Washington Gin Showcase Part 4

Posted on June 16, 2013 by BoozeNerds

Yesterday we went to Proof, a showcase for local distillers. Something right up our alley 🙂 It was fantastic – if you are in the Seattle area and didn’t get a chance to attend, we strongly recommend that you try to do so next year. There were 40+ local distillers with an amazing selection of craft booze, lots of delicious bites from local restaurants, plus plentiful water stations (important!). We picked up several bottles (10 to be precise 🙂 ) of booze, which inspired us to post another Washington gin showcase. Look for another one in two weeks so we can finish up Washington gins (for now!) and then it’s on to Oregon gins, of which there are also a lot of tasty ones. We’ll be bar hopping in San Francisco next Sunday, so we may or may not post anything. Oh poor us 😉

For this showcase, we chose 3 gins that were available at Proof. We decided to go with the Soft Gin from Heritage Distilling, the Alpinist from Seattle Distilling and finally the Bulfinch 83 from Wishkah River Distilling. Read on to see what we think.

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Posted in Booze Review, gin, Gin, Showcase, Tasting Notes | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

MxMo: Southern Virgin & Peruvian Disco

Posted on June 9, 2013 by BoozeNerds

It’s Mixology Monday time again. This month’s theme comes from Andrea from Gin Hound. It’s cherries! A favorite around here 🙂 Both of the drinks this month are favorites that we’ve been holding in our back pockets for just the right occasion. And thanks to Andrea we have one!

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Kentucky Bourbon Tour: Everything else

Posted on June 2, 2013 by BoozeNerds

Hello and welcome to our final post about our Kentucky bourbon tour. Here are parts one and two

While every place we visited had something of interest to offer, of the other distilleries and retailers we saw, three stood out; Buffalo Trace, Limestone Branch and Barrel House. We’ll say a little more about why, plus taste the white whiskies we picked up from them.

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Posted in Barrel House, Buffalo Trace, fernet, Limestone Branch, moonshine, Original Cocktail, Tasting Notes, Tours | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Kentucky Bourbon Tour: Willett

Posted on May 26, 2013 by BoozeNerds

Welcome to our second entry for our Kentucky bourbon tour.

There are many bourbon distilleries in Kentucky, and of those, there were two that were “must sees” for us. One was Four Roses, the other was Willett. Neither us can remember exactly how we first found out about Willett’s bourbon and rye. We’re guessing drinking to excess may have contributed to that forgetfulness. 🙂 Anyhow, they have quickly become a Booze Nerd favorite. Both their bourbons and their ryes offer some really lovely expressions of those spirits. And for their rare releases, you can’t get much better value for the price.

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Kentucky Bourbon Tour: Four Roses

Posted on May 19, 2013 by BoozeNerds

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 BoozeNerds

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 BoozeNerds

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 BoozeNerds

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 Shaun

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 BoozeNerds

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 , , , , | 5 Comments