The Old Fashioned Is Not a Cocktail. It Is the Definition of One.
The name sounds like nostalgia and it is actually a complaint. In the late nineteenth century, drinkers who wanted whiskey, sugar and bitters — and not the elaborate…
Author: Flash Fry
Spirit-Forward Cocktails: The Family With Nowhere to Hide
Some cocktails are built to transform a spirit. This family is built to present one. There is no citrus to brighten it, no syrup to round it off…
How Non-Alcoholic Beer Is Made, and Why It Finally Tastes Like Beer
Non-alcoholic beer was, for most of its existence, bad. Thin, sweet, vaguely of wort, and drunk mainly by people with no alternative. In the last decade it has…
The German Purity Law, and Why Belgium Ignored It
In 1516 Bavaria passed a law saying beer could be made of three things and nothing else. It is still cited on labels five centuries later, usually as…
Ale vs Lager: The Only Distinction That Divides All Beer
Every beer ever brewed falls into one of two families, and almost nobody can say what separates them. It is not colour, it is not strength, it is…
The Cuba Libre: A Rum and Coke With a Contested Birth Certificate
It is two ingredients from a corner shop and a wedge of lime, and it has a better founding legend than almost any cocktail in the canon. It…
The Highball: The Simplest Drink and the Easiest to Ruin
Two ingredients, no technique, nothing to hide behind. The highball is the most-ordered drink in almost every bar and the one nobody writes about, on the apparent grounds…
Why Beer Has a Head, and What Yours Is Telling You
The head on a beer is the most-looked-at and least-understood thing in the glass. It is not decoration, it is not a sign the bartender short-poured you, and…
What Hops Actually Do in Beer (Three Jobs, Not One)
Most people know hops make beer bitter. Fewer know that bitterness is the least interesting of the three things hops do, or that the same plant which makes…
Flanders and Wallonia: Belgium Brews Two Different Ways
A Belgian beer list looks like one tradition. It is at least two. The country is split down the middle by language, and the beers on either side…