From the Blog
Shuijingfang cocktails1
Shuijingfang Baijiu Cocktails Part 1 - Classics I have been living and bartending in China for 3 1/2 years now. Over the course of that time I have tried to taste a few Chinese baijius from a professional perspective (as well as from a social one over dinner!) and write some tasting not...
Shanghai White
Shanghai White has been around for more than two years now, but unless you live in Shanghai or Hong Kong, chances are you won't have seen or tasted it. I've just managed to acquire a bottle, so thought I'd give brief overview. Part of Diageo's portfolio, it is produced in Chengdu at...
Centurion’s Martini
I am sipping on a rather lovely Fin de Siècle made to Harry Craddock's 1930 recipe but with a dash of orange blossom water. 50ml beefeater gin 20ml carpano antica formula 10 ml amer picon Dash homemade orange bitters Dash orange blossom water However it was pronounced a little too cha...
Chinese Baijiu
This baijiu post grew out of an interest in one of the world's most popular spirits that I'd never heard of. I'm a bit of a spirit enthusiast and so on moving to China I was somewhat surprised to hear the statistics. This led to a bit more research and some tasting - initially against my...
Fog Cutter
Given the weather in Beijing today looks like this... ...I thought I'd mix up a couple of Fog Cutters to ease us into the evening. The Fog Cutter is a classic tiki dri...
Cocktail Tourism Part 1 – Introductory steps
I first started visiting notable cocktail locations by accident. Whilst I have been working in bars for the past 18 years, I have also spent a fair few working for a charity involved in plant and animal conservation. Many of the projects i dealt with were in fantastic tropical locations,...
Malacca Sling (Part 1)
I am currently in Malacca, Malaysia, tracing a little family history. My mother was born here (Malacca/Melaka General Hospital - we visited earlier today), and my grandfather spent most of his working life here, representing the Dunlop Rubber Company in their local plantation operations...
2011 bar trends
After all the 'looking back over 2010' between Christmas and New Year, and with all the other lists that seem to be happening at the moment, we thought we'd jump on the band wagon and write our 5 potential bar trends of the next year. 1. More bitter, brown and stirred (please)! Bart...
The Cocktail
We refer to most mixed drinks these days as cocktails, originally however, it was just another style of drink, alongside juleps, smashes, flips, fizzes, sours, cobblers, punches and toddies. In Jerry Thomas’s 1862 How to Mix Drinks, cocktails appear in a scant 11 of 220 alcoholic mixe...
The Botany of Bitters
(first made available in The Hide Bar's Newsletter number 44, October 2010) Bitters have been undergoing a resurgence in the last few years. Driven by the fashion for classic cocktails, bartenders...
The Shakes
Like many, I’ve recently been watching a bit of sport. Whether tennis, football, cycling, each participant tends to have a style of their own – much like bartenders. Whilst we have our own particular styles however, we are generally trying to achieve the same ends. Take shaking fo...
Disco Drinks
Recently one of the drinks industry magazines was praising the work that Galliano has done in recovering its original flavours, and how the ‘new’ Galliano L’Autentico had raised the Harvey Wallbanger back from the depths of Disco. The resurgence of prohibition-era classics over the...
First drink of the night
The other day I was out for a long, and as it turned out, very hot bike ride. About twice as long as it needed to be, and with the added bonus of some very large hills. Whilst all very pleasant, I noticed that my mind frequently wandered. One of the particular subjects it kept wandering...
Drinking Chocolate
In the run up to Easter, I thought I'd put up a few classic chocolate cocktails to give those of you with a sweet tooth something to sip on. None of these drinks include syrupy chocolate liqueurs - they all call for the more subtle and mature flavours of a decent crème de cacao. Whilst...
Bottles & Bottles
Bottles, I’ve got a few. I guess that’s only sensible, being a bartender and all, but for the sake of this piece, it’s the bottles themselves I’m interested in. A spirit manufacturer recently asked me about bottles. They were looking to redesign the bottle shape, and were inte...
What’s in a name?
The name of a drink can be very influential to its success or failure. It can provoke instant familiarity and reassurance that you're going to get what you want, or it can be the thing that draws your eye to it in the first place, leading you to try new things. If we exclude those cr...
