January 2011

Advanced Pairing

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Ever since Americans started drinking real wine, the concept of pairing has been a popular topic. Plainly, what food flavors play well with certain alcoholic beverages? Everybody knows the old standards of red wine for red meat, white wine for fish, maybe a rose for poultry. Intermediate pairing techniques start to veer into more adventurous territory, the red wine and chocolate crowd or the people who get fussy about the long-lost cheese course. This is all well and good, but the process is starting to get a little esoteric. The idea behind pairing is to make every element of a meal harmonize, to make sure you're getting the optimal experience out of whatever you taste. Pairing for the sake of pairing turns this search for pleasure into a game of challenging palates. The following pairing suggestions aren't intended to be novel or at all counter-intuitive. Like classic wine pairing, their one and only aim is to make a meal better.

Don't Abuse-- Infuse.

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I'm sick of flavored liquor. That is, I'm sick of the brand-name, off-the-shelf, candy-scented swill that has invaded liquor store shelves over the past decade. I could put up with the plethora of flavored vodkas out there. I mean, technically most hard liquor is flavored vodka, they're just flavors most people wouldn't drink if they were marketed as such. What's whiskey but sun-and-wood-flavored vodka? Gin's just juniper vodka and brandy is a wine and vodka cocktail. That's the nature of neutral grain spirits. The real offense, the last freaking straw, was when flavored whiskey hit the market. Vanilla whiskey. Cherry whiskey. These are sins, plain and simple. Oh, not because whiskey plus other flavors is an affront to the gods of distillation, but because there's a huge difference between the muddled fruit of an Old Fashioned and some confectionery syrup ruining a perfectly good batch of bourbon. That's why this flavoring thing has gone too far and why it's time to bring liquor infusion back to homemade basics. You want flavored vodka or, dare I say, flavored whiskey? Patience and fresh ingredients are all you need.

The Lush Chronicles: Amateur Night Blues

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There are a handful of nights across the year that invite amateur drinkers to get plastered. Whereas the self-respecting lushes of America are content to caress their livers from the inside on at least a weekly basis, most folks save up the punches on their drunk card for celebrations like St. Patrick's Day, Halloween and, of course, New Year's Eve. Every bartender hates these nights with a passion. People who aren't used to getting drunk have a habit of horribly misbehaving on those nights when they actually do dive into eye-deep booze. This is often embarrassing, violent and all kinds of ugly. Three things in particular happen on Amateur Night that make my marinated heart weep.