The Spirit World

Each year, and with fairly little fanfare, there is a fairly exhaustive spirits judging that takes place in San Francisco. Anthony Dias Blue is the founder of the competition, which saw its eighth year in operation when it held its 2008 judging in mid March.
There were 847 products submitted, across 439 different brand classifications. Judging […]

New York girls have reinvented the ancient act of dressing. Perhaps inspired by the lushness of Sofia Coppola’s divine Marie Antoinette, an enterprising group of Manhattanites have begun throwing dress up cocktail parties complete with the sparkling addition of an on call hair stylist.
A pre-nightlife event, fulfilling that childhood game of make believe, each girl […]

Written by Contributor: Anita Crotty
It seems like ages ago that we chose Benedictine as the theme for the second edition of Raiders of the Lost Cocktail. As November wound down, tasty-sounding cocktails popped up in the comments section, and we all held our breath waiting for the judges to pronounce a winner. The silence was deafening.
 About […]

The Bar Room at The Modern, at The Museum of Modern Art, is a study on how to place the Bauhaus and twenty-first century Danish design pieces found in the museum in a contemporary, chic, and comfortable setting. 
Several doors east of MoMA on East Fifty-Third Street in New York, a serene white curving tunnel leads […]

Wherever you live, some nights positively tingle with the feeling that anything is possible. Anywhere you go, some nights it feels like nothing will ever go right. Ask any gambler: all too often those nights that begin so charged with possibility end in the crushing conviction that everything’s gone hopelessly to shit.
Sorry.  I’ve been watching a […]

Behind a nondescript, carelessly numbered door with a hidden bell off a grubby residential Lower East Side block lies the height of New York’s faux speakeasies.
Without use of a town car or yellow cab, or a divine LES loft, one must make use of at least two subways and a quarter inch of stiletto to […]

Are you an Absinthe aficionado? Or a Bloody Mary believer? Do you have concerns about Cognac? Or doubts about Dirty Martinis? Perhaps you’re an Eggnog evangelist ,or fervent friend (or foe) of the Fuzzy Navel?
(You see where this is going, right?)

Quick, choose one! A Gimlet eye or the eye of a Hurricane? A Harvey Wallbanger […]

One of the key new products I was looking forward to seeing at the recent London Bar Show was Angostura’s new orange bitters. But before I dive into that, I’d like to provide a little background to help set the context.
We’ve covered cocktail bitters overall in the past, in which we discussed the category itself, and […]

Recently, Lucid Absinthe has started selling legally within the US.
Anybody who has hung around cocktails and spirits for very long has run into the topic of Absinthe, the Green Fairy.  Absinthe was banned in Switzerland, the country of its origin, in 1907. It was banned in the US, a country where it was in fact […]

There is a lot of mystique and intrigue around Absinthe. The spirit was banned in the United States at some point in the early 1900s due to its apparent effects on the mind. The chemical thujone was thought to be to blame for the hallucinogenic effects on heavy Absinthe drinkers but recent studies found only […]