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The hops in your tisane shouldn't be the source of the bitterness... their bitterness doesn't come out until the alpha acids are isomerized by boiling in a the presence of the right catalyst molecules. Wormwood, on the other hand, doesn't need to jump through any hoops to bring tons of bitterness.

Here's the Brettliner Weiss recipe: Style: Berliner Weisse Type: All grain Grain: 4 lb. American 2-row 2 lb. Wheat malt .5 lb. Raw wheat Mash: 30 minutes at 142, 30 minutes at 148. Boil: 20 minutes SG 1.056 3 gallons Whirlfloc added at 15 Hops: .5 oz. Willamette (3.8% AA, 20 min.) Yeast: 2 qt starter of Brett C. (White Labs WLP645) Dilute to 4.5 gallons, and add .5 gallon of chardonnay juice. Carbonate to 3.3 volumes CO2. (make sure to use sturdy bottles)

I've heard (but never had the chance to try for myself) that hop shoots are eaten like asparagus. I don't imagine that the flowers that are used in brewing are much fun to eat, insofar as they're very tough. You're not going to get tender vegetable properties out of them.

Well, with luck and a hardware store with older stock (pre-copper-price-spike) you can get a ice maker kit with 25' of copper in the $25ish range.... and the brass fittings to hook it up to a hose cost me about $11... add in $2 for hose and hose clamps. DIY does bring a 40%ish discount, and with prices of everything related to brewing spiking like crazy, any discount is a good discount! I should fill in everybody on my spring brewing adventures now too-- That wit with the peel included has calmed down and is pretty nice right now, though I do still miss the late hops addition. I used both malted wheat and unmalted wheat, and that combination is giving me great haze, the cloudiness that is the signature of a witbier. After that batch, I did an experiment with off-the-deep-end brewing techniques and made a Berliner Weisse that I fermented totally with Brettanomyces Clausenii, a different species of yeast that is proving popular in certain brewing circles recently. This was a smashing success, very quickly producing a dry tart wheaty beer. This style was dubbed "The Champage of the North" by Napoleon as he was marching his armies through northern Germany, as it is tart, spritzy and dry. Riffing on that theme, and the classical habit of dosing Berliner Weisse with fruity syrups, I couldn't resist the urge to spike it with a half gallon of chardonnay juice. It is very very nice now. In the fermentor now, I've got a batch of Saison going... a very simple recipe... mostly pale malt, with a dash of aromatic and a pound of wheat malt and a bottle of beet sugar syrup. This beer is all about the yeast... and the yeast I'm using is a custom blend put together by a microbiologist who keeps a broad library of yeast and is very generous in offering samples of his projects. This is a mixture of the descendants of a couple of limited edition Wyeast offerings, 3711, and 3726 and some yeast isolated and cultured from bottles. It's been fermenting outside in the hot weather for the past 3 weeks, and is getting close to done now. Recent samples are very very promising. Now I've got to figure out what to do with the remaining grains I've got sitting around... PS: I'll gladly post recipes if anybody is interested.

Bingo! Infusing one into the other seems like a very bad idea.

Bittman is, in fact, wrong. You can't argue with that. Pointing it out is not "bashing" him. Manhattans and Margaritas are not related mixologically any more than birds and snakes are related zoologically. Stop making excuses for factual errors by trying to prefix "in his opinion" to the erroneous facts. Bitters are not sour. Bitters in a Manhattan are used in a proportion nothing like lime is used in a Margarita. And "sweet" vermouth is nothing like Cointreau or simple syrup. It is a bad analogy, and factually wrong. And it is confusing. Because it is wrong.

Wanted to make a suggestion for you on your cooling time issues- A wort chiller is really easy to make and does a very good job of taking heat away. Just go to your local hardware store and look in the plumbing section for ice-maker connector kits. Some of them will be coils of copper tubing with bits and pieces of hardware you won't need bundled along. Buy one of them in the 25' range, and then walk over to the coils of nylon tubing and buy yourself 2 feet of nylon tube that fits onto the copper tubing, and a pair of hose clamps to secure the nylon to the copper and the fittings to the nylon. Then walk over to the plumbing fittings section and get a connector (or several) that allow you to hook up the copper coil to your preferred water source. Mine is set up for the garden hose, yours may be set up for the sink... Then take the far end of the copper and bend it up so that it comes up over the edge of your boil pot... maybe make it hook shaped so you can hang it on the pot. Voila! You've got a wort chiller that will bring your wort down from boiling to tap water temperature in a half hour. An ice bath will get it the rest of the way if your tap water is warm like I gather is the case in the desert southwest.

