Back when I first started blogging about cocktails 5 years ago the landscape was littered with so many others writing about cocktails or doing spirits reviews, I found it difficult to differentiate myself from what others were doing versus what I was doing. Eventually I gave up. I couldn't find a way to differentiate myself. Cocktails, spirits, many of their recipes, and their preparation haven't changed much in 100 plus years. The fundamentals stay relatively the same. I also felt like a square peg in a round hole. Not quite in but not quite out. I'm in this weird limbo. A space where I felt ..read more

The US Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau defines singani as a brandy. And if you look at it from the high level it is a brandy.  It's made of grapes. Those grapes are made into wine. The wine is distilled into spirits. Digging deeper though it's  a brandy with provenance. This is also where I may lose some of you. Let me provide a little bit of background. Singani is made by distilling white Muscat of Alexandria grapes into wine. To be considered singani grapes they must be grown in Bolivia at elevations above 5,250 feet in a specific 20,000 acres of the Andes Mountains. Singan ..read more

Bourbon Heritage month is almost here. Cocktail menus will drop their light and refreshing cocktails in favor of rich and comforting drinks. Luckily bourbon is flexible. It is in my mind anyway. As a fan of whiskey, I notice whiskey cocktails on menus quite a bit. What makes bourbon adjustable is the consistency on how it’s made. What does change are the flavor profiles as the bourbon ages. In a transitional month like September you can play with late summer harvest flavors like peaches at the beginning of the month and by month’s end you’re in full Fall mode with apples and warming spices. A ..read more

1 1/2oz Sipsmith Sloe Gin 1/2oz Sipsmith London Dry Gin 1/2 oz. Carpano Bianco 2 dashes Orange Bitters Add ingredients to mixing glass. Add ice, fill 2/3 with ice. Stir for 3-4 minutes until mixture is well chilled. Strain into cocktail glass, and serve ..read more

Distilleries keep core expressions consistent from batch to batch regardless of what happens in the intervening years before bottling. The Master Blender replicates flavor, color, and viscosity with each bottling. Reliability being key for Bartenders when sourcing spirits for cocktails. Creating custom Bourbon is counter intuitive to this process. Today though, consumers value personalized products and services tailored to their preferences. While it may seem simple to expand offerings and maintain core expressions. It can be challenging. A single run for larger producers starts in the tens o ..read more

Okay so this post didn't make it up for world gin day and it missed martini day. It's the thought that counts, right? Finding quality gin used to be difficult. In fact, I still recall the first time I tasted gin. It tasted like pine cleaner smells. Most people in the 80s and 90s in the US had the same experience. Low quality gin was common. It was in 2015 my friend Dustin introduced me to quality gin for the first time. I learned tasty gin did exist and it was worth exploring further. Below is a list of the gins I’ve come to enjoy. Each with its own distinct flavor, aromas, and viscosity. The ..read more

In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ's disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman. - Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It For the last month or longer I’ve been wanting to write about the Presbyterian c ..read more

Washington State has a love affair with liqueurs as much as it does with whiskey. Of the 100+ distilleries here in the Evergreen State, more than half of them have a sweet component to their line. Of those, I would say half of them only produce liqueurs. No two liqueurs are the same. The beauty of spirits is the same components and come up with a different flavor profile every time. Luckily Washington State has a wide variety of botanical influence from across the globe. Other than the obvious tie in with Valentine's Day the dedication of February to liqueurs makes sense. Washington State is ..read more

For those born in the gap between Gen X and the Millennials, they came of drinking age during an interesting time. Growing up watching their Baby Boomer parents make cocktails with bottled and canned mixers, or if it was fancy, a blender cocktail with an umbrella in it. Watching television shows like Cheers, and movies like Cocktail in wonder, and amazement. Then in 1996 a year or two away from when most of them would turn twenty-one, Seagram's defied the American alcohol industry's self-imposed decades-long ban on television and radio advertising. As a powerhouse of distilled spirits in the ..read more

As autumn rolls in with cooler temperatures, pumpkins, apples, and sitting fireside. Along with it comes one of my favorite weeks of the year, peat week! Peated whisk(e)y is a comforting hug to my senses. It conjures memories of campfires and my grandparent’s cabin in Northern Idaho. Simple times where the adults would play pinochle late into the evening. Bonfires were full of laughter, jokes, and stories about adventures of youth while they sipped whiskey. Now more than 30 years later most of them are gone, and all that remains are the memories and the whiskey. While peated whiskey isn’t wha ..read more