Imperia Russian Vodka is Made in Russia Damn It!

And no-one should imply otherwise…

Imperia Russian vodka

Roustam Tariko, a Russian multimillionaire and the president of Russian Standard, knows how to antagonize his competitors in the vodka market: Imply that they are not Russian.

Imperia Vodka, sold by his company, is distilled and bottled in Russia, a fact that is the centerpiece of the vodka’s first advertising campaign in the United States. The campaign slogan, “Vodka is Russian,” is a veiled jab at vodkas like Stolichnaya, which is distilled in Russia but bottled in – gasp – Latvia.

It is also a challenge to premium vodkas that are popular in the United States, but created outside Russia. Absolut, which was introduced in the United States in 1979, is based in Sweden, and Grey Goose is made in the Cognac region of western France. Imperia was introduced in the United States in 2005 and has sold about 35,000 cases.

“We are reclaiming our territory,” Tariko said during a telephone interview from China. “We are trying to gain as much as possible of the marketplace from other people who are trying to claim that they are Russians. There are a lot of people who are trying hard to sell themselves as Russian vodkas.”

Tariko has tagged Stolichnaya in the past with the accusation that it is less than authentically Russian, even suggesting that its makers “should be proud of their Latvian heritage.”

(click to continue reading Russian vodka maker taking a shot at his competitors – Technology – International Herald Tribune – The New York Times.)

Sipping vodka is an occupation for some, but not me. I can drink a quality vodka without diluting it with fruit juice or whatever, but I still prefer it chilled. A glass of good Scotch can be at room temperature, and enjoyed, but for my palate, not vodka.

If Imperia catches on in the United States, Tariko seems intent on converting Americans to the Russian style of drinking vodka.

“Considering that Americans are now moving away from whiskey, moving away from brown spirits in general, I believe that they will all join Russians who drink vodka straight,” he said. “They will sip it like cognac.”

Reading Around on July 2nd through July 3rd

A few interesting links collected July 2nd through July 3rd:

  • Dovecote Records Limewire is a bunch of hypocrites Gets mad at Us for stealing

    Woman: “Who the FUCK are you? And why are you eating our pizza?”

    Kosuke: Well our friend came in and told us there was free pizza at the bar. We are. So. Sorry. It was a misunderstanding.

    Woman: (with unbridled entitlement) This is a company party our CEO is here and you STOLE our pizza. Are you from out of town? Because let me tell you, NOTHING is free in New York City. Nothing is free… well maybe except for the condoms in Times Square.

    Paul and Kosuke continue apologizing. They offer to pay for the two slices.

    Woman: (didactically snobbish) We don’t want your money. No. Enjoy the pizza, but you can’t steal other people’s things. You can’t take what’s not yours

    Kosuke: What company do you guys work for?

    Woman: We work for Limewire.

    <Long pause> Kosuke’s eyes go wide. Anger festers in his pupils.

    Kosuke: Oh ok. Well I work at a record label so fuck you. You’ve stolen from us enough. (Bites pizza. Begins to walk away.)

  • That’s Right! I Said It’s Caipirinha Time! on Flickr – Photo Sharing! – Every time I look at Friendly Joe’s awesome caipirinha making instructional Flickr page, I get a mighty, mighty thirst.

    “Caipirinhas are the Brazilian national drink. That said, we won’t conject on the overall condition of the Brazilian populace at large. No worries- They’re refreshing and the weather’s warmin’ up –
    Follow these simple guidelines and you’ll be ready to samba in your neighbor’s flower beds in no time… “

  • Tour № 2 – Ogden Avenue Extension | Forgotten Chicago

    “Left: A brief aside, in case you forgot who built this damn city!

    Right: Remnants of Ogden’s bridge supports are still visible south of Division Street.”

  • Saddam And Goldman Sachs: Who Is The Student, And Who Is The Master?

    The funniest part is, you could legitimately argue that Goldman Sachs has killed more people than Saddam.

Cachaca, national drink of Brazil, is fire in a glass

I’ve only had caipirinhas twice, but I loved them (though, my head didn’t love me the next day). Unfortunately, I have yet to make a trek to Brazil, though it is on my short list.

Went to Brazil

“A pair of them will make you leap like [a] Playtex Girdle-gal,” wrote Charles H. Baker Jr. in his eccentric 1951 work, “The South American Gentleman’s Companion.”

