I cannot stand alcopops. I can’t stand the marketing to women (or conversely, the lack of marketing to women for beer, scotches, gins, etc). T00 many college-aged women just give up on beer (well, yes, nobody likes beer initially) and stick to the Smirnoff ices, the wine coolers, the Bacardi breezes and god knows what other . Take high fructose corn syrup, add artificial flavouring and food colouring.

Regardless of the sociological & health-related reasons, this little tidbit provides all rationale needed for disliking Smirnoff Ice & it’s kin…

How many calories are there in a bottle of SMIRNOFF ICE®?
SMIRNOFF ICE® has 228 calories per 12-ounce bottle, that’s about 70 more than a super-premium/imported beer but don’t worry, that difference in calories is about the same as one hot wing, five little pretzel twists OR 3 tortilla chips…with nothing on ‘em.

Smirnoff US Website

What? Who on earth would find that reasoning logical?

Let’s do some bullshit mathematics, why don’t we? First, face value: 228 calories per 12 oz bottle? I’m a smaller than average person — my estimated daily calorie intake is in the 1700-1800 region. 7 bottles of Smirnoff Ice is my entire daily calorie allowance (plus my death by diabetes). Now let’s consider I drank my daily calorie allowance in Guinness instead (150cals/12oz and a 20934802934x better tasting drink)… that becomes 11 bottles, which means I could drink my normal limit of 6-7 beers, and still have room for lunch. Those additional 70 calories per 12 oz-bottle? That is 44% more calories per bottle. Drinking 3 beers is practically the same thing as drinking 2 Smirnoff ices — make it become a habit, sprinkle in a dose of 20-somethin’-year-old binge drinking, and you’ve got a recipe for absolute disaster.

Please, for the love of everything decent in the world, don’t drink alcopops. If you’re just in it to get drunk and you don’t like the taste of beer & wine, then just take shots and cradle a glass of water in between them, and keep on trying beers/wines/cocktail concoctions you enjoy and won’t cause massive obesity with the liver cirrhosis.

I recently had the distinct pleasure of dining at one Mr. Bartley’s in Harvard Square. Most of the things on their menu are solid, and therefore aren’t of much interest to liquephiles like you and me, but I did encounter the darndest concoction: the frappe.

A “frappe” is pronounced “frap” (we require none of that high-falutin’ French here), and it is made of milk, ice cream, some flavoring that I assume comes in syrup form (said a Southern-bred friend: “It tastes like that powered strawberry milk I drank as a kid!” and indeed it did), and a blender.

In other words, it’s a milkshake.

Read the rest of this entry »

To the great delight of my tenderly growing home bar, I just received a marketviewliquor shipment, and along with a couple bottles each of the wonderful Shiraz & Niagara varietals we tried during our vacation a couple weeks ago, I also picked up a bottle of Disaronno Amaretto ($18.99/750mL), which is really the one, the only, the true amaretto. I have to admit, I did seriously consider getting the Trader Vic’s Amaretto ($13.99/750mL) but decided the $5 difference wasn’t worth it, at least, this first time around. And oh geez, I’m so glad I opted for the Disaronno.

The shiz is amazing! Absolutely amazing! Impossibly delicious, even on its own with a bit of ice (and I generally find liqueurs too sweet and cloying to stand on its own). It’s a bit of a sweet almond, buttery flavour — you really have to try it, its rather indescribable. Where this particular brand stands out is that it doesn’t taste chemical or synthetic at all.

But where this amaretto really shines is in… cocktails!

Amaretto Sour // 2:1 amaretto & lemon juice. Shake.
Ah, one simply cannot talk about amaretto cocktails without first discussing the Amaretto Sour. So simple yet stunningly flavourful!

Bocce ball // 2:1 vodka & amaretto, fill with orange juice. Stir.
This is basically a variation on the brunch favourite, the screwdriver, but I’ve never heard of it before, only when I googled “Cocktails with Amaretto”. I have to say; I very much enjoyed it. The amaretto flavour complemented well with the orange juice. I suspect it’d be perfectly fine without the vodka — its just there to make this drink a quiet assassin.

Butter Nut Scotch // 1:1:1 scotch, butterscotch schnapps & amaretto. Shake.
Ok. I really didn’t expect this to be good. But I just happen to have these ingredients lying around (despite the Mr. Boston butterscotch schnapps I have being pretty gross, and the scotch being really a blend of scotch and whiskey), so I had to try it. Its not bad, got potential as a rich & satisfying drink (abet a dangerous one from the sheer amount of alcohol involved) — the amount of the schnapps needs to be reduced because it stands out too much in this particular ratio, but I think with a little tweaking, this could a surprisingly good cocktail.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last night I got my hands on a glass of Dogfish Head 120 Minute IPA at a fine local establishment. Let me summarize: it’s 20% alcohol, 30% hops, and 50% awesome.

Now, the internets claim that this stuff tastes wildly different out of a bottle and a tap; I’m skeptical, but I’ll mention that I got it on tap. I paid $10 for a 10 oz glass, which seems pretty extreme (and, well, it is), but the good news is that it’s so much more alcoholic than regular beer that it’s actually a relatively good deal. Not that I recommend this stuff to anyone who just wants to get smashed - this stuff is seriously dangerous, and it would be a waste of some fine craftsmanship.

I try not to spend too much time talking about things like the “bouquet”, so I’ll simply instruct you to smell this beer. I think the word “apricot” would be appropriate, at least if “apricot” is ever an appropriate choice of words.

“But,” you ask, “what kind of IPA smells like fruit?” It’s a fair question and brings me to sort of the major point about this whole ruckus: this stuff transcends regular beer categorization. I mean, it may have been made like an IPA, but calling this an IPA is like calling Porto a fortified wine — there’s important information that’s not getting conveyed. There is a hell of a lot of hops in this, I guess, but I wouldn’t call its flavor bitter in the traditional sense. It’s… I dunno. Sweet, strong (that 20% business is no joke), rather less head than you’d find in a Belgian ale (though since I didn’t pour it, I don’t know if that’s by the brewer’s design or the bartender’s.

In fact, I think the analogy to port wine might be a good one: Dogfish 120 may be the first beer I’ve ever encountered that I would ever consider calling a “dessert beer.” This stuff isn’t cheap, but I would definitely put it in the category of things you have to do at least once in your life. You may or may not like it, but I guarantee that it will change the way you think about beer.

Our last day in Toronto; we had probably walked several miles (sorry, wrong country, kilometers ;)) that day, with staring from our (absolutely awesome) bed and breakfast in Cabbagetown, walking to the University of Toronto, and the crystal monsters of Royal Ontario Museum, to the piers, and all around Toronto islands. Needless to say, we were pooped. But that wasn’t going to prevent us from going out! We ended up going to a Cabbagetown neighbourhood bar by the name of Ben Wick’s pub. Little did we know… we would be the only people in the entire bar. Granted, it was a Monday evening. Granted, it was Easter. Granted, it was 10pm. But… huh? I’m almost convinced it’s a mafia front. Because simple arithmetic surmises that a business with no customers would no longer stay a business…

I forgot who — someone thought we should order something local. After the (slightly strange) waiter rattled off the list, and the only local wine available was of the Niagara varietal that everyone with taste apparently disliked, we went with a South African sauvignon blanc that ended up being inoffensive and unremarkable. After dispatching that and a batch of nacho chips, we went for a red for the second bottle. The (fast-talking) waiter heavily recommended an Australian shiraz (after dropping his voice to talk trash about the other offerings) — and after we acquiesced, he brought over a bottle of Jindalee Estates 2007 Shiraz.

“If you don’t like it, I’ll drink it,” he said matter-of-factly, as he poured us the shiraz.

Wow.

It was good.

It was real good.

Read the rest of this entry »

As the New York Times reported today… apparently eggs are back! Pink ladies, flips, fizzes. What perfect timing — right after I started lamenting that the cream sherry flips and gin fizzes I’ve been enjoying at home would be impossible to find at bars!

 ”Suddenly, eggs are everywhere. Just a year ago, a bartender in the meatpacking district lamented that while she longed to add a flip to her cocktail list, she feared it would be impossible to sell a drink that listed eggs as an ingredient. (“I can’t leave it off, though,” she said. “What if someone’s allergic to eggs?”)

But what a difference a year makes. At Olana, a restaurant that opened on Madison Avenue in February, two of the restaurant’s seven signature cocktails feature eggs: the Pear Sidecar, in which egg whites meet pear brandy, and the Apricot Cobbler, a similar drink featuring apricot brandy. A recent addition to the cocktail list at A Voce, a flatiron district restaurant, is the Agrumi Fizz, in which a mix of gin, limoncello, orange liqueur, and egg whites gets topped with a float of Chianti.”

-   Let Rocky Balboa Drink the Yolk April 6, 2008, New York Times

Now, to the farmer’s market to find fresh eggs! Or maybe I should just skip that and go straight to Olana…

Toronto felt a little bit like an episode of the Twilight Zone. No, not the one where all the streets have trams in them, or the one about the really freaking tall concrete structure that they charge $27 to let you go up (though those were both good), but the one where everybody disappeared.

