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."

Bamforth backs up his decision by citing all the things that often go wrong with beer in a tap system: staleness; bacterial infection because of unclean lines leading to things like diacetyl (a compound that causes beer to smell like butterscotch or buttered popcorn). I decided to call him to discuss.

When I asked him what, in an ideal beer world, would be his choice drink, Bamforth (who is British) told me, "My favorite style is beer on draft in England from a cask." The ideal beer, he says, requires a convergence of factors. "If you have only one or two on tap and the person knows what they're doing and at the end of the day they're cleaning the lines and then rerunning the beer through the taps to expunge any cleaning solution, at the end of the day, it has the potential to be the best."

Which perhaps explains why beer in Japan has tasted so good to me. A friend who worked in bars in Tokyo told me that it was automatic that the lines would be cleaned nightly. Bars and restaurants he knows in the States, he says, rarely bother. Likewise, it can explain why I've occasionally had transcendent pours of less heralded beers like PBR. Clean lines and a fresh keg can make a world of difference.

To get the best beer, Bamforth finds himself doing detective work every time he enters an establishment. The first question he asks: "Which is the beer you sell the most of?" This minimizes the risk of a beer having sat in the keg for a long time. "I'm always suspicious of places that have too many beers on tap," he says.

Also, he recommends, drink locally when possible. Bamforth "virtually never selects an imported beer anywhere, for the reason that there's an above-average chance that it has aged unprofitably." Even bottles that have traveled far are pretty much out of the question.

"The ironic thing," Bamforth says, "is that perhaps the best nonkeg vessel for transporting beer is a can." This explains why many microbreweries are shifting from bottles to cans for their microbrews.

So, bottle or tap? Apparently the best answer is neither.

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."

Eric Swanson, sake guru and specialist for Tenzing Wine & Spirits in Chicago, explained the term to me: It refers to refined, high-end sake that should be drunk out of a wineglass rather than the traditional ceramic sake cup. These sakes have a new appeal to younger, urban Japanese drinkers. And it's this crucial demographic—turning more and more to shochu, spirits, and beer, while sake's primary constituency is older—that's going to have to embrace sake, if it's to survive.

One wineglass sake is Dassai. While most brands produce many different grades and styles of sake, Dassai made a bold, risky decision to concentrate primarily on junmai daiginjo sake. Daiginjo is the most luxurious category of sake, requiring that at least 50 percent of each grain of rice be polished away. While daiginjo is a pricy but fairly common option in America, it's not drunk as plentifully in Japan, where coarser styles still make up the bulk of the market.

Dassai also cut prices to make its sakes almost half as expensive as rival daiginjos, to put the products in reach of younger drinkers. The slash in prices meant years of rough going for the company, but it has paid off. While much of the industry is in decline, Dassai's sales are up 150 percent over last year. "They're having trouble keeping up with demand," Swanson adds. "And every time I go to the distillery, it seems they're expanding."

Dassai 50, the company's flagship brand, is pillowy soft and almost creamy in the mouth. Its lightness and transparency belie the restrained intensity of its flavor. The finish is long, and seems to brighten and sweeten as it persists. The nose is floral and fruity.

Other cutting-edge, high-end sakes are trending too. Yuki No Bosha ("Cabin in the Snow") is Japan's first organic sake, and is handmade with two yeasts (one promoting flavor, the other aroma), whereas most sakes use only one. Bottle-conditioned before release—another unique aspect—Yuki No Bosha is absolutely delicious, with a graceful structure and a wonderful intensity of flavor and aroma.

If this is the future of sake, I'm all for it.

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.

When it comes to pairing food and wine, there are two basic approaches: the complementary, and the contrasting. Complementary is the easy kind we practice all the time—red wine with meat, white wine with fish, and so on—where the flavors of wine and food overlap in a harmonious, predictably pleasurable way. A pairing of contrast, on the other hand, is rare, complex, and can be completely rapturous. But a pairing of contrast is also almost impossible to plan. You discover it, as if by accident.

Accident indeed. The bottle I had was the 2009 Pierre Gonon Saint-Joseph. To my astonishment, it first dispatched a little appetizer of fennel and orange. I would have thought the dish's sweetness and citric acid would have repelled the luxuriant plushness of the Syrah; but rather the prickly bite of the orange just stabbed at the red wine's fabric like the point of a bull's horn at a matador's cape, to dazzling effect.

Next, the nettles, so dark and weedy and full of vitamin greenness. I thought they would war with the deep, purple fruit of the Saint-Joseph, but instead, the contrast was energizing, bringing out a nutty side of the nettles and emphasizing the lush fruit of the wine. Finally, the bird. Northern Rhône Syrah, it turns out, is maybe the best pairing for chicken around. One would think first of Pinot Noir or a lighter red like Beaujolais, and those wines are just fine. But the heady gaminess of a good northern Rhône—its blackberry fruit, dusting of pepper, and enveloping blackness—makes a good foil for delicate, juicy chicken.

I should have remembered this, because good northern-Rhône Syrah is what my friend and coauthor, the great sommelier Rajat Parr, always drinks with roast chicken. I called Raj to tell him about my revelation, and he laughed. "Syrah has a bad rap because a lot of wines are made in bigger, heavy-handed style," he said. "But good Syrah is more delicate, complex, and a rare thing. It's the hunt for the unicorn, that kind of Syrah: not as easy to make as most people think."

And he agreed that it goes with practically everything in a dynamic way: chicken, pork, lamb, and even fish. "Just cook the fish with the skin on and get it crisp. Throw some olives or tomatoes in there, and Syrah's delicious. Just make sure the wine's not too tannic." Syrah is also Raj's favorite red with Indian and Middle Eastern food. "It loves the spices."

Pinot Noir is often credited with being the most versatile red wine. And it is, if you like boring complementary pairings. If you want exciting pairings, go with the King of Contrast.

The other day, I gave a curious friend a sip of rum from my bar. Before I could say anything, he'd 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.

I hadn't had a chance to explain that the Lemon Hart 151 I was handing him (a beautiful rum and a staple of the tiki world) was overproof. You could call overproof booze—a term that simply indicates alcoholic strength higher than 50 percent ABV (alcohol by volume) or 100 proof—an increasing phenomenon. And it's not just rum; many spirits (whiskeys, gins, and mezcals) are frequently made overproof.

So why would anyone want more potent, barely swallowable firewater? Indeed, I asked Lemon Hart's importer, Chicago-based Edward Hamilton, the self-styled Minister of Rum, if overproof spirits were just about getting drunk. His response? "No! In cocktails, overproof spirits add more dimension to a drink. By themselves, overproof spirits can have a bigger body than spirits diluted to a lower proof."

The bigger body of these spirits is not in doubt. But do they have bigger flavor as well? Most bartenders tend to think so. As Martin Cate, proprietor of San Francisco's Smuggler's Cove, told me last year, "High-proof rums [have] massive alcoholic strength, but their flavor bandwidth is also huge."

I'm still not convinced, however. This article suggests that more alcohol does not mean more flavor—that ethanol itself is flavorless.

My friend Toby Cecchini—bartender, author, and New York Times style magazine columnist—told me that for his own forthcoming article on this subject as it relates to whiskey, he's been looking into this question for years and that the answer "depends on who you ask." Most master distillers "won't touch this question," he said, "because 99.5 percent of their sales come from OBs [original bottlings at 40 percent], and they don't want to implicitly impugn those whiskeys by saying that cask-strength versions have more flavor."

