The Most Expensive Glass of Whisky in the World

I have a rule about cocktails: anything over $13 is going to suck. I have a similar rule about spirits: anything over $20 probably isn't worth it.

After reading about LA's "luxury whisky bar" £10, I think I'm making a new rule: anything with a five-digit price tag is just stupid. Granted, I haven't tried the 64 year old, Sherry oak aged Macallan Scotch that fetches $64,000 per pour, so I may owe £10, and Macallan, an apology. Until our little blog finds a patron to sponsor a pour of that nonsense, I'm sticking with my $11 San Francisco cocktails, thanks.

PS: Note the Cocktail Kingdom barware in the article's picture. I have that at home. Not so luxury now, LA. 

Meet Kerry-O, our new dive bar correspondent

Besides having a vibrant cocktail culture, San Francisco has great dive bars. Or so we've been told. Actually, Noelle and I never go to dive bars. She's got a mild case of agoraphobia, and I hate loud places. We've decided, however, that our inadequacies have deprived this blog of a great drinking culture for too long. Are we venturing into the crowds? The sights, smells, and sounds? Not a chance. Someone else is.

Meet Kerry-O.

Kerry-O goes wherever she damn well pleases, and it so happens that she loves her a good dive bar. We've enlisted her help in exploring all of the good dives in SF and reporting back to the thirsty public. Look forward to her posts, which will give the skinny on the best local dives. 

The Perfect Pairing: Friends, Food, and Chateau Ste Michelle Rieslings

A warm summer’s day. A cold winter’s night. Spicy food. Seafood. Chinese. Dessert. What can’t you pair with some nice rieslings? So we were very excited to try Chateau Ste. Michelle’s rieslings—a beautiful trio of dry riesling, riesling, and sweet.

The winery was good enough to send us a box of the wines to try, and it was a sight to behold when we carefully opened up the box to see the three bottles for the first time. What better way to enjoy these wines, we realized, was with good friends and good food? And so we thought it was a great occasion to have a riesling party.

Rieslings are celebrated as an extremely versatile wine that is easy to pay with a wide range of flavors. In light of that, each of our friends brought over one type of food that we thought would be fun to pair with the rieslings. Common suggestions for the sweet white wine often include the likes of spicy thai food, sweet desserts, salads, and pork. But we thought we’d eschew these common suspects and try different types of every day food to see which flavor paired with each wine.

Here are the results of our tasting:

The wine: Chateau Ste. Michelle Dry Riesling
The taste: Partiers noted vanilla, pear, and apricot flavors. The light drink was lovely way to ease into the meal on a hot summers day.
Most successfully paired with: Salmon, salami.

The wine: Chateau Ste. Michelle Riesling
The taste: A bolder, more buttery, low-acid riesling that was citrusy and sweet. Great as a table wine and main course accompaniment.
Most successfully paired with: Spicy hummus, pickled garlic, bleu-cheese-stuffed olives, quiche.

The wine: Chateau Ste Michelle Harvest Select Sweet Riesling
The taste: The sweetest of the trio and the richest, though in the grand scheme of rieslings, it still ranked as medium sweet, making it a great main-course accompaniment. The flavors were warm, like peaches, and fresh, like we were sitting in the vineyard.
Most successfully paired with: Dubliners Irish Cheese, brie, black pepper chicken pate.

The verdict: The Chateau Ste Michelle rieslings are nice wines to have on-hand at home to accompany with your dinners or to cool down on a summer day. Despite their name, most of them sit in the mid-sweet range, making it accessible for many.

Cheers!

Summer Cocktails and Appleton Estate Rum

San Francisco summers are a strange bird: Hot, sunny days are intermingled with grey skies, fog, and icy winds off the Bay. What is a girl to drink? Today Josh and I headed down to the Appleton Estate Rum cocktail event at Heaven's Dog. It was serving up three great summer sips for happy hour. Featuring rum (naturally!), the drinks were refreshing but also warm. Pull up the lawn chairs, we've found some great summer cocktails!

Here were the yummy cocktails featured today:

Savannah Planters Punch
A fruity and refreshing cocktail served over a beautiful bed of crushed ice. This is the dream of a drink you'd love to drink poolside—or at least when you're sitting at a bar wishing you were poolside. The delicate hearted, beware! The drink goes down easy, but it's backed with ironside Smith and Cross rum (114 proof, kids!). Appleton V/X, Delord Armangnac, Smith and Cross, pineapple, lime, Angostura bitters.



Son of a Gun
A bright but also warm and spicy cocktail, thanks to a heavy dash of angostura bitters (enough to make the drink burn dark pink!). Appleton V/X, Angostura Bitters, Lime, Orgeat.



Will P. Taylor Hotel Nacional Special
Another vibrant cocktail, almost creamy from the pineapple gum, brand, and egg whites, despite the absence of any dairy. It's like drinking summer clouds. Appleton V/X, lime, pineapple gum, apricot brandy, Angostura bitters.


Happy summer, all!

Big - a new little bar in San Francisco

When you walk into Big, SF's newest bar, you've stepped into another dimension. With enough room to fit about 22 people comfortable, you'd better check out Big very soon before it gets...well...big.


The decor is perfect. Big reminds me some of Chicago's Violet Hour, since both strategically use heavy, velvet curtains to absorb both noise and light. The result is a cool, quiet atmosphere in which you can actually talk to your companions.



It's got a very living room feel.




The drinks are incredibly fresh and very citrus forward. The bartender has come up with some pretty interesting concoctions, such as a nice smoked gin. They carry Rusty Blade Gin, a barrel aged gin that I'd be interested in trying side-by-side with Ransom. Both the smoked gin (homemade) and the Rusty Blade made darn fine, slow-sipping cocktails.



This was a nice number using Gin, lime, shiso, cucumber, and green Chartreuse.



This was whiskey, maple, lemon, and smoked olive oil.

The wait was quite long for us, so bring only a few companions and your patience. Big isn't the place to go if you're in a rush or if you want to get blitzed before your night out on the town. If, on the other hand, you have a friend in town and you want to give them the quintessential San Francisco experience, stop by for a drink.

In the interest of impartiality and fairness to the reader, I should mention that the drinks are $14 a pop, which, to me, seems a bit steep. Nevertheless, it's worth at least a try, especially for the atmosphere.

Big is on Post between Jones and Leavenworth, right across from Farm Table. If the light is on outside, you're good to go. If not, you're out of luck.

Big
761 Post St
San Francisco, CA 94102
http://big-san-francisco.com/
Open: Tue-Sat 6 pm - 2 am

Winter Cocktails at AQ Restaurant and Bar

It really can't be said that San Francisco doesn't have seasons.

Sure, the city's east cost counterparts boast the full blusters of winter and dramatic fall displays of color and leaves. And even Midwest cities, like Chicago and Minneapolis, may claim seasons intense enough to freeze your tears and melt your skin and all of the earned bragging rights in leathered character.

But thin-skinned and soft-hearted San Franciscans may be, it cannot be said that the City on the Bay does not have seasons. You really only have to look to what San Francisco devotes so much of its pomp and circumstance: the food. In city that puts events like farmers markets at centerstage, eating with the seasons is an important part of San Francisco living. Home cooks and professional chefs kow-tow to fresh catches and seasonal harvests.

AQ Restaurant is the perfect example of this. The restaurant, which just opened in November to a flurry of accolades (including a nomination for the James Beard Award's best new restaurant), changes every aspect of its service with the seasons. The interior changes from the warm colors of fall to stark winter white. The staff rotates its garb from flannels to pressed whites. And, of course, the food and drinks shift every season to reflect the particular season's bounty.

If the concept sounds quaint, it is. But it avoids becoming gimmicky simply because, well, the cocktails are good.

What's cool is that many of AQ's cocktails give a strong nod to the classics. In fact, a whole section of the drink menu is devoted to "seasonal classics," common drinks that are tweaked here and there to make it the restaurant's own.

AQ also features some of its own drinks, too. They're not cocktails you'll necessarily find in the gentlemen's companion—but they were definitely delicious enough to make up a modern cocktail book!

We went to AQ during its winter menu. I was particularly pleased with my Manhattan, which featured orange-peel-infused bourbon, sweet vermouth, winter bitters, and angostura bitters. It was a really lovely spicy take on the old classic. It managed to taste enough like the original but took on its own distinct mood—kind of like visiting the same place at different times of day.

Next I ordered a New Amsterdam Variant #2: raisin-infused bols genever gin, maple syrup, old fashioned bitters, topped with apple cider. It was a sweet drink that ran thick with the maple syrup. The taste of raisins and cider tasted familiar and made me feel warm on a cold winter's night. Completely appropriate drink for fall (apple season!), as well.

The drink somehow become reminiscent of raisins and of hot cider. It was the perfect spice to warm my insides on a cold winter's night.

Josh asked the bartender for a recommendation on a scotch drink, and she whipped up a super tasty Bobby Burns—a deep and smoky drink that usually includes scotch, vermouth, and Bendictine.

Our companion Kasey, on the other hand, ordered a Bison Rose, and it came in this really cool cup! (Standby for low-quality pictures in a dark, dark bar.)

Overall, we were most impressed by the drinks featured on the menu (opposed to ones whipped up off-menu), and the bar takes a really fresh take on well-loved cocktails. Drinks were really well-balanced and very accessible for food-minded folks looking for deep flavors in their cocktails. These are California cocktails at their best!

[For the interested, here are dark, dramatic photos of the AQ winter cocktail menu, which has since been swapped out for the spring menu.]

AQ Restaurant & Bar

1085 Mission St
San Francisco, CA 94103 415) 341-9000
http://aq-sf.com

Leopold's Navy Strength Gin

Ever since having Leopold's Navy Strength Gin, I've got the unshakable feeling that all other gin (which I love, don't get me wrong) is somehow imperfect, somehow flawed in a crucial way. It's bold, juniper forward, and rich.



Trevor Easter, over at Heaven's Dog, introduced me to Leopold's. He explained the totally bad ass origins of the "Navy Strength" category. In a nutshell, one deck of Navy ships was set aside for gunpowder–unless a liquid was over a certain proof, it was not allowed on this deck at all, since if it leaked, it would ruin the gunpowder. A liquor of high enough proof, however, would still ignite. Thus, Navy Strength, which weighs in at a whopping 57% ABV, or 114 proof.

You may think that Navy Strength gin would be unwieldy, but Trevor (the viking in the picture below) made me the best gin-forward drink I've ever had. Ever. Essentially, it's a gin old fashioned using gum syrup (not simple) and a tiny splash of angostura.



I know I could not replicate this drink at home. Crafting such a simple drink requires technical mastery. This is one of the reasons Trevor is one of my top three favorite bartenders in the city–he's a big geek. In a good way. I mean, the guy has an infrared thermometer behind his bar with which he checks a drink's temperature. Every tool he uses is chilled. Each piece of ice is selected and modified to fit the drink.

In other words, this is much more than a simple gin old fashioned. I'd put this on my list of cocktails I could drink forever.

I should also warn you, reader, that this drink, and this gin, isn't for people who like gin. It's for people who love gin.

Heaven’s Dog

1148 Mission St.

San Francisco, CA 94103

415.863.6008