Now, I should mention that we showed up in Toronto on Easter Sunday. Apparently that’s a popular time to sit at home and close your restaurant/pub/whatever. I honestly had no idea. About three-quarters of all the fine cantinas and trattorias we walked past were closed that night, though we wound up getting dinner and drinking a pretty decent pale ale at some pub that called itself the Firkin (I think in the general vicinity of University and Queen Street, but I don’t remember for sure. Let Google be your guide), and then hanging out at a jazz lounge called The Rex on Queen Street where the music was good and the beer was local. Neither establishment was even remotely full, though The Rex wasn’t bad for a Sunday night, I guess. Also, we saw lots of technially-dressed nineteen-year-olds (the temperature was about freezing), which served as a good reminder of Ontario’s drinking age.

The next day was just as strange though. We took lunch at the awesomely-named C’est What? down by the waterfront (craft brews = victory. I recommend this place enthusiastically.) — totally deserted. Around 11 PM we went out to the not-remarkable but not-bad Ben Wick’s out in Cabbagetown, and we were literally the only people in the place. It was seriously weird. They were open, and the bartender/waiter did a reasonable job of paying attention to us without always hovering over us (he gave us the hard sell on a South African shiraz, but it turned out to be really excellent, so I’ll forgive him), so it certainly wasn’t a bad experience, but I fail to understand how Toronto can be so empty.

By contrast, I recently wanted to go out for a drink here in Cambridge with about 5 friends at 9 on a Tuesday night. There was no place at Central Square we could get a table. We wound up walking back to campus and hanging out at one of the student-run dives. Cambridge may in fact have the busiest (weeknight) bars in the world, but it still makes seeing an empty bar weird.

One of the jokes between Neil & I is that we’re the exact same person. It can be generally taken that if I enjoyed a particular food or drink, Neil would probably enjoy it also, and vice versa. In fact, watching us eat can be rather disturbing, as our plates tend to become communal property. Anyhow, this near-universal principle hit a roadblock at our recent wine tasting at Wagner Vineyards by Seneca Lake in upstate New York wine country. Admittedly, our tastes in wine haven’t been as similar as our tastes in beer (and I would argue that my taste is cocktails is quite a bit less cavity-licious than his), but we’ve never been at such a complete disagreement before.

After a couple ho-hum tastings of their reds offerings, we got into the better stuff — Rieslings, Gerwutztraimer, etc. Our first taste of their white wine was of a rather obscure grape, the Niagara grapes, crossed between Concord and white Cassady grapes and created in the same region its grown. A sniff yielded intense intense fruity scents, mainly of grape juice. It tasted exactly like it was scented. Amazing!!

Me:” WOW! This is… this is truly delicious! O_O”
Neil & other friend: “… This… this is really weird.” *spits it out*

Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve decided that writing about liquids just wasn’t cutting it out for us. Two months of using this site as an excuse to drink/buy copious amounts of tea, beer, wine and cocktails has given us rather unfortunate reputations as serious drunks. Thus we’re going to turn to a less dangerous phase of substances to work with. Solids sounded like it would make us fat, and we’re not quite so brave as to delve into the gaseous phase. The only reasonable phase of matter left then, is supercritical fluid, known completely erroneously as, plasma.

The first review of our newly christened blog will be of Plasma Pong. Join us as we travel to Hawai’i and jump between volcanoes!

After landing in the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, we found ourselves in a bit of a cultural wasteland. To be more precise, we found ourselves on a strip of urban ugliness that called itself, “Las Vegas North”. Of course, what with the snow, ice and other non-Las Vegasy embellishments, the town might have been better termed “Reno North”. So we got out of there as soon as we had our fill of the falls, and went on to a quaint town called Niagara-on-the-Lake, with the byline - “the loveliest town in Ontario”. We drove alongside the Niagara River and up to the mouth where it met with Ontario Lake, where Niagara-on-the-Lake is situated.

This area is also the Niagara region wine country, with 18 wineries located in the general vicinity. To cut to the chase — we didn’t stop at any of the wineries. Buuut, that’s simply because none of them were open! Makes sense — several of the smaller Finger Lakes wineries were also closed and that area is generally much more well-known in terms of wine production.

As much as one can learn of wineries from the road, it appears that the Niagara-on-the-Lake wineries produce mainly ice wine and Riesling. The wineries are packed pretty close together (in fact, I bet you could do a biking wineries tour pretty easily), and come lined in a row all the way up Niagara Parkway and down Lakeshore Road, as can be seen in this nifty little map produced by a local bed & breakfast (of which there are lots in Niagara-on-the-Lake).

Antonio Vivaldi’s Bed & Breakfast

The scenery along this trail is lovely (I can only imagine it gets better during warmer times), and there’s alot of stopping points to jump out of your car and walk on the shore of Lake Ontario (or, if you come during March, you can walk on Lake Ontario), or watch hawks flying over the Niagara River gorge.

I’m probably done with Niagara Falls during my lifetime, but Niagara-on-the-Lake might warrant another trip, perhaps several years down the road. And then maybe I can write a post about actual wine, from actual wineries ;).