His racy description captures the effect of cachaca (ka-SHA-sa), the Brazilian national drink with a sweet, fiery flavor that can pack a macho punch. Though often compared to a young white rum (both spring from sugar cane, though rum is made from molasses, a byproduct of refining cane into sugar, and cachaca is distilled from fermented cane), this spirit has a more devilish reputation all its own.

Indeed, though exported brands are roughly 80 proof, more potent bottles are the norm in Brazil. The spirit is popping up more and more here, with a movement toward higher-quality, more refined versions.

“The cheap stuff was all that was available for a long time in the United States,” says Joshua Pearson, beverage director of Sepia restaurant. “We’re definitely seeing more artisan products. … It becomes a nice spirit you can drink without adding tons of fruit juice or sugar.”

The most famous cachaca cocktail is the caipirinha (kai-pee-REEN-ya), a refreshing combo of cachaca, sugar and lime juice served on the rocks. Aged gold cachaca is often served neat.

[Click to read more Cachaca, Brazil’s national drink, is fire in a glass — Bill Daley, chicagotribune.com]

Wonder where to get the best cachaca in Chicago? Sams, perhaps?

Reading Around on March 17th

Some additional reading March 17th from 15:24 to 15:41:

  • eG Forums -> Making Limoncello – Take the peels of one dozen lemons + 1 lime microplaned off. … Place the peels into an airtight container (I use a large screwtopped jar) and cover with 1 bottle of 100 proof vodka (I use 100 proof Smirnoff). …Place the jar in a safe place (on top of my refrigerator works for me!) for at least two weeks, giving it an occasional shake and sniff to check on it. You’ll be able to see the vodka turning bright yellow as it pulls the flavorful oils from the peels. When the peels no longer look colorful and the vodka doesn’t seem to be gaining any more visible color or scent, it’s done. Filter through a coffee filter or cheesecloth into a large bottle or jar and press down to remove all the vodka and oils that you can from the peels. Add a 1:1 simple syrup (I usually start with 2 cups water to two cups sugar, boiled lightly until completely dissolved and syrupy and cooled off) and then thin further with approximately another 750 ml bottle of your favorite regular vodka.
  • Limoncello

  • The Webtender Forums: Re Limoncello like mama used to make <by Dom Costa> – The traditional way of making limoncello is to slice off the topmost layer of lemon peel, avoiding the bitter white pith as much as possible. If there is any pith on a slice, scrape it off with a knife or spoon. An extremely sharp vegetable peeler works best. (If you use a fine grater , avoid the temptation to shave off every last bit of colored peel, because you’re likely to end up taking some pith along with it. In other words, it’s best to give up on the colored parts of the peel that are in any “valleys” in the surface of the lemon.) Once you have your lemon peel, steep it for a couple of weeks in 95% grain alchool. You can tell that the flavoring elements have been thoroughly leached out when the peels have lost their color. Filter well the infusion , and add ( cold) sugar syrup you prapared in advance ( 500gr sugar in one litre hot watwer), let stand for a a week, put it in the freezer, ready to drink.

Whiskey versus Whisky

I’m so dependent upon spell check, I probably never noticed there was alternative spellings of the word for the amber liquid. I tend to write whiskey1 when not thinking too deeply about the subject. Of course, now the word just looks weird2

Street Life with Whiskey

I’m looking out there for the one person who apparently was not offended by the spelling of “whiskey’’ in my column on Speyside single malts. If you are that person, allow me to explain.

Whiskey is a word with an alternative spelling, whisky. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Dictionary.com seems to prefer whiskey. The New York Times stylebook definitively prefers whiskey:

whiskey(s). The general term covers bourbon, rye, Scotch and other liquors distilled from a mash of grain. For consistency, use this spelling even for liquors (typically Scotch) labeled whisky.

But clearly, definitively, and somewhat aggressively, people from Scotland and many fans of Scotch have informed me of their preference for whisky over whiskey, judging by the flood of comments and emails I received yesterday. Here is a brief sample:

Graham Kent of London wrote: I cannot pass over the unforgivable use by a serious writer on wines and spirits of ‘whiskey’ to refer to Scotch whisky. He goes on to say: I am afraid I found the constant misspelling of the product made your article quite unreadable. It is exactly the same as if you had called it ‘gin’ all the way through or were to describe Lafite as Burgundy. It is simply a basic error that a reputable writer should not make.

[From Whiskey versus Whisky – The Pour Blog – NYTimes.com]

People who write such letters chastising writers over the use or non-use of the letter e in a word really need to find other hobbies. Come on. The comments to this post are funny, in a pedantic idiocy vein3.

