Getting Pickled in Scotland
This week's Imbiber post in FoodRepublic introduces the Bareback, a variation of the Pickleback that is all the rage in the cocktail community. Here's a teaser:
It’s my understanding that the “Pickleback” — a jigger of Old Crow chased with a shot of straight pickle juice – was invented at the Bushwick Country Club in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. And were I not, at this writing, on an uncomfortably heated train bound for the Scottish Highlands while what feels like a pack of yapping hyenas practices skateboard tricks between my ears, perhaps I’d be a bit more motivated to make inquiries in the interest of verifying that information.
I do recall reading something in The New York Times last year about a controversy involving the makers of Jameson Irish Whiskey taking credit for the Pickleback craze. But T.J. Lynch of the Breslin in the Ace Hotel in New York — the very bartender Jameson claimed had invented the drink — called bullshit on that claim. There are some folks in Texas as well who assert that truckers have been downing pickle juice with whiskey for decades, but again, I cannot personally verify that information. (And it ain’t unlike a Texan to tell tall tales, after all, now is it?) Then there are the Russians, who’ve been chasing vodka with pickles since the days when Ivan the Terrible was calling the shots.
Point being, I don’t rightly know who really invented the Pickleback.
Sating a Jameson Jonze in Mutineer
In the latest installment of my "Civilization and Its Discontents" column for Mutineer Magazine, I sing the praises of Jameson Irish Whiskey. A snippet:
Let’s face it, the Irish are no strangers to misery — witness the Great Potato Famine and Sinead O’Connor’s entire musical catalog, for instance — but they sure have developed an effective method of coping with it. John Jameson began producing his signature whiskey in Dublin way back in 1780, and for the past 230 years his people have been drowning their considerable sorrows in its toasted woody goodness. But in recent years, Jameson has become quite fashionable worldwide at the trendy watering holes of the breezy beau monde, where it’s not uncommon to see happy hipsters shooting it straight or enjoying it in a gimlet or sour. In places that cater to manly men such as myself, you’ll often find Jameson being used as one of the three ingredients in that most leg-wobbling of grog-shop concoctions, the Car Bomb.
Mutineer Magazine covers all things fine beverage with an emphasis on wine, beer and spirits. It is the mission of Mutineer Magazine to introduce fine beverages to the millennial generation and take fine beverage culture from niche into the mainstream using a cultural rather than commercial approach across a range of mediums. For more information about Mutineer, or to subscribe, click here.
