1. It’s the “Bartender’s Ketchup.” At least, that’s what one wise-acre bartender I know calls it.  In other words, it’s sweet, versatile, and gets dashed into everything to sweeten and round out drinks.

2. Orange liqueur sweetens roughly 1 in 4 drinks. That’s not an official statistic; that’s my estimate after leafing through I-don’t-know-how-many cocktail menus. In craft cocktail havens, it sweetens fewer, as bartenders diversify with simple syrup, agave nectar, fruit juices and other sweeteners. In sports bars or other less mixological joints, orange liqueur might be dashed into drinks more frequently.

3. I didn’t realize (but should have) that the base of these liqueurs can be anything – brandy, particularly Cognac, is most common, but I also tried tequila/agave and rum based orange liqueurs. It probably makes sense to complement, say, a tequila-based drink with a tequila-based orange liqueur.

4. Most orange liqueurs on the market are Curacaos. It turns out, Curacao is a generic term used when the bitter oranges are grown on the Caribbean island of Curacao. That family includes a number of brand names you’ve likely heard before:  triple sec and Cointreau, for example. The infamous blue curacao also is part of this family. (As an aside – I tried a new “dry curacao” from Ferrand, which I really dug.) 

PS – How do you pronounce it, anyhow?  CURE-a-sow. Though I’ve also heard some more pretentious types add a mysterious “l” on to the end to pronounce it more like “cure-a-cell.” Hmm. I have absolutely no idea where that “l” sound comes from.

If you know — or if you have a favorite orange liqueur or drink that features the Bartender’s Ketchup, I’d love to hear about it, please post a comment!

A press release just landed on my desk, announcing the launch of “the world’s hottest chilli vodka” (this is a UK brand; U.S. folks use ”chile” to refer to hot peppers): “100,000 Scovilles – Naga Chilli Vodka, made by infusing vodka with the world’s hottest chilli – the Naga Jolokia. ” In other words, Ghost Pepper-infused vodka.

Fine. Those ghost peppers are mighty hot stuff.  But I’ve had ghost pepper-infused spirits. That’s not the problem. Nor is the following warning on the label/web site (actually, I think this is funny):

By purchasing this bottle, you agree that:

1) I have been warned and fully understand that this product contains extreme heat and should be used and handled responsibly.

2) I use this product entirely at my own risk and I understand the potential danger if used or handled irresponsibly. If I give this product as a gift I will make the recipient aware of the potential danger if used or handled irresponsibly.

3) I accept that the retailer and manufacturer of this product will, under no circumstances, be responsible for, or liable for, any claims of injury or damage arising from the use or misuse of this product and by purchasing this product, whether for myself or as a gift, I acknowledge and agree to this fact without question.

4) I am not inebriated or of unsound mind and am fully able to make a rational decision to purchase this product.

No, what bothers me is THIS:  drinkers are urged not to drink it neat, and “definitely do not have it as a shot.”

Simply put: If you can’t drink it straight, you shouldn’t buy it.

What? You’re going to buy it anyway? Masochist. Might as well buy a copy of my book while you’re at it to get some cocktail suggestions, since you’re so severely discouraged from drinking that vodka straight up.

Although I can’t yet speak to what’s inside, I have been awed by the beauty of so many of these bottles. The designs are so gorgeous, I had to snap a few quick photos to share.

Gorgeous Graphics

These bottles are stunning, no? (From left to right:  Luna Nueva, Magave, Jose Cuervo)

Bold Shapes

Each of these had such bold, beautiful contours – squared-off shoulders, elongated pyramid, circular. The photo doesn’t quite capture the impressive tactile  heft of each of these bottles. (From left to right: Gran Dovejo, Oros Azul, Corazon.)

Is that a present, for me?

Around the neck of each of these bottles is a little something:  a guitar pick around the neck of the Corrido bottle, a leather bracelet (“for good karma”) around the neck of the Karma bottle. Why, how thoughtful, darlin’.

Tiki tequila

How awesome is this? A green glass tiki totem inside the bottle with tiki-style lettering and bamboo graphics and a green wax seal over the cap. My immediate cycnical thought was “oh, how clever, now they can put less tequila in the bottle,” but no, there’s still a full 750ml inside.  Know any good tiki drinks that include tequila?

1. American Brandy is an underappreciated, or at least under-publicized, category. A handful are every bit as good as French Cognacs – but the prices are much, much gentler. (I also just received a press release for an intriguing-sounding oak-aged Canadian brandy….could this be yet another nascent category?)

2. Many of these brandies are made from interesting wine grapes, such as Pinot Noir or Semillon. But not all brandies are grape – in particular, there are some amazing American apple brandies, such as Laird’s. And although I didn’t sample any for this review, the category also includes a number of good peach and other fruit brandies.

3. Unaged fruit brandy = eau-de-vie.

 4. Some brandies (such as those from Paul Masson) are produced in California, but are then transported to Kentucky, where they age in former Bourbon barrels. As a result, many have lovely Bourbon-like caramel and vanilla notes.

