2010.
You guys, it’s happening! Tomorrow! Sorry for the short notice, but I didn’t get much notice myself. Feb 6th from 1pm-9pm, starting at Limerick Junction in Virginia Highlands. Click the poster for more info or go here. It’s $10 to participate, there’s drink specials at each location, and all proceeds go to benefit Red Cross for Haiti relief. So throw away your dignity and traipse about VaHi like a drunken fool…for charity, of course.
2010.
2009.
CHALLENGE: Chivias 18 is stepping up to the long-time king of the blended scotch heap Johnnie Walker Blue. They’re so sure they can best JWB that they sent me a bottle of it along with Chivas 18, daring me to pit them against each other. That’s some swagger, especially considering that Chivas 18 retails at somewhere around $55, while Johnnie Blue starts around $150 and goes up from there (as high as $250 in some places). Hell, I once saw it by the glass in a fancy restaurant (jealous?) for $47 ($47!!). But get this, Chivas 18 isn’t even their top-tier scotch, they also make a 25! The balls on these Chivas guys (and ladies)! So what was I going to do, not drink their free high-end scotch? Biiiiiiiitch pleeeaazze. Let’s get it on!
Round One: Nose
Chivas 18: Picking up some chocolate and caramel. I don’t know how this is possible, but it smells smooth. Before I have even tasted it, I can tell it’s going to go down easy. I get a little bit of a woody scent as well, but not much.
Johnnie Walker Blue: Smells very sweet, lots of honey and some vanilla, with a bit of dried fruit. I highly doubt that it’s going to taste this sweet, but it’s a pleasant nose.
Round Two: Palate
Chivas 18: Warm toffee and honey, with just a little bit of smoke/peat. It would be easy to go for a big peaty blend to try and seem more complex, much like some craft beer brewers who go overboard with hops and mistake big hop flavor for a fully realized product. By limiting the smokey flavors to the background, Chivas gives the other flavors a chance to be noticed and gives it a greater overall complexity. And man, the finish on this thing is unreal. It just keeps going and going and going. I like this a lot.
Johnnie Walker Blue: What? Are you sure this is a scotch that sells for over a hundred dollars? This is so…BORING. There’s a decent amount of peat (though nothing like a Lagavulin or Laphroaig), some sandlewood, and that’s about it. It’s almost structured more like a single malt, but I can tell you at least a dozen single malts (that cost a fraction of the price) that I’d rather drink before this. I’ve had every other color label of Johnnie Walker (red, black, green and even the elusive gold*) and with the exception of the black, I’d rather drink any of them over the blue. Maybe it’s because of the hype that I’m so disappointed, but this just isn’t a $150 scotch. Just to be fair, I went back a day after I first tried it and gave it another shot, drank it both straight and with a touch of filtered water…still unimpressed.
Look, I’m no Dr. Scotch over here, but I’ve been to enough formal tastings and Lord knows I’ve drank enough to fairly judge a scotch. While Johnnie Walker Blue is a fine scotch, it’s not worth the price and pales in comparison to the Chivas 18, which is a far more complex and interesting scotch.
Winner: Chivas 18
*Though I’m still working on the purple
2009.
So here’s the scoop, Beer Advocate, the COLOSSUS of beer ratings, has partnered with music label Suburban Home to bring all of us a sticky-sweet FREE music sampler with 22 tracks guaranteed to sound like music! And it’s all done in the name of craft beer. Check out this badass shirt they’re selling!
I like it. If you’re me, (and I know I am) both of those things are true! It’s a pretty great shirt. I can’t vouch for the free music, because I haven’t listened to it yet, but you can’t beat that price. Also, I have no idea what kind of music you like (I stopped reading minds years ago) so I can’t even make an educated guess. It’s worth at least one listen-through though, right? Of course it is. And as yet another super-bonus, Suburban Home will give you a 12% (12%? Sure why not) discount off of anything in their Vinyl Collective store if you use the code “BEERADVOCATE“. I’ve heard it stands for Battered Epileptics Eagerly Roughhousing Appalachians Diabolically Obfuscating Couples’ Artistic Trebuchet Education. SUPPORT THE CAUSE!
