An online speakeasy of potent potables and other pabulam.

A short and quick review of The Joy of Mixology.

The short version: go buy it right away!

While cleaning up on New Year’s Eve, having made a number of cocktails (and did vodka shots, which I think helped erase most of the end of the night), I managed to drop my bottle of Fee’s West Indian Orange bitters.

CRAP!

So I call Scheider’s and they do have it in stock.  That’s good, if only that it’s still a haul to get down there and back, and other than maybe buying another bottle of that armagnac, I’m not certain if I feel like wandering down there.
I go over to Amazon, where I bought a few of the bitters that I couldn’t find there the last time I had gone (errr, time before last, I guess).  Sure, they have it, also, but there’s shipping to keep in mind.  Ouch.

But then I thought again.  I was kicking myself for not having gotten myself some orgeat and falernum earlier; why not just add that in?

One problem: while the orgeat from Fee’s is listed as being from Kegworks, for some reason, instead of Fee’s, it’s sold from someone else called “Left of Main”.  Which means that it’s an additional shipping cost.  I found that I could force the Amazon site to sell it to me via the Kegworks storefront, however.

I plunked around a bit on the Kegworks website, and sure enough, I found that they had it also.  Even better, they had a “Cocktail Mixers Starter Set” – a bottle of the West Indies orange bitters, a bottle of falernum (smaller than the other, natch), a bottle of orgeat (ditto), blue curacao (I already have some, but it’d be interesting to compare), sloe gin (ditto), and curacao-triple sec (ditto again).

It’s $29.95 plus approximately $9.31 from Kegworks directly; it’s $34.95, reaching $44.10 after shipping, from Amazon.com.  So I ended up going with it from Amazon, as I was buying some other things at the same time and it saved me a bit of hassle.

The smaller sizes will work better for me, I think, as I’m not the tiki drink maker like

tmfiii

is.  Given that I’m also living with roommates, I have to be more careful about the size of bottles, etc., I get that need to be refrigerated after opening.  I know the bitters don’t, but I’m not certain on the rest – and my little dorm fridge is getting crowded with all the stuff that’s in there.

Perhaps I should “take care of” that bottle of apple schnapps this weekend…and whatever beers are in there…oh dear, there goes that plan…

For those of you into that kind of thing, I’ve got a short review of Imbibe! over on my blog.

Coming up hopefully within a day or two will also be The Joy of Mixology.

So after a trip to Schneider’s and World Market…

That’s a bottle of Punt e Mes, partly thanks to a WaPo article the other day, Schonauer apple schnapps, which is supposedly better than the other kind I usually get, some Heering cherry liqueur, and a bottle of Castarede XO armagnac that was on sale.  I also picked up a backup bottle of Laird’s Applejack.

We also hit World Market where I got some whole nutmeg plus some mixer:

That’s two kinds of ginger beer – Bundaberg and Fentimaan, plus Fentimaan “Curiosity Cola” and Stirrings tonic water.

tmfiii is probably coming over this way in a bit; we’ll get a chance to try some of this stuff out!