 5. It turns out that Americans have a long history of brandy innovation, dating all the way back to the original maverick:  George Washington. Though better known as a general and statesman, he also distilled his own rye whiskey and brandy. In fact, according to the Mt. Vernon Museum, the year Washington died, in 1799, his plantation account book shows he had 60 gallons of peach brandy and 67 gallons of apple brandy sent to his main house from the distillery.

Got a favorite American brandy, or brandy cocktail? I’d love to hear about it.

1.  Rum will be the new “it” spirit. Although in 2011 whiskey was the belle of the ball, for 2012 rum seems to be on a speedy ascent. I’ve tasted some utterly amazing aged rums in the past few months. Online magazine Got Rum? relaunched in 2011, and a new rum advocacy group got off the ground during the year as well. And rum-soaked tiki drinks and punches continue to have legs. Let the rum-running begin.

2. We’ll let them eat cake. File this one under trends I wish would go away, but just won’t:  cake-flavored vodka. And marshmallow fluff. And whipped cream. Oh, and I just saw an ad in Cheers magazine for a Swedish fish-flavored vodka. Can some mixologist/dentist please pull this sweet tooth, and soon?

3. Cocktail conference overload! It’s official:  there are too many cocktail festivals for me to keep up with all of them. Just when I had the MCC/Tales thing down, festivals (and good ones, too!) popped up in San Francisco, Portland, Vancouver. Tales of the Cocktail keeps taking Tales on the road – I think most recently, roadtripping through Texas. I hear Scottsdale, Arizona is hosting a cocktail conference in February. Not to mention festivals devoted to whiskey, rum (see above), indie spirits, etc. etc. etc. I suspect there will be more to come.

4. We’ll roll out the barrel. Barrel-aged cocktails have become a certifiable international bar craze. Add to that extra cask-aged spirits (i.e., whiskey “finished” in sherry barrels) and even barrel-aged beer. I’m waiting for someone to debut barrel-aged appetizers to pair with any of the above.

5. Tipplers will get it on tap. Wine. Americanos. Vermouth. Barrel-aged martinis. I’ve seen ‘em all spouting from a tap in recent months, and expect to see still more.

6. Lushies and slushies. Can you believe the frozen Margarita was invented 40 years ago? And now, four decades later, they’re back, in the slightly more sophisticated guise of “Sno-Gronis” (frozen Negronis) at the Tippling Lounge in Chelsea or Moonshine-spiked blackberry sno-cones at The Ritz-Carlton in Atlanta. Alco-popsicles and spiked milkshakes abound too.

7. Bitter will be the new black. Not just cocktail bitters (and there’s a new one every minute, right?) but also spirits and cocktails with bracingly bitter flavors, from Fernet to Cynar. I’ve been wild about some new cocktails with a bitter edge, many of which are compiled into Brad Parson’s groovy new book, Bitters.

8. We’ll all be Ready-To-Drink. The RTD category, as the trades abbreviate, is on the upswing. Some of them aren’t half bad, but I’m hoping that the bar can be raised beyond premixed Margaritas and Mudslides. Can we get the Pimm’s Cup in a can, like they have in the UK?

9. Carbonated Cocktails. I’m blaming crediting Jeff Morgenthaler with popularizing this one too. Every bartender with a Perlini will be adding a bit o’ bubbly to drinks in the year ahead.

10. “New Gin.”  New-style gins have been rolling out at a fast and furious clip. Some are “New West” style, such as St. George – which went as far as releasing THREE new gins at a go, including “Terroir,”  infused with Douglas fir. Others are what I’ve been thinking of as “Anything But London Dry” gins – the profile isn’t that far from a London Dry, but the base spirit hails from Ireland or Scotland. And then there’s the “Florals” – I can’t count how many new gins seem to be packed with a florist shop’s worth of pretty botanicals, from rose to lavender. Now…is anyone drinking all these new gins?

11. You’ll make Your Own Damn Tonic Water. You can use one of the three new ‘tonic syrups” which debuted on the market within the past few months (Tomrs, Jack Rudy, Commonwealth from Bittermans). New gin, why not new tonic? (NOTE – the “bittering agent” gentian also gives tonic syrup a brisk bitter edge, so this might go hand in hand with prediction #7.)

12. Cocktail books will become e-books. Have you been to the bookstore lately? The cookbook section has shrunk considerably, and cocktail books have taken the worst of it. (my Barnes & Noble now allots one measly shelf to the cocktail genre). More narrative-driven wine books and “food lit” books seem to be holding up OK, as are more general cookbooks. But cocktail books — essentially, smallish recipe collections– seem destined for e-book territory sooner rather than later.  Frankly, I find this terrifying. (Have I mentioned that I’m writing another cocktail book, due out in 2013?  How the heck will book-signings work without books or for that matter, bookstores?)  Personally, I will go kicking and screaming, but I can see that it’s coming whether I like it or not.   The good news? Your vintage copy of The Savoy Cocktail Book just became more valuable.

I’m honored to be a guest blogger on event planner Tara Wilson’s “Savvy Entertaining” blog, where I’m talking about bar tools I can’t live without. I suspect at least one will surprise you– but trust me, it’s a necessity!

