Press releases I didn’t finish reading

“Wine her, dine her, and treat her to only the finest.  With VnC Cocktails and VuQo Premium Vodka, you’ll win her heart in a matter of sips. Seduce your sweetie with your impressive bartending skills by stirring up some VuQo Vodka cocktails with a romantic twist or celebrate the single life with a sweet and sexy VuQo Vodka cocktail with your friends.”

Toward a better understanding of drunken boorishness

Everyone knows there are happy drunks and angry drunks. But why? What determines which category you fall into?

A new study that involved researchers from several universities was recently published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology and may offer some clues. Although the conclusions are not nearly as edifying as the testing methods.

The test involved nearly 500 young adults with an average age of 23. They were first tested to determine how much they considered the future before they acted. (Apparently in psychology circles there's something called the "Consideration of Future Consequences" scale, which can be precisely measured.)

Then they were given drinks — orange juice with liquor (unspecified, but I'm thinking vodka). There was even a placebo group, whose orange juice was only slightly spiked and then lightly misted with alcohol before serving, lending the impression that their glass contained a stiff drink. (Note to bartenders: not a bad trick around 1:30 a.m.) Those served the real drink had an average blood alcohol level of around 0.1. Those without measureed at 0.01.

Then they were tested for aggression. Allow me to quote from Ohio State University's release on this:

Each of the participants was told that he or she was competing with a same-sex opponent in a computer-based speed reaction test, with the winner delivering an electrical shock to the loser.  The winner determined the intensity and the length of the shock delivered to the loser.

In actuality, there was no opponent.  There were 34 trials, and the participant “won” half of them (randomly determined).  Each time they “lost,” the participants received electric shocks that increased in length and intensity over the course of the trials, and the researchers measured if they retaliated in kind.

The results? Those who lived in the here and now — both men and women alike, although men were more aggressive overall — tended to become, well, assholes. (I'm not quoting directly from the report here.) Those who considered their future actions while sober tended be more considerate and less aggressive while drunk. To quote:

[OSU Prof. Brad] Bushman said the results should serve as a warning to people who live only in the moment without thinking too much about the future.

“If you’re that kind of person, you really should watch your drinking.  Combining alcohol with a focus on the present can be a recipe for disaster.”

My takeaway from all this: If you see the Buddha on the road, don't buy him a drink.

How to make a cocktail with gas station convenience store ingredients

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The idea: Simple. Four teams of three bartenders were dropped off at a store. They were given $100 to buy ingredients to make a drink. (Not including spirits, which were provided by Pernod-Ricard.) 

The catch: The store was a slightly skeevy convenience store attached to a gas station somewhere on upper Elysian Fields in New Orleans. In Streetcar Named Desire, you take Elysian Fields to Desire. In reality, not so much.

The venue: The teams convened in the back room at Molly's at the Market on Decatur St. This was a catered affair, with fried chicken from some joint. There were two big boxes of chicken. Not much was eaten. You could have run a small car for a week on the oil collected in those boxes.

The drama: At the store, Team White 'N Nerdy (Chris Hannah, Nick Detrich, Matt Rey) headed straight to the dairy case. Here they blew most of their budget on eggs — they bought all 15 dozen eggs so no other team could use them in their drinks. The fate of the unused eggs remains unclear.

The treachery: Michael Glassberg from Team Bitter As Hell and Too Much Baggage managed to swipe a dozen eggs from the erstwhile monopolists. White 'N Nerdy: strategic advantage denied.

The creativity: Pork rind garnishes. Rims encrusted with crushed wintergreen Lifesavers. Red Hot infusions in lieu of Angostura bitters. Louisiana Hot Sauce.

The Bad: Most of the drinks, not surprisingly. When I taste cocktails I mentally start at 100 and then deduct points for flaws. Here, it was more efficient to start at zero and begrudgingly bestow a few points. A drink involving a peppered mango and too much salt tasted a bit like an Epsom Salts foot bath, after the feet had been removed. I mean that in a good way. I did add five points for the garnish of red-pepper encrusted mango (gas stations have mangos?) which looked like an enraged Gulf shrimp.

