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Expect some technical difficulties

This weekend I'm going to switch to a new blogging back-end. The website address should stay the same and I'm hoping I can have all my rss feed readers updated/redirected, but if you don't see new content showing up in your blog reader by Monday (but do see it on the homepage) please sign up again and let me know! Until Monday, you may see some major weirdness. Please cross your fingers for the next two and a half days.

Technical difficulties

Blogger went crazy on me last week, so if you received no posts then a gazillion in your feed readers I apologize but won't accept responsibility for your heartache- and mine was worse. Not being able to blog was like someone cutting off my mouth. Things seem fixed for now, and just in time for Tales of the Cocktail this week. Phew!

Getting kinda tired packing and unpacking...

Oh, the day before travel. It's always the same- stuffing bubblewrap into your suitcase so you can bring bottles home, watering the houseplants, and muddling all the leftover produce into cocktails. (I no longer muddle the houseplants.) I've got the routine down by now. Last night I enjoyed a lemon gin cucanectartini that was a delicious send-off to my next destination: London. Wahoo!

Poppers

It's so hot in my apartment in San Francisco right now that a cork stopper just spontaneously popped off a bottle of vodka in my living room. Or perhaps it was a divine sign that I need a refreshing cocktail right about now...

Welcome home, Camper

While other people on the press trips I take start missing their spouses, family, and pets after a few days, I have none of those things and am always glad to be out of the one-bedroom apartment where I spend most of my waking and sleeping hours. I could stay traveling forever. That said, sometimes I do get a welcome greeting on my return, from all the packages UPS and FedEx has been unable to deliver in my absence. The day after I returned from Spain and France, I had seven packages containing mostly delicious booze. Welcome back, Camper!

Optional adjustment

Kind, wonderful, good-looking readers: I was wondering if I might impose upon you for a small favor. I'm now using FeedBurner to better track rss/atom/etc. subscribers, such as people who use Google Reader or the My Yahoo! homepage. Though you should still be able to use whatever reader you were using without a problem, if you feel like switching to the new one I would love you even more than I do now- as if that's possible! Just click on the button below to (re-)add Alcademics to your reader, then you can delete the older feed so you won't have two copies of every post.

Subscribe in a reader

Thanks- and let me know if you have any problems with this.

What a wild, wonderful year

This past year has been busy, crazy, and wonderful. I realize it's only been a little over a year since I started writing about cocktails and spirits full-time. That seems ludicrous, as I've learned so much since my first big feature in the SF Chronicle in October of 2006. And the thing is, I still don't feel like I know anything. That's great because I get bored easily and it will be a very long time before I am sick of this topic. Cheers to that. This year, I went on visits to the following distilleries/breweries:

• Canadian Mist (near Toronto)
• Blue Ice Vodka (Idaho)
• 209 Gin (San Francisco)
• Genevieve/Junipero/Old Potrero (San Francisco)
• Mount Gay Rum (Barbados)
• Chopin Vodka (Warsaw, Poland)
• Finlandia Vodka (near Helsinki, Finland)
• Don Julio Tequila (Jalisco, Mexico)
• 4 Copas Tequila (Jalisco, Mexico)
• Partida Tequila (Jalisco, Mexico)
• El Tesoro Tequila (Jalisco, Mexico)
• Herradura Tequila (Jalisco, Mexico)
• Cazadores Tequila (Jalisco, Mexico)
• Sake One Sake (near Portland, Oregon)
• Takara Sake (Berkeley, California)

Plus additional trips to New York, Aspen, and Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans. Wow. I'd like to thank the sponsors of those trips. Thanks! You learn so much more about products from visiting the distillery and especially talking to the distillers at each. I hope that the next year is pretty close to this one in content and adventure, but perhaps with a little more cash and health insurance and book deals added in there somewhere. Here's to continued good drinking in '08!