1. I now understand why people go bananas over the whiskey category, and Scotch in particular. It’s mind-blowing what can be accomplished with grain, water, and barrel wood…and nothing else.

2. This was the category that finally got me to spit during tastings. SO many of these are uber-aged, and have such high alcohol levels, that it became a necessity. It was a survival technique; otherwise I’d have been sozzled during every tasting session.

3. The scoring range was totally different from say, flavored vodkas — significantly more in the 90+ area, and very very few below 85. Although I think what I was sent generally was top of the line (in some cases I know it was), the takeaway is that there’s a surplus of excellence in the single-malt Scotch category.

4. I also had the opportunity to sample the most expensive spirit I’ve ever reviewed: $1300. It was a highly limited edition, but based purely on the blind tastings, much more reasonably-priced spirits were just as good or better. (sorry!)

5. The biggest surprise of all to me – I don’t hate peat!  It turns out, I just hate heavy-handed peat — that overpowering smokiness that I imagine must be like licking an ashtray.

Got a favorite single malt Scotch? I’d love to hear about it. Comment away…

It doesn’t matter what whiskey he’s referring to in the headline – THIS is the whiskey you want to know better:

Whiskey doesn’t care. That’s what makes it cool. The only other liquor that’s anywhere near as cool is Tequila. But Tequila’s always been too crazy to really be cool. Tequila will cut you for looking at its woman, then laugh while the cops drag it off to jail, and spit at you during the trial. And trust me you don’t want to pick on Vodka either. Dude doesn’t have much of a personality, but I swear he goes to the gym twice a day. You want the nerd of the liquor crew? Try Gin. You can give Gin an atomic wedgie and the worst it’ll do is scream that his daddy will have you banned from the yacht club.

Where else do we see anthropomorphizing? That’s right, fairy tales, where the wolf is Big and Bad, and the piglets are helpless but chatty. I want to read a fairy tale – or at least watch a cartoon - featuring these spirits as characters.

Eau de Robideau

Answer:  HOOCH!  This pretty flask, full of Scotch, was passed around at a recent Women & Whiskey event, and we were encouraged to spray it on our wrists. It smelled sweet and Bourbon-like, with woodsy and fig-like notes.

Example 2:  Is it perfume or hooch?

Suntory spritzers

Answer:  HOOCH! This is whiskey again. These little perfume spritzers were given out to journalists at a Suntory whiskey launch. But we were asked to spray it into glasses for sniffing the aroma, not encouraged to spray it on ourselves. (Note – atomizers could be a great way to do an absinthe “rinse” for Sazeracs.)

Example 3:  Is it perfume or hooch?

Fresh Sake

Answer:  PERFUME!  Sold at Sephora, folks.

Want more proof? Jump over to the informative Cocktails & Cologne blog to read about the new arrangement between perfumer Roja Dove and Macallan whiskey.

So…how long before someone comes out with a truly potable perfume? Or a spirit meant to spritzed on without leaving you smelling like a sticky Manhattan? Gin seems to be taking on an increasingly floral cast — that gets my vote for most likely to cross the perfume/hooch frontier once and for all.

1. First, I learned that I really, really like aged rum. In general, the rums I tried were AMAZING, and I haven’t had such a good overall crop since the Bourbon category (and the high scores reflected that.)

However…. I do think this got “gamed” a little bit. In other words, I suspect that I was sent cream-of-the-crop reserve rums in many cases, rather than middle-of-the-line specimens. But I’m not really complaining.

2. Whenever possible, I try to arrange tastings to compare apples to apples – ie, for tequilas, it made sense to taste all the blancos together, then the reposados, etc. But it’s awfully hard to segregate rums. At first, I thought age would make sense – but many rums are made using a blend of rums of varying ages, and terms like “VSOP” and “anejo” are used pretty much willy nilly, which must piss off cognac & tequila makers. After a while, I understood why in his seminar at Tales, rum expert Ed Hamilton advised, “don’t get hung up by the age of your rum.”

3. It didn’t make sense to arrange tastings by provenance, either, since rums come from all over the Caribbean and Latin America. However, if I had specifically asked for rums from say, Martinique, or Puerto Rico, I could have done it. Lesson:  I’ll be smarter in future rum tastings and will ask for rums from a specific place.

4. Soft, softer, softest. Sometimes we refer to spirits as having a “soft” or “velvety” texture. But  I’ve never felt anything quite like aged rum for feather-bed softness on the tongue. It sounds like a cliché, but my raw tasting notes for one rum in particular said, “like sticking my tongue in feathers.” Not an appetizing description if you think about it too closely, but it was super-velvety. (The rum was Angostura 1919.)

5. Many rums were aged (or finished) in barrels that previously held Cognac, Sherry, Bourbon etc etc. You can really taste it in the spirit, too, which is lovely. The type of wood used varies too – French, American oak, etc. I knew this was increasingly common in whiskey, but I didn’t realize how prevalent the practice had become in rum too.

Do you have a favorite aged rum?  I’d love to hear about it. (you know where to leave a reply…)