Whatever, go download some free music already. And of course, drink craft beer!
2009.
This is definitely not as funny as that other drunk dude, but it IS proof that somehow, somewhere, somebody is looking out for amazingly drunk fools.
YIKES. That could not be any closer. It also goes to show that if you’re drunk, you don’t have to be driving to nearly kill yourself. Have a safe weekend everyone!
via :: Roger Ebert
2009.
So I have a group of friends who I get together with every Monday night. When 24 is on, we watch that. If it is not, then we usually watch a movie (preferably The Hangover or something about Pope John Paul II). So because of them, they are the reason I have yet to drag my OTP be-hind ITP to Monday Night Brewery to observe the talented gents there brewing and drink their FREE BEER. But that’s beside the point. Once a year we convene to carve pumpkins and celebrate our natural visceral instinct to behead and scoop out another person’s head (human nature, duh). It’s been three years now, and to be honest…I’m not a big pumpkin carving guy. I struggle every year to come up with something to carve. Here are my past pumpkins:
- An outline of my hand (lazy, easy)
- A bucktoothed face (boring, dumb, COME ON!)
Truthfully, I’m pretty lackadaisical when it comes to sawing pumpkin flesh (Breaking NEWS!), and outside of the written word, I’m not super-creative (unless we’re talking macramé). HOWEVER, this year I was determined. I wanted to carve a booze-themed pumpkin come HELL OR HIGH WATER! So after much ponderation I came up with the following:
Yep, a bottle pouring out BOOZE. I left it pretty ambiguous, so you could picture it as a beer bottle OR a fifth pouring out your favorite libation. The best part? IT WAS DEAD SIMPLE. Other than the typical de-capping and scooping nonsense, it’s mostly big, non-specific cuts. The “flowing booze” are just cuts made with the standard tools in a pumpkin carving kit, and a thin wall between candle and atmosphere. So simple. Here’s a shot taken in half-darkness (because things get blurry in full-dark):
And in (blurry) full-dark:
I apologize, if you didn’t know I’m 84 years old and I have shaky hands and a bad pancreas so sometimes these things are blurry because of all my shakes. But isn’t this so much better than the same old “barfing pumpkin” crap your mom sends you every year? “I saw this and it reminded me of you and your college friends. You boys are so silly. Lots Of Love!, Mom”. THANKS SO MUCH, MOM. So if you think you have a boozy pumpkin that can beat mine, post a link to the pic in the comments and Bring It On, Eliza Dushku style.
You Betta DRUMLINE!
2009.
*Here’s the thing about running a website: when there are holidays, everyone expects you to write “theme posts”. PR firms fill your inbox with (mostly) horrible drinks featuring their booze with silly campy obvious names like “Wolfman’s Delight” or “Santa’s Little Helper”. They send these with the full expectation that I will publish every single one of them and proclaim them as great and “perfect for (whatever is the) holiday!”. UGH. So boring, right? I don’t blame them for having these expectations necessarily, because there are plenty of lazy thoughtless blogs out there who do exactly that, never caring enough about their readers to actually try any of the drinks and basically cut-and-pasting the PR release (which are often drafted by people with no knowledge of cocktails AT ALL). Those blogs are dicks. Lucky for you, THIS IS NOT ONE OF THOSE BLOGS.
You should probably send this to your parents immediately. Wait till they see your (gift)!
HOWEVER, I may (and probably will) post on or around these specific holidays as they cycle through, but rest assured they will be on MY terms. This is very fun season for drinks, autumn weather is probably the best weather they’ve invented (so far) and lends itself to awesome drinking, and that will certainly lead to mind-blowing posts for you and your family to enjoy for years to come. I can totally picture your grandmother ebroidering my words (e.g. “Those Blogs are Dicks. Happy Kwanza!“) on pillows and scarves for years to come. So I promise, no posts on “Frankenstein’s Pineappletini” or “Gobbler’s Gimlet, brought to you by GE!“. Just the STRAIGHT DOPE with NO FILLERS. I’ll only post it if it might actually be interesting (or funny or about your mother in a pilgrim costume).
