Croatia Week: On the Balcony We recently tended bar for a Harvard Kennedy School of Government alumni event held at the Croatian embassy. It was sort of a reunion of participants in Ronald Heifetz’s crazily popular class on Adaptive Leadership. We designed custom cocktails for the event, using Croatian liquor for the ingredients and Adaptive Leadership catchphrases for the names. Today, we give you On the Balcony. On the...
Read MoreSpirits Week: Rum Last week, we gave a brief overview of the three big categories of liquors, their distinctives, and the part they each play in cocktails. Over the course of this week, we’ll be going into more detail on one of those three categories: the base spirits. These are the highly alcoholic, basic building blocks of the liquor world. Spirits Week will be of most interest to those of you who like your drinks to have a...
Read MoreElection Mocktail: The On Lime Voter During graduate school, one of Steph’s projects was a study on making the voting process more efficient and modern. What if voting didn’t involve long, slow lines and great, big voter registration rolls and arcane, hard to read ballots? In a whirl of optimism, naivete, and forward-looking, she went into the project asking, ‘If texts and online voting work for American Idol, why...
Read MoreCocktail/Mocktail Hour with the Kennedy School Alumni Council There are so many Harvard Kennedy School graduates kicking around in DC that it seems like most any cocktail party could claim ‘alumni gathering’ status. The Harvard Kennedy School DC Alumni Council takes it to a new level by intentionally thinking through interesting places and thought-provoking, timely topics to bring Kennedy School alumni together. They...
Read MoreSuper Bowl Party! If you can’t tell, we love a good party. While we like them all, maybe our favorite party of the year is the Super Bowl. It could be because the Super Bowl is a party that pretty much everybody joins in on; all across the US, almost everyone is gathering in big, raucous groups of friends, all watching the same thing at the same time. It could also be because the Super Bowl has been an especially easy event for...
Read MoreWhat We’ve Been Drinking: Tequila Old Fashioned As we mentioned in our brief history of the cocktail, the Old Fashioned is, perhaps unsurprisingly, more or less the original cocktail. We think now of the Old Fashioned as a whiskey drink. It actually may have started as a brandy drink. Brandy was the favored spirit in the French-influenced Louisiana Territory where cocktails may have gotten their start. When French brandy was...
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