My home bar is the best bar because of gifts like this from people like my sister-in-law who has always supported and continues to encourage my research and experiments as a bartender.
It must be in the DNA. My wife and her parents are similarly some of my all time best test subjects.
Filed under HOME BAR, NEW PRODUCT, NEW TO ME, SHRUBS, SHRUBS
The flavors in this barrel aged gin are unreal!
I’m very excited to try my hand at making some creative drinks with this Bag & String Wine Merchants exclusive from Buffalo’s Tommy Rotter Distillery!
Filed under BOUTIQUE SHOPS, BRANDS, DISTILLERIES, GIN, HOME BAR, LAKEWOOD, LIQUOR, NEW PRODUCT
I went to the Southern Tier Distilling Company yesterday and bought a bottle of Citrus Gin, and made myself this cocktail with Cactus Fruit — AKA prickly pear.
I figure I’ll call it a Stoneman Circle Sour.
Filed under DISTILLERIES, GIN, LIQUOR, NEW PRODUCT
I couldn’t make it Friday or Saturday, but I finally made it this afternoon to Southern Tier’s new distillery:
That’s the distillery’s London Dry gin mixed with ginger beer in the pic.
I also tried their 100 proof corn whiskey and Maple Spirit — made with local syrup.
The distillery offers single shot tastings, flights of four different 1 oz samplers or cocktails. Today being Sunday, the distillery workers were making Bloody Marys with their house vodka — as well as the Mojitos, Moscow Mules and other drinks they’d been mixing all weekend.
Filed under BARS, BRANDS, DISTILLERIES, NEW PRODUCT
BLACK BUTTON DISTILLING
ROCHESTER, N.Y.
Rochester, New York-based Black Button Distilling, which produces Corn Whiskey, Citrus Forward Gin, Vodka and Four Grain Bourbon variants, is also set to release a limited edition Lilac Gin (84 proof) to select liquor stores on May 1, packaged in 375-ml. bottles.
I took this news entirely from Good Spirits News, which cites Shanken News Daily.
I’ll be in Rochester this weekend for the Rochester Cocktail Revival. And I hope there’s time to visit the Black Button Distillery.
From Black Button’s website:
A tribute to the rich botanical heritage of “The Flower City” and home of the annual Rochester Lilac Festival, Black Button’s Lilac Gin is made with hand picked fresh lilac petals and complimentary botanicals.
“As a local company, we are always looking for ways to celebrate Rochester’s unique heritage,” said Jason Barrett, Rochester native and Black Button Distilling owner/head distiller. “The flowers of the Lilac Festival are a major part of our city’s identity. The ability to use local ingredients and showcase them in our own way is exactly what Black Button is all about,” he said.
Filed under BRANDS, DISTILLERIES, FESTIVALS & EVENTS, GIN, NEW PRODUCT, ROCHESTER
Actress Mary Astor was born on this day in 1906.
She starred in silent movies as well as “talkies,” and is perhaps best-known for having played the role of Brigid O’Shaugnessy in the movie The Maltese Falcon. She also played the role of Mrs. Anna Smith in the movie Meet Me In St. Louis.
In searching the Internet for a Mary Astor cocktail, I came across two recipes that piqued my interest. The first was a drink I found on the site of a liqueur brand called Chareau, which is a booze company based in California — and the liqueur they make is aloe flavored.
Check out the site’s “about” section by clicking here. The liqueur sounds mind-boggling. I don’t know that I ever would’ve thought of aloe as a primary ingredient for a liqueur. Of course, I’m also not a California farmer.
Other ingredients in the liqueur include: Cucumber, eau de vie, lemon peel, muskmelon, spearmint, sugar and water.
Online at the Chareu site, the company lists this as their Mary Astor cocktail:
Photo from chareau.us
INGREDIENTS
PREPARATION
Stir ingredients over ice and strain into a coupe. Garnish with edible flowers. Cocktail by Pablo Moix.
Crazy interesting, right!? I have got to know what that tastes like.
ASTOR’S PAINLESS ANESTHETIC
So, while still interesting, Chareau’s Mary Astor cocktail is a brand specific modern cocktail.
There isn’t any official “Mary Astor” cocktail that I’ve found, but there is the thing called “Astor’s Painless Anesthetic!”
What is an Astor’s Painless Anesthetic? Well, according to Lesley M. M. Blume’s book “Let’s Bring Back: The Cocktail Edition,” the drink was created for Mary Astor by the Stork Club.
The full title of Blume’s book is: Let’s Bring Back: The Cocktail Edition: A Compendium of Impish, Romantic, Amusing, and Occasionally Appalling Potations from Bygone Eras.
Google made research into the matter even more helpful by having a copy of The Stork Club Bar Book available to search online:
INGREDIENTS
PREPARATION
“Shake well with ice cubes and dash of orange bitters, twist of lemon peel and just a touch of sugar.”
THE STORK CLUB
The Stork Club was a nightclub in Manhattan, which was open from 1929 to 1965 and was regarded as one of the most prestigious clubs in the world.
The club was a symbol of café society, where the wealthy elite, including movie stars, celebrities, showgirls and aristocrats all mixed in the VIP Cub Room of the club.
