We’re giving away tickets to San Francisco’s Premier Wine, Food, and Spirits Week.
We have 4 tickets to the Sugar Party, 4 to the Spice party, and 4 to the Industry Party.

It’s easy to win!

1. Tell your friends about Drink Me

2. Get them to sign up for our email list (top right of this page)

We will choose 6 new email addresses and they will win a pair of tickets to one of the events (and bring you)!
The more friends you tell, the more chances you have to win.

Good luck. We’ll see you there.

SFChefs 2010 presented by Visa Signature®, is a food and wine event celebrating the unique flavor, diversity and bounty of Northern California. The main tasting tent will be in Union Square, where chefs, wine makers and distillers will offer an exploration of taste featuring local products. Classes and seminars will offer interactive opportunities for the public to participate with local farmers, ranchers, chefs, winemakers, distillers, media, luminaries, authors, vintners, mixologists and culinary experts in an entertaining forum.

http://www.sfchefsfoodwine.com/ (more…)

by Katie Pizzuto

Lambic in general, is a world of beer unto itself. Completely unlike any lager or ale you’ll ever taste, Belgium’s lambics serve as a reminder that not all beers are brewed equally, and at some point or another, if you find yourself becoming a sort of craft brew geek, you inevitably wind up exploring lambics as a sort of rite of passage. While most of the world’s breweries are clinically sanitized and sterilized, the natural spontaneous fermentation of a lambic is what gives the beer so much complexity, and what creates the bizarre mix of aromas and flavors that would mean a spoiled batch of beer in any other place in the world.

But knowing that casual beer drinkers—not merely Budweiser-swilling folks, but even those with a more experienced palate—might be turned off by intensely sour beers, Belgian brewers began adding fruit to lambics and doing a second fermentation. The sugars and sweet flavors of the fruit help temper the sour personality of the lambic. In the best of these, the lambic character is still apparent and the fruit flavors merely round it out. Krieks use sour cherries, framboises use raspberries, pêches use peaches, etc. In the end, I expect to drink a beer that will have a distinctive fruit profile, but I also want to know that the underlying beer is a true lambic. Unfortunately, large-scale breweries like Lindemans (the biggest lambic import in the US) have, for years, been cutting corners and giving a gullible US consumer a product that can barely be considered a lambic, much less a true fruit lambic.I’m not even sure where to begin with Lindemans’ list of sins against the nature of a true fruit lambic. For starters, at no point are any actual…err, fucking fruit…a part of making this fruit lambic. (more…)

By Brian Yaeger
( article from issue 8 )

First and foremost, there is one primary way to discuss and grade a beer and that’s by how much you like it or don’t. Seriously, it’s either thumbs up, thumbs down, or if you’re wishy-washy, thumbs sideways.

But to really get down to the multifaceted ways of appreciating a beer, you can begin to smell for aromas ranging from earthy to spicy to toasty. You can size up its body based on a billowy head or the web-like lacing it leaves on the glass. You can turn into a math nerd and quantify numbers such as original or final gravity, which dictate its percentage of alcohol by volume (ABV) or how hoppy it is based on its international bitter units (IBU). But whereas all those factors build up to the beer’s overall character and, essentially, flavor, one characterization gets paid the shortest shrift.  Color. (more…)

Two of our favorite things…
We just gave away two tickets!
(Congrats to our winners of the contest)

Howdy, folks! Welcome back to Booze In The News, where you’ll find the latest, funniest and most obscure newsworthy, alcohol-related bits all in one place.

1.) A man in Germany has set the world record for the largest house made out of beer coasters. Using more than a quarter of a million beer coasters, and spending 42-56 hours per week since January, Sven Goebel secured himself a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. Someone should also give him an award for being the most unproductive productive person in the world. (more…)

Who would ever think to give yeast cells the chance to sing?  Joshua Penrose of Ohio State University has done just that with his “Resonant Carboy” project. Eight carboys with various levels of fermenting mead solution (honey, water, and yeast) have a sort of high-tech microphone stuck on top to record the sounds of active yeast cells as they process the natural sugars in the honey to create carbon dioxide gas emissions. (more…)

There’s a party at Macy’s this Wednesday and YOU’RE invited!

Join Macy’s Culinary Council chef Tom Douglas and Andrea Robinson, Master Sommelier, to pick up some great tips on wine and food pairing. Chef Douglas will share some of his favorite recipes and guests will get a look at Andrea’s new stemware collection, “The One,” sold at Macy’s. Tickets are $15 at the door, and all proceeds benefit Meals on Wheels of San Francisco. (more…)

Howdy, folks! Welcome back to Booze In The News, where you’ll find the latest, funniest and most obscure newsworthy, alcohol-related bits all in one place.

1. As if the water pumping laws due to endangered salmon species weren’t enough, Northern California wineries now must face a new threat: European moths. Apparently, it is a very popular practice for California vintners to sneak over award-winning grape vine cuttings from France to propagate their own crops, despite its illegality. Theory has it that these non-native crop destroying moths were accidentally smuggled over with one of these illegal vine cuttings. More paranoid vintners suspect other wineries of doing it on purpose to stymie their competition. (more…)

Howdy, folks! Welcome back to Booze In The News, where you’ll find the latest, funniest and most obscure newsworthy, alcohol-related bits all in one place.

1. The wine you’re drinking may be radioactive. Scientists have recently discovered trace amounts of radioactive carbon in wines produced after atmospheric atom bomb tests took place in Earth’s atmosphere. However, the amounts of radioactivity are small enough to be harmless. So don’t worry, you (hopefully) won’t grow a third nipple or begin glowing. (more…)