The holidays are past, but we still have a sweet tooth here.

• chocolate shavings for rimming
• 1 part crème de cacao
• 2 parts vodka
• dark chocolate garnish

Warm a martini glass over a small flame, then roll the rim in chocolate shavings. Put a square of dark chocolate in the glass, then prepare the liquor. Shake vodka and crème de cacao with ice and strain into glass. For additional flavor, sprinkle the top with cocoa powder or chocolate shavings.

Please tipple responsibly.

We’re huge fans of The New Joy of Cooking by Marion Rombauer Becker, Irma S. Rombauer, and Ethan Becker. Hardly a meal goes through our kitchen that isn’t shaped in some part by the recipes and general information in its pages. A recent discovery was Joy’s description and defense of cocktail parties.

So, when a book as serious and valuable as The New Joy of Cooking raises alarms about the declining future of cocktail parties, we listen. Cocktail parties are important, they’re an American invention that should be honored. So, host or attend a cocktail party today and raise your glass in hopes that everyone may someday have the freedom to toast in peace.

alcohol, american invention, cocktail, cocktail parties, cocktail party, drink, entertaining, joy of cooking, party, toast, Cocktails

Hot weather demands cool drinks. Lemonade is fine for the kids, but adults need a pitcher of something more entertaining.

• 2 parts Vodka
• 1 part Orange Juice
• 2 parts Lemonade
• dash Lime Juice

Prepare in a pitcher with ice and share. Adjust quantities to taste.

Enjoy safely.

alcohol, drink, entertaining, hot weather, lime juice, orange juice, summer, vicar, vodka

Ok, the truth is that at MaisonBisson we celebrate all holidays with a drink. Since we take cocktails quite seriously, I wanted something very pretty for the little Fourth of July soiree we were having. I have found that the secret to a perfect strawberry daiquiri is using frozen strawberries. I also use lots of crushed ice and a ripe banana — it adds a nice creaminess. I garnished with whipped cream, blueberries, and star fruit.

It’s an easy and delicious recipe.

• 2 cups crushed ice
• 1 cup rum (light or dark depending on your preference)
• 2 cups (a 16 oz tub) of frozen strawberries (thawed)
• ripe banana

Combine all ingredients in a large blender that can crush ice. Blend, pour, and garnish.

Warning – this is a delicious drink and goes down really easy. If you are not careful you could find yourself standing by the bonfire and singing Yankee Doodle Dandy in your birthday suit.

alcohol, blue, blueberry, cocktail, cocktails, crushed ice, daiquiri, delicious drink, drink, fourth of july, frozen strawberries, ice, independence day, july 4, july 4th, red, red white and blue, ripe banana, rum, star fruit, starfruit, strawberry, strawberry daiquiri, whipped cream, white, yankee doodle dandy, Cocktails, Sweets, Homemade, Holidays, Summer

• Black Adder = cider + Guinness
• Snakebite = cider + Harp

cider, alcohol, drinks, mixology, Snakebite, Black Adder, Harp, Guinness

Who wouldn’t enjoy a frozen mud slide on a hot summer day? Typical recipes call for crushed ice and cream or ice cream. For some reason, we decided to try making them from ice cream, from scratch.

The MaisonBisson Frozen Mud Slide

This recipe requires an ice cream maker, we used the Deni Scoop Factory.

• 1.5 cups heavy cream
• 1 cup milk
• 1 cup sugar
• .5 cups Bailey’s
• dash vanilla

Mix ingredients in bowl, then pour into ice cream maker’s freezer container. Follow your ice cream maker’s directions about time to freeze. Our Deni Scoop Factory was done in about 30 minutes. Spoon frozen ingredients into glass, add appropriate amounts of vodka and Kahlua and stir. Top with whipped cream and a cherry. Enjoy.

alcohol, cocktail, crushed ice, drink, freezer, frozen mud slide, heavy cream, hot summer, ice cream, ice cream maker, kahlua, milk, mud slide, sugar, summer, vodka, whipped cream, Cocktails, Sweets, Homemade, Summer, Cocktails, Sweets, Homemade, Summer

The holidays are long since past, here’s a drink to carry you through ’till Spring.

Rusty Nail

• 3 parts Scotch
• 1 part Drambuie

Serve over ice in an old fashioned glass.

Please enjoy it responsibly.