However, in some cases, the higher-proof spirits may literally have more flavor, because they haven't been chill-filtered. In order to be bottled at 40 percent ABV, for instance, most whiskeys are chill-filtered to remove compounds that are insoluble at that alcoholic strength (meaning that these whiskeys would become hazy in the bottle, a quality that distillers worry is visually unappealing). Chill-filtering to remove those compounds, however, also strips the spirit of some of its native flavors. Hence, the Scotch distiller Bruichladdich releases no whiskeys below 46 percent ABV, the alcoholic strength above which those particles remain dissolved in alcohol (explained at length here).

While not technically overproof, Bruichladdich's whiskeys play to the tastes of aficionados, who more often prefer their malts at cask strength: spirits bottled at the high proofs they come from in barrel, unadulterated. This leaves the ministrations of dilution up to the drinker.

But of course most drinkers are not aficionados—and perhaps don't want to worry about the proper dilution of their hooch. Then again, most drinkers probably don't care if their spirits are chill-filtered or not. In a world where things are increasingly dumbed down and compromised to favor the least common denominator, I'll err on the side of flavor. Give me unfiltered, cask/navy strength, and overproof, and leave the watering down to me. Just make sure it's labeled properly, so I don't scorch my throat.

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.

And they might be thankful for that. Once described by a spirits expert as tasting "like the bottom of Bluto Blutarsky's laundry hamper," let's just say that the flavor of Moutai is unique. And incredibly difficult to describe. In China it's said to have a soy sauce character. And, yes, there's that (though not Kikkoman soy sauce, but the fuller, deeper umami-rich savor of better soys). But there's also wild tropical fruits, berries, chocolate, vanilla, musky jungle flowers, and burning rubber. Indeed, sensory scientists employed by Moutai (the spirit is now produced by a state-owned company) have isolated over 1,000 different aromas. How does it taste? Much the way it smells, though it carries its 52 percent alcohol (104 proof) remarkably smoothly, finishing with incredible flavor rather than an alcoholic burn. I actually love the stuff.

Moutai comes by its astonishing complexity via a production process unlike anything I've seen in the West. Made mostly from sorghum and a little bit of wheat, it undergoes a fermentation process that includes the steaming of the sorghum, amassing it into a giant mound where it starts to ferment (like a compost heap), burying it in a pit for a month, pulling it out, distilling some of the alcohol out of it, and repeating this process seven times. Where the fermentation process for grain used in a batch of whiskey takes around a week, the process for Moutai runs over six months. After distillation, the spirit is aged in ceramic vessels for an average of five years.

IT'S A PARTY DRINK
Moutai also comes bundled with the greatest drinking ritual of any spirit, if you want to enjoy it as they do in China. There, Moutai is only drunk at mealtimes, in little half-ounce shots. And it goes amazingly well with a huge range of dishes. You also never drink it by yourself, but rather with others and with a toast. This can be a private toast between two people, or a group thing where everyone at a banquet downs their Moutai in unison. Glasses are then refilled when someone offers you a toast or you decide to toast another.

The only downside of Moutai is that it's hard to get in the U.S., and if you can find it, it's expensive. A Newsweek piece on it has the current price at about $340 a bottle, up from only $30 or $40 just 12 years ago. Incredibly popular as gifting currency in China, much of the 10 percent or so of Moutai that's exported to other countries ends up coming back across Chinese borders, as profit can be made on it there.

But the scarcity is because Moutai cannot be made anywhere else. It's produced in Guizhou Province in southwest China, on the banks of the Chishui River (which supplies the water from which it's made). It doesn't taste the same when the production process is carried out anywhere other than where it's been for hundreds of years.

GET USED TO IT
For most people, the scarcity and price of Moutai are irrelevant; they wouldn't want to drink this bizarre stuff anyway. For those curious about the taste, there are other examples of Moutai's category of spirit, called baijiu by the Chinese, like Shui Jing Fang (pictured above) or Wuliangye. Neither is as refined, complex, or delicious as Moutai, but they are available and offer a sense of the taste of baijiu.

And it might be wise to familiarize yourself with the taste. By sheer numbers, baijiu is the most consumed spirit in the world, over vodka, gin, and whiskey. Diageo, one of the world's largest spirit companies, is betting big on it, according to the Wall Street Journal. So maybe it's time to order out some Chinese, pop a bottle of baijiu, and start toasting your dinner guests.

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?

Now, many arguments can be made for pints, most of them based on tradition and universality. Certainly, I would never deny an Irishman his pint of Guinness. Also, one could point out that our 16-ounce pint is one of the smaller of the traditional measures for beer. German beer halls in Munich sell by the liter and half-liter. English pints, called Imperial, are 20 ounces, even larger than ours. And one of those giant beakers that can't even stand up on their own, a yard of ale is roughly 2.5 Imperial pints or almost 1.5 liters.

In this context, our beers are almost dainty, though in my mind, not dainty enough. I'd rather take as my model the German stange, the cylindrical glass used in Cologne for their famous Kölsch beer. These glasses, if not necessarily the shape I'd want for all beer, generally hold a volume of beer that strikes me as typically the right amount: between 6.5 and 12 ounces.

So what's wrong with our clunky American pint? First of all, I'd argue that sipping off a lip that's 1/8 inch thick makes for an awkward mouthful. The beer rolls over the lip of the glass in a wave and falls not so much on the tongue, as around it, filling up the sides of your mouth before you truly get a chance to taste it. Crystal wineglass makers like Riedel figured out long ago that a well-conceived narrow lip can deliver the liquid with precision onto the part of the tongue most appropriate to receive it. Even the Boston Beer Company, maker of Sam Adams, acknowledged this point when a few years ago they designed their better beer glass (pictured above), noting that their vessel's "outward turned lip places beer at [the] front of [the] palate to maximize [the] enjoyment of sweetness from the malt."

The second problem is the volume. Sixteen ounces is just too much for many of today's beers. If you're drinking at a moderate pace, by the time you've gotten to the last third of the beer it may be warm or going flat. Conversely, if the pint glass is chilled—a particular pet peeve of cicerone Sayre Piotrkowski—it will overly chill the beer, and suppress its aromatics.

Strong, Hoppy Beers Are Not Good for Pints
The pint measure, both English and American, was originally used for beers of much lower alcoholic strength. The difference between 20 ounces of 4 percent ABV beer versus 8 percent—as many craft brews are today—is huge. In Belgium, a land of fairly strong beers, a pint (pintje) is but 250 milliliters (about 8.5 ounces), according to Lonely Planet.

And alcohol level is not the only issue. For me, the intensity of so many of today's pale ales, IPAs, and double IPAs (like, say, Lagunitas's Hop Stoopid, a beer I like) makes them too powerfully flavored to drink in quantity. Give me six ounces of these beers, and I'd be happy.

Piotrkowski also notes that smaller glasses make for more interesting food-pairing vessels. "If you want to do beers with different courses, you've got to have a smaller glass, so that you can try more things. Heck, if you just want to try multiple beers at a session, you might want smaller glasses," he says.

In Seattle, where I spent some time growing up, many bars offered a schooner, a smaller measure. Last year, Britain mandated a greater variety of glass sizes, including the schooner. Here's hoping that smaller glasses catch on in the States, too.

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.

Sure the name of another Loire Valley variety, Cabernet Franc, gets around. Like Philip Seymour Hoffman in Moneyball, it shows up in a lot of high-profile places (Napa, Bordeaux) but remains mostly a strong character actor. Arguably, Jonah Hill (as the fat brainiac) steals the film from Pitt. He's got subtlety, pathos, and wry wit—much like the Loire's greatest grape, Chenin Blanc, which can be bone-dry, semisweet, or flat-out honeyed, depending on how it's made. And there are many other good, unknown players in the Loire—Romorantin and Melon de Bourgogne, for instance—as well as familiar favorites like Gamay and Pinot Noir, which have bit parts.

