Last night, the “Historical Oracle,” David Wondrich visited Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report and performed his typical rat-a-tat-a-tat shaking style, discussed Prohibition-era cocktails, how to strain drinks through one’s beard, and how to get Stephen Colbert to sex you up all night. The key, Cherry Heering.

Wondrich appeared, in part, to promote his book Imbibe!: From Absinthe Cocktail to Whiskey Smash which you should buy, post-haste.

Colbert Bump

• 1.5oz Gin
• 1oz Cherry Heering
• .25oz fresh lemon juice
• Heavy splash of soda

Fill a tall glass with ice and build. Stir and serve.

It’s not enough that your product is despairingly bad, Le Tourment, and that people everywhere have to pay for the privilege of such bottled evil before realizing it. It’s not enough that you’ve put a sub-standard product on the market that is riding the coattails of ever-growing absinthe appreciation and enthusiasm and on the backs of quality brands such as Marteau, Obsello, St. George, and others. It’s not enough that your product barely resembles anything remotely related to absinthe much less something potable. No, you have to spam my comments and burn 10-15 minutes of each of my days for the past few weeks filtering it out. Shame on you, on both counts.

As a cocktail blogger and writer I can tell you that some PR firms “get” it. They understand that to gain our attention requires time, respect, and communication. You know, like any other human with self-respect. Sure, blogging is a labor of love, first and foremost, but it also requires time and effort and attention and a good many of us also write in some professional capacity. That you would think, essentially, taking a dump on our doorstep every day and making us clean it up would engender some sort of good will, admiration, or desire to promote your product only illustrates your ignorance, disregard, and, I suspect, your secretly-held disdain for bloggers in general. After all, if I shit on *your* doorstep every day, you might take it that I don’t like you either.

Let me provide this illustration by example. You know those folks going door-to-door trying to get you to attend their church, subscribe to The Watchtower, or generally asking you personal questions about your relationship with God which is none of their damned business? Off-putting at best, and insulting at worst. Now, take that example, have them arrive every day for the past 3-4 weeks and then add a kicker. Not only do they make daily visits, they also have an associate that writes “Jesus is the awesomezt, have you tried him?,” or, “I’ve heard Shiva is nice, but have you tried Jesus? Americans are crazy for him!” on your front door in dry-erase marker. Every…single…fucking….day. Some days two or three times. Yes, easy enough to clean off. Yes, it’s not really *hurting* anyone. But, what does it say about how they feel about you, your home , and your time? It says, to me, “Fuck you, our message is more important than you and you’re not deserving of the respect or time it would require to actually key your interest in our message, product, or business.” And, what does it make you think of that church, religion, or publication? Nothing good, I assure you. So, thanks Le Tourment. I didn’t like your product in the first place but was willing to equivocate a bit. Then you had to spam me. All your PR firm has done is prove that it has no respect for me, and, I would venture, no faith in your product.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there are firms that do this right. I’ve had great experiences with Brand Action Team, The Baddish Group, and Brown-Forman and would put them in front of anyone looking for best practices on how to work with the cocktail blogging community to build influence and exposure for a product . Each of them, in different ways, has taken our influence seriously, taken their time to speak with us personally and inquire after their product(s) after sending it to us, and sought our feedback and insights on those products. I’m willing to listen carefully to them about their products, share my issues, and take their feedback into account when they disagree with my assessment. I would think this should be any firm’s goal.

Spamming my comments , sending me unsolicited emails asking me to feature a crappy batch of recipes that I can tell by looking at them didn’t have mixological principles in mind, just the heavy use of XYZ product for its own sake, or emailing me a lamely-worded press release in-toto and asking me to run it on my site is telling me that you either don’t know me, don’t read my site, or, if you do, don’t take me seriously. I can live with that. But, please, do me the favor and be honest in your not respecting me and my ilk. In other words, leave me the fuck alone. Pretend I don’t exist, and I’ll pretend you don’t either.

Because, when you act like I exist, here’s what I get:

And this is only what I can dredge up from my history in the past week or so. Sad, alarming, and completely unnecessary. I hope any brands reading this know that I’ll be happy to give your product a fair shake and its due. I just hope you’ve selected a PR firm that can treat us with respect, forthrightness, and dignity. As for you, Cashmere, the IP addresses from which the above come have been permanently banned. Well done for you, and well done for your client.

Speak Out, Bloggers!:

Darcy at The Art of Drink

Jon at DrinkPlanner

SeanMike at Scofflaw’s Den

Marleigh at SLOSHED!

Blair at Trader Tiki’s Booze Blog

Chris at An Exercise in Hospitality

Stevi at Two at the Most

Tiare at A Mountain of Crushed Ice

Paul at the Cocktail Chronicles

Chuck at Looka!

Matt at A Jigger of Blog

This post carries a warning: watch what you say. You never know who may be listening, much less recording. And, if you’re a college professor, you might as well assume the latter at all times. This is a verbatim transcript of a section of a Biochemistry course in which an instructor, perhaps unwisely, decided to expound on what may cause the difference between a person being a “sad” drunk versus a “happy” drunk and manages to divulge some interesting personal details, a recipe for “Hopping Gators”, and thoughts on spousal shootings in the process.

Is there Biochemistry involved? Yes. Is it the most appropriate topic, or approach, in a college classroom? Well, you decide.

I think one of the more interesting things is why you get happy drunks and sad drunks. Right? You guys read this chapter? I should give you a quiz so you’ll read it.

If you’re exercising a lot, real strenuously, you sort of wear out your glycogen reserves and you sort of get in a hungry stage, and if you go out drinking with your buddies, right, you get a bigger bang for your buck . Right? And depending on how well fed you [are or] not, you can, you can, get sort of, as we say here, uh, agitated? Impaired judgment? Shall we say? And why does that happen?