So uhm….Happy Whatever!
*Totally CRUSHING IT with these interstitial notes only tangentially related to booze lately, right?. Quality is job one, or whatever.
2009.
As you may or may not have read, the FTC had handed down some new guidelines to bloggers about disclosing who got what from whom. It’s all very legal and boring and SNNNNOOOORE but I’m going to address it here, add it to the site disclaimer, and then BOOM it’s done, we need’nt speak of it again because NAPTIME GRANDPA.
The long and short of it is…people send me booze. For free. I don’t promise them anything (either mention OR positive review) but they do it all the same. One of the perks of running a blog that makes you no money. So, for the sake of full disclosure, you should assume that any and all products I mention or review on this site have been given to me for free by the producer, PR folks, a friendly neighborhood bar, or someone else affiliated with the brand. A lot of booze is pretty expensive, and if the good people who represent these brands didn’t supply me with some of these products, I’d likely never have heard (or been able to afford) them, so I owe them at the very least a debt of gratitude for recognizing this blog as influential enough to affect your buying habits enough to provide me with samples to share with all of you good people. If I don’t try it, I can’t recommend it, right? That being said, if you’ve ever read anything on this site, you know that I don’t hold back in criticizing a brand or calling someone out on their crap product, regardless of how I happened to come across it. If I don’t have my honesty intact, I really don’t have anything. I feel like that’s one of the things that has built this blog into what it is today, a source people can trust for an honest take on whatever it is I might be drinking at the time. Thank you ALL for keeping me honest and making this site a place where we can all talk openly and honestly about booze no matter how bad (or incredible!) it may be.
So, my friends, I wanted to make sure you knew the full truth (in the small chance it wasn’t clear earlier) so we can go forth unfettered into this exiting new future where companies send me televisions and cars and mansions for free while I review them, in addition to all the booze they have sent me. That’s what this whole thing is about, right? Free Aston Martins and gold (-plated) bathtubs? Right? RIGHT!?!
2009.
You guys watch Mad Men, right? Of course you do, it’s great! So you know that one chick on there, the one married to Don? Betty is her name. Here’s a reminder of what she looks like, just in case you’re not sure:
Granted, she doesn’t dress quite like that on the show, but still, you know who I mean. Anyway, in a recent interview with GQ January Jones reveals that she’s quite the beer drinker and drinking game afficionado. Here’s a few of the things revealed in the interview:
- She claims to be a beer pong champion among her friends
- She once got cut off on a flight for playing quarters too loudly
- She’s planning on dressing up as Troy Polamalu for Halloween
- Five beers into the interview, she picks up the recorder and announces: “Dear men of America, I like beer, I like football. I’m probably the most interesting girl you’ll ever meet.” She drinks three more before the night is over.
No arguments that January is quite the interesting lady. I’d also like to extend an open invitation: January, anytime, and I mean ANY TIME you’re in the Atlanta area let me know and I will drop absolutely everything (including any and all babies I may be holding) to play beer pong, quarters, oggle-the-pretty-lady or whatever you want. I’m all yours.
via:: GQ
2009.
If there’s some aspect I don’t like about booze, I have yet to find it. From it’s production to it’s taste and smell to the way it makes me feel, there’s nothing I don’t find fascinating about alcohol. Hell, I even appreciate hangovers, a not-so-gentle reminder of the raw power booze can exert over me and reduce me to a whimpering pile of pain. And now BevShots has come up with yet another way to enjoy our spirits. Blending art and science, they take photos of beer, wine, spirits and cocktails at a microscopic level and then blow them up to poster size to be framed and hung on your wall. The photo above is of sake, here are a just a couple more of the numerous shots they offer:
Gin
English Oatmeal Stout
Obviously, these are very cool. Not only would they look great on your wall, but they’d be great conversation pieces (if that’s something you’re concerned about). They’ve got tons more, even allowing you to search through them by color to find the right match for your pad. Check ‘em out!
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