Footnotes:
  1. that is, with an e before the final y []
  2. a strange trick the mind plays on itself: write and re-write a word too frequently in a short period of time, and the word begins to appear foreign []
  3. not sure that phrase makes sense, but I should be asleep anyway []

A Revival for the White Russian


“The Big Lebowski – 10th Anniversary Edition” (Universal Studios)

Can’t say I’m a fan of the drink, just of the film that inspired the revival.

AMONG the significant dates in the history of Kahlúa, the Mexican coffee liqueur, surely March 6, 1998, rates a mention.

That was the release date of “The Big Lebowski,” the Coen Brothers movie about an aging slacker who calls himself the Dude, and who, after a thug urinates on his prized rug, becomes caught up in a Chandleresque mystery.

Played with slouchy brio by Jeff Bridges, the Dude’s chief pursuits involve bowling, avoiding work and drinking White Russians, the sweet cocktail made with vodka, Kahlúa and cream or milk.

The movie was a flop when it was released, but in the decade since, “The Big Lebowski” has attracted a cult following, and as the film’s renown has grown, so has the renown of the White Russian, or, as the Dude calls them, “Caucasians.” The drink is the subject of experimentation at cutting-edge bars like Tailor, in SoHo, which serves a crunchy dehydrated version — a sort of White Russian cereal. The British electro-pop band Hot Chip, meanwhile, recently invented a variation named the Black Tarantula. Not long ago, the cocktail was considered passé and often likened, in its original formula, to an alcoholic milkshake.

Believed to date to the 1950s or early 1960s, the White Russian has no great origin story; its culinary precursor is the Alexander. Having been popular in the disco ’70s, the cocktail is, in the words of Mr. Doudoroff, “a relic of an era that was the absolute nadir of the American bar.”

As it happens, this was the period when Jeff Dowd was living in Seattle, driving a taxi and doing a lot of “heavy hanging,” as he put it. Mr. Dowd, 59, an independent film producer and producers representative, is the inspiration for the Dude — a character Joel and Ethan Coen created by taking what Mr. Dowd was like back then and exaggerating a bit, although the White Russians preference is spot on.

“There was a woman I lived with named Connie,” Mr. Dowd said, by phone from his office in Santa Monica, Calif., beginning a rambling oration that was highly Dude-like. “She and her boyfriend, Jamie, were mixologists. We were hanging out and drinking at that time. We went from White Russians to Dirty Mothers, a darker version of a White Russian. It was a very hedonistic period.”

Mr. Dowd moved on from White Russians years ago, but has started drinking them again, mainly so as not to disappoint fans. “When I first met Cheech at the Sundance Film Festival,” he said, referring to Cheech Marin of the comedy duo Cheech and Chong, “the first thing we all wanted to do is smoke a joint with him so we could tell our grandchildren, ‘Hey, I smoked a joint with Cheech.’ Well, people want to say they had a White Russian with the Dude. I don’t want to turn them down, which has added a little extra tonnage to me.”

[Click to continue reading A Revival for the White Russian – NYTimes.com]

Original Gin and the Fall of Man

I would be very interested in sampling the fruits of original gin, genever.

Cocktail Hour can strike at any time

COMPARED with vodka, gin is a relative newcomer. But despite what the Russians might say, the history of gin — like its flavor — is far more complex.

Gin was born as genever in Holland in the 17th century. It was renamed gin when it got to England about 100 years later. Eventually, the English style, which is stronger and lacks the touch of sweetness that is typical of genever, came to dominate the market. But genever is making a comeback.

Next week Lucas Bols, a Dutch company that was founded in 1575, will start to sell its genever in the United States again. It was last imported in quantity about 50 years ago, but small amounts have seeped into the United States since then. Grain shortages in Holland during the world wars and Prohibition in the United States combined to do in the export of genever.

The Lucas Bols genever joins a few other brands of genever already on the market. Zuidam and Boomsma are imported from Holland. And earlier this year, Anchor Brewing and Distilling, the San Francisco company that makes Junipero, a dry gin, started selling Genevieve, a genever that it had developed about 10 years ago.

[From Malty and Complex, the Original Gin Is Making a Comeback – NYTimes.com]

Drinking the daylight green

A side benefit to being a citizen of the 21st century is that our recent history is available for close examination. The quest for the authentic, platonic ideal is simplified, in other words. Classic, formerly obscure films are a mouse click away, popular music from around the globe is being re-released at an amazing rate, absinthe is being served at your neighborhood saloon, and now one can drink gin as Hogarth imagined it.

