Friday, November 29, 2013

Fall's New Best Drink - Pumpkin Latte Martini

Pumpkin Latte Martini

As usual, I'm a little alter in posting a seasonal article, so please just pretend that I posted it a few weeks ago when I actually wrote it.  Ready…. GO!

Fall is here… cool weather is upon us, the leaves are changing color and Thanksgiving (fuck YES) is right around the corner.  It also means that it’s that time of year for one of my favorite flavors: pumpkin.  I had a few influences for this drink.  Mostly pumpkin coffee that I crush by the gallon.  I'm just making a booze version of it here.

Since I love pumpkin so much, I'm taking the Pumpkin Martini recipe that I made last year to the next level.  Even if you’re not a pumpkin flavor lover, this martini is delicious.  I’d ask if you’re ready, but I know you are…


I know, it actually exists...
-1 and 1/4 ounces Pinnacle Pumpkin Pie Vodka
-1 and 1/4 ounces Van Gogh Double Espresso Vodka (can be replaced with real espresso, but this was will get you less drunk. By a lot.
-A splash of half and half pumpkin coffee creamer
Depending on how coffee-y you like it, put more of the espresso vodka and less pumpkin vodka.  It also turns out awesome. 


David


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Monday, September 30, 2013

How to Help the Bartender Not Eff Up Your Order

Do bartenders ever get your drink order wrong?  If yes, sorry- it happens.  There’s good news here- you can do something about it. 

In this post I'm going to go over some dos and don’ts when it comes to ordering at the bar. This will help the bartender give you better service and get your drinks right.  Unless you want to be one of those people the bartenders make fun of later in the night…

1)     Talk LOUD
It’s loud in bars and clubs.  If you order speaking slightly louder than normal, the bartender won’t hear you.  We can’t read lips.  

You have to project.  I.e., yell.  This way we will clearly hear what you want and not have to ask a few times.  It will also stop the bartender from hearing the wrong thing.

2)     Don’t Spit When you Talk
Yes, people do this, especially when talking loud.  And you may be one of them.  A lot of times the bartender will lean in a little so they can hear you better.  However, this also can put them into spitting range.

Not only is it gross, it’s distracting.  So while you are ordering and potentially spitting everywhere (mostly in and around our face) we get distracted (by the spit) and don’t hear all of what you want.  

Would you risk more spit in your eye to ask what the order was again?  Thought not…  

3)     Know Your Order Ahead of Time
Has nothing to do with this post,
but it's what came up when I did
a Google Image search for "decisive"
Bartenders are under a lot of pressure to serve everyone waiting quickly.  If it’s busy and the bartender gets to you and you’re all, “ummm… uhhh… I think…” or have to ask your friends standing behind you what they want, it’s pretty fucking annoying.  

When you finally do get your order out, chances are we may be busy thinking that you’re a jackass instead of all the way listening.  So please just have your order ready to go.

4)     Say Your Order Once, All the Way Through
This is the most important one.  Along with the spitting one.  

Again, has nothing to do with this
post but I had a hard time finding
pics for this article.  And I think this
picture is awesome.
If you say your order all the way through, then it’s pretty easy to remember and get right.  Here’s an example of how the order a few drinks the right way: “I’ll have one vodka soda, two vodka tonics, and two gin and tonics”.  Clear, right?  Right!  

DON’T:
-Pause in the middle
-Back up
-Repeat yourself
-Make changes mid-order

Doing this is effing confusing.  If you do this, we can mostly just guess what and how many of what you actually want. We probably also forgot half of it. 

So stop being that guy/girl. 

David

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Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Get Smart on Bar Essentials

One of the things that I do on here is review stuff.  An example of some awesome stuff that I’ve reviewed is Whiskey Stones.  Another really popular review that I posted a while back that includes stuff that is awesome and also stuff that sucks is my Vodka Review: The Good, the Bad and the Overrated.

Today I'm going to talk about some of the sweet swag that BarProducts.com was cool enough to sent me.  But before I start, if you have something that you want me to review- go ahead and send me some and I’ll be happy to write about it.  Game On.

ITEM 1: Sweet Openers
I can’t stress enough that you can NEVER have too many openers.  I spread them all over my house in different places.  You never know when there will be some kind of emergency and you’ll have to immediately crack a beer.  Also, one way bartenders accessorize themselves is with their opens, sometimes stuck in a sweatband around their arm- one of the few opportunities we can try and look awesome because bars usually make us wear stupid uniforms.

ITEM 2: Versatile Jigger
First, a jigger is like a small measuring cup, but for booze.  I make a lot of drinks at home and this thing is
pretty cool because it measures a lot of different qualities (from ½ to 3 ounces in different intervals) in one. This way I can measure so my drinks at home don’t suck.

ITEM 3: Bumper Stickers
These kind of speak for themselves.  I’ll likely to go up on a tip jar. Remember people, tip your bartenders.

OK, I'm done doing this

David

Want to buy a bunch of delicious beer to use your opener on? And get it delivered to your house in an hour? Check out Drizly:



Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Jack Daniel’s: 7 Facts About Old No. 7

I love Jack. It’s delicious.  I’ll drink it on the rocks, out of a flask, shoot it, put it in my cereal and shower with it.

Not only is it an awesome drink, it has a lot of history. So I gathered 7 fun facts about this liquid form of awesome.  Next time you’re at a bar and don’t really have anything interesting to say, well, you’re welcome:

  1. The label on the bottle reads “Old No. 7”.  Why No. 7?  It’s a complete mystery. Nobody knows why. Stop asking.
  2. You Can Buy Jack by the barrel.  For $10,000, you get an entire barrel of Jack, specially bottled for you. You also get the actual barrel in which it was matured. That’s 240 bottles worth of Jack, plus the actual barrel that you can do whatever you want with.  That's actually a pretty good deal for my 3 month's supply. 
  3. Jack D the man started making his whiskey as a kid.  He perfected the “charcoal mellowing” process by the age of 16, and registered his distillery that same year in 1866. The Jack Daniel’s Distillery is the oldest registered distillery in the country.  Yes, that's right, he was the most awesome kid ever.
  4. You can buy used Jack Daniels’s barrels because they are only used once. They ship many to other distilleries and wineries, including to Tabasco too make Tabasco sauce. Oh, what I wouldn’t do to that barrel…
  5. Frank Sinatra used to drink a bottle of Jack every day. I know what you’re thinking- there’s a name for that.  It’s called being a boss.  There’s actually a special Sinatra blend called Sinatra Select that is 90 proof.
  6. The Jack Daniel’s distillery is located in Moore County, which has been a dry county since 1909. This means that even though they can make Tennessee Whiskey there, it can’t be sold there.  This fact actually kind of sucks but I was a little desperate for another fact when adding this one.
  7. It’s fucking awesome.

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Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Your New Favorite Pumpkin Martini Recipe

I know that it’s a little late in the season for this post, but seriously, pumpkin stuff tastes good any time.

This fall, I realized that I love pumpkin flavored stuff.  I’ve always liked pumpkin flavored products, but it recently came to me that pretty much all pumpkin anything is delicious- pumpkin pie, beer, 
bread, coffee… So it didn’t take a lot on convincing to get me to invent and write about a pumpkin martini.

Before I get into it, a pumpkin martini isn’t a new thing. If you Google “pumpkin martini”, it comes back with over 6 million results. The thing is that a lot of the recipes out there use obscure ingredients, take 45 minutes to make (no joke), require cooking, baking or my personal least favorite- recipes for making ingredients that are the actual drink ingredients.

If you know me or the type of drinks I like to make, I’m all about making and enjoying drinks that don’t require a lot of prep time or trips to a gourmet grocery. Keeping with how I roll, I came up with a pumpkin martini that uses easy to find ingredients and doesn’t require you to use a stove, oven, blender, knife or can opener. I mean, who the eff has time for that? We got drinkin’ to do!

Add the following ingredients into a shaker, plus ice:
-2 ounces Pinnacle Pumpkin Pie Vodka
-3/4 ounces Pinnacle Whipped Vodka
-1/4 to 1/2 ounces half and half (you can also put pumpkin coffee creamer if you’re feeling bold)
-Orange food coloring (optional if you want it to be orange)


Shake and pour into a martini glass. Put a dash of cinnamon or nutmeg garnish on top. You can also add whipped cream on top if you’re feeling desert-y.   

Enjoy!

David

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Thursday, January 10, 2013

Sound Smart When Ordering Your Drink

There have been plenty of times when I’ve heard someone order a drink and one of two (or two of two) things have happened:

1)      A person orders a martini or whiskey drink.  The bartender asks them certain specifications of how they want it.  They turn silent with confusion.  

2)      A person orders a martini or whiskey drink with their specifications of how they want it.  But their specifications don’t make sense or aren’t even real terms and the bartender has to ask a bunch of questions to figure out what that person means.

In either case, one word most likely passes through the mind of the bartender and possible onlookers: DUMBASS. 

I don’t want this to happen to you and neither does your friendly neighborhood Spiderman.  I mean bartender.  So you can sound like you know what the f*ck is up when you’re ordering at the bar, I have gone over a bunch of terms that are good to know, especially if you are going for a martini or whiskey drink.  Ready?

A martini classically contains gin.  As of late however, I have made ten times more martinis with vodka.  Even though vodka martinis are way more popular these days, you still need to specify that you want a vodka martini vs a normal martini with gin.  Last, please order it with a good gin or vodka. Otherwise it’s just gross.

I heard someone ask for their bourbon “straight up” one night.  This can be an unclear order to the bartender and spurred me to include this paragraph. Straight up generally means chilled and served in a martini glass without ice, hence the “up” part, because the alcohol is high up above the table/bar due to the shape of the martini glass.  Another word for “straight up” is just “up”.  One generally doesn’t serve non-chilled alcohol in a martini glass or “up”.

Another set of terms has to do with having your drink in a rocks glass (a short cup made of glass) opposed to a martini glass.  If you want your Jack Daniels in a rocks glass with ice, you would say “on the rocks”.  If you want the bartender to just pour you some Jack in a glass and give it to you with no ice, you would say that you want your Jack “neat” or “straight”.  This is distinct, however, from “straight up”, which would be chilled Jack Daniels in a martini glass, which isn’t really a thing unless you add a few things to make it a Manhattan.  With me so far?
                                                                                                         
One time a girl ordered a dirty vodka martini from me.  I made the martini with the vodka she asked for and served it to her.  She took a sip and said, “You didn’t make this right.  There’s too much vermouth in here.”  I’ve decided to make this girl’s story into a cautionary tale.  A lot of bartenders, including myself, won’t put any dry vermouth in a dirty martini because you just can’t taste the difference. Plus most people think that dry vermouth is gross.  Read on for the various martini specifications…

There are a bunch of other terms for quantities of vermouth in your martini or Manhattan.  Like I mentioned above, a dirty martini will often have olive juice and no dry vermouth. A dry martini has a tiny tiny splash, like a few drops, of dry vermouth.  Extra dry will have none at all. Then there is a perfect martini or perfect Manhattan, which has equal parts sweet and dry vermouth.

The last term that we’re going to cover here is “with a twist”.  This means that the drink calls for a lemon, lime or orange rind, commonly lemon, twisted up, quickly rubbed over the rim of the glass and then dropped in the glass.

OK all, that’s all I have on this topic for now, so go out to a bar, get drunk and sound smart!

David


P.S., You can skip the bar all together and get crunk at home. All without leaving the house. Drizly delivers your booze to your door. In an hour. It's the only way that I shop for alcohol these days.