The Loire is a diverse collection of terroirs splayed along the Loire River as it makes its run west from central France to the Atlantic. It's moderate, with warm but not-too-hot summers and a fair bit of rain from the Atlantic that keeps the whole place a vibrant green for most of the year. Soils run from the Kimmeridgian limestone that produces some of the best wines of Champagne and Chablis to various other iterations of calcareous soils, along with clays, schists, slates, and flints (known there as silex).

Why has the Loire evaded serious contemplation by so many wine drinkers? First, its sharply flavored, acidic, and intensely mineral wines are not easy on novices. Rather, the herbal, strident, and exotic flavors and sometimes teeth-rattling acidity of the Loire are typically the kinds of things that many drinkers turn to after they're bored by their initial romances with the richer, sweeter wines of places like Australia, California, and Spain. Second, Loire wines can be victims of their own complexity. All that talent—from Sauvignon Blanc to Cabernet Franc to Chenin Blanc and beyond—likes to strut its stuff in as many ways as possible. Therefore you get Chenin that's sparkling, bone-dry, dry, semisweet, and supersweet. You get Cabernet Franc from limestone soils and from schist soils, each of which dramatically impacts how it tastes. Sauvignon Blanc can be a tour de force, as in Sancerre. Or it can be an airy, stony character of austerity and restraint. So much variety ends up producing a dizzying array of wines that are hard to nail down for all but the most attentive of drinkers.

Of course, Moneyball was about a guy trying to win in baseball by putting more on the field for less money. And that's another way that it's similar to the Loire, which year after year plays the game with more talent at every position than most other regions could ever imagine. And it's all a bargain. As a friend said to me, "The Loire is the best at every grape it makes. No one in the world [with apologies to New Zealand] makes better Sauvignon Blanc. No one [with apologies to Cheval Blanc] makes better Cabernet Franc. And there's no competition when it comes to Chenin Blanc."

Indeed, the Loire never wins the pennant, but, like the Oakland A's of Moneyball, it always fields a strong, competitive, and extremely compelling team for not much money. And we can't ask much more of a set of wines these days.

I'll write more about the specifics of the Loire wines in coming months. But until then, I just want to suggest that the region is worthy of your vote—if not for best picture, then maybe for a few other satisfying, meaningful awards.

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 impressed with American beer? That's the word on the street.

Unfortunately, none of the Belgian brewers I contacted responded to my emails, so I was left to consult with some experts on the matter. British beer expert and author Tim Webb confirmed: "Yes, it is happening"—Belgian brewers are making American-style beers.

So what does that mean, exactly? One word: hops. If Belgian brewing is known primarily for its yeast strains, American beers are notable for their hops, particularly ones from the West Coast—Cascade, Centennial, Columbia—that have powerful and distinctive flavors. Although a few older, famous Belgian beers are known for hop character, like Duvel and Orval, they pale in comparison to the hop bombs American brewers make, such as Pliny the Elder. That's changing.

Jeff Alworth, the Portland-based author of the Beervana blog and the forthcoming book The Beer Bible, pointed me toward some newer Belgians that are taking hops to a more extreme, American level. Houblon Chouffe from Brasserie d'Achouffe is labeled as a Dobbelen IPA Tripel. Tripel is a classic Belgian style, and Dobbelen IPA means "double IPA."

The Houblon Chouffe (Houblon meaning "hop" in French) has that piny, floral burst on the nose that's a signifier of American hops, and indeed, according to this report, it's brewed with Tomahawk and Amarillo hops, two classic American varieties (as well as Saaz, which is Czech).

Because the most famous Belgian beers are brewed by Trappist monks, it's easy to think of Belgian brewing in general as tradition-bound, unchanging. But nothing could be further from the truth. There is, in fact, a great deal of experimentation and creativity going on in Belgian beer—and some of it has an American ring. How to tell? Follow the hops.

The most aggressive experimentation is being done by some of Belgium's newer breweries, a phenomenon Alworth has dubbed "international extreme," which is "a kind of stateless brewing buoyed by über beer geeks" who favor flavor- and alcohol-heavy styles like imperial stouts, triple IPAs, and quadruple abbey ales. In Belgium, De Struise Brouwers fits into this category. Its Black Albert is a strong stout in the style favored by American brewers like Surly (and in fact De Struise has done collaborations with Surly). It even makes a variation of Black Albert that is aged in Four Roses Bourbon barrels. How much more American can you get than that?

Why, with such a strong native tradition, would Belgian brewers be interested in such things? Beyond the general curiosity that drives brewers everywhere, there's the question of economic motivation. As Wendy Littlefield, a partner in the Belgian import firm of Vanberg & DeWulf, told me, Belgian brewers' local market is shrinking. The traditional center of Belgian beer drinking is in the country's beer cafés. "The number of cafés is declining rapidly, and 80 percent are owned by AB InBev," she said—InBev being the world's largest brewer (owner of Stella and Budweiser, among many others). With InBev selling primarily its own products on those lists, "if you're a young brewery trying to get a start, you will not get it in the cafés. There's just not enough distribution there." Littlefield added: "And you're not going to be sold in supermarkets, because they've been cutting back on the number of brands."

So what do brewers do? Export. To America.

And while I'd be concerned if Belgium started ditching its traditional styles, a little global blending of styles can yield compelling results. Littlefield turned me on to a beer she imports, Hop Ruiter. It's a bottle-conditioned, strong golden ale of classic Belgian proportions but aggressively brewed with three kinds of hops. Yet none of those hops are American varieties, so the beer becomes a lovely blend of rich, sweet maltiness with hops that add structural bitterness and spice without completely taking over. It's delicious, original, and an incredibly tasteful expression of influence.

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).

I approached vodka for a long-weekend tête-à-tête after a bartender friend pointed out that the new ad campaigns of several vodkas are unabashedly pushing the basic, unflavored spirit as a beverage to be drunk alone rather than in cocktails. Good examples of this include Absolut's Elyx: "it is perhaps best enjoyed neat or on the rock (just one single, large, slowly melting ice cube)." Likewise, Stolichnaya elit, whose new campaign cajoles, "Of course, neat or on the rocks will allow you to best savor our distinctive taste. The choice is yours. You Know Better." And, best of all, new television ads for Ketel One show young corporate men conspicuously savoring vodka on the rocks while bonding with each other and attracting female glances.

While vodka needn't fight for survival (in 2009 it owned a third of U.S. market share; whiskey was next at 25 percent), perhaps it's fighting for its own self-esteem. In terms of perception, vodka is comparable to Microsoft, whose operating system owns most of the world's computers yet will never enjoy the hipness of Apple. As the dominant spirit, vodka has been consistently derided by bar-industry cognoscenti, many of whom view it as overmarketed and flavorless.

Audrey Saunders, owner of New York's Pegu Club, feels indirectly responsible for this. "In the beginning of the Pegu Club," says Saunders, all the customers would come in asking for vodka tonics, vodka Cosmos, vodka sodas. "We literally had to hand-sell gin to the general public. My bartenders would tell drinkers, 'We have this amazing juniper-and-citrus-flavored vodka.' The customers would try the drink and say, 'Wow! This is great.' Then the bartenders would reveal that what they were enjoying was in fact gin, and they'd say, 'I don't like gin.'"

While Saunders frets over the condescending I don't do vodka attitude that so many bartenders express—"Never make someone feel bad about their choice," she says—she thinks it stems from the training program developed to get young bartenders to expand their knowledge. "I wasn't telling them to reject vodka," she says, "but that they needed to better understand the nuances of every gin, whiskey, tequila, and rum."

Nevertheless, the damage was done, and we've worked our way through a five- to seven-year period where people who ordered vodka drinks were looked down upon by snotty bartenders and pitied for their intentional existence in a world devoid of flavor.

But is vodka devoid of flavor? While U.S. law stipulates that it must be odorless, colorless, and flavorless, there is subtle flavor in many vodkas. Flavor can be found especially in vodkas that are distilled directly from an actual ingredient, rather than redistilled from neutral spirit bought on the open market (which is how most vodka is made). So, a slight hint of pepperiness can be detected in Square One and Wyborowa, which are made from rye. Potato vodkas like Chopin, Luksusowa, and Monopolowa can have earthy notes and distinctive creaminess. Even the huge, ubiquitous brand Absolut is distilled solely from wheat grown in the vicinity of the distillery that the company ferments and distills itself; the vodka has a subtle, sweet smell of grain. (The aforementioned Elyx from Absolut is a single-farm wheat vodka, which is a fairly new concept attempting to borrow some of the mojo of terroir from the wine world.)

If I were to become a drinker of vodka straight up or on the rocks like the natty gentlemen of the Ketel One commercials, I would drink one of the aforementioned vodkas. (The other vodka pushing for consumption on the rocks—elit—is impressively rich, smooth, and creamy and completely devoid of flavor.) Of course, if you put any vodka on the rocks it will quickly become too cold and diluted for you to smell much of anything. This I learned during my attempt to become a straight vodka drinker. It was not successful. My incessant yearning for a splash of vermouth and a twist proved greater than my ability to enjoy vodka on its own.

But I did develop a new respect for the vodkas that speak of their ingredients. And I can appreciate vodka's new efforts to present itself as a spirit worthy of being drunk unadorned. It may not be for me, but that certainly doesn't mean it's not entitled to a little self-esteem as it sits in its castle and counts its millions.

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?

’Gnac Juice—In my friend Marc's strange, personal vernacular (vergnacular?), that's the term for Cognac and Armagnac. For years in my mind, those spirits had seemingly been irretrievably co-opted by aristocrats and rap artists, so I'd given them only a modicum of attention. But over the last six months, my own postprandial sipping of the stuff has greatly increased (thanks to receiving a delicious, but rapidly disappearing, bottle of Cognac Dudognon as a Christmas present). I adore brandy but realize that I know very little about it, so it seems quite sensible to continue building on my natural propensities.

Jura ’Nidiot—Last year I wrote that I wanted to become better versed in many of the lesser-known wine regions of France and Italy. That was a stupidly broad ambition. Every small region I mentioned in that column is a universe unto itself, deserving years of its own attention. In setting New Year's drinking resolutions, it's better to be more specific and reasonable. So this year, I'm going to just say that I'm aiming to sharpen up my sense of the Jura, that subalpine region on France's eastern edge. It's true that the wines have become fashionable in certain circles, but that's no reason not to be excited about them. 2011 saw me already falling in love with the ethereal perfume of the Jura's light, aromatic red grape—Poulsard—as well as digging on mineral, brisk whites like Savagnin and Trousseau Gris. A stellar Château-Chalon (a bright, energetic oxidized Savagnin) from Domaine Macle put me over the top. If I can get to France this year, it's going to be to the Jura.

Southern Hemis-fear—While I still follow American wines closely, I've taken a two-year break from peering into the wines of Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Chile, and Argentina. And now I'm feeling a bit guilty and neglectful. It's time to begin checking back in on the other side of the world.

The Rye Stuff—Not whiskey this time, but beer made with rye. Every time I'm in New York, I make a point of finding a bar with Sixpoint's Belgian Rye on tap. Blanco, Texas's Real Ale Brewing Company has also impressed me with its balanced, gulpable Full Moon Pale Rye. There've been a couple of bottles of fascinating German roggenbier too (roggen is the German word for "rye") that have gotten me as excited as any beer I've tasted recently. 2012 will be my year of rye beer, as I track down and slurp any and every one I can find.

So that's my list. You'll know I'm making progress on these goals if you see them reappear in columns. And how about you, dear reader? What would you like to see in your glass in 2012?

I don't think wine makes a great gift. Its perceived value is tarnished by the way bottles are casually dealt out at the door by dinner party guests upon arrival. However, I do think fine spirits make splendid gifts. Elegant bottles can be found in whatever price range suits your fancy—from $30 on up—and, even better, a spirit makes a lasting impression, since it's unlikely to be consumed right away. Here are my picks of the year's best new spirits.

Angel's Envy Bourbon (about $45): Created by Lincoln Henderson—former master distiller for the Brown-Forman Corporation, with successes like Woodford Reserve and Old Forester under his belt—Angel's Envy is a personal project. I'm not always the biggest bourbon fan, but I loved this whiskey. While all the expected flavors are there—vanilla, spice, berries—I was blown away by the texture and structure of the whiskey. For something so complex, it was wonderfully tight-knit, taking a lengthy journey of sensation down the tongue. Full-blown, it's also got an element of gentlemanly restraint, as anyone who's spent time with Mr. Henderson would rightfully expect.

Brugal 1888 Rum (about $50): Brugal is the rum of the Dominican Republic, but it's been some time since there was a new version released to the U.S. The number 1888 is the year that the company was founded, and this is a spirit worthy of such a commemoration. It takes a page out of the playbook of many Scotch whiskies, finishing the rum's aging in sherry barrels as opposed to the typical American oak. The result is something a little more nuanced than the average aged rum. The nutty, tawny notes from the sherry give the rum's sweet cane flavors a nice burnishing of complexity and sophistication. There's depth and richness in the cane aromas. Blended from lots aged between 5 and 14 years, this is a sipping rum. In cocktails, however, it could be treated like a whiskey—it would make a splendid Old Fashioned or Palmetto (basically a rum Manhattan).

St. George Spirits Gins ($35 each): The popular indie distillery on Alameda Island in the San Francisco Bay finally stepped into the gin market. Given Master Distiller Lance Winters' celebrated willingness to distill anything and everything, it's a little surprising it took St. George so long to create a gin. But when it did, it did so big time, with three separate gins: Terroir, Botanivore, and Dry Rye. The Terroir is an ode to the beauty of the Bay Area, a brambly gin made with locally foraged Douglas fir, bay laurel, sage, and other plants native to the area. And it really does smell like a hike on Mount Tamalpais. Botanivore is loaded with 19 botanicals and is overwhelmingly lush while preserving a lovely balance. The Dry Rye is unique: strong on juniper but balanced on a foundation of malty pot-distilled rye. It's reminiscent of a genever but has its own signature. Each of these is a great gift, but the whole set? That would be a knockout.

Hakushu Japanese Whisky (about $50): I'm a lover of Japanese whiskies—the best are reminiscent of Scotch, but with their own beautiful Japanese sense of restraint—so it was with great excitement that I learned that Hakushu would finally be imported to the States. It's a single malt from a distillery set high in a woodsy mountain range north of Tokyo; it uses peated malt in its mash, and therefore takes on a slightly smoky cast that goes nicely with its hints of pear and spice.

Rhuby Liqueur ($36): Art in the Age, a Philadelphia artist collective that also produces organic spirits, previously remade root beer to its original alcoholic specifications with Root. Now they bring us Rhuby, a spirit based on a 1770s recipe for a spiced-up rhubarb tea invented by John Bartram, the Pennsylvania botanist. Rhuby is something entirely unique, blending herbal and sweet characteristics into a surprisingly refreshing liqueur. Its pale pink color suggests springtime, but grapefruit, remember, is a winter fruit. So get your citrus rolling, as Rhuby is a wonderful mixer along with things like soda, tonic, and gin.

The best holiday gifts for the wine-, beer-, and spirits-lovers in your life are not actual bottles (unless those bottles are particularly rare, old, or expensive) but books about those subjects. And the publishing world agrees with me, which is why it continues to pump out volume after volume, year after year. Here are my recommendations for 2011.

Wine
Authentic Wine: Toward Natural and Sustainable Winemaking by Jamie Goode and Sam Harrop: This may be the ugliest and unsexiest book I've ever recommended. Its bright yellow cover doesn't exactly suggest curling up with it and a nice glass of Beaujolais on a quiet winter afternoon. The text isn't particularly lively or artful either. But the book's greater value is its general explanations of the details of winemaking, both natural and commercial (e.g., sulfur use, organic and biodynamic farming, common wine additions, etc.). It will provide satisfying answers to technical questions for the questioning oenophile in your life.

An Ideal Wine: One Generation's Pursuit of Perfection—and Profit—in California by David Darlington: This is a well-reported and well-written account of the modern history of wine in California. Darlington paints great characters and has a highly engaging reportorial style. Starting in the 1970s, he traces the paths of a few California vintners—especially the consultant Leo McCloskey and the winemaker Randall Grahm—as they navigate the disciplines that wine inevitably and haphazardly crisscrosses: science, art, commerce, and agriculture. The book delves deep into controversial issues like the role of technology in the manipulation of wine, the impact of critics, and the tug of war between making something personal and something commercial.

Beer
Brewed Awakening: Behind the Beers and Brewers Leading the World's Craft Brewing Revolution by Joshua M. Bernstein: This book looks at almost every important trend in craft brewing today. The focus is primarily on the American scene, but includes some global references (like an engaging profile of Mexico's Cucapá brewery). Bernstein spotlights current topics like seasonality and reviving lost beer styles, always in an engaging way with lots of stories of individual brewers and the problems they solved to create their new brews. The book is designed to look like a personal journal, with different fonts, photos "pasted" in with the images of paper clips and tape, etc., all of which is a bit too cute for my taste. But it gives the volume an accessible, if busy, feel. (This is not the place to find definitions of things like tripels, or entries on Belgian beer, though. For that, get a copy of The Oxford Companion to Beer, which would be a nice book to package with this one.)

The Great American Ale Trail: The Craft Beer Lover's Guide to the Best Watering Holes in the Nation by Christian DeBenedetti: A lovingly written touring guide to America's craft breweries. It describes each brewery's scene, philosophy, and "key beer" contribution to American brewing. While it's a great road trip guide (complete with suggested itineraries for regional touring), what I love is the context it provides for each brewery. When I'm striding into an unfamiliar brewpub, I want to know why it's important and what beer it's known for, and this book tells you.

Spirits and Cocktails
Calvados: The Spirit of Normandy by Charles Neal: Very few things are as satisfying after a great meal as a glass of well-aged, amber Calvados, which captures the sweetness of autumn better than any other spirit. This book is likely the most authoritative volume on the apple- and pear-based brandy of northwest France that has ever and will ever be written. Neal, who is an importer of the stuff and researched the book over years and years of visits to the region, explains everything: subregions, soils, fruit varieties, Norman cuisine (with recipes), distillation methods, cellaring, etc. He also includes profiles of pretty much every producer in existence, totaling around 180 unique entries. This is a book of rare obsession and thoroughness, essential for any proper library of spirits books. It would be lovely as a gift alongside a bottle of something delicious.

Bitters: A Spirited History of a Classic Cure-All by Brad Thomas Parsons: This book gives a full-sized accounting of what's in those little bottles that bartenders these days are always shaking into their cocktails. We're living in a golden age of bitters: After decades of there only being a couple of varieties available (e.g., angostura and Peychaud's), spirits shops today are full of them, in flavors from lavender to cherry to celery to xocolatl mole. Parsons's book discusses all of these and the companies that make them. Parsons also offers more than a dozen recipes for making your own bitters at home. These are quite useful, as I can assure you that using homemade bitters is always more satisfying than using ones you've purchased. Finally, there's an excellent, if somewhat typical, section on how to set up a home bar. But I really like Parsons's annotated list of the 10 essential bitters for the home bar; and his recipes for bitter-forward cocktails, both new and old, are terrific.

The PDT Cocktail Book: The Complete Bartender's Guide from the Celebrated Speakeasy by Jim Meehan: This will make a wonderful gift for the cocktail-lover, even if they've never set foot in the eponymous Manhattan new-school speakeasy. Meehan's recipes (for both classic cocktails and contemporary originals) and explanations of tools, techniques, and equipment are excellent and authoritative. Most electric about the book are the illustrations by Chris Gall, animating the recipes and evocative cocktail names with vivid, witty comic-book-style brilliance.

Whenever we visit New York, my wife says, "When you're in Manhattan, you've got to drink a Manhattan." I was going to Singapore, so I figured I'd follow the same logic: drink Singapore Slings. But I discovered that it would not be as easy as it seemed.

"Of all the recipes published for this drink," wrote David Embury in 1948's The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, "I have never seen any two that were alike."

In other words, nobody knows what a Singapore Sling really is. There are many versions, much debate, and the drink remains a mystery. I was determined to solve it.

My research began at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore. I ventured to this sprawling, beautifully manicured colonial hotel, and up a flight of stairs to its Long Bar, where the Singapore Sling was supposedly invented in 1915 by a bartender named Ngiam Tong Boon.

In this beautifully crepuscular wood-paneled room, I learned for myself what everyone had warned me about: that the Singapore Sling at the Raffles Hotel is terrible. Two versions are available: the sickly-sweet premade one, and the not-quite-as-nauseatingly-sweet version that they'll make on request from scratch. I tasted both. Made with pineapple juice, cherry liqueur, grenadine, Cointreau, Bénédictine (an herbal liqueur), lime juice, bitters, and soda water, this pink fruit bomb is a joke of a cocktail—more like Hawaiian Punch than something that would have whetted the dry wits of Noël Coward and Somerset Maugham, both of whom spent time here.

Most cocktail enthusiasts agree that this cannot be the original drink. The base ingredients—gin, sugar, lemon or lime juice, and soda water (a gin sling)—have never been in question; it's the modifying ingredients that are the subject of controversy. Most cocktail books from the 20th century list the Singapore Sling as being nothing more than a gin sling with the addition of Cherry Heering. But if that's the case, then how and why did all these other modifiers come into the picture?

Time to dig into the archives. Jason Wilson of the Washington Post discussed these issues in a piece back in February. He came to the conclusion that the Singapore Sling we know today is a conflation and probable descendant of the Straits Sling (which includes kirschwasser—dry cherry brandy—Bénédictine, and bitters, with "Straits" being a local name for Singapore), with the mysterious inclusion of pineapple juice happening somewhere during or after the 1970s.

Wilson also notes that a 1922 book's formula for the Straits Sling—the recipe's first appearance in a book—calls not for Cherry Heering, but for "dry cherry brandy," which suggested to some that the actual ingredient might have been something more akin to cherry eau de vie or kirschwasser. If this were indeed the true recipe, as Wilson—who is not a fan of the cloyingly sweet Cherry Heering version—hoped, it would profoundly change the nature of the drink, making it more tastefully dry and causing it to lose its pink color.

But, in an Imbibe magazine piece back in July, cocktail historian David Wondrich put this argument to rest. Thanks to the modern miracle of scanned, searchable newspaper archives, Wondrich told me, when in Singapore this year, he was able to visit the National Library and look back at contemporary accounts of the Singapore Sling going back more than 100 years. He found, among other things, that the first mention of the Sling was in 1897, 18 years before the Raffles supposedly invented it. He also saw a 1903 reference to it as pink, ruling out the notion that it was originally made with clear, dry cherry eau de vie (kirschwasser). Finally, while he didn't find an exact print of the recipe, Wondrich did happen upon an account of the drink, which mentioned cherry brandy and Bénédictine.

But thankfully for those of us like Wilson and me, holding out hope for a drier, more urbane version of the cocktail, Wondrich did log one other interesting detail: The only cherry brandies that turned up in contemporary liquor ads were Heering and Bols. But, Wondrich notes, at the time Bols did also sell a dry version of its cherry brandy. Perhaps this is the "dry cherry brandy" of the 1922 book.

Excited by this notion, I took the idea to Michael Callahan, who had just opened 28 Hong Kong Street, a new cocktail bar that, only days old, was unquestionably already one of Singapore's best. Not a particular fan of the drink, Callahan, who moved out from San Francisco earlier this year, wasn't promoting the Sing' Sling (unlike most other places in Singapore). Nevertheless, he agreed to make one for me, along with an interesting suggestion. Instead of Cherry Heering or kirsch, he offered a bit of Luxardo's Sangue Morlacco (or Blood Morlacco), a crimson, medium-dry cherry brandy from Italy that might be similar to the product Bols used to offer. Using that, Callahan mixed me his approximation. Far from a sweet cartoon of a drink, it was pale pink, as pleasantly crisp as a new linen shirt, and vigorously refreshing—a drink I could well imagine pith-helmeted Brits sipping in the Raffles's Long Bar while discussing tiger hunts and the empire.

Singapore Sling from 28 Hong Kong Street bar, Singapore
1 ounce Luxardo Sangue Morlacco
1.5 ounces gin
1 ounce Bénédictine
1 ounce lime juice
2 dashes angostura bitters
2 dashes Peychaud's bitters
Ice
2 ounces soda water
Lime peel, for garnish

Shake everything but the soda and lime peel with ice in a cocktail shaker. Strain into a collins glass filled with ice cubes and top with the soda water. Garnish with a lime peel.

As a kid, I used to go hiking in the Cascades, and one of my favorite memories was drinking water straight from the streams. Not only did it have a sweetness and a gorgeous, mouth-filling roundness, but it also had this flavor and slightly granular texture that suggested the eroded pebbles and stones over which it was flowing. This was my first exposure to what I now think of as "minerality." And I'm sure my love of mountain water pushed me in some way to pursue wine, especially mineral wines, which, it turns out, are a somewhat controversial subject in the wine world.

Why are they controversial? Because wine writers and scientists are at odds over what minerality actually means. English wine journalist Jancis Robinson says in this article: "Anyone who has visited the volcanic island of Santorini ... [i]t is not surprising that fine wines made here taste intensely of the volcanic rocky soil."

Meanwhile, scientists like UK geology professor Alex Maltman contradict that: "whatever 'minerality' in wine is, it is not the taste of vineyard minerals."

Do the wines of Santorini really taste like volcanic rocky soil? Not exactly. Nevertheless, there is something in the wines that suggests stoniness and dissolved minerals. Everyone can pick it up, expert tasters like Robinson and novices alike. Can the common sensory detection of millions of people be wrong?

I think not. It's just that what we call minerality may not be minerals. As Terry Theise, the celebrated importer of European wines, put it in his recent book, Reading Between the Wines: "We don't care whether the flavor we call mineral results from an actual trace of dissolved literal mineral in the wine. I personally think it doesn't. More accurately, I'm agnostic on the question, because it hasn't (yet?) been demonstrated to be true. But something is creating that definite, tangible flavor, and we don't know what or how."

Clark Smith, a scientifically minded winemaker and writer based in Sonoma County, California, has offered a few interesting theories as to what might cause the sensations we describe as minerality. They include the idea of an electron discharge that creates the almost electric buzz that some mineral wines provide, as well as speculation on sulfides—sulfur-bearing compounds released by the action of yeasts during fermentation—that may perhaps give a stony texture and flinty aroma. (I'm partial to the latter theory.)

Either way, according to Smith's ideas, "mineral" wines may emanate from rocky, mineral-rich, nutrient-deficient soils—the kinds that are especially abundant in the Old World, where soils have been depleted over thousands of years of constant farming, and where grape vines were historically relegated to poorer, rocky soils. Neither is much true of most new-world vineyards, perhaps accounting for the trope that old-world wines are more mineral than new. It's one reason why we prize French classics like Chablis, Sancerre, Côte-Rôtie, Vouvray, Puligny-Montrachet; German Rieslings from the Mosel and Rheingau; and Italian Nebbiolos and Verdicchios.

As eloquently put by Theise, minerality is a metaphor: "I think minerality is perhaps the noblest of flavors because it is metaphorical, and metaphors work on the imagination. Fruitiness, on the other hand, is a simple matter of identification—it tastes like this apple or that pear, this peach or that melon—and once you've identified it, you don't think anymore. Minerality in contrast is suggestive, even mysterious. We don't know what it is or how it got there. We grow alert to the loveliness of the unknowable."

And the unknowable, even to a boy of six drinking from a mountain stream, is the most alluring taste of all.

Fred Jones, a sommelier at Hearth in New York, recently told me of his success in pairing a 2004 Bordeaux with food. It was softer and friendlier than a lot of wines he could have chosen, not overpowering to the food, and best of all from the customer's perspective, it was a less expensive Bordeaux. Go figure: It was wine from a "bad year."

Bad years, a.k.a. bad vintages, mean that the conditions (weather, soil) weren't optimal, and hence the wine isn't as strong as in "good years." But I like bad years. So does Jones. And here's why you should like them too.

1. They're cheaper. Wines from good vintages are big and fruity, clean and full-bodied. But, just as often, they are heavy and tannic, unapproachable when young, and—worst of all—expensive. I laughed when I read the following line in an online article a few weeks ago: "At this early stage of vintage 2011, some Bordeaux vintners are expressing relief that they haven't produced another great harvest this year." France's famous southwestern region has enjoyed a "vintage of the century" every couple of years, attended by an enormous spike in prices. Now, even midlevel Bordeaux is outside the reach of financial mortals. On the other hand, the occasional lesser vintages can be snapped up for good prices.

2. They're ready to drink now. The wine is somewhat thinner, softer, less concentrated, and less likely to age for decades in the cellar. Well, that's a wine I want to drink. Why? Because it's ready to go. We should thank nature for sending us the occasional inexpensive, soft, friendly, short-lived wine. These are the perfect things to quaff lustily while those iconic bottles slowly trudge toward some state of readiness (if they ever arrive).

3. They pair better with weeknight dinners. Off-vintage wines may not be what we want to uncork with a thick, dripping slab of rib-eye, but who's eating steak like that more than once or twice a month? Rather, these lighter wines are perfect accompaniments to the chops, chicken, bean soups, curries, and stir-fries that make up our more quotidian diets.

4. There really is no such thing as a bad year. There are hardly ever "bad" vintages anymore. The global wine economy is just too competitive to allow producers to release the kind of thin, swampy, painfully green wines that originally made us fear bad vintages. Winemaking skill and technology have become so ubiquitous that producers have the means to deal with most problems. And if it was a truly wretched year—underripe fruit, rain, rot—producers will often not release the wine. They'll sort out bad fruit, even if it means reducing their crop by half or two-thirds, rather than risk the potentially crippling damage that a bad score or stalled sales can do to their reputation. Some vintages might not be as charming as others, but bad—as in brutally flawed—wines hardly exist anymore, meaning that our risk of buying something truly displeasing is really quite low.

So what are the good "bad years"? Of course, I don't mean to suggest that great vintages shouldn't be celebrated. But in these cash-strapped times, I'm happy to let others empty their bank accounts for 2007 Napa wines while I drink 2008. The same with 2009 Beaujolais and red Burgundy—if it's my money, I'm happy with 2008. So maligned was 2007 Pinot Noir from Oregon and so hyped was 2008. Well, guess what? Many of those 2007s are shaping up to be pretty delicious right now—and, best of all, they're available at good prices.