Of course, nobody understands satire anymore (just ask Roger Ebert) but that’s a minor price to pay for our land of cultural splendors…

Museum of American Cocktail

Cocktail Hour can strike at any time

Sounds fun, I want to go there, soon.

the Museum of the American Cocktail opening this month will focus on the rich history of sophisticated drinks that have been served since Thomas Jefferson was president 200 years ago.

Cocktails – originally defined as any mixture of bitters, spirits and sugar – were an early fixture in this French port city. Besides easy access to sugar, a European sensibility allowed a drinking culture to flourish when it foundered elsewhere in the south’s Bible Belt.

“I definitely think New Orleans has always been the home of civilised1 drinking,” said Ann Tuennerman, founder of Tales of the Cocktail, an annual festival that attracts thousands.

“The image the tourists have is not how most locals think of drinking. We believe in better, not more.”

The museum is located near the city’s French Quarter and features a collection of rare spirits, books, and Prohibition-era literature. There will be vintage cocktail shakers, glassware, tools, gadgets and other cocktail memorabilia.

[From From martinis to Manhattans, US museum pays homage to mixed drinks | World news | guardian.co.uk]

I have not been to New Orleans since Katrina, except in spirit, but a journey to celebrate spirits sounds like a festive spritzer. Errr, whatever.

Footnotes:
  1. British spelling, from a British paper, we aren’t correcting it []

Grapes of greed

Save Ten Percent with Pippin

The corrupt Illinois legislature is back in the news, with the out-of-state wine ban we’ve mentioned before about to take effect.

For some reason, the state legislature decided that Illinoisans should not be allowed to have wine shipped to them from Internet wine shops and out-of-state wine stores. On June 1, the law will strip Illinois wine lovers of the right to buy wine from out-of-state wine stores; that’s a right they’ve had for 15 years.

Why do such a silly thing? How about $6.3 million. This is how much Illinois liquor distributors have paid in campaign contributions to Illinois politicians since 2000. You see, liquor distributors don’t like it when they don’t get a cut of the sale. When you buy that special bottle of wine from an Internet retailer, the distributors don’t bring it into the state, so they don’t get a cut of the sale. So the liquor distributors wrote a law, found a few friends in the legislature to introduce it and voila . . . you lost your rights.

It turns out that in the course of losing your right to access the wines you want so distributors can have their profits protected, Illinois has given up millions of dollars in tax revenue that would have come from taxing Internet sales of wine. Hey, who needs a few roads fixed any way? And who needs more funding for schools? Priorities, you know?

[From Mmm, grapes of greed — — chicagotribune.com]

Here are the main villains in this tale:


According to FollowTheMoney.Org, a Web site that tracks state campaign contributions, this law’s lead sponsor, Rep. Edward Acevedo (D-Chicago), has received $32,000 from alcohol wholesalers since 2000, including $10,000 since the legislation was introduced last year. Senate sponsor James Clayborne Jr. (D-Belleville) has received $85,000 from alcohol wholesaler interests since 2000, including $15,000 since the legislation was introduced. Since 2002, Gov. Rod Blagojevich has received more than $500,000—just from alcohol wholesalers in Illinois, $50,000 of which was given to him since he signed the bill into law.

More on this topic here, and here (and my own pages, more, more, and probably elsewhere. )

Hemingway’s Papa Doble

Is Life a Caberet?

I’ve never been much of a fan of rum. Either the rum I’ve had has been of inferior quality, or perhaps I’ve never had the mixologist skills to make a quality daiquiri. I’m intrigued by this tale however:

Lillian Ross made her career with a New Yorker profile of Ernest Hemingway that suggested his thirst was prodigious. And she made John O’Hara mad: “The most recent, and most disgusting, example of the intrusions into Hemingway’s private life was made by a publication that reported on Hemingway’s drinking habits, somewhat in the manner of a gleeful parole officer,” complained the man who had all but invented the New Yorker-style short story. “But for Eustace Tilley to raise an eyeglass over anybody’s drinking is one for the go-climb-a-lamppost department.”

Truth be told, no one did more to play up the heroic magnitude of Hemingway’s drinking than Hemingway himself. Whenever someone made the pilgrimage to Havana to be introduced to the novelist, Hemingway would meet him at La Florida bar, affectionately known as the “Floridita.” And there, with much bravado, Hemingway would boast of the sheer quantity of alcohol he could consume in the form of Papa Dobles — the double frozen Daiquiris made to his particular specifications.

