slkinsey

Interesting. Distilled by Blackwood Distillers in Shetland, Scotland. Some interesting local botanicals include angelica root, wild water mint and sea pink flowers. There are apparently two bottlings of gin by Blackwood: Blackwood's Vintage Dry Gin, their regular bottling, and Blackwood's Vintage 60, a limited edition gin made with hand-gathered Summer botanicals from the Shetland Islands. Audrey, have you tasted their gin? What's it like.

You should be able to use the regular iSi chargers. But, I have to tell you that the antique glass bottles with the cool wire netting, of which I have several, are almost never in working order (usually the rubber seals in the headpiece have failed). So don't buy a vintage glass soda siphon on eBay unless the seller can confirm that it they have charged it and it works without leaking.

To a certain extent, I would think that icy shots of straight vodka are out of the question in this situation. Unless they bring the bottle already ice cold, it will take too long for a full bottle of room temperature vodka to get down to freezer temperature.

Keep it in the freezer and it will stay fine more or less forever, in my experience.

If you really want to "taste the vodka" then I think straight chilled is the only way to go. For cocktails with vodka, there are very few I like, but I have enjoyed Audrey's "Dreamy Dorini Smoking Martini." It goes a little something like this: 2.0 oz : vodka 0.5 oz : Laphroaig 10* 2-3 drops : Pernod Stir with ice, strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with lemon twist. * I have used other intensely smokey single malts, such as Lagavullin, with success

I also have a ton of broken down chicken carcasses (raw, not from roasted chickens) and around a dozen cocktail glasses in the door. But that doesn't strike me as all that weird for an eG crowd.

I was just making room for some extra ice in my freezer when I realized I have some pretty weird stuff in there. I mean, most people would think it odd that half my freezer space is taken up with various animal fats, currently duck, goose, bacon, lard and chicken fats plus some butter made from the cream skimmed from parmigiano reggiano. And indeed the weirdest thing in there is yet another kind of fat. I have a big chunk of blubber a friend from Alaska brought the last time she was in New York. I think it's whale blubber, but it might be seal blubber. Haven't decided what to do with it yet, but rest assured that I will be making Steven Shaw eat some of it and we will be writing about it here. Recipes for blubber are, of course, appreciated. So, what's the weirdest thing in your freezer?

Many strong sourdough cultures are decades old, having co-evolved through literally billions of generations.

Whoa. That's a lot of questions, dude. I think it might be interesting if those who fill out the forms for Esquire also post their choices here. I won't fill it out myself, because any bar I might choose would be one of which Dave is already aware. But for top places in NYC, one could do worse than Flatiron Lounge, Milk & Honey and Pegu Club.

Just get a decent quality PTFE-coated frypan. Whatever is being sold at a deep discount. No nonstick surface will last forever, and I am not aware of any nonstick coating that emits "harmful chemicals."

Shalmanese: For various reasons having to do with growth-limiting conditions for sourdough microorganisms, it would be much better if you reduce the amount of "old" starter you hold behind. You are holding back 33% of the old starter. The starter culture would have much better growth characteristics if you held back only around 10% of the old starter. I often refresh by dumping out all the old starter and only holding back whatever sticks to the inside of the jar. Reducing the percentage of held back old starter is the single most important thing you can do to increase the activity and health of your sourdough culture. I would also recommend feeding your starter at 1:1 flour and water by weight rather than by volume. This also helps to reduce growth limiting conditions and makes it easy to know how much flour and water you have in a given weight of starter. Finally, you should try to feed your starter when it is at peak activity. If you wait until the starter is starving before you feed it, you are starting off on the wrong foot already. Rickster: It sounds like your starter culture is awfully young to be put in the refrigerator for three weeks. This is the kind of treatment that is often only handled well by cultures that are very robust and well-established (which is one reason I think it's better to acquire an established culture rather than making your own).

FWIW, I prefer Absente over Pernod for an absinthe-substitute.

I don't think it's entirely accurate to say that there existed only a "minuscule minority ... who were never taken seriously" in the scientific/medical community who were were skeptical of the premise that dietary fat was the end-all, be-all with respect to heart disease, cancer, etc. -- although this may be true of the popular media.

Cafe Edgar on the Upper West Side in NYC has something very similar they call a "Viennese."

For those who may not be familiar with bicerin, it is essentially a drink with a shot of espresso, a couple of ounces of Italian-style hot chocolate (considerably thicker than the American version) and a couple of ounces of unsweetened softly whipped cream on top.

Doc, I don't think viruses can be cultured in a nutrient media. Think about it: viruses don't have a metabolism and replicate by using the machinery of a living host cell. If there is no living host cell, the viruses cannot replicate. Since a nutrient medium is not a living host, no replication. Right?

I don't see why you couldn't use regular sugar. You'd just have to make sure you stirred everything together long enough to dissolve the sugar before adding ice. Simple syrup is often preferred simply because it's easier. It's easy to measure and you don't have to worry aboud dissolving.