The ugly: Team White 'N Nerdy made a drink called the Nod Noggin, which was a Becherovka-based drink along with whatnot that made it disturbingly opaque and brown. However, the team showed considerable creativity in crafting a drink that left foamy brown rings around the glass as it was consumed. I tip my hat to this sly homage to the gas station rest room. Also, once I made this connection, I couldn't finish the drink. Nor could those around me after I helpfully pointed out the similarities.

The good: Team Electric Crabs (Murf Reeves, Liam Deegan, and Michelle Lunza) made a drink consisting of Martell Cognac, Strawberry NesQuik, King Cobra Malt Liquor and Karo syrup. With a Graham Cracker rim. I took a sip, first making sure a spit cup was within reach. And the drink was... how can I put this... actually quite good. It was, in fact, remarkably balanced. You could taste each of the ingredients separately, and it came together in an unexpectedly interesting way. I would order another one. (Recipe below.) Electric Crabs took the prize from the judges. (Those sitting in judgement were Keith Marzalek, Chris and Laura McMillian, and Chris Patino.)

Oh, the humanity! This idea for Station Libations — held the evening of December 14 — came from a dark part of Rhiannon Enlil's shriveled, bitter heart. One can only hope more of her events fill the calendars of 2012.

After School Special

1.5 oz Martell Cognac
2 oz Strawberry NesQuik
1/2 oz King Cobra Premium Malt Liquor
1/2 oz Karo Syrup

Shake like a fiend with ice. Strain and serve.

Press releases I didn't finish reading

"I wanted to send over images of a fabulous wine confection created for Ramona Singer of The Real Housewives of New York City that I thought might interest your readers … Heather Barranco from Dreamcakes (known for her jaw-droppingly inventive cakes – www.heatherbarranco.com) just created an amazing custom cake for the surprise birthday of Ramona Singer that was  topped with a fabulous edible Ramona Pinot Noir bottle (a nod to Ramona’s new wine) handcrafted from sugar with a hand-painted label. "

Slow cocktails, now slightly faster

Phantom Cocktails from Ty Migota on Vimeo.

Photos of cocktails are always so static and inert. Well, not here — this is a wonderful two-minute series of dramatic video shots of cocktails in action, or at least being acted upon. Shot in super slow-motion and utterly mesmerizing.

But, hey, who let the Coors in?

Gunpowder proof test, revisited. Again.

I’ve written before (like here and here and here) about the historic gunpowder proof test. (Recap: accounts from pre-hydrometer days in the 17th and 18th centuries suggest that sailors at sea worried that their daily rum tot had been watered down tested it by mixing it with gunpowder to see if it would burn. If it didn’t, it was below proof and thought to have been adulterated.)

In theory, 50% alcohol is the dividing line — the thought being that the  water predominant in lower proof spirits would leach out the potassium from the potassium nitrate and render the powder inert. (At this juncture I won’t get into a lengthy discussion about alcohol by weight vs. alcohol by volume, but suffice it to say that’s been taken into consideration.)

Anything less than 50 percent was considered “below proof” — as in, it wasn’t proven. (Purser gets tossed overboard.) I’ve done demos with black powder and liquors for several groups, and in further tests on my own, and the one constant I’ve noticed is inconsistency. Sometimes a low proof spirit will flare. Sometimes a high proof spirit won’t.

So I invited a brain trust of writers and bartenders over to the house last week to help me figure out what was going on.

We started the test with the highest proof spirits and worked downward. Actually, we started by drinking gunpowder Manhattans, made with Smoke and Oakum gunpowder-infused rum and some smoky lapsong souchong tea syrup. It’s my understanding that one should never experiment with liquor, gunpowder, and matches, especially indoors, unless you’ve been drinking first.

Anyway. Gunpowder mixed with Everclear (190 proof) and Lemon Hart (151 proof) flared up reliably and quickly. But then the outcomes got all vague and flukey — some liquors at 100 and 114 proof flared up. Another at 110 did not. (I think. I wasn’t keeping tidy notes.)

Then I tried sloe gin (54 proof) just for the hell of it, and after applying a blow torch to it for a bit, the powder flared. Whatever. No rhyme or reason. Results were, as usual, all over the map. And I have to believe that historic conditions on board a lurching, filthy ship were much less controlled than in my living room.

