It’s campaign season for drinkboston again. For the second year in a row, this site is up for Best Blog in the Boston Phoenix’s “Best of Boston” readers’ poll. Last year, drinkbostonians conceded the race to the band-interviewing puppet podcaster Silly Gillman. This year, we’re up against the political commentators Blue Mass Group, the music-savvy Bradley’s Almanac, the local fashion photo album ClickClash, the college radio scenesters On A Friday, and the “all Boston, all the time” Universal Hub.
All worthy contenders. But as worthy as a blog about the drinking life in Boston? To the ballot, my fellow barflies. And for the love of god, don’t forget to click the “Finished” button after you’ve voted (and don’t forget to cast ballots for your fave bars and bartenders!). Here’s the fine print from the online ballot listing all categories:
FINISHED VOTING FOR YOUR FAVORITES? Please be sure you have finished selecting all the categories you wish to vote for, then click the link below to finish the voting process. We accept one vote per user per category a day.
I’ve used Lonely Planet’s travel guides on various trips, but never have I actually appeared in/written for one — until now.
Mara Vorhees, a Somerville resident who wrote the 2009 edition of Lonely Planet’s Boston City Guide, cold-called drinkboston a little while ago to see if I wanted to write a sidebar for the guide’s Drinking section. Uh, does a cold martini taste good at 5:00 p.m? Called “The ‘Boston’ Cocktail Mystery,” the sidebar riffs off of a post I once wrote about the curious hodgepodge of vintage cocktails with “Boston” in their name. Mara was also nice enough to mention me in the section’s intro as an expert on the local drinking scene. Neat.
There’s a lot of good stuff in this guide, even if you’re a local. For $17.99, it’s worth keeping around the house for when out-of-towners come to visit. Especially if they happen to be fond of drink.
Ted “Dr. Cocktail” Haigh’s Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, originally published in 2004, is the book that made me “get” this whole classic cocktail thing. I’d been dabbling around the edges of that world for years, drinking Martinis, Negronis and the occasional French 75, collecting vintage barware here and there. But most of the books I encountered failed to inspire me: they were either thick tomes listing, without context, every mixed-drink recipe of the last 50 years, or books for the serious bartender, dense with text about tools and techniques.
That’s why I was so thankful when I found VS&FC, with its mere 80 carefully chosen, carefully formulated classic recipes, snappy historical briefs on each drink, and as good a summary of cocktail history — including how cocktails got popular again — as I’ve ever read. The book was fun, accessible and smart. It guided me in stocking my home bar, and when I tasted the mysterious delights of Corpse Reviver 2’s and Widows Kisses, I never looked back.
If you missed VS&FC’s initial printing, don’t worry. The Revised and Expanded Deluxe Edition is now available. Besides a hard cover and a whole new (and improved) look, it’s got 100 recipes (still a quite manageable list), more photos of booze artifacts from the Doctor’s own collection, and added appendices, including one on “the 25 most influential online cocktail pioneers.” Hint: I’m on page 318. Ever seen yourself quoted in a book that influenced you to become that quotable person? It’s freaky.
Speaking of which, several of the bloggers mentioned in the “pioneers” section, including myself, are contributors to the blog for Tales of the Cocktail 2009. I recently contributed a post previewing a seminar on hangovers taking place Sunday, July 12. I’ll be filing additional stories later next week, so stay tuned.
Now presenting: a discussion of the lore behind Boston’s Ward Eight cocktail, and a demonstration of how to mix one, in a video starring the somewhat-ready-for-prime-time blogger behind drinkboston.com.
You may already be familiar with how2heroes (tagline: cook. eat. be merry.), a video website that “celebrates people’s passion for food [and drink] – the flavors, the presentation, the secrets to success, the cultural inspirations, and of course the ‘heroes’ who share their knowledge and experience.” In just a year, the site has produced 500 short videos featuring food and drink professionals and enthusiasts demo’ing and talking about particular foodstuffs and drinkstuffs. Besides myself, featured Boston folk in the Beverages category include:
There’s a lot worth checking out on this site. The how2heroes staff does a good job getting a bunch of people who aren’t used to being on camera to convey their knowledge of food and drink in a straightforward and often engaging way.
I did my damnedest to get Locke-Ober, where the Ward Eight was invented, to let me shoot my video there. Regrettably, they showed no interest. A special thanks to Tremont 647 for letting me (and some of the others above) shoot at their bar.
Welcome to drinkboston.com’s shiny, new package. A simple, default WordPress template served the site well for three years. But it was time for a more expansive design with cooler fonts and added features, like a randomly generated cocktail recipe and space for promoting events.
I gave web designer Noah Kuhn a stack of old magazines from the ’40s through the ’70s for inspiration. I’m happy with the result. Your thoughts?
Hey, imbibers, guess what? Drinkboston’s been nominated for the Boston Phoenix’s 2009 “best” issue, and your vote is crucial!
The category: Boston’s Best Blog/Podcast. The stakes: high. The payback: a giant bowl of punch on Boston Common? A keg party at Redbones? A group hug at Eastern Standard? Oh, I’ll think of something.
While you’re at it, check out (and place your vote for) some of our old friends in the Best Bartender and Best Bar categories.
It’s one of the oddest drinks I’ve ever tasted. And I mean that in a good way. I first had milk punch (not to be confused with the simpler concoction of brandy, rum or bourbon, sugar, whole milk and nutmeg served over crushed ice) at a Stir class last winter. It was sweet, velvety, rich … and confusing. That’s because, though it’s made with milk, it’s somewhere between translucent and transparent. In other words, not at all “milky.” Leave it to the bartenders at Drink to reintroduce this punch, which takes two days to make, to the modern imbiber. I write a short introduction to one of their recipes, Rum-Hibiscus Milk Punch, in today’s online Globe.
There are many variations on the basic milk punch recipe. The drinkboston punch party at Eastern Standard in June featured Milk Punch No. 1 from the Savoy Cocktail Book. Aphra Behn, a 17th-century English dramatist and novelist and allegedly the first woman to make a living as a writer, is credited with inventing milk punch, or at least having the first widely publicized recipe for it. Whatever its origins, it became well known enough during the 18th century for Benjamin Franklin to share a recipe for milk punch with James Bowdoin during his 1763 stay in Boston.
“Franklin’s Milk Punch recipe shares characteristics of two types of beverages — possets and syllabubs,” according to the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Wow. I am so looking forward to walking into a Boston bar and ordering possets and syllabubs.
Ever wonder how the Boston mixology scene — the constellation of bars and bartenders who take drink-mixing seriously and are chronicled regularly on this site — came about? Who the originators and other key figures are? What they think of their collective work and its future? Well, you’re in luck, because I lay it all out in a recent cover story for the trade publication Nightclub & Bar. (Yes, that’s Drink’s own John Gertsen on the cover.) Here’s to all the cocktailians in this city who are helping the scene to thrive!
An article that will appear in this Sunday’s Boston Globe Magazine, “Find. Join. Learn. Go. The World Wide Hub: Sixty-four websites on Boston life that you should know,” includes drinkboston in its food/restaurant category.
There are a bunch of good sites mentioned here in categories ranging from politics to sports to commuting. A couple of these sites participated in a recent confab of bloggers: Povo (the host of the gathering), which “seeks to be an encyclopedia [of Boston] by neighborhood,” and Universal Hub, which “provides a broader slice of the city than you’ll see anywhere else” (this from the newspaper that runs Boston.com!).
Welcome to drinkboston.com’s shiny, new package. A simple, default WordPress template served the site well for three years. But it was time for a more expansive design with cooler fonts and added features, like a randomly generated cocktail recipe and space for promoting events.