I read enough of this to get a good laugh, but not enough to understand if it was serious or not. Some of it reads like satire, but other parts as are dry as, well, they’re dry (who really needs a simile anyway, they’re just dry, okay?).

alcohol, book, books, drink, drinking, libraries, library, notes from a library supervisor, punch, supervision, the vodka in the punch, vodka

Roderick sent me a link to this Reason article on Absinthe that claims:

the U.S. Food and Drug Administration considers true absinthe “adulterated” because of the wormwood. Production, sale, and importation are banned, but mere possession is not, and customs agents typically ignore a bottle or two in your suitcase. It’s a legal situation that seems designed to keep absinthe cool.“

The Wikipedia article on absinthe pretty much confirms that point, so who’s going to test it?

(notes:)

1. image from the Virtual Absinthe Museum
2. Yes, I asked Roderick ”please tell me you don’t read Reason (the PR arm of the Libertarians, which is the PR arm of the Republicans to pull in “younger, hipper” voters) regularly.“ He had an entirely plausible answer for the negative.

absinth, absinthe, advertising poster, alcohol, drink, food and drug administration, green fairy, legal situation, libertarians, liquor, little green fairy, spirit, wormwood

…people with Parkinson’s disease temporarily became compulsive gamblers after taking [...] drugs designed to control movement problems caused by the illness…

That’s the lead in this Forbes story on the matter, and that’s not all. A variety of ‘interesting’ side effects popped up among a relatively small number of study participants:

• pathological gambling
• compulsive eating
• increased alcohol consumption
• obsession with sex.

The drugs in question are “dopamine agonists” and are part of the standard treatment of Parkinson’s disease. Though the story emphasises the rarity of these side effects, it talks up the dramatic effects when they do crop up:

One 52-year-old married man started gambling “uncontrollably” after raising the dose of his dopamine agonist. His wife phoned the neurologist to report that her husband had lost more than $100,000, was eating compulsively — he gained 50 pounds — and had an obsession with sex that resulted in him carrying on an extramarital affair. The man lost his excessive interest in gambling and sex when the medication was tapered off, according to the report

Another man with no history of gambling started frequenting casinos for days at a time, exhibited an increased sex drive, drank more alcohol and ate excessively. When his medications were stopped, he reverted to having sex once weekly instead of four times a day.

And one 68-year-old man lost more than $200,000 gambling in six months and left town for days at a time without telling anyone where he was.

But instead of celebrating the fact that they’ve found a drug that might be used to make the entirety of earth’s population as drunk, sex hungry, and overweight as we Americans appear to be, these killjoy doctors are looking in the results for clues to combatting compulsive or addictive behavior elsewhere. Dr. M. Leann Dodd senior associate consultant in the department of psychiatry and psychology at the Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minnesota wonders:

It would be very interesting to see whether or not medications that have the opposite effect on [these nerve receptors] might curb some of these behaviors. Does this lead to potential treatments for blocking [the neural activity driving these obsesive behaviors]? That’s clearly something to look at.

Anyway, thanks to Jon for pointing the article my way.

tags: alcohol, compulsive arousal, compulsive eater, compulsive eating, compulsive gambler, compulsive gambling, disease, dopamine, dopamine agonist, dopamine agonists, drug effect, drug effects, drug side effect, drug side effects, drugs, extramarital affair, increased alcohol consumption, obsession, obsession with sex, obsessive compulsive, obsessive drinker, obsessive drinking, obsessive eater, obsessive eating, obsessive gambler, obsessive gambling, ocd, parkinson’s, parkinson’s disease, pathological gambling, side effects, uncontrollable urge, uncontrollable urges

In a popular antebellum Arkansas story, a backwoodsman bought a 5-gallon barrel of whiskey, only to return a week later for another.

“Surely you haven’t drank that whiskey already?” inquired the astonished merchant.

“It ain’t so much,” replied the backwoodsman. “There are six of us, counting the kids, and we have no cow.”

It’s not quite as detailed as some of the stories in the Foxfire books, but it’s a good treat.

tags: alcohol, arkansas, arkansas history, backwoodsman, foxfire, history, john barleycorn, moonshine, moonshining, prohibition, sourmash, whiskey

Alan Moorhead, in his 1952 Rum Jungle — a sort of casual ethnography or serious travelogue — explains the uses and attitudes towards alcohol in his native Australia:

[...] I took it for granted that for all social occasions, at any time of the day or night, beer was the drink. You did not take it with your meals, but before or afterwards and in considerable quantities. Beer was the solace of life and the white man’s true vision of bliss. You drank it, either at home in pint bottles, or standing up in a bar (from which all women were excluded) in thick glass pots. And since beer exercised so potent a spell and was so delectable in every way, it was only natural that all public houses should close at six in the evening and that the sale of all alcoholic liquor be prevented by law until nine o’clock the following morning. On Sunday the pubs were closed altogether. Had men been able to drink at leisure at any time of the day or night there was no saying what they would do; that was the underlying fear.

