Cachaca: The Spirit Of Summer (Swipe)

 

• What You Need To Know
• Cachaca, the Brazilian national spirit, is no longer a secret.
• The Caipirinha, a cachaca-based cocktail, is a perfect summer alternative to the mojito.
• Cachaca has a strong, distinctive aroma and flavor.

“Cachaca is by far the most popular spirit in Brazil, and we’re betting that the caipirinha is going to blow up the way the mojito did a few years ago in North America.”

Whenever we find ourselves in Rio, we always make sure to spend at least one evening at Jobi, a little bar in the Leblon neighborhood. The beer is cold (they’re obsessed with getting their beer ice-cold in Brazil, something we can definitely get behind) and the cocktails and snacks are perfect. And when we say cocktails, what we really mean is the caipirinha.

The Perfect Ice…The Perfect Drink(Swipe)

The Iceman Cometh: The Rise of a Gourmet Ice Entrepreneur

By Katie Robbins

 

Michel Dozois is pinning the success of his two-year old company on the dubious thrills of watching ice melt.

When courting new clients, Dozois, the owner of Los Angeles’s Névé Luxury Ice Company, sits them down for a simple experiment. He fills two Old Fashioned glasses with ice—the first with conventional cubes, the second with his company’s “ice rock,” a single large cube, which takes up about 50 percent of the glass—and tops them with a dram of good whisky (his spirit of choice is Laphroig). Dozois then asks the potential clients to sit back and wait, allowing nature to take its course.

About every seven minutes, he asks the client to take a sip—first of the conventional drink where the ice is rapidly melting, then of the drink made with the sturdy opaque brick of Névé ice. The second shows minimal dilution; it’s essentially whisky served neat, but much, much colder.

But Dozois’s pitch isn’t only about taste. He insists that less dilution also benefits a bar’s bottom-line. “If your body can take this much fluid,” explains Dozois, gesturing to several glasses, “How much of that do you want to be water? If it dilutes less, it will take you less time to drink what’s in the glass, and the bar will make more sales.”

Gourmet ice, often heavily filtered and hand-cut to guarantee the optimal amount of dilution, has officially become part of cocktail culture. Sasha Petraske, who in 2000 reinvigorated the New York bar scene with his speakeasy Milk & Honey, is considered by many to be the father of designer ice in the U.S. Since then, bars around the country, from Bar Agricole in San Francisco to Philadelphia’s Franklin Mortgage Investment Company, have followed suit, creating cocktails that feature market-fresh ingredients, small-batch bitters, and large blocks of beautiful ice.

Trick or Treat Drinks

This weekend some of us may get our party on. For some Halloween is the traditional kick off to the Holiday season. So if you gone do it, you might as well do it right! And the only way to do it right is to do it UML style. Luxist helps us get our grown person drink on.

Absinthe:
Reintroduced in the last couple of years to liquor stores, it is a anise flavored distilled spirit, emerald green in color that turns to cloudy opalescent white when mixed with a bit of water, which is traditionally poured over a sugar cube. Known in the 19th century as “The Green Fairy” for its power to bring on hallucinations. It was known to be a favorite of such “dark” artists and writers as Van Gogh, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allen Poe and Ernest Hemingway. Lucid is one brand, priced at about $50.00, and packaged in a cool black bottle featuring the eyes of a black cat.

Crystal Head Vodka:
Apprpriately bottled in a crystal skull, you could buy a few to make a real statement at your bar. Price: about $42.00. Here are two recipes to make use of Crystal Head: