This month’s Culinate column (and by this month I mean August) is all about fresh sugar cane spirits, particularly cachaça and rhum agricole.
Permalink - Share/Save - Comments (0)From the category archives:
Food and Drink
My newest Examiner post covers the FDA’s draft rules for calorie labeling, which may extend not just to restaurants, but also to convenience stores, movie theaters, and supermarket salad bars — all without much evidence that they’ll do any good.
On a related note, last summer I wrote about how technological change will make these laws superfluous:
Improvements in information technology are another reason to doubt the merits of forcing restaurants to post calories directly on menus. Websites like Calorie Lab already provide databases of the nutritional information from more than 500 restaurants. As far as I know they don’t have a phone app yet, but they could easily make one (one competitor already has). As smart phones proliferate it will be easier than ever for consumers to access calorie counts in addition to much more thorough nutritional information about the foods they eat. Yet these archaic laws will still be on the books forcing unneeded clutter on printed menus.
Even better than smart phones, this week Eater takes a look at how iPads are replacing printed menus in a few restaurants. The devices are durable, interactive, can hold a lot more information than a printed menu, and can work with a restaurant’s point of sale system. If desired, an electronic menu could offer extensive nutritional information at the push of a button. They’re cost-prohibitive right now for most restaurants, but in the future we can expect the price to go down and electronic menus to become more common.
It will be interesting to see how the law is adapted for electronic menus. Will calorie counts have to be displayed prominently like they are now, or will it be enough to have them easily available on the device for interested consumers? If the former, that will be another sign this law is intended more to nag people than to provide them with desired information.
Permalink - Share/Save - Comments (0)Man, do not steal a recipe for Eben Freeman:
After the seminar, I spoke to Freeman, who admitted he came up with the idea for the talk after becoming fed up with other bartenders and establishments taking credit for and profiting from his recipes and techniques. (Fat washing, for example, the process by which a spirit can be infused with, say, bacon, was pioneered in part by Freeman, yet is often attributed to others.) “Someone needs to get sued … to set a precedent,” he told me.
“In no other creative business can you so easily identify money attached to your creative property,” Freeman went on. “There is an implied commerce to our intellectual property. Yet we have less protection than anyone else.”
No disrespect to Freeman, who is understandably frustrated, but he fails to address the purpose of intellectual property in copyrights and patents. This is neatly summed up in the Constitution:
[The Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
Intellectual property exists to promote progress. Its purpose is not to ensure that no one’s ideas are stolen or that creative people can earn a living, unless those things are needed to promote progress in a field. The granting of temporary monopolies in the form of patents and copyrights is the price we pay for progress, not a goal in itself.
It might be completely true that bartenders are shamelessly stealing from each other, and that’s certainly something we should condemn, but we probably shouldn’t get the law involved unless we can show that this theft is causing mixology to stagnate. Along with fashion, cooking, and even magic, we’re in an industry that’s arguably better off with weak IP. This decade’s boom in craft cocktails is a sign that we’re doing OK without stricter protections, and I’d be worried that additional threats of lawsuits would have a chilling effect on the sharing of new techniques and recipes.
Perhaps Freeman or someone else has a workable, beneficial idea for expanding intellectual property related to cocktails, but I have a hard time imagining what that would be.
Update 9/1/10: Ezra Klein agrees.
Previously:
Two Pimm’s, one cup
Dark and Stormy and the piracy paradox
Dark ‘n’ Sue Me
After a brief hiatus, Mixology Monday is back! This month my friend Lindsey Johnson takes charge and orders something brown, bitter, and stirred. From MxMo founder Paul Clarke:
While punches, sours and flips are essential parts of every cocktail fiend’s drinking diet, perhaps no other style of drink is as dear to our booze-loving hearts as those potent mixtures of aged spirits, amari, aromatized wines and liqueurs, sometimes (sometimes? Almost always!) doctored with a dash or four from the bitters shelf.
This seems like a good occasion to post another cocktail from my session with David Shenaut and the producers of Ilegal Mezcal. Here’s the Mexican Train:
2 oz Ilegal reposado mezcal
3/4 oz Carpano Antica sweet vermouth
1/4 oz green Chartreuse
5 drops mole bitters
Stir, strain, and serve up in a chilled cocktail glass. This is a mezcal-driven variation on a Tipperary, tied together by one of my favorite pairings, Chartreuse and chocolate. The bitters are the housemade mole bitters from Beaker and Flask. Bittermen’s Xocolatl bitters would probably work nicely too, though without any mezcal on hand I can’t try out an exact recipe (hence the lack of photograph this month). Regardless, it’s an interesting drink to try out when a discerning brown, bitter, and stirred order comes across the bar.
