In my research on the Paloma I have come across many variations on the drink, so I thought I'd link to them here. Typically the Paloma is made with tequila (always use 100% agave!), grapefruit soda such as Squirt or Jarritos, a squeeze of a lime wedge and a pinch of salt. Esquire's standard recipe is here. A version using fresh grapefruit and soda water is here. Here are some Paloma variations from around the internet. Blood Orange and Thyme Paloma by Airda Molenkamp [recipe] Nuestra Paloma by Thad Vogler of Beretta, SF. It contains St. Germain, bitters, Cointreau, and grapefruit juice. [recipe] The Charred Grapefruit Paloma by Warren Bobrow [recipe] Paloma, Mi Amante by Paul Clarke - A Paloma using strawberry-infused tequila. [recipe] Paloma Variation - A Paloma using IPA beer, plus tequila, grapefruit cordial, and lime. [mentioned here; no recipe] Palomita - A Paloma without tequila; just using Coinreau, lime, and grapefruit. [recipe] Green Palomarita - Mezcal, lime, grapefruit, Chartreuse [recipe] Dove & Daisy - Tequila, lime, Aperol, orange liqueur, salt, soda water. [recipe] La Paloma - Grapefruit liqueur, tequila, grapefruit juice, lime, soda. [recipe] Cantarito - A Paloma variation using lemon, lime, and orange juices in place... Continue reading

One of Alcademics' readers figured out a simple way to make perfectly clear ice balls by using a silicon ice ball mold, a piece of wire, and a pot of water. His name is Craig Belon and so he calls it the Belon Method. No actual parrots are required. Artwork by Craig Belon, as are all photos in this post except the next one. The method is this: 1. Get yourself a silicone ice ball tray like this one that comes in a pack of six. 2. Over a pot of water (or better yet, a cooler as that will produce lots of clear ice) make a wire loop that the ice ball mold will sit on. 3. Fill the pot with water just up to the wire. Also fill ice ball with water. Feel free to fill the ice ball with distilled or filtered water for better taste. Dunk the filled ice ball mold into the pot of water with the hole FACING DOWN. As you pull the mold up out of the water to set it on the wire. The water should stay inside the ice mold rather than running down into the pot. That's the whole trick.... Continue reading

In the Water Project here on Alcademics, I'm looking at what is in commercial brands of sparkling mineral waters and reconstructing them. To do so, first I looked at how to get all the dissolved solids out of tap water. Then I measured properties of commercial mineral waters - pH and dissolved solids- and compared them with publicly available information. The next step was to examine what each mineral in mineral water tasted like on its own. Again referring to the information on Khymos.org, I could see that the primary minerals in mineral water are Calcium, Sodium, Magnesium, and Potassium. The website also allows you to look at bicarbonate, sulfate, chloride, and nitrate. To taste each of these minerals/salts on its own, I looked up the mineral water with the greatest concentration of a particular mineral, then added the ingredient in the proper amount to mineral-free water to give me that water's amount of it. In other words, if Apolinaris water had the most Magnesium (it did), then I started with water with no minerals in it and added the magnesium-containing ingredients in its recipe (epsom salts and magnesium carbonate) without worrying about the other minerals in the recipe. I... Continue reading

I am now writing for FSR Magazine, an industry magazine for full service restaurants. In my first feature I tackle the topic of why a head bartender is essential to a successful cocktail program. If a drink menu is out-of-date or overly-simplistic and the bartenders can’t speak intelligently about the cocktails, I know two things about a restaurant: That there is no lead bartender in place, and that I’ll be ordering a beer. In ths story I write about promoting-and retaining- lead bartenders. I interviewed Leo Robitschek from Eleven Madison Park and Benjamin Schiller of Chicago's Boka Restaurant Group. Read the story here. And if you're working in the full service restaurant business, you can get a free subscription here. Related articles Designing Bars that Make Money Cocktail Menus: Giving Credit Where Credit is Due A Few Bars in London: ECC Chinatown and Opium A Tribute to Harry Craddock on the 50th Anniversary of his Death Continue reading

My latest story is up on Details.com. I took a look at Michael Veach's amazing book Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey: An American Heritage and wrote about a few of the many bourbon myths he busted. These include who invented bourbon, why it's called that, what they used to put into it to make it taste older, and more. Go read the story on Details.com. Continue reading

Here at Tales of the Cocktail in Buenos Aires, taking place at the Intercontinental Hotel, I have attended three seminars on one day. The last one was about the science of cocktails. Below are my notes- these are hard to translate from science slides to text, but here goes: The Science of Cocktails: Ice, Infusions, and Insight by Don Lee and Mike Ryan In cocktails being precise is more important than being accurate - it's better to have all drinks be exactly the same than have the occasional one be perfect. That's an argument for measurement in cocktails. Don Lee measured the amount of dashes when you dash bitters - to see how accurate a dasher was and how that changes over the course of a bottle. He found that it changed over time, but on average: Angostura 41 dashes = 1oz = 30 ml Regan's or Peychaud's 30 dashes = 1 oz = 30 ml Japanese Dasher Bottle 150 dashes = 1 ounce = 30 ml Salad dressing oil and vinegar doesn't mix because one is polar and one is non-polar. No matter what the temperature the ice starts at (freezer vs. well ice) when shaking, the drink cools... Continue reading