The brain trust was very helpful, however, in enumerating an ungodly number of variables that could affect the test results. Among them:

Type of gunpowder. I assumed that historic black powder had to be used, which I tracked down. But did the original sailors use fine-grained musket powder or coarse-grained cannon powder? We were using musket powder. Perhaps the results would change with cannon powder.

Humidity. We tested on a fairly humid day in New Orleans, so that could explain why some results were different than in Maine, or in an air-conditioned hotel ballroom. But not the internal inconsistencies of the night's tests. And wouldn’t a test in the tropics on board a ship be pretty damp? Not so sure if this variable matters much.

Quantity of spirit used to dampen the gunpowder. Most accounts I’ve seen say that the grains of gunpowder were dampened with spirits. But how dampened? In most tests I used 10 drops per quarter-teaspoon of powder. But that was purely arbitrary. I probably should try other ratios and see if that has an effect.

Type of liquor. Do brown spirits affect powder differently than clear spirits? Maybe the additional cogeners are having an affect on the powder. Next time: try diluting Everclear with water to various proofs to control that variable. (Thanks to Brett Martin for that one.)

Method of igniting. We mostly used a $3 charcoal starter, but I also tried a creme brulee torch. (Note: don’t use your creme brulee torch. The gunpowder blows the igniter into a state of permanent paralysis.) Of course, neither were available in the 18th century — maybe a flint was used? Or a fuse of some sort made with hot-burning sulfur. Next time, I'll try different ignition methods. (Thanks Kimberly Patton-Bragg.)

Soaking time. I haven’t seen any account that reports how long the powder was dampened before flame was applied. Perhaps the original test involved drying the gunpowder after soaking it? I’ll give that a shot next.

So my lofty goal to solve the enigma of the gunpowder test was far from achieved. If anything, the night marked one step forward, ten steps back. I’ve now got a lengthy list of additional questions to consider. I was hoping to either figure it out, or dismiss the test as a romantic fiction.

Neither happened.

But the brimstoney gunpowder Manhattan? That’s a keeper. So the evening wasn’t a total waste. 

Press releases I didn’t finish reading

“Ocean Vodka, the official vodka of the Aloha State, will soon be available throughout the U.S. mainland. Inspired by the ocean paradise of Hawaii, Ocean Vodka is hand crafted using deep ocean mineral-rich water from 3,000 feet below the surface off the Big Island.”

Field Trip: Vitascope Hall (Hyatt Hotel), New Orleans

Chain hotel bars aren’t usually my destination of choice — too predictable, too mediocre, too many people wearing laminated convention badges around their necks and laughing their scary, fake laughs. But I’m happy to make an exception when I see something being done right.

I stopped by the revamped Hyatt Regency New Orleans during its re-opening ceremony a few weeks ago — it had been closed more than six years, ever since Katrina blew out many of its upper windows (pictures of the hotel became an iconic NOLA image) and the failed levees flooded the ground floor. Wandering through the third floor atrium lobby — which is haute John Portman if you’re a pop architect geek — one of the bars (not yet open) caught my attention. A holy mess of liquor bottles were neatly enshrined within a tall glass dividing wall. And they weren’t the mass market bottles you might expect. Here was Old New Orleans Rum, Rothman & Winter Crème de Violette, St. Elizabeth’s Allspice Dram, and a few other cocktailian favorites. This clearly wasn’t my parents’ Hyatt Hotel.

Later I made a call to Alex Hill, director of food and beverage, to find out if the bottles were just chum for the craft cocktail crowd. Perhaps once lured inside they’d be gaffed with Popov and Malibu. But, no. The drinks list was actually a couple notches above what you’d expect. “Our goal was find someone local, someone who understood the cocktails,” Hill said. They didn’t want to call in a NYC-based brand ambassador with a big spirits brand to help get the cocktail program launched. They wanted to find someone who understood local history and nuance. And — after a visit to Tales of the Cocktail and a chat with Ann Tuennerman — they found Rhiannon Enlil.