Permalink - Share/Save - Comments (0)New York City is implementing a new system under which the letter grades given to restaurants by health inspectors must be prominently posted and in which further details are available online. This seems like a good thing: The more consumers know, the better the market works. But to some extent this just replaces ignorance about what goes on in the kitchen with meta-ignorance about what the grades signify. The letter grades are only as good as the inspection regime, and if consumers don’t know what the grades mean, then they may not be helpful. An article in The New York Times looks at some of the complications:
Under the former system, restaurants received points for each violation; a total score over 28 was considered a failing grade. But under the new system, in which 0 to 13 points gets an A, 14 to 27 points merits a B, and 28 or more is a C, officials have softened some rules, like those governing the temperatures of food held for service. And they will not count certain non-food-related violations, like burned-out light bulbs or improperly posted signs, toward the grade, although operators could still have to pay a fine.
So a restaurant that may have received 15 points under the old rules might score, say, 9 under the new ones, said Andrew Rigie, director of operations at the New York State Restaurant Association, a trade group that has been lobbying against the letter grades.
“That’s a big problem,” Mr. Rigie said. A person seeing an old 15-point score on the Web site “would determine that restaurant to be a B-graded restaurant, but there’s a possibility that under the new system it would have an A.”
It’s good that the city is not counting some non-food related violations against the grade, but one has to wonder what else goes into the score. There are 1,200 possible points that restaurants are graded on. Is the difference between a 13-point A and a 14-point B really that meaningful? Or even a 5-point A and a 20-point B? I have no idea, and I suspect that most diners don’t either.
I wrote about this when the new regulations were first announced, noting that the rule:
confuses the measurement with what we’re trying to measure. What we should care about is actual food safety, not the letter grades restaurants are receiving. If the grades aren’t highly correlated with preventing customers from getting sick, then restaurants are just wasting time and money to comply with arcane regulations and to create the illusion of safety.
To this end, making detailed reports available online is a good step. I’m more skeptical that the letter grades will provide useful information. This is the same city, after all, that has cracked down on sous vide cooking and putting egg whites in cocktails (to say nothing of banning trans-fats). Should we trust the experts to identify the most salient concerns with these grades, or should we instead ignore the differences between As and Bs and focus on the worst offenders?
Permalink - Share/Save - Comments (0)I won’t defend Starbucks for burning their coffee, but I will defend them against the charge that they don’t do enough to promote recycling of the 3 billion paper cups the company goes through each year. Over at the Examiner I take a look at some of the obstacles to finding uses for all those cups and wonder whether it’s worth making the effort.
Permalink - Share/Save - Comments (0)Over at the Examiner, I take a look at the CARE Act, a wholesaler-backed bill that would essentially reverse Granholm v. Heald and exempt state alcohol laws from Commerce Clause challenge.
Permalink - Share/Save - Comments (2)Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell’s attempt to privatize liquor sales is facing opposition from fellow Republicans, such as Representative Tom Gear:
Gear, for instance, said he was concerned by suggestions that Costco and Wal-Mart would be able to sell liquor in a new system. He said he’s worried the big companies could make it tough for small retail businesses to successfully compete in the market.
“My idea was to create jobs from small operations, mom-and-pop stores,” he said. “Costco can put in liquor and never have to hire a single person.”
As Jacob Sullum notes, “Gear evidently sees liquor privatization as a stimulus program that should be judged by the number of jobs it creates.” And as this blog said recently in regard to Washington brewers’ opposition to that state’s own privatization bill, “markets are for consumers.” They’re not for uncompetitive craft brewers or inefficient retailers. They’re for consumers, and consumers are best served by a system that forces sellers to compete on price, selection, and various other factors.
Permalink - Share/Save - Comments (1)Today’s New York Times takes a look at bartenders making the transition into the wonderful world of liquor brand ambassadors and cocktail consultants:
Not long ago, bartending was, for some, one of the classic dead-end jobs, the choice of wannabe actors and the terminally unambitious. The only way up the drink-slinging ladder was to own a bar. But with the cocktail renaissance, today’s star mixologist is tomorrow’s brand representative, hawking various products for liquor conglomerates, or tomorrow’s cocktail consultant, setting up drink programs for new taverns and restaurants.
Some in the industry have misgivings about the shift — it distracts working bartenders from doing the job at hand, they say, and drains off the best talent. But nowadays, any entrepreneurial bartender worth his tattoos has a vest pocket full of business cards.
It’s not quite as glamorous as they make it out to be. I mean, the towels on the Bols Jet today were barely even hot.
Permalink - Share/Save - Comments (0)Fantastic post from Nate McLaughlin, who’s in the process of opening his own Washington brewery, on why he supports I-1100:
For years craft breweries have been saying how horrible the three tier system is and that we need to abolish it. Now here comes the chance to whack away at the Washington Liquor Control Board and the craft breweries decide that they would much rather hide behind the status quo.