According to the Beer Judge Certification Program, German Oktoberfest-style beer has "no hop aroma." Ironically, in the U.S. a new sort of unofficial October celebration is beginning to emerge around a completely different—indeed opposite—style of beer: It's called "wet hop."

You need to know something about hops to understand this beer: Hops are the seed cones of the plant species Humulus lupulus, and they're actually very delicate flowers. They don't survive long after being cut, which is why almost all hops are dried immediately after harvest, to preserve the valuable oils and resins that add so much savor and tang to beer. Most hops used by brewers are in this dried or pellet form.

There was, however, an obscure European tradition of brewing a special seasonal beer with just-harvested green, a.k.a. "wet," hops. In 1996, the brewmaster of Sierra Nevada, Steve Dresler, learned of this technique from a hop farmer and decided to give it a try. The beer, now called Northern Hemisphere Harvest Ale, has been made every year since. And other breweries have followed.

Part of a wet hop beer's beauty is the challenge of making it. "Hops are really fragile, and they start to compost almost instantly," explains Sierra Nevada's spokesman, Bill Manley, "which is why they're usually dried immediately." Sierra ships fresh hops from the Yakima Valley in Washington state (where about 75 percent of American hops are grown) to its brewery in Chico, California, in plastic crates carried in refrigerated trucks, which depart right from the hop fields. The hop growers call Sierra's team from the road to let them know when to start their boil, "and [the hops] usually show up at 3 a.m. on Labor Day weekend," says Manley.

Sierra (which also makes a wet-hopped ale with hops grown on the brewery's own property, the Estate Homegrown Ale) is not alone in its efforts. Tough as it is to get clean, untainted hops to nearby California in under 24 hours, breweries all over the U.S. are now producing wet hop beer, shipping said hops to points near and far. To wit, Sixpoint in Brooklyn (whose Belgian Rye is one of my favorite American beers) overnighted 800 pounds of fresh hops for their fall beer, Autumnation. In Minnesota, Surly Brewing makes a beer called Wet. Deschutes Brewery in Oregon makes a wet-hopped version of their popular Mirror Pond pale ale. And there are dozens more.

Why go to all this trouble? First and foremost: the flavor. Wet hops have a different taste than kiln-dried hops. The base notes are similar—floral, bitter, spicy, tangy—but there's less full-throttle intensity, and the fresh hops add a vibrancy, a fineness, a definition, and a chlorophyll-driven energy that you don't get in standard-hopped beers.

Another reason brewers have taken to this style is simply the celebration of change. "In the new craft brewing," Sierra Nevada's Manley says, "brewers are really interested in short-lived, fresh flavors, terroir, and being in tune with the seasons."

Morgan Herzog, proprietor of the excellent Seattle shop The Beer Junction, agrees. "There's only one moment you can make this kind of beer. Even in the dynamic world of brewing you don't have many situations where you capture fleeting flavors," he says. "I think that's why you're seeing it become so popular, with so many breweries jumping on the bandwagon. It really has the makings of a new American tradition."

Fleeting indeed. Even though most hops are harvested in September, it still takes a few weeks to brew the beers and release them. And these beers don't last long either. They're meant to be drunk within weeks of being released, which puts their season squarely in ... October. To me, this suggests why the celebration of wet-hopped ales should perhaps become America's Oktoberfest, a ritual that, unlike Germany's, really is dependent on the season.

Trying to get a handle on rum is like shopping for computer equipment: The styles and choices are so complex that at some point you're likely to throw up your hands and say, arbitrarily, "All right, give me that one."

Many rums have caramel coloring, so darker might not mean older. The bottle often misleads about exactly how old the rum is, and where it's from. (The country of origin on the label only means that the rum's been bottled there, not that the sugarcane was grown there.)

Recently, I judged a rum competition at a San Francisco tiki bar, Smuggler's Cove, that was run by rum promoter/importer Edward Hamilton, of The Ministry of Rum. Hamilton and Smuggler's owner, Martin Cate, are foremost experts on rum. They helped me come up with a rough system for categorizing this incredibly complex spirit.

Although Cate believes that rum can be divided into more than forty categories, at his bar he breaks it down to twenty, and he says it can even be simplified to just three: English, French, and Spanish. Hamilton calls the same three categories heavy, French, and light.

The good news is that we can ignore the French style, because I already discussed it in this column. (Briefly, it's known as rhum agricole and is made from fresh sugarcane juice.)

Heavy rum, a.k.a. English, comes mostly from the former English colonies of Jamaica and Guyana, and is often made in a pot still. It's fatter, rounder, more complex, earthy, and funky; is usually distilled to fire-breathing proofs; and makes for category 5–level hangovers. Exporters include J. Wray & Nephew and Smith & Cross, both from Jamaica, and Lemon Hart from Guyana.

Light rum, what Cate throws into the catchall "Spanish" category, is what most people are used to. It's stuff like Bacardi and DonQ from the island of Puerto Rico. The rum is finer, lighter, easier-drinking, and easier to mix into cocktails like daiquiris and Mojitos. Fun history fact: During Prohibition, when Americans repaired to Havana to drink, they were introduced en masse to this style of rum. The preference they developed ignited that industry, and today, Hamilton estimates, it accounts for about 98 percent of the rum we drink.

My favorite? The heavy, a.k.a. English. Its high proofs, often earthy aromas, and suggestions of overripe tropical fruit and singed caramel make for a far more interesting spirit. No, it's not the best for light, refreshing cocktails, but it is the best for Talk Like a Pirate Day, which just passed. And there are hybrid styles like the exceptional Appleton Estate Reserve, which brings the best of both worlds to a single rum.

Ultimately, it's up to you to find your own style. Next time you're at a good bar, line up tastes of heavy, light, and French-style rums. Make note, brand by brand, of the style and what you like best about it. Or, if you can visit San Francisco frequently, enroll in Cate's Rumbustion Society at Smuggler's Cove, a tasting program that takes you through all 20 of the bar's styles. I recommend spacing this program out over several visits.

Quinine, nature's cure for malaria, is curiously on the rise in beverages. Besides tonic water, you can taste it in the recent imported quinine-flavored elixirs Bonal and Cocchi Americano, in sodas like San Pellegrino's Chinotto and Scotland's Irn-Bru, and in the not-new-but-one-of-my faves Barolo Chinato, a digestivo from Piedmont, Italy.

Bitter wines are a key to our cocktail past, which should make all those mustachioed and cuff-wearing bartenders you encounter very happy. Here's how: Cocchi Americano (made since 1891 in the Piedmont town of Asti from Moscato wine) is the closest thing we have to the original version of Lillet, a.k.a. Kina Lillet. The original Lillet was a somewhat bitter, quinine-rich, aromatized wine that was called for in many classic cocktails, like the Twentieth Century (1939) and the Corpse Reviver #2 (1930). Kina Lillet became a hot topic of conversation several years ago with the remake of the James Bond movie Casino Royale. In the 1953 Ian Fleming book, Bond invents a variation on the martini that he calls the Vesper: "Three measures of Gordon's, one of vodka," he says, "half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it's ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel."

In 1986, Lillet changed its formula to the still delightful, but softer, version today just called Lillet. When the revamped Casino Royale came out, bartenders had been making the Vesper for two decades using today's Lillet, which made an adequate but somewhat flabby drink. Over time, as more bartenders became aware that the original recipe had called for Kina Lillet, they started doing things like adding a touch of tonic water to give a hint of quinine (though at the same time diluting the drink). Now, with the availability of Cocchi Americano, they can get closer to the original Vesper. With all the interest in these antique spirits, what's holding Lillet back from doing a limited-edition release of Kina Lillet? (Hello, Lillet, are you listening?)

