“Patron is a phenomenal drink. It sells phenomenally well, grew phenomenally fast, is phenomenally well marketed and tastes like licking a plumber’s fingers.

The next time someone tells you it’s the world’s best tequila, poke them in the eye and tell them it’s not.”

Read more: Tequila: More than the drink of mere champs | CNNGo.com

“New rule: If you’re going to talk or write about the Park Hyatt Tokyo’s New York Bar, you have to do so without mentioning the movie. You know the one. Enough is enough. It’s been eight years.
Here’s a new, non-celluloid, and much better reason to like the place — next week the hotel is flying in four top mixologists from the United States to turn the New York Bar into a real New York bar for six nights.”

etc etc. Click the link to read it.

“Fourteen years ago in a parking lot in the aptly named city of Lebanon, Tennessee, a gentleman who called himself Jellybean and claimed to have killed 26 people allowed me a swig of his homemade whiskey. His drink had a nose, palate and finish of ethanol. He may have forgotten to malt his grains, he may have been using an ill-proportioned still, or he may have been drinking ethanol.

Like Jellybean, I’ve always fancied myself as a boozemaker, but never had the skill or equipment to produce anything worth drinking. So imagine my delight when I tried infusing vodkas and found it as easy as stuffing something into a bottle and waiting until it tastes nice.

There are, as I write, bottles of homemade pepper vodka, perilla vodka and wasabi vodka on my coffee table. There’s a hops vodka and a banana vodka on top of my fridge. There’s a butter vodka in the fridge, a black truffle vodka on the sideboard and an ambergrease vodka on top of my wine cellar, but we’ll come to that later.”

etc etc. Click the link below.

I wanted to buy a new coffee maker, so I took some lessons from the experts, then conducted a little home experiment. Then I emptied my brain onto the pages of the Japan Times again.

23 April, 2010

‘Iyashikei is a rice brew, but it tastes like fino sherry. Omiji kijoshu is a rice brew, but it tastes like oloroso sherry. Ineburimaru is a rice brew, but it tastes like stout. If you thought sake was
supposed to be fragile and floral, you need to visit Sake Bar Yoramu. ‘‘An aged wine still tastes like it’s from the same category, but that’s not true of sake,’’ says owner Yoram Ofer. But then
nobody ever aged a wine like he ages sake. Ofer leaves namazake, the unpasteurized stuff they tell you to refrigerate, sitting on his doorstep for years. ‘‘If you keep it one summer out of
the fridge, nobody will know you did it,’’ he says. ‘‘It’ll be the same sake but with
more umami. Some go wrong, but then you just close it and put it back for
another year.’’ The results can be wild, but an evening here makes every other
kind of alcohol seem horribly limited. It’s sake, folks, but not as you know it.’

“In January, Tokyo Walker magazine declared Korea’s rice wine the next big drink, saying that, like the highball, it’s cheap, relatively healthy, and proving popular with young women.

They’re right on all counts. Makgeolli sells for less than ¥500 a liter in Japan, is low in alcohol (5-7 percent), and its yogurty sourness comes from lactic acid, left over from fermentation, which science suggests can boost the immune system, lower cholesterol and reduce blood pressure. According to South Korean tax office figures, the drink is already a hit in Japan, with a whopping 89.6 percent of exported makgeolli heading here in 2008.

But the brew has an image problem. In its native land it’s also known by the nicknames nongju, wheju, chejuor takju, all of which connote hillbilly booze, and despite a history at least eight centuries long, it’s still usually sold in white plastic bottles at rock-bottom prices. While Japan’s rice brew became the drink of Shinto gods and emperors, its unfiltered Korean cousin has never been anything but hooch.”

“I ordered a shot of George T. Stagg’s fiery Hazmat III in Shot Bar Bourbon, a tiny subterranean bourbon paradise in Ginza, and the bartender served it in a wine glass. I asked why. ‘For the flavor,’ he said, and to demonstrate, he tipped my drink into a shot glass. The bourbon lost its aroma and half of its taste. It wasn’t a subtle change; it was a character-killing transformation.

That’s how I became obsessed with glass shapes. I began asking bartenders to explain their choice of vessel, and found that many could. When I drank at home, I’d pour from shot glass to snifter to old-fashioned to Burgundy, then bore people stiff with my findings.

I went to Riedel, the 250-year-old Austrian glassmaker that pioneered grape-varietal specific glassware, and asked whether their 140-strong suite of stemware was grounded in science or a desire to sell us 20 glasses when we really only need two.

‘When you drink, you never think about how it goes in, how much goes in and where it goes in your mouth,” says Wolfgang Angyal, president and CEO of Riedel Japan. “We know where to put the tastes. A glass delivers the drink to our senses, and its shape determines the bouquet, taste, balance and finish.’”

“A tawny port pairs wonderfully with Stilton. Grand Marnier tastes great on vanilla ice cream. Chianti seems to suit a Margherita pizza. And whisky? Well, that goes with haggis.

But haggis is a sheep’s stomach stuffed with a mash of its offal, and tastes just as it sounds — so we’ll have to find something else.

Suntory, the nation’s top whisky distiller, hopes to make 2010 the year of whisky and chocolate. It’s not a new idea, but it’s a great idea for a company looking for more ladies to sip single malts.”

Pic by Will Robb

“This week’s bar is in Saitama.

Still reading? Good, because it’s a bar worth leaving the city for.

My photographer, a drink-friendly Scot who knows a fair bit about whisky, emailed me: “Went to a little place last night called the Cask and Still which had a really nice selection of whisky’s [sic], 400 different malts which you don’t find many places… They also had Yona Yona ale on draft, the best pint I have had in Japan. The place is pretty small, just on the Tokyo/Saitama border in Nishi-Kawaguchi (Saitama’s soapland).”

That’s a little harsh. Nishi-Kawaguchi has spent the last three years tackling its reputation for harlotry: It closed many of its sex parlors and asked artists to paint murals on the shutters. It’s still not a central plank of Japan’s tourism strategy, but better bleak than seamy. At least you can take your mum there now.”