[...]
WBG makes claims that this new way of competing will crush all our small breweries. Let’s be honest, these places are not competing with the large breweries that they are worried about being able to “give discounts, free product and services to obtain shelf space or handles at big box stores, chain restaurants, and other retailers.” They really are kidding themselves if they think they don’t already do this. Yes, it is illegal, but no one is making any arrests or sending out fines, we know this goes on and I am not surprised at all. This just makes it legal. But don’t belittle your product, be glad that people have to bribe to get their brand of booze into a place when people are clamoring to get yours in. We’re smarter and more innovative than they will ever be. We can beat them.
Read the whole thing here. For more background, see this blog’s post from last week. Beer-loving economist Patrick Emerson agrees here.
[Via @DrinkGal.]
Permalink - Share/Save - Comments (0)One of my college economics professors had a maxim that he drilled into us students: “Markets are for consumers.” Economic logic can help to predict how certain changes will affect people up and down the supply chain, but if you start using that knowledge to protect producers’ interests at the expense of consumers, then you’re doing economics wrong. Markets are for consumers. (The maxim applies to monopolies too. They are problematic because they raise prices or are unresponsive to consumers, not because they wipe out competitors.)
Keep this maxim in mind as you read about the Washington Brewers Guild’s opposition to Initiative 1100, which will liberalize alcohol sales in Washington:
Beer brewers and drinkers opposed to privatization of state liquor sales? Indeed, says Heather McClung, president of the Washington Brewers Guild, which represents the state’s small craft breweries and, roundaboutly, craft-brew drinkers. Her industry is lined up against I-1100 - though still weighing I-1105 - the privatization measures headed for the November ballot and detailed in last week’s SW cover story. “There is something that is being left out of the discussion it seems,” says McClung.
I-1100, for example, is actively promoted as a modernizing of liquor laws, she says, when it’s actually a sweeping proposal that repeals 39 state laws, enabling the biggest retailers, distributors, and producers to own and give favorable pricing to each other. That, says McClung, of Seattle’s Schooner Exact Brewing Company, would eliminate the level playing field that small breweries such as hers need if they are to prosper.
At issue is a section of the initiative that would allow breweries to self-distribute and offer discounts to bulk buyers like Costco, grocery stores, and bars. Beer in Washington must currently sell at a uniform wholesale price: Costco pays the same amount for crates of it that a small retailer pays for a few cases. As a result, beer prices at large retailers are higher now than they will be if I-1100 passes.
Eliminating the uniform price requirement might make it harder for craft breweries to compete with the big beer companies who can offer greater discounts and benefits. Does this make the initiative anti-consumer? Only if you look exclusively at craft beer drinkers. Craft beers currently make up about 7% of the US market (probably somewhat higher in beer savvy Washington). The vast majority of beer consumers will benefit from being able to buy macrobrews at lower prices.
To put this another way, the Washington Brewers Guild is saying that the state should keep beer prices artificially high for 93% of the beer market in order to maintain the same broad selection for the remaining 7% (or whatever the actual figures are in Washington).
Personally, I doubt that the results will be as bleak as the WSG predicts. Craft brews are growing in popularity while macros are declining, and that’s unlikely to change. Smaller breweries are also starting to merge, operating independently while taking advantage of economies of scale. There may be some closures — this is true regardless of I-1100 — but craft beers don’t show any sign of going away.
However, even if I’m wrong, that doesn’t mean this is a bad bill. As much as I love good beer, it would be improper to elevate my preference to force of law. If the only way the current high number of small breweries can survive is by shackling their larger competitors, then we may need to settle for having fewer breweries. I hope that beer drinkers will continue pay more for quality, but that’s their decision to make. Markets exist for consumers — all consumers, not just the ones who like microbrews.
Additional notes: The question of tied houses is complicated, and arguably the matter of most concern. It’s the aspect of I-1100 I would be least confident in supporting.
File this story under the “Brewers Behaving Badly” label, which previously featured California craft brewers lobbying against laws that would allow beer companies to hand our more swag or offer free tastings in bars, Pennsylvania brewers opposing a measure to let consumers buy beer in 18 packs, and Michelle Minton’s coverage of Colorado brewers opposing the sale of good beer in grocery stores.
For more on liquor privatization efforts, see my recent post in the Examiner.
Hat tip to Drink Gal, who also has a good post on the subject.
Permalink - Share/Save - Comments (1)Over at the Examiner, I look at liquor privatization efforts in Washington, Oregon, and Virginia.