Well it happens because when you drink, you have to uh, remove the alcohol, and you remove the alcohol by alcohol dehydrogenase and acid aldehyde dehydrogenase. This creates higher levels of NADH in the cytosol. And so you’re not really getting a lot on energy, per say, at that point in time. And then those higher levels of NADH cause a shift of pyruvate to lactate, and it also causes oxaloacetate to malate shift. These are the precursors of glucose from the liver.

So, you know, if you’re exercising, and you go drinking, you get, you get a little, little wilder, you know. Have you ever tried Gatorade and beer? Hopping gators? Get drunk on that? It used to be popular when I was in college. Well, well, Gatorade and anything , because the the the carbonate and the glucose gives you [I couldn't really hear this part, something about the carbonate and the glucose and an enhanced uptake, and screwing something.]

Anyway, so, so you end up, uh, um, screwing up your glucose levels and just like any war usually starts when people are hungry . Or fights start when people are hungry . Or if you look at the Saturday night shootings of spouses, you know, it all happens after alcohol . So, vitamin B’s play a role in this. I’m going to ask you some roles for thiamine and, and uh, pyridoxine and some of this stuff. You know, beer has a lot of B vitamins, but, but typically if you’re drinking a light American beer in, into excess, you’ll go into a vitamin B deficiency.

So. If you want to be happy and drunk, you should drink and eat, like Europeans do and have lots of B vitamins. And don’t drink – don’t go out, like, at midnight and and drink like a fish, and not expect to have the consequences .

So, to make sure we understand the drinking rules according to Professor Bombast, the promised quiz:

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* Please note that my views on alcohol consumption are in no way linked to the professor quoted above and that I believe moderation, safety of one’s self, and the safety of others are always of primary importance and that this is not meant to glorify or encourage overconsumption in any way. I’m not sure how you might get that impression, but someone surely will, so, if that’s you, go back and re-read this several times until it sticks.

I’m sure the employees give get great french benefits.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a fan of guilty pleasures. I refuse myself as little as possible in life and, occasionally, this leads to make drinks that, shall we say, I would be ashamed to serve my high school girlfriend’s sorority-loving sister. And, about once-a-year, that means the Horny Monkey. This is a Pina Colada gone horribly wrong, and that’s saying something.

The malevolent forces that align to drive me into the arms of the Horny Monkey tend to fall out like this:

1. It’s late, very late
2. I’m drunk, very drunk
3. It’s Summer
4. I’m looking for a combination of alcohol and sugar shock to stay awake
5. There are no manly men present.

So, should you find yourself in this scenario, your demise goes something like this:
Read More »

Thanks to the combined efforts of Rumdood, Trader Tiki, and yours truly we’ve assembled what I believe to be the most comprehensive (and daunting) set of cocktail, drinking, and booze-related sites compiled to date. This file is in OPML format and was exported from Google Reader and, frankly, I have no idea how the XML will translate between RSS readers.

I’ve resisted the urge to categorize them in any fashion, so it’s a simple list of all 125 sites for which we could find RSS or Atom feeds. I will keep this updated and posted at the top of my blogroll to the left or you can right-click the link below and import it into your reader but, beware, you may be cursing us if you do-my reader currently mocks me with 527 unread posts:

Cocktail OPML File-a-ganza!!!

Update (08/07):
File update with

• My Year of Drinking Heavily
• Drinks for the House
• Standards and Pours
• 52 Martinis
• Kincke
• Mixology

Update (08/21):
File update with

• Shoes & Cocktails
• http://stiryourspirits.blogspot.com/

Update (09/11):
File update with

• Two at the Most (previously Ana Bolena)
• The Mixoloseum Blog
• Refined Vices
• The Intoxicologist is In
• OH Group

I throw quite a few shindigs and I like to think I bring together the right type and range of people that will generally enjoy one another deeply for an evening and yet not become such close friends that, after some time, they abandon….me. A few years ago I held a New Year’s Eve Party and a lot of old friends that had moved to, and remain in, California were visiting Tulsa and were invited. I was very excited to see them and wanted things to go off well. I also invited local friends and family which, necessarily, includes my brother-in-law. Unfortunately for me, specifically, and the party, generally, my brother-in-law’s girlfriend at the time also had an out-of-town friend visiting and asked, sheepishly, if I minded if they brought this friend along. Well, why not, right?

Why not, indeed. While this was before my more enlightened drinking days I still liked to put a good spread of alcohol and this begat ‘The Shittiest Toilet in Scotland’. A drink born of woe, ignorance, and boorishness. All of the below is true. I leave you to it: Read More »

Those 8 of you that were actually awaiting the results of the contest, there is a winner; I’ve just been too taken up with Real Life (RL©) and spewing clean-outs in my basement coating everything within in rotten detritus and funk to get to much of anything blog-related done recently. The basic run-down however is that the entries fell into three categories:

• Cocktail mixers being used in nefarious and inappropriate ways,
• Cocktail mixers being just plain awful, and
• Using mixing ingredients as substitutes when they really ought not be.

Let’s take an example from each , the first being:

As you probably know, there was a catastrophic ice storm in the Oklahoma area in early December that knocked power out for a huge percentage of the population during sub-zero temperatures. As one would expect, trying to prepare, serve, and drink quality drinks in the dark is a heady challenge that makes one appreciate ice makers, lights, and neat Scotch (in just about that order – and I love me some good Scotch). So, in the midst of 8 days without electricity and spending it with the in-laws (as Casa de Cocktailnerd was hovering around 40 degrees) I was called upon, in the daunting face of such dire ice-less and candle-lit circumstances, to mix drinks. Here’s what I learned: Read More »

This, from my son’s homework he got back from school: Read More »