Review: Pressice Barware Ice Ball Press
Prove me wrong: There’s categorically no better way to improve the presentation of a cocktail than by serving it with a spherical ice ball. The trouble is making them. Spherical ice molds are a massive pain in the butt, and hand-carving spheres is something best left to highly trained Japanese cocktailing masters. For the rest…
Review: Smooth Ambler Old Scout Bourbon Single Barrel 5 Years Old (2021)
Smooth Ambler’s Old Scout line helped to put the small craft distillery on the map more than 10 years ago. I recounted in my review of the new Old Scout Bourbon how the distillery, after briefly running out of aged MGP stock, resurrected the line in 2019 with a significantly larger, if more youthful, stockpile…
Recipe: Witch Word
Liquore Strega is a sweet herbal liqueur with a fascinating and lengthy history, and on a recent Zoom event, the brand walked a group of booze writers through the spirit’s background — with a particular eye on how to use it in cocktails. The recipe of the day is called the Witch Word — Strega…
Review: Still Austin American Gin “The Naturalist”
Still Austin is best known for its whiskey production — it’s officially called Still Austin Whiskey Co. — but the (obviously) Austin, Texas-based operation also produces a gin: American gin, as they call it. It’s infused with 12 botanicals, including juniper, coriander, orris root, elderflower, Jamaican allspice, two types of cinnamon, and three types of…
Review: 2019 Truth and Valor Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve
Truth and Valor is a Paso Robles winery focusing heavily on cabernet sauvignon and zinfandel. Today we look at two of those cabs, both from the 2019 vintage. 2019 Truth and Valor Cabernet Sauvignon Paso Robles – Big and a bit pruny, this is a classically constructed California cab, bold with currants and some light,…
Review: Clonakilty Double Oak Irish Whiskey
At the Clonakilty Distillery in southwest Ireland, they are definitely establishing terroir for their spirits. The barley for their whiskeys is grown on a 9th-generation family farm, they make a gin using whey from the farm and locally-foraged rock samphire, and their aging warehouse stands on top of 200-foot cliffs overlooking the Atlantic Ocean just…
Review: Bently Heritage Source One Vodka Rested in Oak Sherry Casks
Oak-aged vodka has been done before, but never with much success. If you wanted whiskey, you’d drink whiskey, amirite? Vodka in barrel sits in a strange middle ground occupied by uncommon oddities such as light whiskey and tobacco-flavored vodka, stuff that sounds interesting on paper but which usually sit on the shelf untouched in favor…
Review: Buzzard’s Roost Straight Rye – Toasted Barrel and Peated Barrel
It’s been over a year since Drew reviewed our first expression from Buzzard’s Roost, a single barrel bottling from this increasingly prolific producer. (It now sports six different expressions of “sippin’ whiskey,” all rye originally sourced from MGP. Age information is available, but the bottles carry no formal age statements and no data on how…
