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<title>My RSS Feed</title><link>http://www.theimbiber.net/index.html</link><description>Hot News&#x21;</description><dc:language>en</dc:language><dc:creator>imbiber@theimbiber.net</dc:creator><dc:rights>Copyright 2006 Dan Dunn</dc:rights><dc:date>2006-10-26T11:32:10-07:00</dc:date><admin:generatorAgent rdf:resource="http://www.realmacsoftware.com/" />
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<lastBuildDate>Thu, 28 Jun 2007 13:14:28 -0700</lastBuildDate><item><title>Leave the Drinking to Real Drinkers&#x2c; eh Pumpkin?</title><dc:creator>imbiber@theimbiber.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>Imbiber Home Page</dc:subject><dc:date>2006-10-26T11:32:10-07:00</dc:date><link>http://www.theimbiber.net/page23/page24/files/sullivanpumpkin.html#unique-entry-id-3</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.theimbiber.net/page23/page24/files/sullivanpumpkin.html#unique-entry-id-3</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I&rsquo;m not altogether clear on when our culture went completely in the tank, but it hit me square in the mouth last week.  I think of it as the great pumpkin scare of two thousand and six.  I was judging a cocktail contest, whose provenance I shall leave unnamed to protect the innocent, and one of the drinks offered to those of us sitting in judgment behind the (literal in this case) curtain, was essentially a pumpkin pie in a stemmed glass.  Took a few seconds to taste it because the rim of the glass was coated for a good half-inch with cinnamon.  Now cinnamon is a lovely spice, just the thing for lightly dusting on toast with a little sugar, but when applied in copious quantities to glassware, and directly under the nose, it causes one&rsquo;s eyes to close involuntarily.

The drink itself may have involved a distilled spirit, but with a nose in cinnamon-induced spasm and a tongue heavily coated in what tasted like concentrated canned pumpkin pie filling, it was impossible to tell.  The drink&rsquo;s creator was, I&rsquo;m sure, proud of the thing.  Even one judge&mdash;a man whose fond memories of his grandmother&rsquo;s pumpkin pie outweighed his ordinarily sound judgment&mdash;liked it.  Not so much as a cocktail, he said, but as a dessert.  The consensus, however, was that it was far, far too much of a mediocre thing, less a cocktail than a homage to an autumnal theme, a desperate attempt, like a Martha Stewart centerpiece, to get an entire season inside one container.  Plus it tasted like a vanilla malt gone horribly wrong.

The next day my local paper informed me that the number-two-selling flavor in beers at the moment is pumpkin.  And the day after that I was reading a web-letter from a prominent cocktail maven, only to discover that the featured cocktail of the month was a pumpkin special which used a puree of the eponymous gourd to hide the flavor of Plymouth Gin, one of England&rsquo;s more useful gifts to the world.  Perhaps, I thought, they&rsquo;re confused and think Plymouth gin was invented by Pilgrims in Plymouth, Mass., to serve to the visiting Indians on the first Thanksgiving.  In fact, it just happens to have been made, as it is being made once again, in Plymouth, England--only a football field or so away from where those Puritan scolds boarded their ships to leave licentiousness behind.  And it&rsquo;s a lovely gin, when you can taste it.

What, I asked myself, is going on here?...  Are they so used to holiday-driven consuming that they&rsquo;re no longer capable of common sense?  Well, there is that, but the real problem, I realized in a blinding flash of insight, was that we now have not just a generation of drinkers, but a generation of bartenders who really, deep down, don&rsquo;t like the taste of booze.

...In the course of my subsequent research into the transformation of the American palate, I found bartenders beside themselves looking for a replacement for Bols Pumpkin Smash Liqueur, which has been sensibly removed from the market.  I found pumpkin schnapps, and found it used in cocktails in the Campbell Apartment in New York, heretofore a place I believed to be trustworthy cocktail bar.  I met Skyy pumpkin-infused vodka and discovered five&mdash;count &lsquo;em, five&mdash;pumpkin-flavored beers at my local wet goods dealer.

All this, I believe, so that a new generation of vipers can get lit without having to suffer the actual flavor of hops, malted barley, oak-infused corn mash, ancient grape spirit, distilled molasses, or anything else not commonly associated with fruit smoothies.

