The Spirit World

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 […]

For many years now, elderflower syrup has been a somewhat common ingredient for a variety of cocktails. At least in Europe, and specifically in London. I’ll often get calls or e-mail from some bar here in the states asking where they can get elderflower syrup for some cocktail they want to add to their menu. […]

Last week we discussed vermouth, with an eye towards expanding your use and appreciation of this fine product. Vermouth deserves a little more exposure and understanding, and what better way to help it along than to provide you with another drink that makes use of it, and thus helping you to find out how it […]

To the average cocktail drinker, vermouth is almost always dry, its cocktail companion is almost always the Martini, and its use is as minimal as possible in order to (supposedly) make the Martini as dry as possible.
Vermouth is a fortified wine, it is almost always made from white wine, and comes in either a red […]

Pisco is a product that had once been extremely difficult to find here in America, but recently we’ve been seeing a variety of different brands being exported from South America.
Technically, Pisco is a form of brandy in-so-much as it is made from grapes. Any spirit distilled from fruit is considered a brandy, with grape brandies […]

Maybe it’s just me, but there are several words that are just so dang confusing when it comes to trying to figure out how to pronounce them properly. For years, I had seen “orgeat” in print, but never pronounced. To look at the word and apply crude American pronunciation to it arrives at something like […]

Lillet is an often overlooked ingredient, while technically it may not be considered a vermouth, like a vermouth it is a aromatized and fortified wine. There are a variety of fruits, herbs, and spices that make up the proprietary recipe for Lillet, one of those spices is quinine, the same ingredient found in tonic water, […]

I believe my first encounter with Falernum, was after a friend just got back from Bermuda, and asked me for the recipe for the “Bermuda Rum Swizzle” that they loved to drink while they were down there. I had never heard of this drink, and so did a little research to see what I could […]

One of the first issues that many people encounter when they encounter cachaça for the first time, is that squirrelly little “ç”. That little squiggle under the “c” is known as a “cedilla”, and is usually referred to simply as “c-cedilla”. The cedilla mark itself, is used in conjunction with various other letters (d, g, […]