Now, I’ve known Rhiannon for a few years. I often bike up to Cure early on Sundays, when it’s slow and she’s usually working and we can chat. So I may be biased. But, seriously, that woman knows her way around a cocktail. They'd be hard-pressed to find anyone better.

The idea was to improve the cocktail program, but not to go overboard with the craftiness. “We didn’t want a ten minute ticket time on a drink,” Hill said. “We have to be a bit quicker.”

I went back a few days later to see how it panned out. The bar is called Vitascope Hall, after New Orleans’s first movie theater. It’s a big, open, modern, angular spot, with lots of televisions for the sports crowd. (Not coincidentally, it’s the closest hotel to the Benz-O-Dome.) You can download a Vitascope iPhone app and, in theory, tap on the music you want to hear over the bar’s sound system. In reality, the playlist seemed to be stuck on the “Worst Shit of the 1980s” channel. I was told the system’s not quite up and running yet.

Rhiannon had flirted with some 40 different potions in crafting the new cocktail list, which ultimately listed nine drinks (including two punches, one serving four and one six). They use about 20 different house mixes (syrups and infusions), and six different bitters. Most seemed to strike a perfectly reasonable compromise between ease of preparation and taste.

My favorite: the Saratoga Trunk, a big and tasty drink served over crushed ice. It’s a twist on a late 19th century classic, made with Four Roses Single Barrel, Laird’s Applejack, Carpano Antica vermouth, and Fee’s whiskey barrel bitters. One word: Yum. (Is “yum” actually a word or just a random phoneme?)

Other drinks anchored in the past include the Place d'Armes (Rittenhouse Rye, house-made grenadine, lemon, lime, orange, mint) and the Rum Daisy (Cruzan and Goslings rum, lemon, cranberry syrup, clove, soda water).

There’s also food, of course. Another word: disappointing. We ordered mussels with lemongrass, curry and green onion, and while the flavor was good, some of the little bivalves were sadly desiccated, some unopened, and some — maybe 70 percent — just right. And the cheese plate struck me as designed for a palate brought up on grocery store domestic Swiss. It could have aimed higher.

Still, for a big chain bar, this struck me as a three steps forward, one step back The cocktails far outpaced most other chain hotel bars I’ve endured lately, and my hat’s off to them for not taking the easy route and just implementing a bland, could-be-anyplace corporate cocktail program.

11:11:11 on 11.11.11? Time for a cocktail

I was the 11th to sign up, but the first to arrive at The 1111 Building on Jefferson Davis Parkway — arguably the most offensive bit of faux French Empire claptrap in the whole of New Orleans. The buidling has been empty and sad for some time, but was resurrected for a few moments this morning by Bart Everson, who had called a conclave (coven?) of 11 people to meet at the appointed time. Which, of course, was 11:11:11 on the morning of 11.11.11.

Why? I'm not sure. But it seemed an excellent excuse for a drink.

People filtered in right around 11am, as Bart made up his drink. It was — no surprise — the No. 11 Cup from New York's Eleven Madison Park (with Averna and Punt y Mes, among other ingredients).

A complication arose when a police car pulled up and the officer yelled out the window, “This is private property.” Our fears were allayed when we realized this was an emmisary from the Xavier University Police. Here we thought we’d been invaded by the Soviet Union's army, but then realized it was just a private security detail from Belarus. One of our 11 turned out to be a Xavier professor, who spoke calming words. The crisis was averted.

A minute or so before the appointed time, we took our drinks and walked to a carport and all stood in parking space #11, while listening to the Grateful Dead play The Eleven on a boom box. Somebody counted down the time. At 11:11:11, we all toasted, chanting "Eleven!" as the morning dram slid down the hatch.

And then the 11 of us went our separate ways, having somehow averted a disaster of interplanetary scope and scale in ways that even we could not fully comprehend.

Press releases I didn’t finish reading

“Bakon Vodka, the world’s first meat flavored spirit, has become known as a cutting edge company and a leader in the independent spirits industry. Today, the founders of Bakon Vodka are pushing the envelope again as they excitedly unveil Bakon’s new bottle design with a distinctive twist. On sale in specific markets today, each new bottle of Bakon Vodka incorporates an individualized QR code... to provide customers with a new way to interact with the spirit.”