Most of the cocktails in that contest had at least four and in many cases five, ingredients.  Many of these were obscure, and many more were cloyingly sweet or overpoweringly intense.  In virtually no case was the spirit underneath even remotely detectible.

Which is bunkum of the highest, or lowest, order.  The great cocktails of all time have two or three ingredients, and most of them include bitters.  The goal is a balanced taste of the principal spirits and wines inside, and the result is more, not less, than the sum of its parts....  You want a strawberry shake, order one at McDonald&rsquo;s.  If you have a can of Kool-Whip in your refrigerator, please stay home with it and if you have ever voluntarily ordered a bananas & cr&egrave;me frappuccino, please do not seek work as a bartender.  Finally, if the only flavor you really, truly like is chocolate, I would suggest that you have the taste buds of a nine-year-old and I would further suggest that you find a nice ice cream parlor and stay the hell out of decent saloons where the grown-ups are trying to get a drink.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Eye Openers</title><dc:creator>imbiber@theimbiber.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>Imbiber Home Page</dc:subject><dc:date>2006-10-12T08:13:32-07:00</dc:date><link>http://www.theimbiber.net/page23/page24/files/eyeopeners.html#unique-entry-id-2</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.theimbiber.net/page23/page24/files/eyeopeners.html#unique-entry-id-2</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[&ldquo;First today,&rdquo; the old man liked to say, and it was usually on the way home from work.  He wasn&rsquo;t averse, however, to having a quick one on the way in in the morning, particularly if it was below zero and his calendar included, as it often did, changing brake shoes on trains....  His eye opener was a shot of Jim Beam, water back.  The water was in lieu of an Old Style, because mornings call for a little restraint.

...French cement finishers still greet the dawn with a thimbleful of marc&mdash;a clear grape spirit made from the stems and seeds left over in the wine factories and aged for as long as it takes to get a funnel in the bottle.  The Italian version is grappa, and one of the great wonders of the booze business is how they managed to convince American stockbrokers that it was worth $25 a shot....  Portuguese grape pickers are allotted a similar morning tot with a name that translates as &ldquo;bug killer.&rdquo;

...Every culture makes something like this--the Irish call theirs poteen, and here in the land of the free we actually have a legal name: Corn whiskey.  The distillers call it white dog, and it&rsquo;s what drips from the copper coil.  The blessed distilleries of Scotland used to have a tradition of called the &ldquo;dram queue,&rdquo; when everyone in town lined up in the morning (and several times during the day) for a taste of the local product fresh from the still.

Now I&rsquo;m not recommending that you greet every sunrise with a glass of something raw....  I once spent an unfortunate summer working the graveyard shift at a Federal Reserve Bank in Chicago.  (&ldquo;Graveyard shift,&rdquo; by the way, was coined in the 19th century for the middle-of-the-night hours of cemetery guards hired to keep medical students and necrophiliacs from stealing newly interred bodies.  We like you to know these things so you have some bar conversation).  After work, at 7:30 a.m., my colleagues and I would adjourn to a saloon across the street, where we&rsquo;d settle in with some Polish cleaning ladies to wash the dust of cancelled checks from our throats.  And to watch a parade of freshly shaven guys in suits stride up to the bar for a couple of double shots of vodka on their way to the office.  To wash the thoughts of the next eight hours from their minds, I assumed.

You do not want to be one of these guys.  If it sounds reasonable to you, you need to learn this line: &ldquo;I quit.&rdquo;  On the other hand, you don&rsquo;t need to become someone whose only morning experience with a drink is a mimosa.  That, if you don&rsquo;t do brunch, is Champagne and orange juice and it&rsquo;s a waste of good Champagne, or would be but for the fact that at most people&rsquo;s brunches it&rsquo;s a waste of cheap Champagne.  You may continue to drink bloody Marys (although I think you&rsquo;ll find them improved if you use gin instead of vodka) and you might even want to up the ante with the occasional Ramos Fizz&mdash;egg whites, milk and gin shaken to death until they froth, topped up with a little seltzer&mdash;to impress your friends.

But the real case here is for the occasional eye-opener, not the Sunday brunch quaff.  The shot to start your heart when you&rsquo;re facing an arduous day....  If you, like my father, regularly remove large metal parts from railroad engines in the snow, this would be a good reason

If you don&rsquo;t, then a two-foot snowfall counts; you don&rsquo;t want to dig out a car alone.  Painting your apartment is a perfect excuse, particularly if you&rsquo;ve put the arm on three friends to help&mdash;it&rsquo;s only polite to give them a little something to start on. Moving day&mdash;because you need some encouragement for carrying all those boxes.  Funerals call for a little bracer to prepare for the grief and honor the deceased.

...Plus you&rsquo;ve got five or six hours of dressing, posing and church-going ahead of you, so you&rsquo;ll need your strength.

...Honor the eye opener, the little bracer for when you need bracing.  My own vote goes for a shot of Irish whisky before the coffee: it goes without saying that bracers are taken standing up.

And that &ldquo;first today&rdquo; turns out to be an old Irish toast for just such moments.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>The Idiots&#x27; Guide to Sightseeing in Southwest England and Wales</title><dc:creator>imbiber@theimbiber.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>Imbiber Home Page</dc:subject><dc:date>2006-10-04T15:35:17-07:00</dc:date><link>http://www.theimbiber.net/page23/page24/files/sullivansheep.html#unique-entry-id-1</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.theimbiber.net/page23/page24/files/sullivansheep.html#unique-entry-id-1</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Sheep, very short men with pug noses and great bellies, beer, sheep, extremely narrow roads, sheep, beer, ruined castles, sheep, beer, sheep, wild ponies, sheep, moors, beer, sheep, pubs with very low ceilings, sheep, hedges, beer, dry stone walls, sheep, golf courses, sheep, lamb chops, sheep, monasteries, beer, and sheep.

Some of the sheep will be dead, of course.  I mentioned to Trevor, my driver through the Dartmoor, where the wild ponies roam, that there seemed to be an awful lot of sheep just standing in the middle of the road, looking curiously at the passing cars.  &ldquo;Do they always stand in the road like that,&rdquo; I asked....  At night, when the tarmac holds the heat better than the moor, they lay down in the road to sleep.&rdquo;  There&rsquo;s some who hold the theory that the origin of &ldquo;pub crawl&rdquo; dates to the early days of the automobile in these parts, when the return from the pub meant a long, slow crawl around the sleeping sheep in the road.  The wild ponies on the same moor are generally smarter, just, than the sheep.  They wait alongside the road for the traveling Americans to come up to them and pet them.  &ldquo;Then, likely as not, they bite their fingers off,&rdquo; Trevor said.  Which made me feel better about the autumn round-up, when that year&rsquo;s crop of ponies are gathered and sold&mdash;some to become pets/cart pullers to the children of country gentlefolk and the rest, according to Trevor, &ldquo;bought and sent to France.&rdquo;...  On the other hand, if they&rsquo;re going to bite off vacationers&rsquo; fingers ...

So stay in the car on the moors, at least until you get to a pub, and you will get to a pub, because there are slightly more pubs than sheep.  You will, of course, be taller than the pub, an alarming number of which were built in 1680, or 1722, or some other year when the average Englishman&rsquo;s height was 4&rsquo;6&rdquo;.  The average Welshman&rsquo;s height at the time was 3&rsquo;4&rdquo;, but they&rsquo;ve shot up over the centuries so that now many of them are tall enough to get into most of the rides at Six Flags.  Still short enough to fit in the pubs, though, which isn&rsquo;t true of you or me....  In the Ring of Bells, not to be confused with the Ring &lsquo;o&rsquo; Bells in the next town over, I discovered that it is quite possible to have a good time when you can&rsquo;t stand upright in any part of the saloon.  This gets easier after the third pint, although going to the gents then causes some distress, because it&rsquo;s in a room that will just barely allow you to kneel upright.  For many of you this will be a familiar feeling, kneeling in the gents, but I&rsquo;m still scraping the scabs off the top of my head two weeks later.

...Never saw a bottle of light beer in fourteen days....  (As if all malt beverages weren&rsquo;t ready to drink.)  Never, in fact, saw a bottle of beer in a pub at all.  These are sensible, if short, folks out there in the English and Welsh countryside.  They believe in real ale, and are supporters of CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale, a religious organizations of some years standing which is dedicated to stamping out anything that tastes good and is less filling.  They&rsquo;re interested in stuff that taste really, really good and is filling as all hell.  Great pints of creamy, malty ales, bitters that you could cut with a knife, beer the color of butterscotch pudding instead of panther by-products.  Beer that&rsquo;s made down the road, or in the very basement below where the little man is pulling the pint out of a barrel, pumping it by hand, unaided by CO2 tanks and hoses passing through crushed ice.

...It&rsquo;s the temperature of that cellar, which is just cool enough to let you taste the beer.  This is important, because there&rsquo;s something to taste in the first place.  Granted, there are lot of places in the states, microbreweries and brewpubs, also doing the Lord&rsquo;s work, but there&rsquo;s something about country pubs with real ale that&rsquo;s more appealing.  Could be that they don&rsquo;t have any &ldquo;flights&rdquo; of beer to taste, or menus listing the special Hallowe&rsquo;en pumpkin porter, or different glasses to hold every unique beer in the 45-tap selection.  Could be that the company along the bar is just a bunch of guys with bellies whose conversation is more or less limited to &ldquo;another, the same, please&rdquo; instead of hop varieties and whether the Lemongrass Weissbier would stand up to the Nachos Marinara.

Or it could be that beer is the perfect analgesic for a throbbing pain caused by cracking your head onto another 17th century beam.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Very Wet in Every Sense</title><dc:creator>imbiber@theimbiber.net</dc:creator><dc:subject>Imbiber Home Page</dc:subject><dc:date>2006-09-28T22:53:52-07:00</dc:date><link>http://www.theimbiber.net/page23/page24/files/sullivanmeetsdunn.html#unique-entry-id-0</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.theimbiber.net/page23/page24/files/sullivanmeetsdunn.html#unique-entry-id-0</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[This is a relatively new English word with two meanings.  If you&rsquo;re not a journalist, it means: &ldquo;Hey, I&rsquo;m a writer!  I&rsquo;ve got a column!&rdquo;  If you already scribble for a living, it means: &ldquo;Here&rsquo;s something I couldn&rsquo;t sell.&rdquo;

So when Dan Dunn, the eponymous Imbiber hisownself calls me and wants to know if I&rsquo;ll blog for his new website, I promise him solemnly to send some copy.  And here it is&mdash;a few hundred words I wouldn&rsquo;t even try to sell.

Dunn and I go way back.  OK, maybe just back, but it feels like way back.  Met him on a sailboat in July, 1999, the night before the Classic Malt Cruise, a week-long, very wet in every sense, tall ship sail through the Hebrides, punctuated by nightly visits to distillery parties where talented Scotsmen pour endless drams, with no cash register in sight.  Some people might call it a junket; I like to think of it as research.

Dunn was perched on a bunk in the basement (I&rsquo;m not real good on nautical terms) of a 105-foot brigantine, freshly fired.  By a newspaper editor.  For going on that very junket.  Violated their code of ethics, he said they said.  He was a little fuzzy on the concept himself.  First thing he wanted to know was if it was possible to earn a living as a freelancer.  I told him sure, largely because I had a fat Conde Nast contract in hand at the time, and it looked easy from where I was sitting.  Nothing to it, I suggested.  Guy with your obvious charm and way with words, be like falling off a bar stool.

He needed instruction, of course, in the whiskey department.  I believe his tipple of choice at the time was strawberry schnapps and Fanta with a splash of grain alcohol.  Whiskey was, of course, like mother&rsquo;s milk to me.  I&rsquo;d been drinking whiskey, along with sundry other distilled and fermented beverages, when Dunn was drinking, well, mother&rsquo;s milk.  He was, however, a quick study.  Never loath to stay up late, tasting, learning, learning, tasting, until, by the end of the cruise, he was exhausted with the academic effort and could scarcely be roused from his bunk.  I sat by his bed, applied cold compresses, and imparted the tricks of this dismal trade, the mysteries of the gerund, the intricacies of the semi-colon, the ways into the minds of editors.

So I feel a little responsible for him.  And now, with this invitation to contribute to his website, Dunn becomes an editor himself, and I feel the crushing weight of failure.  Like Jeffrey Dahmer&rsquo;s Sunday school teacher.  Like Bill O&rsquo;Reilly&rsquo;s mother.  I reminded him, in that phone call, that Mussolini was an editor, and told him I&rsquo;d soldier on.

Which I shall, with the occasional, unsaleable, screed about the various waters of life in these pages.]]></content:encoded></item></channel>
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