I recommend another way of consuming these quinine-flavored elixirs: on their own. Bonal, which is from southern France and is based on red wine, is wonderful served simply with a cube of ice in a tumbler (I love to take a sweet vermouth like Carpano Antica this way as well). Cocchi Americano is even more bitter, but when drunk with a splash of soda and a slice of orange—as they do in Italy—it's delicious. While the wines on first impression seem sweet and rich, the quinine finish simply squeezes them in its fist and pinches off any hint of unctuousness. These wines embody everything that's beautiful and civilized about an apéritif: just enough alcohol to relax the mind before a meal, with a lingering bitterness that stimulates our appetite for food.

Barolo Chinato, on the other hand—such as the superb version from Cappellano—makes for a wonderful after-dinner sip, offering satisfying richness with the bonus of the digestive kick of herbs. Not to mention a nice hedge against malaria.

You're at a restaurant and the sommelier comes up and says: "Would you like some wine with your meal?" Maybe you don't know exactly what you want, so you just say, "Bring us something that goes well with the food." A few minutes later, the sommelier shows up with a bottle of wine made from a grape you've never heard of. You taste it and don't know what to think but say anyway, "That's fine," because you don't want to seem difficult, even though you don't particularly like the wine. And then the rest of the meal you can't stop thinking to yourself, I just spent $45 on this?

The sommelier community spends a lot of time thinking about the best way to talk to customers. But customers should also consider how best to talk to somms. As Daniel Johnnes, wine director of Daniel Boulud's restaurant group and one of the country's most influential sommeliers, said to the audience on a recent panel I moderated, "I would love it when the customer would offer information: 'You know, it's hot out—I want something fresh and crisp and lively.' [Customers] need to communicate and give as much info as you can."

June Rodil, the sommelier of Austin, Texas's Congress, agrees. "Some customers expect you to give them an experience by reading their minds," she says. "We do our best, but the more detail they can offer up-front makes everyone happier: them and us."

As Johnnes said, if you can articulate your own tastes even a little, it greatly helps the sommelier's efforts to please you. What kind of a mood are you in? Do you want to gulp some lusty, full-throated, heavy red? Or are you in the mood for something lighter and punchier?

If you can't describe what you like, one of the most valuable pieces of information a sommelier can have is what you drink at home. Some people go to restaurants to have their wine experience broadened, but many just want to drink something they're comfortable with. Problem is, sometimes people are ashamed of, or worry about being judged by, what they drink at home. Rule one: Don't lie. If you're trying to impress your server and say that you drink mostly culty Napa Cabs, unless you explicitly say otherwise that's what they may try to bring you. Rodil's advice? "We're seriously not here to judge you. So even if you drink Sutter Home white Zinfandel at home, that gives a huge clue as to what might make you happy."

Of course, the more you can tell your sommelier the better, but there are limits. "It helps us to know what kinds of wines you like to drink at home," says one prominent sommelier who wishes to keep his name and his restaurant's name secret so as not to offend any of his guests. "But we also get lots of people who are really into wine who just go on and on about what's in their cellar, what they drank last night, what winery tasting rooms they got VIP treatment at, and so on." The lesson? Don't be a wine bore, even if you feel that you're in the presence of a fellow wine bore. The fact is, no matter how fine your cellar is, the sommelier is probably tasting better wine than you on a nightly basis, they don't care what you have in your cellar, and they have 20 other guests waiting patiently for their attention.

And lastly, there's that sticky issue of price. It's the one basic, straightforward detail about a wine, yet it still causes so much tension. Everyone's afraid of getting pushed over their heads on the cost of a bottle, but also fearful of seeming cheap. This can cause serious anxiety, especially as customers on a date or taking business colleagues out might be hesitant to declare out loud how much they want to spend. Sommeliers are trained to pick up signals. For instance, they'll suggest that if you're ordering the wine you just point to a couple of items on the wine list in the same price range to indicate what you're comfortable spending. Or, as Johnnes recommended, "You can say, 'We're on the way to the movies after this,' and it's clear that it's not time for the big guns." On the other hand, Rodil says, "can we just please get over the shyness about price? We have good inexpensive bottles on the list and good expensive. There's no embarrassment in wanting a less pricey bottle. Just blurt it out."

Communication with a sommelier—just as with your spouse, lover, family, or dog—is most effective when you simply try to be honest, direct, nondefensive, and open-minded. But the reward with a sommelier is more tangible: You get a good bottle of wine.

If you just look at store shelves, you'd think that the U.S. has an unslakable thirst for gin. From Death's Door to CapRock to Berkshire Mountain, the list goes on and on of companies vying to share glass space with your favorite tonic or vermouth.

The ironic thing is that gin isn't gaining in popularity. Diageo lamented in its 2010 annual report that "Tanqueray net sales declined 3% as the gin category continued to decline." So, if the category's declining, what's with all these new brands? I wrote about this phenomenon a few years ago, suggesting that the "proliferation of new gins is not a response to a market demand, but instead seems angled to create one."

Now, four years later, not much has changed. Gin is searching for itself. Like a micro-organism living in a hostile environment, it's going through a rapid-fire burst of evolution, trying to find a form or quality that will allow it to survive or even prosper. Here are three of the most interesting of gin's latest mutations.

Nolet's Silver: From the Netherlands-based creators of Ketel One, Nolet's Silver has an aroma of rose so intense that it's hardly recognizable as gin. In fact, it was hard to pick out gin's most dominant trait: juniper. CHOW.com's Supertaster columnist called it "gin that's actually probably vodka."

In the hands of the right bartender, I could see Nolet's performing compelling feats, but when it tries to cover the gin standards, it falls down. Nolet's absolutely destroyed my beloved Fever-Tree tonic water. And the dry martini I made with it was a little like sipping perfume. I recommend pairing it with strong, fresh lime juice and going light on the simple syrup to make a gimlet or a gin rickey. I'm nicknaming this gin the Turkish Rose (after one of its main ingredients).

No.3: If Nolet's is perfume, No.3 is aftershave. Its creator, the famous wine and spirits merchant Berry Bros. & Rudd, has been around since 1698. The obelisk-shaped, antique-looking bottle and label recall black-suited, bowler-hat-wearing London bankers: firm, manly, and direct. The gin contains what the label says are but six botanicals, the essential three being: juniper, citrus peel (orange and grapefruit), and angelica root.

On the nose, I'm struck by the simplicity. The juniper is forward, but it's well-integrated and beautifully balanced by the earthy angelica and the high-toned citrus. In the mouth, it's dry but finishes with an attractive persistence and warmth. Unsurprisingly, No.3 makes an outstanding martini and an addictive G&T. If your needs for a gin are like your needs for a bank—solid, dependable, unglamorous—this is the bottle for you.

Bloom: This is the girlfriend of gins. As a PR agent wrote me, Bloom is "the first premium gin distilled, blended and balanced specifically for the female palate, using botanical essences inspired by her English garden -- lavender, honeysuckle, and chamomile." The tall, clear bottle is engraved with climbing vines and blossoms, like a faux henna tattoo.

Juniper is prominent, though it's a wispy, mellow version: Its aromas don't leap out of the glass to assault your nostrils, but rather gently invite you in. I found myself reaching to smell my glass again and again. Silly, gender-based marketing aside, the taste is subtle, soft, complex.

Bloom makes a quite subdued, but fine, martini. I recommend a restrained vermouth like Dolin Dry with a twist, rather than an olive. If mixing with tonic, Fever-Tree is a bit overpowering. The more earthy Q Tonic makes for a nice soil in which to plant the more floral Bloom.

Will any of these gins be around as long as Hendrick's, the cucumber- and rose-scented gin that has become a classic? Clearly that is what they're going for. We'll see how the strident, demanding Turkish Rose fares. Or the companionable Girlfriend. The British Banker, well, I expect him to be around for a long time.