Personality A La Roy I first remember reading about “Hercules” when I got my original The Savoy Cocktail Book.  I was working my way through all of the pages and kept coming upon ingredients I had never heard of.  Hercules was one of those spirits and I was about to call it quits early on in the book.  I never thought I’d be able to make all these cocktails until…..Mr. Erik Ellestad had done some fabulous research on these great spirits.  He runs a fantastic blog on the book itself and he’s ran through the cocktails and has currently been doing Coolers.  He’s usually behind the stick at Alembic Bar on Haight Street in San Francisco on the last Sunday of every month…..he’ll definitely have surprises and goodies for you. In regards to the “Personality A La Roy”, the first known record of it is in The Savoy Cocktail Book.  [...]

If you’re a regular follower of the bizarre and wonderful world of YouTube, you probably remember this video that made the rounds a few years back, in which Dan Aykroyd pitches his very own diamond-filtered vodka brand, Crystal Head. Aykroyd is a self-proclaimed spiritualist with an interest in UFOs, and he wrote Ghostbusters because of a fascination with the occult. The video itself deals as much with these factors as it does with the booze, which is what makes it so oddly hilarious—no one really thinks of vodka when they think of ghosts, nor do they expect a legendary comedian to take either thing all that seriously. The Internet responded with the urge to buy crazy shit that the Internet tends to have, and Crystal Head became a relatively well-known brand—even John Hodgman took a glug for the sake of Web giggles. As part of SF Cocktail Week, of which [...]

The Last Word is one of those classic cocktails everyone should really put their lips to. It’s a delicious concoction of equal parts Gin, Maraschino Liqueur (no, not the sweet red stuff!), fresh lime juice and Green Chartreuse. It’s a prohibition creation, supposedly from the 1920’s at the Detroit Athletic Club. Whoever created it did a mighty fine job hiding all their booze from the police, cheers to you sir! Murray Stenson at the Zig Zag Café in Seattle is credited with reviving this classic and pushing it to the front lines again. As classics keep on surging back, the Last Word is one of those cocktails on the top of the list. I remember first enjoying mine at NOPA a few years back and now you can damn near get it anywhere in San Francisco. Just say you want a Last Word and any bartender worth their weight in [...]

It seems like it’s been a lifetime since I made my first visit to St. George Spirits in lovely Alameda, even though it’s actually been less than a year.  It was during that first visit when I first heard Pauly, the awesome tour guide, allude to Master Distiller Lance Winters’ love for terroir and fascination for expressing a sense of place and memory through spirits.  I was enthralled.  I waited intently, yet my chance to see this ballyhooed gin seemed to never come. Well, St. George’s fresh take on gin was finally made available to the public on Sep. 9th.  I got my first taste at the CUESA Farmer’s Market Happy Hour & SF Cocktail Week Preview Night at the Ferry Building on Aug 24th, then I went back for seconds at a cocktail event at Berkeley’s Acme Bar & Co. on Aug. 29th.  I was floored…it was all I [...]

While we may assume that the fancy infusions and quirky conglomerations on offer in craft cocktail bars are something new, it’s a tradition that goes back as far as formal fermentation. Even in the Iliad, Homer wrote of epic heroes drinking wine mixed with goat cheese and ground barley, which might make a Long Island Iced Tea not seem so bad. The current craze for carefully-constructed cocktails with fresh and exotic ingredients has its roots in a number of historical trends, so don’t be alarmed if a man wearing arm garters offers to make you a drink involving eight ingredients and six minutes to prepare; it’s all been done before. Nearing the end of the Middle Ages, the technology for distilling wine and beer into stronger spirits was carried around the world by explorers, and mixological innovation grew exponentially to combat the fierce assault of raw spirits on the palates [...]

We’re giving away a pair of tickets to WhiskeyFest in San Francisco!  It’s super easy to win…  Just comment on our Facebook post about the contest and finish this sentence: “The perfect time to drink whisky is…” We will choose a winner at the end of day wednesday for the pair of tickets!  Good luck.  More info about the event HERE. Good luck!

When speaking spirits, people’s tendency to focus on the word ‘distillation’ or ‘distiller’ can lead one to believe that the distillation process is all that makes a quality spirit.  While you will have great difficulty in producing a spirit without some form of distillation, it’s actually one of the later stages in production.  An oversimplification of the distilling process looks something like this: ingredients + fermented product + still = spirit.  The process of distillation does not magically round out the edges or take liquor to the next level. In fact, if the ingredients put in the still (the wonderful invention in which distillation happens) are marginal or flawed, the distillation process will likely accentuate those unpleasant peculiarities, resulting in a poorly made and poorly tasting product. As one can imagine, there are endless opportunities for a distiller to stick their nose in along the way and tweak the process. There [...]

George Dickel is often overshadowed by it’s mega-giant neighbor Jack Daniels, but Master distiller John Lunn shows us why the one who makes the most noise isn’t always the one you should listen to. It’s the quiet ones you gotta watch, right? DM: Most masters come from a long line of the same, often generations deep. How did you get into distilling? JL: On a whim. I applied to an ad in The Tennessean (the Nashville newspaper). I have a chemical engineering degree from Vanderbilt. I was working at a sponge factory and saw an ad for a Master Distiller trainee, and I thought “why not?” The story of how I got the job is really cool. I had to send my resume to Diageo corporate, and I made the first cut, and came in for a second interview with Dave Bacchus, the master before me. I’d never tasted Dickel before that so I went out and bought a bottle of [...]