Featured Issues

— No. 142 —

Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve

Well, we were lucky enough to get our hands on a bot­tle of Pappy Van Winkle’s Fam­ily Reserve 15 year, which some say is the best of the prod­uct line. It wasn’t an easy task secur­ing a bot­tle that’s for sure. This line of wheated bour­bon has a cult-like fol­low­ing. The craze got its start in 1998 when Van Win­kle 20 year was sub­mit­ted to the pres­ti­gious Bev­er­age Tast­ing Insti­tute. It received an unheard of rat­ing of 99 out of 100.

— No. 139 —

Willett Distillery

I recently had the expe­ri­ence of fol­low­ing around the dis­tiller of my favorite dis­tillery with my bud­dies and some cam­era equip­ment. We were there when the dis­tiller opened the doors until he packed it up for the day. Wil­lett was nice enough to give us free rein of the grounds and we got to wit­ness each nuance of the process.

— No. 136 —

Aperol Falernum

A while back I saw an arti­cle in “Art Culi­naire Mag­a­zine” with a few Aperol cock­tails and an Aperol faler­num recipe. The recipe came from Jane Lopez, Bev­er­age Direc­tor at The Cat­bird Seat, in Nashville, Ten­nessee. I thought this was a great idea and decided to make my own twist. I used my go to faler­num recipe as a start­ing point, but omit­ted the fresh juice to help pro­long the liqueur’s shelf life. I also cut back on the cloves because my original …

— No. 133 —

Grapefruit Hop Syrup

Inspired by my recent hobby of home brew­ing, I cre­ated a unique grape­fruit hop syrup to exper­i­ment with. IPAs that have a strong grape­fruit palette are my favorite. I’ve found that cas­cade and amar­illo hops have a nice grape­fruit and cit­rus pro­file to them and I wanted to try this fla­vor com­bi­na­tion in cock­tail recipes.