Kentucky Bourbon Tour: Four Roses

Posted on May 19, 2013 by

Being booze nerds and all (hence the name :) ), it isn’t unheard of for us to spend our vacation time doing things that are booze-related. So a week and a half ago, we decided to go to Lexington, Kentucky and visit some of the bourbon distilleries there, both to see how one of our favorite spirits is made and to see what goodies we could find that aren’t getting distributed to Washington.

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MxMo: Clark Kent

Posted on May 18, 2013 by

It’s time again for Mixology Monday. This months theme, Witches’ Garden, comes from Mark Holmes at Cardiff Cocktails. It’s an herbal theme that we’re very excited about. We have lots of herbs in the garden right now, in the form of sage, thyme, rosemary, parsley, and chives. In the end we decided to try something with garlic chives, which are tasty and we didn’t think they’d get much play. Plus chive flowers are all fluffy purple and festive.

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Daiquiri Comparison

Posted on May 5, 2013 by

The weather is very warm here in Seattle which makes it perfect for sipping a delicious daiquiri. We like daiquiris here at Booze Nerds :) The daiquiri is classic, and a fairly simple drink, only three ingredients.  Despite that, there are a lot of recipes out there, and the proportions of the ingredients can make a big difference in how the drink actually tastes. This is one of those things that fascinates us as Booze Nerds. :)  So we decided to try several different recipes side by side to see how they compared flavor-wise.

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The Four Roses Alphabet

Posted on April 28, 2013 by

We here at Booze Nerds like bourbon a lot and one of our favorite distillers is Four Roses. For those of you who are unaware of this, Four Roses has 10 different recipes that they make, using two different mash bills and five different proprietary yeasts. However they can explain it better than we can: 10 Recipes.

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MxMo: The Night Market & the Hippie Chick

Posted on April 21, 2013 by

It’s time again for Mixology Monday. This month’s theme comes from Rowen at the Fogged In Lounge, and is all about vegetables. An interesting challenge to say the least. But then we like interesting challenges. :)

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Posted in gin, green chartreuse, lillet blanc, Mixology Monday, Original Cocktail, shochu | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Umami Cocktails

Posted on April 14, 2013 by

We both enjoy savory cocktails, but there isn’t a vast variety out there outside of bloody marys and dirty martinis. So we thought we’d experiment a bit and see if we could come up with a few new options, and soy sauce seemed like a reasonable place to start. It brings some lovely savory salty and umami notes. We tried it with several base spirits, including gin, scotch, mezcal and aged rum. Christa wasn’t a big fan of it with gin, but Shaun quite liked it. It would probably make a nice dirty martini or Gibson. We both felt that it didn’t work at all with the scotch. We tried both a smokey scotch and a sweet smooth scotch. In both cases, the soy pulled out some serious bitter notes that were not appealing. However for the mezcal and the aged rum the soy pulled out some interesting notes that we felt could work as a starting place for a couple new cocktails.

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Posted in aged rum, barenjager, creole shrubb, mezcal, Original Cocktail | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Cherry Spirits

Posted on April 7, 2013 by

It’s spring and the cherries are in bloom, and cherry is one of our favorite spring flavors. The fruit isn’t in season yet, so we have a number of cherry spirits to tide us over until it is available. Today we thought we’d ferret them out of our cabinet, make a drink with each, and think fond thoughts of cherry season :)

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Posted in cherry liqueur, kirschwasser, Original Cocktail, rye | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Apostate

Posted on March 31, 2013 by

Some people are celebrating Easter today. Some of us are celebrating *not* celebrating Easter. :D We decided to create a new cocktail with that in mind. We wanted something that spoke to being carefree and happy, so we went with a tiki style drink. There aren’t a whole lot of bourbon-based tiki drinks out there, so we decided to start with that as a base. We also have a lovely coconut puree from Perfect Purees that we are always looking for a good excuse to use. All of the purees we’ve tried from them are brilliant, so we highly recommend them if you want access to excellent tropical ingredients year round. We can’t recommend them enough. Tangerines are in season right now, and we love tangerines in drinks, so we decided to add them to the party as well. They add a nice sweetness, but they also add more acidity compared to oranges. So they bring a lot more to the party. Without further ado, we give you the Apostate.

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Cognac Cocktails

Posted on March 24, 2013 by

We’re big fans of cognac. There are lots of lovely bottlings out there, and quite a number of delicious cocktails to use them in. We have a number of really nice cognacs in the cabinet, so we decided to try several of them in two different drinks to see how they came out. We decided to go with a Munich Sour for a citrus-heavy tiki style drink, and a Parisian for a more spirit forward style drink.

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Spring Equinox Cocktails

Posted on March 17, 2013 by

The spring equinox is upon us once again. It’s not warm here yet, but we’re starting to see some fresh ingredients in the markets that make us think of spring. Not bunnies, they don’t make a good cocktail ingredient ;) We went with mint and strawberries instead.

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Posted in bourbon, Cocktail, cocktail recipe, fernet, gin, Original Cocktail | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment