A couple of weeks ago, the Lauer household was inundated with tomatoes. The gardens were cranking 'em out in July, and we could only consume so many of them. Our stomachs replete with red fruit, we offered them up to neighbors and co-workers, and with their stomachs replete, we had to move on to long-term storage solutions...along... Continue Reading →
Tempered Spirits is officially one year old! Huzzah! Cue the music! The site has come a long way since the first post, which covered the Martini, and to celebrate the fact that the blog has survived a trip around the sun -- I've never been one for keeping journals, logs, or web sites -- I... Continue Reading →
It's February...and it's time for another cocktail night! We're scaling back a wee bit and mixing up two drinks, rather than our usual three, to give more attention to our chosen cocktails and allow everybody to sample the ingredients, not to mention some homemade limoncello. Well, OK, it's also to give the bartender (me) a... Continue Reading →
This past weekend, the weather came dangerously close to 70 degrees...in February. Man, life is tough in Georgia. Anyway, it felt so much like Spring that I found myself wanting a drink that matched the weather. One of my all-time favorite Springy drinks is a recently (well, relatively) re-discovered classic, the Last Word: The Last... Continue Reading →
Last month, Imbibe ran a piece on Irish Whiskey that caught my attention, namely because I hadn't tasted or mixed with very many Irish whiskeys. If you've paged through a large number of cocktail books, you'll understand why -- it's just not used in cocktails very often. According to Imbibe the scene is changing, however, and... Continue Reading →
What's that? A cocktail contest, you say? Hmm... If you haven't run across it yet, About.com has a fairly extensive cocktail cocktail site set up. Helmed by Colleen Graham, the site includes a drink database, weekly articles, reviews, tips -- just about everything you'd find in a paper-and-print cocktail guide. They've also started a monthly... Continue Reading →
Somehow, cocktails that are simple, elegant, and timeless get overlooked. More often than not, these drinks involve simple mixological maneuvers that, once performed, seem obvious under the scrutiny of 20-20 hindsight, but had simply never been done before, and never recorded. Somewhere, sometime, somebody must have thought, "You know what? I'm going to add some... Continue Reading →
Gin is good. Cocktailians like gin, mainly for one reason: it plays well with nearly everything you can toss into a drink. Citrus? No problem. Herbs? Easy, it's already infused with those. Bitters? Perfect. Aromatic wines? Hey, I already mentioned it works with herbs, fruit, and bitters! It's a neutral-esque spirit that can easily hold... Continue Reading →
It was bound to happen: a neighborhood cocktail club is in the works and nearly set to debut (one week to go). I hate to keep such a thing exclusive and secret, mainly because I believe that good drinks are something that everybody should be able to experience, hence my slight lack of fondness for "speakeasies" like... Continue Reading →
Huzzah! Huzzah! The soda siphon has arrived! Time for a round of Fizzes and Collinses! First up, one of two quintessential New Orleans cocktails, the Ramos Gin Fizz, also known as the New Orleans Fizz, depending on whom you ask. According to David Wondrich, New Orleans was experiencing an enormous boost in tourism in the... Continue Reading →
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