It’s January. The holidays are over, and the cold seems impenetrable. If there was ever a time to lock yourself indoors and drink for roughly the next three months, it’s now. And yet, tens of thousands of people have chosen to do the exact opposite — turning...
Alcohol truly is a magical substance: It’s the only depressant that can act like a stimulant; it’s been revered since its conception as nectar of the gods; one of the oldest distilled spirits is eau de vie, which translates to water of life; and of course, hard alcohols are called...
If you’re anything like me, you have a lot of friends who like to drink. Maybe they’re whiskey people, gin people or anything-I-can-get-my-hands-on people, but every year you know you can wipe out half your holiday shopping list by a trip to the liquor store. And that’s...
I have always struggled with numbers. I must have been sick the day they taught us how to tell time in elementary school because I still mess that up; I have no idea what the mathematical difference between a permutation and a combination is; metric conversions are...
You could say I’m prone to hangovers. And that’s not because of some genetic failing or predisposition. It’s just that, well, I’m simply not a one-glass-of-wine-at-dinner kind of girl. Call it whatever you want — an occupational hazard, binge drinking, a lack of self-control — I prefer...
Alcohol mixes well with many things. It is, after all, a solution. But one thing it doesn’t typically play well with is a tired, hungry, dehydrated body. There has, however, been recent chatter about how every bro’s favorite celebratory beverage of choice — i.e., beer — might...
There’s an old story, likely apocryphal, about a Russian tour guide (or maybe it was someone in Alaska) who took a group of tourists to Siberia in the dead of winter. Somehow, though, despite the guide’s expertise, they all got lost. “What do we do?” the frightened...
Drunk sleep is famously lousy. If you pass out at 2 a.m., odds are you’ll wake up at dawn, unrested and unable to go back to sleep. Even if you do sleep through the early morning hours, noon finds you no better rested. A fog envelops you...
It happens all the time: You throw a big party; buy all the booze you could possibly need; the evening is a wild success; everyone goes home happy (well, okay, somebody drunk-dials their ex and someone else throws up in a cab, but almost everyone goes home happy);...
All I remember is that it was purple. When you visit Portland, Oregon, there are a handful of culinary experiences everyone insists you must check off: Ice Cream, Thai food, the tin-foil artistry encasing your leftovers from a certain Cajun restaurant, and of course, Voodoo Doughnuts. Admittedly,...
If you’ve never tended bar before, the process of ordering, consuming and paying for drinks warrants little thought. It’s what you do when you go out: You ask for a drink, someone makes it for you and then you pay for it. But for those of us...
If any cocktail ever successfully crossed over into the world of nonalcoholic beverages, it’s the mojito — with the mint, lime and simple syrup, the rum hardly matters. I’d say that four out of the five times I hear or see the word “virgin” at work, it’s followed by...