Featured Issues

— No. 83 —

Bonal Gentiane Quina

Bonal Gen­tiane Quina shares many char­ac­ter­is­tics with ver­mouth, amari and char­treuse. That’s because it’s an infu­sion of gen­tian root, cin­chona (qui­nine) and herbs of the Grand Char­treuse moun­tains, all in a Mis­telle base (for­ti­fied wine). Mis­telle is the result of adding alco­hol (usu­al­ly brandy) to the juice of crushed grapes rather than fer­ment­ing them to pro­duce the alco­hol. This tech­nique offers a sweet­er, fresh fruit tone since the fruc­tose has­n’t been con­vert­ed to alco­hol.

— No. 80 —

Orgeat Syrup

Orgeat is a sweet almond syrup with a love­ly touch of orange and rose flower water. If you’re lucky you might be able to find a bot­tle at your local liquor store, but quite frankly noth­ing beats the home­made stuff. It’s a lot eas­i­er to make than you might think too.

— No. 78 —

Aperol & Campari

Cam­pari and Aper­ol are an acquired taste. I’m sure you know a few peo­ple who won’t touch the stuff and some that swear by it. I fall into the lat­ter cat­e­go­ry. I appre­ci­ate their sophis­ti­cat­ed depth and find the bit­ter com­po­nent they bring to cock­tails absolute­ly essen­tial. If it was­n’t for Cam­pari we would­n’t have the time-test­ed Negroni or Amer­i­cano. Both Aper­ol and Cam­pari are Ital­ian aper­i­tivos pro­duced by the Cam­pari Group. Cam­pari was cre­at­ed in 1860 by Gas­pare Cam­pari. Aper­ol was …

— No. 75 —

St. Germain

Spring is final­ly upon us. So lets kick it off with a bot­tle St. Ger­main Elder­flower Liqueur. If you go to the St. Ger­main web­site they’ll tell you the love­ly sto­ry behind their art­ful­ly com­plex liqueur. It all begins at the foothills of the Alps, dur­ing but a few fleet­ing days of spring. Locals will hand­pick wild elder­flower blos­soms and bike sacks of these blos­soms down the hill­side to mar­ket.  These sacks will be the entire­ty of what will become St. Ger­main Elder­flower Liqueur.