The bounced booze email Hall of Shame

For the third time in a week, the email address on a spirit company's website bounced back as an invalid address. As I contact a lot of brands, this happens a lot. Boy it's frustrating. Note to PR people- please check the email address on your clients' websites. If it doesn't work, you're missing press opportunities. And if you're afraid of spam, just set up one of those graphic identifier thingies (I use it for the comments for this blog) to weed it out. I'll keep adding to (and hopefully subtracting from) this list as time goes on, but here is: The Bounced Booze Email Hall of Shame 12/26/07 Right Gin from RightGin.com 12/18/07 Milagro Tequila from MilagroTequila.com 12/18/07 jnixon@wgrantusa.com from the William Grant USA website (this may be the address the general email or press email forwards to) Feel free to send me others or put them in the comments.

Busted!

It is an immutable law of lifestyle journalism that all articles about booze appearing in the run-up to New Year's Eve must give tips on either avoiding hangovers or curing them.

So says Jason Wilson in today's Washington Post story on grapefruit drinks. So true. Last year this time I wrote about bartenders' hangover cures. Last week I wrote about non-alcoholic cocktails. Friday I have a story about brunch drinks. As a consumer, I've always hated the lack of imagination in lifestyle story programming, especially between Thanksgiving (celebrities who take two hours "giving up" their holiday to ladle soup), and New Years (how to keep those weight loss resolutions). But as a freelancer, they make it really easy to sell stories. And I happen to know there's a weight loss vodka coming out early next year.

Up to my ears in tequila

I have three current assignments on tequila, which means I've been tasting a ton of it. Tequila is a tough category to write about for a few reasons. Each brand has a minimum of three expressions, but usually four or five, and then there is a bargain line produced by the same distillery. And unlike scotch, just because you like one brand expression is no indication that you'll like any of the others so you need to sample them all and pick and choose. Also, every time you write about tequila, you have to explain mixto, blanco, repo, anejo, extra, which takes up a lot of words that could be otherwise used to provide new information. And finally, tequila can be hard to learn about, as distilleries use different methodologies to make it, age expressions it for different amounts of time in different types of wood, and source agave from different regions. Much of this information doesn't make it onto the website so you have to track down the right person, which isn't usually the PR person but the brand manager or even master distiller. That said, I find it all fascinating and I'm *loving* the work.

So last year

The Chronicle has a big story on the popularity of speakeasy bars in the Sunday pink (datebook) section. It's a fine story, but really old news. (At this rate next year we might hear that skulls are in fashion.) Last week they ran a story on historic cocktails in San Francisco, including the pisco punch. These stories, once limited to nightlife sections, were discovered by food and wine editors in the last year or two, and are now rolling over into the style and news sections only in the past several months. Overall this is a good thing- more attention to cocktails means more consumer awareness means more pressure on drinking venues to do a better job. It also should mean more writing assignments in better publications for me if I'm smart. But my initial reaction to seeing these stories popping up in venues and sections that until recently wouldn't touch cocktails (several of which I'd pitched cocktail stories to directly) is always a very personal one: That's what I've been talking about this whole time. I get jealous that these stories are assigned by and to people who just figured it out. I guess I'm going to have to adjust my attitude on this front. Maybe the reason that these editors are discovering that cocktails have ingredients and history and culture behind them is because the booze nerds have been doing a good job of getting the information out there. Instead of thinking of slow editors as slighting me, I need to think of myself as a pioneer. And that's pretty dumb, because I'm reporting on things that other people are doing, not creating anything myself. Heck, in the same Chronicle section today they reprinted a column from 1962 about the 100th anniversary of Jerry Thomas' book. You mean I didn't invent the wheel? I thank you all for bearing witness to my ego check. You may now resume your drinking.

Mexicoh!

