I present to you something that’ll make imbibing in Beantown a little easier: a Google map of best Boston bars. Happy wandering.
Anyone out there good at map mashups? I’d love to put best Boston bars and the MBTA on the same map. If you can make that happen, I will personally buy you a drink at the Boston-area bar of your choice.
Posted in Books & resources, Boston bars | 7 Comments »
Michael Jackson, the British drinks writer known as the Beer Hunter, died yesterday in London. He was 65. If you have visited a beer bar or brewpub and enjoyed the flavorful, varied selection of beverages found therein, you can thank Jackson for that. He basically invented the field of beer writing in the 1970s and ’80s and thereby shepherded and hugely influenced the worldwide beer renaissance that has occurred since then.
He inspired most if not all of the beer writers working today, including me. I have a few of his books: Great Beers of Belgium, the Bar and Cocktail Companion and an autographed copy of the Beer Companion. He also inspired artisanal brewers in the U.S. who lovingly revived the near-forgotten beer styles these books describe — stuff like porter, bock and IPA. It is in large measure because of him that mass-produced light lagers no longer monopolize the beer market like they did 20, 30 years ago.
Jackson succeeded because he wrote well. In his columns, he could be witty and poignant in the same paragraph, and his descriptions of drinks were concise and expressive, not florid. He wrote like he was talking to you, bringing you along on a pub crawl around the world. I met him briefly only a couple of times, including at a 1999 dinner at Redbones BBQ, where the above photo was taken. Philadelphia-based beer writer Lew Bryson knew him fairly well and wrote a heartfelt remembrance of the man, who had fought Parkinson’s disease over the past several years.
In the Beer Companion, Jackson describes what it’s like to drink Kolsch beer in its city of origin, Cologne, Germany. Many of us have had vivid, poetic beer-drinking experiences, but Jackson could actually put those experiences into words:
“In Cologne’s brewpubs during the early evening, small casks are raised from the cellar by dumb-waiter, tapped, and exhausted within minutes. To the visitor, in the jostled space of the standing area (known to the locals as the Schwemme, or ‘swimming bath’), it is an impressive sight. The waiters, whose uniform jackets or shirts are traditionally blue, over leather aprons, carry specially designed circular trays that hold the glasses like cartridges in a revolver.”
Posted in Beer, Books & resources | 1 Comment »
Here’s a loud clink of the glass to Paul Clarke, the Seattle-based cocktail writer (frequently for Imbibe) who publishes the well known blog Cocktail Chronicles. In a post called Link Love, he talks up several drink blogs, including this one and the LUPEC-Boston blog. I, for one, am excited to be part of such a vibrant nationwide community of cocktailians and barflies. Woohoo!
Posted in Books & resources, drinkboston in the news | 2 Comments »
By Scott N. Howe
In days gone by, people drank booze because drinking pretty much anything else would kill them. This may sound scary but, believe you me, our ancestors made the best of this bad situation. They built villages around beer, formed churches on wine, raised armies with rye. Our founding fathers even wrote the U.S. Constitution in between epic sessions of whiskey, wine, and cider intake.
This all may be hard to comprehend in our modern era of $12 appletinis sipped while sending text messages to clients from a booth at the back of a theme bar. Still, understanding how we got from there to here can teach valuable lessons to today’s tippler. Fortunately, author Barbara Holland has collected these lessons in a small but tasty new tome, The Joy of Drinking.
Holland explains how booze has been part of all the world’s cultures since the world started developing cultures. Everywhere and forever, people have been picking the local fruits, vegetables, nuts, and flowers and concocting soul-soothing, mind-expanding potables. She calls drink “the social glue of the human race,” and claims that “(N)o major civilization ever arose from a land of water drinkers.” As such, she cannot abide prohibitionists or coffee achievers, and she heaps special scorn on modern health nuts with their plastic water bottles and desperate commitment to wellness. Holland also takes a few shots at know-it-all drink snobs. “(I)n the metropolitan haunts of the highly sophisticated,” she snarls, “the cocktail is no longer an instrument of friendship but a competitive fashion statement, or one-upmanship.” Ouch.
Instead, she lavishes high praise on elegantly sloshed icons like Nick and Nora Charles of the Thin Man movies and wistfully wonders what it might have been like to down a few tankards with Bill Shakespeare and his literary pals at the Mermaid Tavern. Holland even devotes an entire chapter to the hangover, reporting that for much of history, the morning after was nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, a bad hangover was once a sign of worldly sophistication and social cachet!
If you’ve ever felt guilty (even a little bit), about your drinking habits, then pick up The Joy of Drinking immediately. In a few short pages, you’ll realize, dear drinker, that you are part of an ancient and noble tradition, one that links you to the great leaders, the great artists, and the just-plain-folks who have made life worth living since the dawn of time. In fact, in a few short pages, your inhibitions will disappear, a warm glow will encase you, and all will be well.
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If you’re curious about absinthe, aka the “green fairy,” check out the Virtual Absinthe Museum. You could lose an afternoon there as easily as if you were actually drinking the stuff.
“It’s the fruit of many years’ research and is the largest and most authoritative site on the internet devoted to the history and lore of absinthe,” says David Nathan-Maister, who publishes the site and runs Oxygénée Ltd., a U.K.-based business devoted to all things absinthe, including both new and vintage bottles of the storied herbal spirit. The company takes its name from a poster advertising Cusenier’s Absinthe Oxygénée, “one of the greatest brands of the era” — the “era” being the time before absinthe was banned in 1915. The ban (which has been lifted in Europe but not the U.S.) and lots of other fun facts are covered in the site’s Absinthe FAQ. And you can buy nice, Art Nouveau posters there, too.
Posted in Absinthe, Books & resources, Liqueur | 3 Comments »
"Lauren Clark takes readers on a supremely sudsy tour of New England ales, lagers, pilsners, and porters. This is the New England the Puritans warned everybody about, but few have chronicled."
– Wayne Curtis, And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in 10 Cocktails
Drink sites
For club kids
Friends
John Gertsen (invented at No. 9 Park)
Equal parts:
Punt e Mes
Booker’s bourbon
Stir gently but thoroughly. Strain into pre-chilled rocks glass without too much fanfare.