Wow mbanu the swirling of the pastis and letting it dry sounds so cool and makes a whole lot of sense. Thanks. That's a neat trick probably best sampled at home since I can't imagine that many bartenders would want to coat the glass and then keep checking it to see if it's dry before they finish making the drink. FWIW, letting the absinthe or absinthe-substitute dry to the inside of the glass is not the standard technique. Actually, I'm not aware of any cocktail where the glass is rinsed and allowed to dry (although of course there may be some of which I am unaware).

Have a look at the thread All About Rye Whiskey and ask around. There are plenty of excellent, reasonably priced rye whiskeys on the market. Indeed, rye whiskey is probably the best bargain for the money in liquor today.

For a few reasons. First, there is the tradition and showmanship element. Second, swirling absinthe around to coat the inside of the glass and discarding the excess is a useful way to get just the right amount of absinthe. Third, when you coat the inside of a glass with a liqueur and pour the drink in over that coating, the rinse infuses into the drink somewhat differently than it would if you simply added a few dashes to the mixing glass. As far as I know, Peychaud's only is traditional. And for sure you need Peychaud's bitters to make a Sazerac. Can't make one without Peychaud's bitters. But there's no harm in adding a dash of another bitters in addition, and a lot of people prefer it that way, myself included.

I feel your pain, Craig. Friends in the know tell me that there are a few places on the West coast that blow away the best places in Italy, but there's nowhere near the ubiquitous baseline quality one can expect on every street corner in Italy (this is discussed a bit in this thread). That's one reason among many I take almost all my coffee at home with my own roasted beans and from my own Rancilio.

A (gin, whiskey or perhaps scotch?) sour with basil?

Absolutely. I think it's clearly a topic on which there is more than one defensible viewpoint. I've only tried to explain mine. I actually kind of like canned corned beef hash and greasy eggs. But I do get your point. Unfortunately for me, there are a lot of fun bars I can't visit any more because of my profession. I can't be damaging my hearing with loud music, straining my voice shouting over same. Them's the breaks when your hearing and voice are the tools of your trade. That's one reason I have been so happy about the NYS and NYC smoking bans -- I can finally go back into bars without screwing up my voice from the cigarete smoke.

That's interesting. I hadn't thought of M&R being necessarily "lighter" than NP, but now that you say that it makes some sense. We have a thread here on vermouth, and it might be interesting at some point to order the various bottlings of vermouth as to different qualities -- fullness of flavor, sweetness, etc. Anyway, back to No. Ten. . . Someone like Gary is in a better position than I to speak on this point, but No. Ten has always struck me as being one of those lightly flavored "martini gins" designed to appeal to the vodka crowd. This makes it a good substitute for vodka -- subbing No. Ten for citrus vodka in a Cosmo formula, for example, although I think Plymouth works just as well this way and has more character (I like aquavit in a "Cosmo" too) -- but a little underwhelming in actual gin cocktails with flavorful modifiers.

As always, interesting and thought provoking stuff... To a certain extent, some of these reactions depend on one's store of knowledge, which I think we would agree is regretably low when it comes to cocktails, not only in the customer base but even among professionals. To return back to my original musical example... one reason I wouldn't like to see a freeform atonal piece for banjo and flute called "Piano Sonata in G Major" is that the word "sonata" has certain connotations as to musical structure (see here), which would not be satisfied by the freeform atonal piece. Now, that's something you might not know about, and therefore you might not care. Similarly, if I were in a bar and ordered a drink called a "collins," I would absolutely expect a tall drink on ice with citrus and fizz, and would probably be disappointed to be served an up drink in a V-glass. For most people, though, this wouldn't be the case because "collins" doesn't particularly mean anything to them. This all goes to my later point, and yours, about writing for a certain audience. . . I wonder if that's entirely true. My guess is that, if you were writing an article for Mixologist, or perhaps even something for an audience such as we have here in the eG Forums, you might have gone a little bit into talking about what a collins has been historically, how or whether this new drink is derrived from or related to that concept, etc. Certainly this is the kind of explaining you do in The Joy of Mixology. But, again, that book has a different goal and a different audience from the magazine article. Actually, I'd still be interested in hearing your thoughts on how, if at all, the Dylan Collins is related to or updated from the Collins category. To a large extent, and on all the important parts, I couldn't agree more. But -- and this is reflective of my personal biases -- I think there are an awful lot of potential cocktail names out there, and I think if someone is going to give a drink a name associated with an established category of cocktail (collins, julep, daisy, etc.) then it should respect those traditions. Otherwise, why not just pick another name? Absolutely. Audrey has made this point to me a number of times. If someone comes into the bar and wants a Ketel One tonic or whatever, you want to make them feel good and give them a great Ketel One tonic. That's job #1.