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With our “Brewing Up Cocktails” event successfully wrapped up at The Hop and Vine with co-conspirators Ezra Johnson-Greenough and Yetta Vorobik, I thought it’d be fun to go into the details on a couple of the drinks. These both use products from the Bols line and adapt popular cocktails for use with beer in place of the usual ingredients.
First up is the Dutch Devil, pictured up top in the flute. There were two inspirations for this drink. The first is the classic champagne cocktail, made with champagne, a sugar cube, and Angostura bitters. The second is Stephen Beaumont’s Green Devil, which deliciously mixes gin and Duvel Golden Ale with an absinthe rinse. This drink sort of combines the two, putting Duvel in place of sparkling wine and taking advantage of the malty notes in genever:
1 oz Bols Genever
1 Angostura-soaked sugar cube
Duvel
Build in a flute. We were serving these with the sugar cube added first, but the cocktail science article I linked to this morning suggests that adding it last might be a better way. At The Hop and Vine, this drink is now on the menu with a candied ginger garnish.
The second drink is a variation of the Bramble, a lovely cocktail created by London bartender Dick Bradsell. It’s made by mixing gin, lemon, and simple syrup in crushed ice, then topping it with blackberry liqueur and fresh berries. Our idea for this one was to take out the lemon and simple syrup and replace them with a sour ale. But which beer to use? Ezra likes it with the Cantillon Gueuze. My preference is the Bruery’s Hottenroth Berliner Weisse. Berliner Weisse is a tart style of wheat beer native to Germany, where it’s often served with raspberry or woodruff syrup. I like the way it balances this drink and the way the final addition of blackberry liqueur mirrors the way it’s traditionally served:
3/4 oz Damrak Gin
Bruery Hottenroth
3/4 oz Clear Creek blackberry liqueur
Build the first two ingredients in an ice-filled rocks glass, top with the liqueur, garnish with fresh blueberries, and enjoy.
For notes on the rest of the drinks featured at the event, check out Hoke Harden’s write-up for the Examiner.
Permalink - Share/Save - Comments (0)From Marion Nestle:
Anti-obesity advocates have much to learn from anti-smoking advocates.
Context here.
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If you’re in Portland today, consider stopping by the inaugural Northwest Spirits and Mixology Show at the Jupiter Hotel. Admission is free with proof of hospitality industry affiliation, otherwise $10 with registration here. The show is industry only from 12-4 and open to everyone from 4-7.
The Oregon Bartenders Guild is contributing to the show with a few mixology demos. I’m working the “classic to contemporary” slot, tweaking a classic cocktail. I’ll be making and serving a Bols Boulevardier:
1.5 oz Bols Genever
1 oz Campari
1 oz sweet vermouth
Stir, serve up with a cherry or orange twist. This drink is traditionally made with bourbon, so I’ll be using Bols to tie it into the trend toward white whiskeys (Bols is made from about 50% malt wine, an unaged grain distillate). This has been one of my favorite genever cocktails to order when I’m out at bars that are still developing their own drinks; the ingredients are widely available, it’s easy to make, and it’s really tasty. My demo is slated at 5:25 and I’ll be sampling the cocktail from the OBG booth for sometime before.
Permalink - Share/Save - Comments (0)From an op/ed by an Oregon liquor store agent on why we shouldn’t privatize liquor sales:
A net revenue of $163.5 million (fiscal 2008-2009) just from liquor sales was returned to the citizens of Oregon. What retail business can generate net profit revenues of 40 percent of sales? I’d sure like to invest in such a company. Even a wildly successful company like Apple posted only a 19.9 percent net profit margin for 2009, which is far less than what OLCC liquor revenue generated for Oregonians.
And in the same article:
If the citizens of Oregon think that getting the state out of liquor distribution and retailing will reduce the price of alcohol at the checkout counter, think again. I’ve compared retail prices in California and Arizona to ours in Oregon, and except for the best-sellers (less than 10 percent of the inventory) the prices are the same or higher in those states.
So his arguments are that 1) monopoly liquor distribution yields enormous excess profits for the state and 2) introducing competition will increase prices for consumers. If this is the best the anti-privatization side can come up with, I think it’s safe to say the pro-privatization side wins the economic argument.
Permalink - Share/Save - Comments (3)OK, one quick post from Tales with a couple links. I’m at the Washington Examiner today with a post about why the FDA’s menthol hearings are asking the wrong questions. Then at the Portland Examiner, Hoke Harden has a great (and way too flattering!) write-up of the Brewing Up Cocktails event. If you’re curious about the drinks we served, go check it out.
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Jacob Grier is a freelance writer, barista, mixologist, and magician in Portland, OR. He writes, eats, and drinks a lot. His articles have appeared in The Washington Post, Reason Online, The Oregonian, and other publications.
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