Spirits Week: Tequila and Brandy 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...
Read MoreTonic Bar @ Opower + the Elderberry Lavender Tequila & Tonic We loved getting to be part of a staff party at Opower. You could tell instantly that the company was cool and the people were great and made us wonder if we could ever have a career in energy efficiency. The answer to that is, probably no, but we’ll settle for serving drinks to these fine folks. Our tonic bar is perfect for parties with a range of...
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...
Read MoreCocktail Experiments: the Joya As I hope you’ve been able to tell by now, we’re big fans of creating new cocktails by means of variation on a theme. It can be extremely challenging to come up with a cocktail recipe from a completely blank slate. But it’s very fun, you learn a lot about your ingredients, and you have a pretty high success rate when you start from an existing recipe. Hands-down our favorite base for...
Read More12 Drinks of Christmas: Aztec Eggnog For the eleventh drink of Christmas, my true love served to me … an Aztec Eggnog. It’s the 11th of our 12 ideas to make your holiday parties merry and your nights by the fire bright. There are a handful of food and drink recipes in our lives that are so good that we must have them, and so rich that we must limit how often we consume them. Turning them into a holiday tradition is a...
Read More12 Drinks of Christmas: Mid-Winter Margarita For the seventh drink of Christmas, my true served to me … a Mid-Winter Margarita, shaken in a Mason Shaker. We know that the old Mason jar has become aggressively hipster recently (even The Atlantic, of all places, is talking about ‘the hipster vessel of choice.’ Of course, the article is thoughtful as always). Count us with the hipsters on this one. We got a cocktail...
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