Reading over the Stork Club’s Wikipedia page I found out that Walter Winchell actually coined the name of the Stork Club’s “Cub Room,” — a fact which has me now wanting to rewatch that HBO biopic starring Stanley Tucci.
I’m a sucker for gimmicks and I have a tendency to get over eager about new products and flavors and quirky packaging among other things. What can I say, I’m an easy mark.
All that aside though, there are a number of new boozes to be released this year which I’m going to make it a point to try.
There were surely new things I tried in 2014, but there was also a whole lot I missed out on — such as Angostura’s new amaro and that Canadian Club rye which was only released in Canada.
There were plenty of others for sure, but those are just the first two which came to mind. But enough about the past, I’ve got my eyes set on tasting these following bottles in the near future — and by all accounts, they’re surely more attainable goals. At least, I won’t have to travel to Canada to taste any of them!
•WOODFORD RESERVE RYE•
I love Woodford Reserve. And I love rye! So this news about the new Woodford Reserve Rye really set me off. Truthfully, I’d heard a little bit about it some months back when I was at a competition in Pittsburgh, but the January announcement of the new product means it should soon be on store shelves.
Woodford’s rye will be$38 for a 750-ml. and will initially launch in 15 U.S. markets. The rye will be 45.2% abv and will be the third permanent extension in the company’s Portfolio.
•JIM BEAM RYE & BONDED BOURBON•
Jim Beam has two new boozes about to be released, a rye and a bonded bourbon.
The rye is a relaunch, reformulating the brand’s Jim Beam Rye as Jim Beam Pre-Prohibition Style Rye. The rye will be 90-proof and will offer “a bolder, spicier taste profile,”according to the company.
Jim Beam Pre-Prohibition Style Rye will cost around $23 for a 750-ml.
Similarly priced, Jim Beam Bonded will be a 100-proof Bourbon aged four years, and made in accordance with the “Bottled in Bond Act” of 1897.
Jim Beam Bonded will be produced in a single distillery season at a single distillery and is said to to feature spicy oak notes with a background of vanilla and caramel.
What is “Bonded” booze?
The phrase “Bottled In Bond” is something I saw on several bottles of liquor for a long time before I finally went and looked up exactly what it meant.
As with so much else in the realm of whisk(e)y, “Bonded” booze is simply a set of requirements which a producer must follow in order to earn the term.
Bonded booze must come from a single producer in single season at a single distillery. It must be aged in a Federally-bonded warehouse and it must be bottled at 100 proof. There’s more to it than that though, so give the phrase a Google and read on:
•History of the Bottled-in-Bond Act•
One purpose of the Bottled-in-Bond Act was to create a standard of quality for Bourbon whiskey. Prior to the Act’s passage, much of the whiskey sold as straight whiskey was anything but. So much of it was adulterated out of greed — flavored and colored with iodine, tobacco, and other substances — that some perceived a need for verifiable quality assurance.
The practice was also connected to tax law, which provided the primary incentive for distilleries to participate. Distilleries were allowed to delay payment of the excise tax on the stored whiskey until the aging of the whiskey was completed (and the supervision of the warehouse ensured proper accounting and the eventual collection of the tax).
This combination of advantages led a group of whiskey distillers, led by Colonel Edmund Haynes Taylor, Jr. (creator of Old Taylor bourbon), joined with then Secretary of the Treasury John G. Carlisle to fight for the Bottled-in-Bond Act. To ensure compliance, Treasury agents were assigned to control access to so-called bonded warehouses at the distilleries.
•SVEDKA 100 & GRAPEFRUIT JALAPENO•
It seems like there’s barely a week that goes by without some new flavored being launched by one brand or another. That said, Svedka piqued my interest with the announcement of its new grapefruit jalapeno flavor — which will cost $12.99 for a 750 ml. The flavor is intended to capitalize on consumer interest in fusing sweet and spicy flavors.
The company is also launching a new 100-proof variant, which will cost around $15.35 a 750-ml.
Shanken Daily News and Good Spirits News are where I first saw these new boozes reported, and they’re where I took all the above info for this post. The images came from a Google images search.
Filed under 2015, BOURBON, BRANDS, LIQUOR, NEW PRODUCT, RYE WHISKEY
There’s a new hard cider on the market, but this one has a local connection to Western New York: DeMunck’s Hard Cider.
According to the DeMunck’s website, the company makes its cider in small batches. Hopefully it’s a year-round product. This stuff’s exceptional — dry and flavorful.
ABOUT DeMUNK’S HARD CIDER
DeMunck’s ferments 100% pure apple juice with its own house Belgian Abbey Ale yeast for a very special hard cider. Made in small batches, DeMunck’s Hard Cider is smooth, easy to drink and naturally gluten-free.SPECIFICS
•5.0% Alc. by Vol.
•134 Calories
•Naturally Gluten Free
•Fermented with Belgian Abbey Ale Yeast
•Packaged in 12 oz amber glass bottles in high sided 6 packs to help preserve freshness
•Available on draught in 1/6 and 1/2 barrel kegs.
DeMunck’s Hard Cider is produced by the Southern Tier Brewing Company in Lakewood, N.Y.
Filed under BRANDS, HARD CIDER, NEW PRODUCT
Frontier Mixology 