[From Hemingway’s Daiquiri – WSJ.com]

According to Eric Felten, the Papa Doble recipe was mistranslated for years to use lemon instead of lime:

Cocktail scholar Philip Greene (a government intellectual-property lawyer in Washington) was able to track down the source of the mistake: a recipe booklet the Floridita published in 1937 as a promotional giveaway. Like a volume in the Loeb Classical Library, the Floridita pamphlet presented its text in the original language on the left with a translation on the right. But the copy editing wasn’t all it could be. For starters, the Papa Doble is listed as the ” ‘E. Henmiway’ Special.” The English recipe specifies the “juice of ½ lemon.” But the Spanish original next to it specifies “Jugo ½ limón verde” — which isn’t lemon at all, but lime.

It’s an error that has been repeated for decades. Nearly 10 years ago, Michael Palin of Monty Python fame filmed a television special chasing down Hemingway’s adventures, and at one point he sat himself down at the Floridita bar to work his way through a succession of Papa Dobles. Mr. Palin’s description of the recipe is “basically rum, lemon and sugar over crushed ice, with a Maraschino cherry.” Unfortunately, not only did Mr. Palin repeat the lemon error — he compounded it with a raft of his own errata.

Parenthetic note: I’ll have to look for the Michael Palin documentary, I’ve seen several of those, and they are well done, and a lot of fun. Final note, perhaps the proportions are slightly different – more lime, and more grapefruit:

After meeting Hemingway over Daiquiris in 1948, A.E. Hotchner went on to drink innumerable Papa Dobles at the Floridita with the great man himself, and he paid attention to what Constante was doing. “A Papa Doble was compounded of two and a half jiggers of Bacardi White Label Rum, the juice of two limes and half a grapefruit and six drops of maraschino,” Mr. Hotchner writes. That’s four times the lime juice of the 1937 recipe, and far more than the scant teaspoon of grapefruit juice originally called for. I don’t know which recipe is the truest, but I like the results when you split the difference, combining the two ounces of rum specified by the original recipe with a little bit of extra citrus. The texture is also important. Mr. Hotchner recounted that the Daiquiri ingredients were “placed in an electric mixer over shaved ice, whirled vigorously and served foaming in large goblets.” Hemingway himself described a properly beaten Daiquiri as looking “like the sea where the wave falls away from the bow of a ship when she is doing thirty knots.”

Sounds like a good experiment for Memorial Day (hopefully much better than this one, yikes)


here’s my attempt: though didn’t have maraschino. Delicious actually.
Papa Dobles
[click to embiggen]

The Hangover Artist


“Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis” (Kingsley Amis)

Much more fun than being a hunger artist if you ask me.

Kingsley Amis was a hangover artist. Had he written nothing more than his description of Jim Dixon regaining consciousness after a bender, his place in literature would be secure. “He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning,” Amis writes in “Lucky Jim,” his first (and best) novel. Dixon’s “mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.”

Feeling bad isn’t such a bad thing, from Amis’s point of view. With its “vast, vague, awful, shimmering metaphysical superstructure” of guilt and shame, the hangover provides a “unique route to self-knowledge and self-realization.” In his book “On Drink,” Amis recommends a raft of remedies for the Physical Hangover and then gets on to the Metaphysical Hangover, a combination of “anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future” that may or may not be the result of alcoholic overindulgence. Dealing with the Metaphysical part of the equation entails reading Solzhenitsyn, which “will do you the important service of suggesting that there are plenty of people about who have a bloody sight more to put up with than you (or I) have or ever will have,” and listening to Miles Davis, which “will suggest to you that, however gloomy life may be, it cannot possibly be as gloomy as Davis makes it out to be.”

On Drink” is one of three slender books Amis cobbled together from his newspaper columns on the subject in the ’70s and ’80s, the others being “Everyday Drinking” and “How’s Your Glass?” (the British equivalent of the expression that serves as the title for this column). They are back in print at last, Bloomsbury having gathered them into one delightful volume under the title “Everyday Drinking” that’s now hitting bookstore shelves. It is essential reading for any literate bibber.

[From The Hangover Artist – WSJ.com]

Truth Drug
{Truth Drug – click to embiggen}

There is an art to writing well about drink and drinking, and about other drugs too. Easy enough to write under the influence, ahem, but writing about the experience itself is more of a challenge.

Digg-enabled link for non-subscribers.

Oh, and my memory serves, Amis was for a time a mentor and close confederate to Christopher Hitchens. Don’t really have a point, just trying to see if my fingers still capable of translating thoughts to the page. There were some doubts.

Cocktail Hour can strike at any time