Well, all the signs are here. Today is the last day of my holidays, its pouring with rain outside and I don’t seem to be sweating continuously today. It can only mean that summer is finally over.

While I work on an actual post, I’ll give you my five favourite drinks of the summer that’s just passed. If there are any on the list you haven’t tried, I recommend you do before it gets too cold. They are, in reverse chronological order:

Bramble - Not necessarily a summer drink, but I liked it anyway.

Navy Grog - A great and unusual flavour.

Horse’s Neck - One of my favourite summer drinks. Simple and refreshing.

Caipirinha - Just because it’s in fashion doesn’t mean it’s bad.

Papa Doble - The best on the hottest days of the summer.

Well, that’s enough filler for now. I’ll get back to working on a proper drink post.

I’ve been on holiday for the last week and will continue to be for the next few days, so posting will continue to be scarce for a while. Stay tuned…

I’ve added a little code to the ingredients pages that gives you a list of  recipes in which each ingredient is used. It’s a small touch, but I find that it improves the browsability of the site tremendously. The best bit is that it’s totally automatic, as long as I post recipes in a certain way, so it will become more and more useful as the blog grows. As usual, please check it out and if you see any problems just let me know.
We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming.

Continuing the alcohol reviews after the other day’s rum reviews, this entry concerns Bourbon. Actually, American Whiskey would be more appropriate, since I’m not about to make separate categories for Canadian, rye, etc. But this definition works for now.

My experience with Bourbon is a distant second to my favourite, Rum, but I’ve tried most of the ones I’ve found. The selection available here in Spain is very limited and therefore so is the depth of my knowledge. Bourbon is also pretty expensive, and I’m less prone to experiment with it. Thankfully, a quick look at the scores makes it clear that the fes whiskeys that are available aren’t at all shabby.

Before I start, I’ll just refer you to the rating system explained. Remember that the score also takes price into account (which is why Jim Beam gets the same score as Woodford Reserve — the former costs about a third of what the latter goes for and is still pretty good.) Anyway, here go the reviews:

Woodford Reserve Without a doubt the best I’ve tasted.

Makers Mark The best you’re likely to find in a bar around here.

Jim Beam Black Truly impressive for the price, smooth and full-flavoured.

Jim Beam My standard bourbon, great value-for-money.

Wild Turkey Smooth and reasonably priced, but it’s getting impossible to find!

Jack Daniel’s Nice, distinctive flavour but a touch too expensive.

Four Roses Tastes kind of like perfume, too sweet.

A great cocktail is more than just a recipe. When you’re sipping on it, the whole package adds to the enjoyment of the drink. Apart from quality ingredients, you need the right glassware, the right garnish and, when the drink requires it, the right ice. Darcy O’Neill has a great post on why ice matters which you should read before continuing.

Here is a quick guide to the various types of ice used and hints for the home mixologist.

Cubed Ice

What you get out of your freezer, and the base for the rest of the ice types featured. Ideally, you should use big solid lumps of ice, so if the ice trays that come with your freezer make small or hollow cubes, ditch them and buy some trays that make bigger cubes. It’s important to not take your ice out of the freezer until the very last minute. The last thing you need is your ice sitting on your kitchen counter melting while you measure out your ingredients, squeeze your fruit, etc.

Cracked Ice

The next size down, cracked ice is just cubes broken up into fairly large pieces. The usual way to make this is to put cubes into a kitchen cloth and break them inside. However, I find that many times the ice pieces stick to the cloth, making it difficult to serve into the glass.

My preferred method is to put a few cubes inside a sturdy plastic freezer bag and, with a kitchen mallet or sturdy rolling pin, hit each cube pretty hard once. Serving from the bag is easy and, since it is transparent, you can see what you’re doing.

Crushed Ice

Everyone’s seen it, but how do you get nice crushed ice without expensive bar equipment? As with cracked ice, some people claim that banging up ice manually in a cloth will work. I find this unsatisfying because your pieces of ice won’t be a uniform size and with the finer pieces resulting from a good beating, you may get excessive dilution in the drink. Another option would be a blender, but this tends to make the ice too fine (see Shaved Ice below).

I struggled with this problem for a long time, and ended up forking out for an ice crusher. It’s an affordable manual crusher I bought at Ikea (I can’t find a link to it), and while it can be hard work crushing up ice for four or five drinks, the quality is just about ideal. I highly recommend getting some apparatus for crushing ice.

Shaved Ice

Shaved ice is basically ice ground up very fine to a snow-like consistency. The best way for getting this is to place ice cubes in a blender or food processor and just let it rip. There isn’t really an alternative apart from doing the ice-in-a-towel trick for a long time (a freezer bag won’t handle the beating for very long). The key difference between this and crushed ice is that shaved ice should be like a mass of malleable ice, while crushed ice should consist of individually identifiable pieces of ice.

And that’s about it for your ice needs. I can’t think of any recipes that require any other type of ice, although if you know one I’d appreciate a comment.

I’ll be on holiday for the next week, so posting will likely be non-existent. I’ll be back on Monday the 18th.

Apparently, Angostura is planning to launch Orange Bitters sometime in the near future. Even better, according to this thread in the Drinkboy forums, they should be launching everywhere they currently sell their current bitters.

This for me is good news. Angostura Bitters are the only bitters I can find here in Spain, and a massive 100% rise in the number of bitters choices available can only make me happy. Hopefully, I’ll be adding several recipes I never thought I’d be able to add here shortly…

Welcome to Dave’s Drinks.

This site is not intended for your viewing pleasure, although I have left it open and searchable in the hope that others might find it useful, as I do. The intention is to create a catalogue of cocktail recipes and ingredients, stored in some sort of logical order, to try and keep track of what I’ve tried, what I want to try and just what I like. You might find ratings, random short text fragments, strangely organized lists, odd updating cycles, flat-out lies and maybe even some cocktail recipes. The fact that I’m using blog software has more to do with wanting to set something up quickly than with fitness for the task at hand.

In short, don’t expect too much for now. But have fun. And suggestions are welcome, of course.