opinionated alchemist

Look - there are a ton of recipes out there to make an Espresso-Vodka (aka Espresso Martini). It is a drink which gets into its 30's  but it is still very popular. Why I do pick it up now? Because of the brilliant video below of "How to Drink". Even those folks are often a bit off - the videos are brilliantly entertaining - and more often than not inspirational. What more to say? First of all the elephant in the room (which more and more is accepted by a lot of bartenders - but it is and stays an elephant in the room): The Espresso-Vodka (the original name of the EM) is not   a martini cocktail! Please, please, please - stop to mix up and confuse categories of drinks with the glasses they are served in (or other common denominators). A warthog is not an elephant - only because of its tusks (and the fact that it is a mammal, has 4 legs, 2 eyes, a small tail - you get it). How stupid would it be to assume that one animal is another animal only because o...

It seems that there is for the moment a big Old Fashioned promotion going on. Angostura, which is one ingredient, which is in essentially every bar, tried to push their popularity even further - well they know, that 99% of all bartenders and bars are using their product. But what is an Old Fashioned? And what makes an Old Fashioned an Old Fashioned? I have been annoyed, when one of my favorite YouTube channels "How to Drink" really screwed up with this cocktail. So first the video below... Why did Greg screwed up? Let's start first with the origins.  We can safely presume, that the Old Fashioned was the original cocktail: The first definition of cocktail known to be an alcoholic beverage appeared in The Balance and Columbian Repository ( Hudson, New York ) May 13, 1806; editor Harry Croswell answered the question, "What is a cocktail?": Cock-tail is a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitter...