just wonder if this may have contributed to the origins of the word? did it take this long to evolve into a printed word? and could the changing definition be a similar situation to the way the word martini has changed in meaning? just a thought s

was reading 'rum' by hugh barty-king and anton massel the other day (which incidently is a damn fine book) and stumbled across a passage on the 'draque punch' or 'drac punch' a mix of rum, lime, mint sugar and water - which is seen as the father of the modern julep and the mojito, invented by a richard drake in the 1590's, which is interesting in itself (and amazing the cyclical way this flavour combo keeps grabbing our attention throughout the years), but then underneath theres a passage stating " drac punch was traditionally served with a wooden spoon with a cock's tail handle, see theo mayerne, 'the distiller of london, 1639' " has anyone seen this original document? is there a prior reference? was the word cocktail started in elizabethan england because of this mixed drink? to me it just seems like way to much of a coincidence for it then to have started by any of the more widely known stories?

a bit late on the uptake i know, but i've been a busy man. i used to work in a very busy cocktail bar in chelsea, and i swear theres nothing worse than some cheerful little greek or italian coming to the bar, ask for a dry martini, and when offered with said martini cocktail look horribly dissapointed then embarrassingly say they just wanted a martini dry with no gin. this happened so many times before i learnt to size up the customer and ask, do you want a martini cocktail, and even then they get confused, on the flip side theres nothing cuter than being asked for a 'white martini' for the first time, and finally realising that there not after some new cocktail from match bar but a martini bianco. cheers indeed

after 14 years making cocktails in various parts of the world, and even though now i work as the operations manager for a group of very successful cocktail bars clubs and restaurants if someone asks me what i am, i'm a bartender. sure some bartenders are better than others, some restaurants serve better steaks than others - there still all steaks though. some waiters are better than others, they don't go calling themselves 'food delivery technicians' or 'meal placement directors'. they're waiters. all these new wonderful names to describe work which is essentially bartending to me just serve to confuse people and do nothing to promote the value of the position. i'm proud to be a bartender, and never happier when actually behind a bar, making good drinks and making sure everyone enjoys themselves. i think if you have the creativity to use flambed pineapple and pickled ginger to make a superb cocktail, or can spin 4 bottles above your head while doing it without killing anyone (or breaking anything) then that makes you a great bartender, but still a bartender.