Bottle or tap? When choosing a beer, I used to think: "Tap, of course. Always." Yet, in Charles Bamforth's book
Beer Is Proof God Loves Us, the professor of malting and brewing sciences at UC Davis was asked by a reporter, "If there are 50 beers on tap, what do you order?" His defiant answer was, "Something out of a bottle."
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on Wednesday, May 9th, 2012
In recent years, sake consumption has been declining in Japan. And rough times have been compounded by the recent earthquake and tsunami. (The Japanese practice self-restraint, or "jishuku," when others are suffering.) But I recently found out that there's new hope for sake, in the form of "wineglass sake."
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on Wednesday, April 25th, 2012
Not long ago I was with a couple of friends in the country. It was raining heavily, and we were making a meal of some of the first treats of spring: nettles, delicate little spears of asparagus, bright green watercress. There were oranges and fennel, and we had a chicken. The only problem was that we didn't have a white wine, which all that brilliant spring chlorophyll seemed to demand. I did happen to have a bottle of Saint-Joseph—Syrah from France's northern Rhône—which, it turned out, was a magical elixir.
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on Wednesday, April 11th, 2012
The other day, I gave a curious friend a sip of rum from my bar. Before I could say anything, he eagerly tilted back his head and downed it. Almost instantly he began waving his arms and hopping around like someone who had just swallowed a Scotch bonnet chile. "What the *!#%?" he screamed when he'd finally regained his breath.
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on Wednesday, March 28th, 2012
Sorry, tequila, mezcal, and pisco. I love you, but the most naturally complex (no flavors added) white spirit in the world is Moutai (also spelled Maotai), the national spirit of China. Despite the fact that it's existed, in one form or another, since the first century BCE, most people in our country have never heard of it.
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on Wednesday, March 14th, 2012
When we use the cliché "pint-sized," we're generally talking about something very small. So why is it that the pint glass, as the most common American vessel for beer, is—among its other faults—entirely too large?
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on Wednesday, February 29th, 2012
I recently was in France, checking out natural wine bars in Paris and attending an epic tasting of the wines of the Loire Valley. On my flight home,
Moneyball was playing in the main cabin. Watching it, I couldn't help but think that Loire Valley wine is a bit like
Moneyball, which stars international superstar Brad Pitt and ... who else? Most casual wine drinkers only know the Loire's one megastar, Sauvignon Blanc of Sancerre. But there are so many more great wines.
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on Wednesday, February 15th, 2012
Sure, Belgian beer is big in America. And American brewers have been making their own versions of Belgian styles for a handful of years. But did you know that Belgian brewers are equally as impressed with American beer? That's the word on the street.
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on Wednesday, February 1st, 2012
First off, I have to confess that I'm drinking gin as I write this meditation on vodka. And this gin tastes really good after taking several days to figure out if I liked the world's most popular spirit (vodka).
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on Thursday, January 19th, 2012
Most people's New Year's resolutions contain something about not drinking, or not drinking as much. I, on the other hand, set goals about what
type of drinking I want to focus on in the new year. Last year it was
cider and Calvados (among other things). Check. What about this year?
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on Wednesday, January 4th, 2012
Bottle or tap? When choosing a beer, I used to think: "Tap, of course. Always." Yet, in Charles Bamforth's book Beer Is Proof God Loves Us, the professor of malting and brewing sciences at UC Davis was asked by a reporter, "If there are 50 beers on tap, what do you order?" His defiant answer was, "Something out of a bottle." READ MORE 