Citrus juices, flavored syrups and seltzer, in various combinations do a fine job. The classic British mock aperitif, the elderflower cordial, is nice and wine-y in a non-alcoholic way. I'm a fan of raspberry syrup, lime juice and seltzer. A latter day lime rickey. I'd bet a further interesting accent could be achieved with a bit of green tea in there for tannic backbone. Think about the flavor complexity of cocktails you like, and consider where you might get similar effects without booze. For a scotch drinker, a bit of lapsang souchong certainly evokes the smokiness... I wonder if you one-up that effect by adding a whisky barrel chip or two to some lapsang to create woodiness to go with the smoke. You might have to let that mellow for a week in a bottle before it got palateable since wood takes some time to meld with other flavors. I'm back... just did an experiment that confirms my suspicions that green tea would be a nice addition to the lime raspberry mix. For the sake of communicating what I did I used a scale to measure parts: 50g of freshly brewed Li Zi Xiang tea, 15g of raspberry syrup, 7g of lime juice, over ice and filled with seltzer in a 12 oz glass. Came out very nicely tart and complex.

Maybe a throw-down is in order? Why don't Pegu/PDT/D&Co. (or another serious cocktail bar run by people reading this post) issue a challenge to Bittman... maybe the NYT tasting panel that convenes to do wine and beer stories could judge. That's Bittman's schtick, after all... he's done a whole season on PBS of going to the big-name chefs of various cuisines, letting them do something the right way on camera, and then simplifying the hell out of their ideas and executing his own take in the second half of the program. Try pitching this to the Times and see if you can get a follow-up done.

Well, pitching at 80F is not the most terrible thing you could have done... but it does leave you open to certain possible consequences, depending upon the yeast you're using. Yeast are little chemical reactors that can make different reaction products depending on how much energy (e.g. heat) they have available to them. Some varieties of yeast will take extra energy and one-up themselves, instead of making simple alcohol, they'll make "higher alcohols" aka fusels which bring solventy or spicy flavors, and potential headaches. Some yeasts will throw fusels if your temperature gets above 80F, other yeasts love those temperatures and are quite well behaved up to the 90s. In my own experience, I've had bad fusels thrown by Wyeast 1762 when it got pitched at 80+. I've intentionally pushed Saison yeasts and Witbier yeasts into the 80s, and gotten great results. Let us know what yeast you used, and how it finally turned out.

Nope. It was definitely at Pegu. She's not a NYC regular, and only went for cocktails to the Pegu Club when she was in town.

I'll pass along the reference to the Beijing Peach, but was hoping that somebody here actually knew what Pegu was serving so the replication could be pointed at what was actually remembered. Now that I think of it, I'd bet that some of the more potent oolongs would infuse into gin with spectacular results... I'll have to give that a shot soon. I'm thinking that the woodsiness of a Bai Hao might work really well.

I've recently been queried about a drink that appeared at the Pegu Club a couple of years ago that a friend remembers fondly and would like to replicate. It was a jasmine infused gin and peach drink, as far as the recollection of the imbiber goes. Anybody have any ideas on the constituents of this drink? My guess is that it was a cousin of the Earl Grey MarTEAni, hence Tanqueray infused with jasmine tea, and with something peachy mixed into the souring component... Anybody have other guesses or (even better) actual knowledge about this drink?

An update on the orange peel topic- I just brewed a Wit, and in addition to coriander and a kaffir lime leaf, I threw in a dried whole peel of a temple orange, and did not add any late hops. I'm not impressed with the effect achieved. It has the right bitterness, but it tastes pithy, and I miss the late hops effect. I think I'll end up blending it with another batch to dilute the pithiness and add some late Saaz flavor.

Recipes are not and cannot be copyrighted. You can certainly post the list of ingredients and measurements here without any worry whatsoever.

Yup... I agree that citrus drinks really do suck if the citrus is replaced by the powdered citric acid and "flavorings" products called "sour mix". Ask if they use fresh juice when you're ordering, and if the answer is no, stick with the glass of wine.

