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.

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 »

Newsweek online magazine has a piece on the trend of naming and developing cocktails inspired by the Iraqi Conflict. Intially, I wasn’t sure what to make of this; as the article mentions, the idea of taking a fun-loving and irreverant concept such as cocktails and applying it as an ironic homage to wartime seems crass at best. However, as it goes on to discuss, the origin of war-inspired cocktails has a long and storied history including such fine (and lasting) concoctions as Artillery Punch and the French 75. That led me to my next reaction, appreciative mirth. Thinking of a cocktail named ‘WMD’ or ‘Guantanamo Bay Breeze’ suddenly comes to represent one of the best qualities of the American spirit; an eternally optimistic view of what’s next and how we’ll all survive to see better times in which we’ll drink said drinks and toast those not with us.

 It’s an interesting read; in the meantime I’m off to make my ‘Freedom 77′, a mixture of Applejack, orange juice, and Andre Cold Duck. Click here to read it, if you didn’t click above already.

First, a caveat to this, I think that Gary Vaynerchuk does absolutely fine work on his site tv.winelibrary.com, a wine video blog (vlog) which attempts to demystify wine and make it more accessible in a down-to-earth and direct way than the way many wine aesthetes approach it.

That out-of-the-way however, this is the sort of attention-grabbing, publicity-stuntish, and misguided attempt at “education” that drives me batshit loco. It’s like that doofus Will Cramer who yells at you and through his exuberance hides the fact that he’s giving you information that any broker on Wall Street had at least 24 hours before and whose value is now diminshed to the point of being moot; except in this case it’s trying to get you to do shit my 5-year-old will tell you is retarded. I understand what he’s trying to do; yes, different varietals have basic flavor profiles that are shared across vintages, terroirs, etc. and you can train your palate to identify those core characteristics and better evaluate wines from those baseline flavors. But, and let me make this clear, *ahem* you shouldn’t have to eat bacteria-ridden dirt, eat rank-ass tobacco, lick rocks, et al to understand the tones and flavor profiles of wine. When 80-90% of our sense of taste (only bitter, sweet, salt, and sour aside – and umami if you want to get real damned technical) is derived from the sense of smell, this is completely useless and counterintuitive and is more likely to turn people off from exploring wine than turn them on. That is, Conan’s reaction is just about on-target with how the majority of people would react in this situation, ‘You’re an idiot…’

This defeats Vaynerchuk’s core mission which is noble and well-handled through his vlog. All that aside, I bet his traffic spiked a good amount after this sort of visibility, and more power to him on that score. I just hope people get past this foolhardiness and stay for the well-reasoned and informative look at wine his vlog provides. Slate online magazine also has a great profile of Vaynerchuk here; definitely worth a read.

It's bad enough that the whole thing is creepy, Back to the Future II sorts of bad, and completely without charm, but did they have to spell 'Tanqueray' incorrectly as well? It's just salt in the damned wound. The mind reels. And what's with the vaguely threatening, 'If I wasn't bolted to the floor I'd ______' comment?! Are we supposed to project our own luddite fears into that dropped sentence? What, kick our asses? Take over the world? Take a steaming robot dump? Huh?! I'm sure you have the Keiths, Jeffreys, Darcys, and Jimmys of the world shaking in their proverbial boots, you freaking Max Headroom wannabe.

Hmmmmm, but maybe we could hack it…