Hello again from Tales of the Cocktail live in the Intercontinental Hotel in Buenos Aires! I just attended Beachbum Berry's seminar: Tiki Drinks from A to Zombie, and below are my notes. Please forgive any spelling errors - I was typing live. The golden age of tiki was from the end of Prohibition to the beginning of Disco. The 40 year drink trend inspired cultural trends in clothing, design, architecture, and music, rather than those things inspiring cocktails. Tiki palaces were fine dining restaurants- the most expensive nights out. Big tiki restaurants were often designed by Hollywood art directors, had no windows; they were sets. In most restaurants, you switch from cocktails to wine, but in Polynesian restaurants you drank rum cocktails all the way through the meal. Desserts were flaming coffee grogs and other drinks. The drinks drove this faux-Polynesian economy. All these drinks came from one man, the most influential bartender of the 20th century, Don the Beachcomber. He came up with 70 original cocktails in the 1930s. These drinks were stolen by thousands of other bars and were the template for this entire trend. The Doctor Funk cocktail, for example, traveled from Don the Beachcomber to Beverly... Continue reading

Hello from Tales of the Cocktail on Tour in Buenos Aires! I am attending three seminars today held at the lovely Intercontinental Hotel. (Then the rest of the time I'll just be in bars.) The first seminar was a talk by David Wondrich called Drinking the Americas from Punch to Prohibition Below are notes I took in the seminar, mostly unedited, but let me know if these raise any questions and I'll try to answer them. When Columbus arrived some South American and North American peoples had localized fermented beverages but not really any trade or exchange in them. When the Spanish came, they tried to recreate Spain in the Americas. Havana, Cartagena, Santiago, Chile, etc. So they planted wine grapes which in some places succeeded. Then distillation. The Spanish weren't big spirits drinkers as much as Northern Europeans. So in the Americas it became important because distilled spirits travelled better than wine. But the Spanish government in Spain tried to discourage practice of local distillation of grapes as it didn't profit them. In the Caribbean, sugar cane grew very well. Wiped out existing land and economy, imported slavery. English islands were particularly brutal. English weren't interested in building new... Continue reading

As part of the Water Project I am attempting to deconstruct and reconstruct mineral water. One of the prime sources of information for reconstructing mineral waters is the blog Khymos. As I was buying strange bags of minerals like magnesium and calcium off the internet (seriously my apartment is full of suspicious white powders) I also noticed a word of caution in the comments of the Kymos website. It’s important to remember that the hydroxide solutions are basic and undrinkable until they have been carbonated, so an uncarbonated solution should really be kept out of reach of children! So I decided I had best not kill myself and figure out what the safe and typical range of pH is and how to test waters I would make. I purchased a pH meter on Amazon, which meant I had to buy a whole bunch of calibrating solutions as well. A pH scale with annotated examples of chemicals at each integer pH value. Author: Edward Stevens As you may recall from science classes, pH ranges from 0 to 14, with 7 being neutral. 0-7 pH = acidic 7-14 = basic/alkaline For drinking water, most sources cite an approved range of 6.5 -... Continue reading

Here are some new spirits launching. The text is taken from these brands' press releases. Tapatio 110-Proof Blanco Tequila (May 2013) Carlos Camarena, the iconic distiller of Mexico’s 75-year-old Tequila Tapatio brand has launched a 110-proof Tequila. Tapatio 110-Proof Blanco (55% alc. by vol.) was distilled at Alteña Distillery from 100% estate-grown blue agaves in the Arandas Highlands of Mexico. Under Master Distiller Carlos’ Camerena, the agaves were hand-selected for ripeness and slow-baked for four days. After being crushed, the agave ‘Mosto’ was fermented in small wooden fermenters using their proprietary 75 year-old yeast culture. The ‘Mosto Muerte’ was then double-distilled in small (90-250 gallon) Alambiques Tequilano copper pot stills and aged lightly in stainless. Suggested retail for Tapatio 110-Proof Blanco is $48 (1 Liter). It is available in CA, WA, OR, TX, NY, NJ, CT, FL and MO. Ron Barceló Imperial Premium Blend 30 Aniversario Ron Barceló Celebrates 30 Years Since the Introduction of Ron Barceló Imperial with a Limited-Edition Release of Ron Barceló Imperial Premium Blend 30 Aniversario. Each year since Miguel Barceló first created Ron Barceló Imperial in 1980, private reserves of this prestigious ten-year-old blended rum were set aside for two years of additional aging. Aged... Continue reading

In my search for information about water sources used for various spirits as part of the Water Project, I came across Uisge Source, a company that bottles waters from different regions in Scotland. The waters from Speyside, Islay, and the Highlands are meant to be representative of the waters used by distillers in those regions to make scotch; for dilution of drinks in the bourbon-and-branch style. As I learned in the book Whisky on the Rocks, even distilleries next to each other may have different water sources, so it shouldn't be assumed that all the distilleries in an area use waters just like these in their whisky, but it seems like a good place to start. The really cool thing about Uisge Source that it's not just water they sourced from these regions; they actually tell you about the chemistry of the water. Islay’s Ardilistry Spring produces water with higher natural acidity which is created by filtration through peat. St Colman’s Well in the Highland region produces a hard water, high in minerals due to filtration through porous and brittle red sandstone and limestone. The Cairngorms Well in the Speyside region produces a soft water, low in minerals as a... Continue reading

For WorldsBestBars.com I write about new bar openings in San Francisco. For the April newsletter, I visited three bars: Hard Water Hakkasan Padrecito And wrote what they're like. So maybe you would like to go read it or something. Below are some pictures from Padrecito, just because. Continue reading

Yep. The Mackinnon is a highball made with 2 ounces of Drambuie, a splash of white rum, lemon, lime, and soda water. Sounds gross right? It's pretty good, actually. Go get the recipe at FineCooking.com. Continue reading