I'm back from a week in Mexico, where we toured 5 distilleries 5 days in a row. Between them- 4 Copas, Partida, Cazadores, El Tesoro, and Herradura- I endured at least 9 mariachi bands, 1 bout of Montezuma's revenge, 1 venue in which you can pee in a trough beneath the bar, very few hours of sleep, 1 missed flight, more than 60 pages of notes, 684 photos, 30ish great co-travelers, 1 two-story pour of tequila into my mouth, 6 bottles smuggled home in my luggage, and so much information that I could write tequila stories for the next six months with the information gleaned on this trip alone (editors: e-mail me, okay?). I'm unlikely to have time to describe the trip in detail now (I'm still three trips behind in that) so instead here are the pictures.

Here today, gone tomorrow

The problem with traveling so much is that I haven't had time to report on the travel. (I need to get better at working on planes.) I'm back from New York as of this afternoon and heading off to Mexico (again) Saturday night. And in the meantime I have a ton of stories due. Anyway, while in New York I hit David Wondrich's book launch party, where it turns out I knew about 15 people I'd met either out here, on press trips, or at Tales of the Cocktail. It was great. The party was at Flatiron Lounge, then we went to an after-party at Passerby. Then I hit Death & Company and PDT. Both bars were wonderful once we were in and had a seat. I think it's the same at Bourbon & Branch out here as it is there: the bars put in roadblocks to keep them from getting too crowded and uncomfortable, but then it makes the experience of getting in a little uncomfortable. Personally I don't mind the rigmarole to earn great cocktails in a comfortable space. (And the door at PDT is far more awesome than I imagined.) The next night I went back to PDT and Passerby, despite the fact I had a car coming to take me to the airport at 5:45 AM. (It's Jordan's fault.) So instead of the work I needed to do on the plane I napped, thus repeating the cycle of hurrying to finish stories from one trip while packing for the next. I don't mind the rigmarole to earn great trips to fun places. Hooray!

I.O.U.

...several blog posts, including: -A trip to Barbados with Mount Gay Rum, or, Quest for Falernum -Molecular mixology seminar in San Francisco, or, Chemistry for Drunks -Dinner with Joy Spence of Appleton rum, or, the Master Blender who has her own handler to keep her from giving away all the booze -WhiskyFest San Francisco report, or, I don't know yet because I'm about to go there Watch this space for exciting updates, or, this is a blog post about not posting

Boozin' Confusion

Sometimes finding the right person to contact to ask questions about a booze brand is harder than it seems. You see who owns it and ask then call them up, right? Of course not. There is a weird distribution system in this country (and, it seems, in others) that I still don't understand. Sometimes the correct contact is from the distributor. Sometimes it's the owner. Often it's a PR firm working for one or the other. Recently I tried to find the brand history of Cynar, which is owned by Grupo Campari (Campari, Skyy vodka), but distributed by importing company Premium Imports, which is owned by Heaven Hill (Elijah Craig, Evan Williams). So that took a while. This week I wanted to fact check a sentence about Amer Picon, which is owned by Diageo. Because PR people move around so much, I have no reliable contacts at Diageo anymore, (note to Diageo: check your email), which makes them really hard to contact in the first place. So I called a contact from their wine division, who was very nice and talked to a spirits person for me, who told him they didn't own the brand. (Note to person: check your website.) Not true, of course, but this took some extra unraveling and contacts and people. They do own it but it's not distributed in the U.S., and where it is distributed (France, Belgium), it's distributed by Moet Hennessey. So then I could use my contacts at MH to call their contacts in Europe to find that my fact was basically correct. That was a lot of work to verify a piece of information that's readily available on Wikipedia. I've found in both cases, the people who own the brand know little about the brand and the distributors, who may be competitive companies to the brand but are selling it, know all about it. When I get this all figured out (estimation: another year) I'll let you know.

Welcome to Alcademics.com!

Hi- If you're seeing this it means you're viewing my new domain, alcademics.com. If you use a blog reader, please make sure it's pointing here instead of the old blog hosted on cramper.com. I'll be making many template changes in the upcoming days and weeks, but please let me know if this site looks funky in your browser so I can try to fix it. What do you think of my new domain name?