The Spirit World

The second annual Long Island Real Ale Festival will be held on January 28, 2006 from 3 to 9 PM at the Blue Point Brewing Company in Patchogue, New York (161 River Avenue). Long Island’s five breweries will have cask conditioned ales available for sampling. DJ Swanson of John Harvard’s in Lake Grove […]

Sticking with a seasonal theme, both the cocktail and the appetizer for this week’s Happy Hour at Home feature ingredients that come to mind at this time of year.
The cocktail, Cranberry Hot Toddies, is one that is easy to make ahead of time - in fact it’s better if you make it an […]

Long Island is blessed with four brewpubs: the Southampton Publick House, the Black Forest Brew Haus, the Brickhouse Brewery, and John Harvard’s Brew House. Since they are all within regular striking distance, I’ll introduce you to all of them at some point over this coming year.
On their web site John Havard’s advertises ten locations […]

So far, the cocktails we’ve been looking at have all been good standard classic cocktails, with a relatively long history behind them. For this week, let’s turn the clock back even further and take a look at a cocktail that could perhaps be viewed as the one of the oldest cocktails.
As I mentioned in connection […]

Thursday night a friend and I stopped by one of the new places in town. Veil is being discussed amongst all good foodies in the city and everyone who has not yet been there is planning to check it out soon.
Located in the new little center of dining pleasure on the east […]

When you study for the Beer Judge Certification Program, you are told that if a beer gushes, or erupts out of the bottle when you open it, this usually means that the beer is infected. But when you open a bottle of a beer from the de Dolle Brouwers (Esen, Belgium) and it leaps […]

Just after the holidays I picked up a new mixology book that caught my eye as I was browsing through stacks of books. The book, is “Drinks” by Vincent Gasnier.
First, it’s a large format book which I find attractive - I like when I can leave a cookbook laying around as if it were […]

I may have suggested in some post or comment somewhere that this week’s Happy Hour at Home would be about coffee - Spanish Coffee to be exact. However, we’ve had so much discussion about coffee liqueur over the last few days that I decided to give you a taste of something different. I’ll […]

Long ago, there was a time when I didn’t like beer. If anyone asked me about beer, I just wrinkled my nose and shook my head. Why? At the time, my only experience of beer was of a single style of beer called American Light Lager. If you ever had a […]

Champagne Cocktail

Another New Year winds the calendar back up again, and to help you utilize some of the extra champagne you might have on hand, I thought I’d introduce you to one of my favorite champagne libations, the Champagne Cocktail.
The first bartender’s guide ever written was aptly named “The Bar Tender’s Guide”, and was published […]