A sidecar fits your bill-- a classic that is a well balanced mixture of sweet, tart and boozy. So does a margarita-- try it on the rocks rather than in slurpee format. A good litmus test to see whether a bar is serious about cocktails is a sazarac-- if they don't have the required Peychaud's bitters, then they're not a serious cocktail bar. Beware that a sazarac does have an anise flavor to it, so if you hate black licorice, it's not the drink for you. You could go highball instead of cocktail too... I find that anejo (or dark) rum and tonic with a lime makes a mighty fine drink that telegraphs that you care about what you're drinking.

That trailer does look remarkably watchable, and the show appears to have some promise...

IF the device has built in refrigeration, e.g. keeps all the liquids in it at 38F all the time, I think that the citrus juices could survive for a sufficiently long time to make the minimum service interval a good few days. And if the machine is earning its keep, it should need bottle refills much more frequently than a minimum service interval. Though building in a timer/level sensor that dumps old juices after a certain period of time would certainly be a good engineering move to head off the spoiled juice problem. Don't forget that citrus juices are packed full of citric and ascorbic acids, the preservatives that get dumped into lots of other things.

I don't think that this sort of machine is going to replace the artisan aspect of making good drinks, but it could raise the base level of the craft a bit. Quality is holistic... getting crap ingredients into the ideal proportions is still going to result in a pretty crappy final product. But think how much worse it can be if those same crappy ingredients are mixed in god knows what proportions by an unskilled human who doesn't really care that much. Try ordering a Manhattan in a karaoke bar in Ft. Worth sometime. There is only so much of a market for custom crafted artisan cocktails... and a machine would do a piss poor job at my standard order in a bar where I trust the mixological skills-- "Surprise me". So there's no real competition from a machine like this for a cocktail artisan... but is cuts out the crappy middleman in spots where the mixer doesn't give a damn.

So long as the machine uses modern programmable variable controls and has a user interface that can customize a drink to a client, I'd not be averse to a bar using one of these machines to make drinks. Think about it a bit-- the essential function of the machine will be to accurately measure the additions to the drink. Some cocktail folks get their knickers in a twist over the unpardonable sin of free-pouring and find a cocktail whose ingredients didn't touch a jigger to be an abomination... but the underlying concern is, I think, about accuracy of measurement. Accuracy of measurement is what a machine is all about. Doing it right, a machine could be even better than a jigger measurement, for example doing it by weight, which would take into account the differing sugar levels in different brands of the same ingredient, resulting in a more constant sweetness level in drinks made. Adding the paint-shaker apparatus to agitate would certainly permit labor intensive drinks like a Ramos Fizz to be offered more regularly and to more customers. Very important concerns re the machine that I can think of- 1. Cleanliness of the interior workings. You don't want tubes and valves becoming encrusted with sugary residue (or any residue for that matter), thus necessitating a mechanism to flush the system with water after EVERY drink is made. Better yet would be an automatic algorithm which would run a cleaning solution through the thing on a set interval-- never underestimate the prevalence and power of neglect. IF staff has to remember to run the clean/flush procedure, most of the time it won't happen. 2. Ice and proper dilution- It sounds as if the ingenious trade-secret cooling system may not add the bit of dilution that proper ice does in a cocktail... that would be a problem. If a bar can't keep good bartenders around I think they'd keep some customers if there was a machine that had "their" recipe for a particular set of cocktails programmed into it... A good programmable machine would allow for a customized, reproducible experience, independent of the staff on duty at any time.

I've never ever heard the query "How's your food tasting?'... that doesn't sound like something a native speaker of English around my parts of the world would say... frankly it sounds really foreign to me. "How's everything?" is common, as is "Are you enjoying everything". "How is your food tasting?" sounds strangely German, insofar as folks who don't a speak language with an -ing verb form don't really know how to use it, and German has no such form...

The citrus oils from Boyajian are wonderful and would blend well with chocolate... Link to Boyajian's website.

As a U. Texas alum, I must express shock and sympathy for your necessity to move into Okie territory. Fortunately for you, an eG brewer, Okbrewer, lives down there and keeps the place civilized by making good beer.

Go right ahead and post a hyperlink... I'd love to see what somebody has to say about their experience brewing with whole oranges. It sounds like they are taking the pith's bitterness into account with the minimal bittering hop addition.