I learned of the book from a mention in Bill Bryson’s In A Sunburned Country. It wasn’t as exciting a read as the title might suggest — the name comes from a region of northwest Australia where uranium had then recently been discovered and was being mined. Moorehead offers a rather unbelievable story for the cause of name, so I’ll pass on repeating it here.

What I will note is his description of the US Army’s activities in the northern territories during World War II.

The Americans are remembered now for their extraordinary celerity. They went up into the Atherton Tablelands — the massif that rises from the coast behind Cairns — and built camps almost overnight. When they had no bitumen with which to make airfields they tool barrels of molasses from the sugar-cane factories and made runways out of that. With DDT they banished the mosquitoes (which have since returned), and they brought more life to Cairns and Townsville than the local people had seen in many a long day.

If nothing else, Moorehead’s work reveals how, in 1952, the risks of uranium and DDT were unknown and, instead, they represented progress and wealth.

tags: alan moorehead, alcohol, alcoholic liquor, australia, beer, bill bryson, liquor, native australian, night beer, northwest australia, pint bottles, public houses, rum jungle, social occasions, sunburned country, unbelievable story

I just love tests (previously: psychotic, leadership style in movies and famous people in history, and eccentric or autistic), so I was quick to try myself at this one when Al emailed me. It’s about alcohol, and like most tests, it’s not about getting the answer right, but giving the answer that the test writer wants. So it’s flawed, but it’s a bit of fun. Here are my results:

Score: Bacardi 151
Congratulations! You’re 137 proof, with specific scores in beer (40), wine (116), and liquor (147).

All right. No more messing around. Your knowledge of alcohol is so high that you have drinking and getting plastered down to a science. Sure, you could get wasted drinking beer, but who needs all those trips to the bathroom? You head straight for the bar and pick up that which is most efficient.

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

You scored higher than 69% on proof
You scored higher than 67% on beer index
You scored higher than 94% on wine index
You scored higher than 99% on liquor index

Try your own mind at the Alcohol Knowledge Test.

tags: alcohol, alcohol iq, bacardi 151, bar skills, beer, knowledge, liquor, personality test, personality tests, test, tests, wine

Cola wars are one thing, but “altbev” sure has come a long way since soft drink makers identified the market segment in the 90s. Coke’s Fruitopia was among the entries from the majors, but, as usual, it’s the independents that have lead the way. Water remains the leading altbev, but energy and “health” drinks are squeezing the market. Just as Coke and Pepsi were developing their bottled water brands to catch up with Poland Spring (owned by Nestle, by the way), Red Bull appeared and turned things upside down. Sure, Red Bull wasn’t the first energy drink, Jolt proved that over-caffeinated soda (how much caffein?) could sell well and Krank20 did the caffeinated water thing early on. But Red Bull found its place and took off. The small can, the list of hard to pronounce energy enhancing ingredients that sounded somehow natural and healthy, the late 90s economic bubble, and post Starbucks caffeine chasers looking for the next buzz all fell together just right.

Coke tried to follow Red Bull and Pepsi tried their own new products, but their attempts just seemed to legitimize Red Bull’s place. Importantly, however, people just couldn’t come up with a reason to switch from Red Bull. As much as they tried, nobody could differentiate between one caffein buzz or another, so the first to market had a huge advantage in field (which isn’t to say that the drinks don’t have detractors).

The real winner for any beverage, however, is when it becomes part of a popular mixed drink. Jack and Coke, rum and Coke, Seven and Seven, and now Red Bull and Vodka are part of our mixology.

With drinking and hard liquors back in fashion, nobody imagined it would take long for distillers to try to capitalize on Red Bull’s success. Enter Zygo, the “morning vodka.” I’m not sure what zygo means, but Google lists a lotta hits that aint vodka, including interferometers and augmentative communication devices.

Ken, a co-owner, appears to be a New Hampshire boy (he describes it as “north of Boston”), but the hooch is brewed from potatoes in Idaho. The 70-proof liquor boasts taurine, d-ribose, guarana and yerba mate among its energy enhancing additives. I was amused to find Ken working the drinking community with a post to ClubPlanet.com.