In the northern hemisphere the hot day's of summer are quickly approaching. With global warming giving the planet a fever, we need to stop creating green house gases, but until that happens, a nice refreshing summer cocktail might help. One such cocktail is the Pimm's Cup, a classic cocktail invented in England in 1840 by James Pimm as a health tonic. The Pimm's cup is a true classic cocktail that’s best served on a hot summer day. So when you have your friends over for a game of polo, royal visit or when you head to your next regatta, you might want to pack the ingredients to make a Pimm's Cup.

Most aspiring mixologists love to create unique cocktails by combining an array of flavours. The use of bitters is one example of an ingredient that has become popular again. For many years bitters were left out of Manhattans and many bars didn't even stock them. But times are changing and with the cocktail renaissance in full swing, many bars are creating their own unique recipes for "house bitters". Obviously there is a plethora of other unique flavour tinctures and extracts that mixologists are creating for their cocktails, but there hasn't been a lot of focus on house vermouth, well at least not in North America. Vermouth is a key ingredient in many classic cocktails, much like bitters, but the selection of vermouths available at your local liquor depot is probably pretty poor. Making homemade vermouth isn't any harder than making bitters so here's some starting points.

I've been reading Waiter Rant and the good Waiter has posted a couple of good articles: 50 Signs You're Working in a Bad Restaurant and 50 Signs You Might be An Asshole Customer. These posts inspired me to write one for bartenders, since I've worked with more bad bartenders than good ones. Your not a bad bartender if only a few of these apply, but you might want to think about modifying your work habits. Please feel free to add to the list by leaving a comment.

When I'm not inspired to write about something cocktail oriented I do a General Website Update. Obviously with a new baby it cuts out some of my time to do things related to this website, but for the most part I'm still working on it regularly. But, beer and spirits seem to have been in the forefront because they are easy to write about. But, with summer coming I’m looking forward to writing about more cocktails and mixology related topics. So what else is new, or whatever happened to those projects you ask?

Here is drink that produces an image of a hard-nosed cocktail that will put hair on your chest. Even the word "cocktail" doesn't seem to go with the Rusty Nail. The drink hearkens back to the day when men were men and dogs slept in the garage. After a hard day of work, the man of the house needed a hard drink, not one of those fruity pink drinks in a prissy martini glass. Jump forward 50 years and you have guys who sip Cosmopolitans and make goofy faces when they drink a shot of tequila, even though they have some salt and lime (lemon) to cover up the flavour. Hell, even flavourless vodka makes people squirm. Now a Rusty Nail, that’s a real drink.

Pilsner, the lager that makes the world go round. I like a nice crisp lager and based on my bartending observations so do a lot of people. Some of the most popular beers are pilsner style lagers, like the original Pilsner Urquell, Labatt Blue, Steam Whistle, Beck's and many, many more. Now add Stratford Pilsner to the growing list. So, what can a small microbrew hope to do to gain market share against the international beer behemoths that spill more beer in a day than this brewery makes in a year? Well, hopefully make a tasteful beer that doesn’t use cheap adjuncts and maintain consistency from batch to batch. Is that too much to ask for?

Well it seems Mixology Monday piqued my curiosity about shooters. Why? Well because they seem to be very photogenic and colourful. So with my new lightbox for photographs I decided that I’m make a few shooters and then photograph them. It worked out fairly well, since I was taking pictures with one hand and holding a pipette in the other. Yep, I use a pipette to make layered shooters because it is a magnitude easier and a whole lot faster. The spoon thing is old school and can result in a mess, but with a pipette you never make a mistake, unless you get the liqueur order wrong. Follow along for a little more enlightenment.

Well the time has come to discuss the Mixology Monday topic of shooters, being hosted by Rick at the Martini Lounge. The shooter is the cocktail of the college crowd. Yes, the shooter is the cocktail that almost every student, and every new drinker, is introduced too, other than light beer and white zinfandel. They come in groups and push forward, towards the bar, with the brand spanking new inductee, into the alcohol hall of shame. They announce that it’s so and so’s age of majority birthday (19 here) and order them some vile shooter. It’s like Vikings dunking a new born baby into ice cold river water to see if the child is hardy enough to be called a Viking! From that point most people develop a hatred for a particular spirit because of said shooter, unless of course you happen to order a shot from a nice bartender like me.

When it comes to drinks, a good cup of coffee is probably on the top of many peoples list, mine included. Like cocktails, there are decent cups of coffee, bad coffee and great coffee. A decent cup of coffee would be from a coffee shop chain like Tim Horton's or Starbucks (suspect coffee quality with me). A bad coffee comes from a gas station, at 3AM in the morning, somewhere in Ohio, and the clerk refuses to accept money after you fill your travel mug. A great cup of coffee comes from those rare independent coffee shops that roast their own beans and genuinely care about the coffee. These places can be hard to find, and expensive, so the last bastion of great coffee is at home. Good beans and a proper coffee brewing apparatus, like a French Press, can elevate your coffee experience to a new level.

The Cockspur brand of rums is the second one in this review from the Barbados, the other being Mount Gay Extra Old. Of course the Barbados may very well be the birthplace of rum, many hundreds of years ago, but Cockspur has only been around since 1884. It was started by Valdemar Hanschell who ran a supply store in the Barbados, and since this Caribbean Island was a main hub for shipping in the 1800's, selling rum was a must. Eventually the rum became the main product and with a merger with another producer rum producer and the company became Hanschell Inniss. They continue to produce Cockspur rum in three varieties, the five star, the Old Gold and the VSOR. The Cockspur Old Gold is the rum of choice for this review.

This rum reviewing sessions are almost finished, there are only a couple of more rums in my collection that need to be tasted. In this review I’ll be looking at Cruzan Estate Diamond which is a 5 year old rum from St. Croix. The rum is actually a blend of rums older than 5 years, but younger than 10 years. This rum has a long history, well maybe not this particular rum, but Cruzan has been distilling rum, in the Virgin Islands, since 1760. Making rum for that long means you must be doing something right. This is one of the younger rums in the review and probably won’t be as complex as others, but let us take a look.