Month: December 2012

Australian Made: Tamborine Mountain Distillery

We see more and more booze coming in from all corners of the globe at Bartender, so much so it is sometimes easy to forget that there’s plenty of good gear made right here in Australia – and no one wins awards for their booze like the guys at TMD.

Internationalist: think global, act local

By Philip Duff

I just survived a hurricane. Well, I say survived. Hurricanes ain’t what they used to be. Last year here in New York I bravely battled Hurricane Irene, which turned out to be mostly an opportunity for cute girls on the Upper East Side to walk around in short shorts and knee-high rubber boots ( a sight I found disturbingly arousing – must have lived too long in the UK in my youth). It rained a lot.

Grasshopper bounce into action

The team behind Sydney’s successful Grasshopper bar – one of the first small bars to brave the CBD – have opened their second venue with wheels already in motion for a third. Boston as the café cum bar is called is nestled at the base of the Gateway building just a stone’s throw from Circular Quay.

Tapavino

No one that we know of is putting sherry out there in as big a way that these guys are. There is a groundswell of interest building in all things Jerez in the States (bartenders like The Columbia Room’s Derek Brown have been raving about it for a while now) and we’re seeing the local winos talking about it more and more, particularly the Equipos Navazos bottlings which you can find here at Tapavino.

Open your own bar!

Every bartender worth his tips has at some point thought about opening their own bar – be it a cocktail bar, dive bar or gin joint, the urge to open something you can call your own is often what keeps us going through all the late nights, double shifts and vomiting drunks (the tequila helps, too).

Milestone Melbourne bars

Over the past few months two prominent Melbourne bars have reached noteworthy milestones and I wanted to take a few minutes to congratulate them on their achievements. First up ,we see one of Australia’s founding modern-day cocktail bars, The Gin Palace, celebrate an amazing 15 years of operation. Most people should be well aware of this Melbourne institution and the man behind it Mr. Vernon Chalker.

Bar Profile: Virginia Plain

There are two big wine trends that have taken shape over the last few years: one of them is a trend toward natural wines; the other, an increasing interest in orange wines. And there is quite a lot of overlap between the two. Natural wine, loosely defined, is wine that is made with the least intervention possible.

Take a look down the rabbit hole

Molecular mixology, modernist mixology – call it what you will, the fad became a trend which has now become a permanent part of a bartender’s repertoire. And at The Rabbit Hole, they’re doubling down on modernist techniques, which form the basis of a lot of their drinks.

Cocktailian: the art of the artichoke

By Gaz Regan. “What do you like to mix with Cynar?” fellow cocktail scribe Warren Bobrow, who writes for the likes of Foodista.com and the Williams-Sonoma blog, asked me recently. And I had to admit that I’d never really fooled around with this Italian aperitif/digestif. It wasn’t entirely off my radar, though.