A Bitter Spirit

Author: Kate

  • Welcome to our 2014 Advent Calendar

    To paraphrase one of the gurus of our age "All right, all right, all right". We're back – the boozin' siblings, Drew and Kate. We had such a great time doing our Cocktail Advent calendar last year that we're doing it again in 2014.

    We've got a new theme this year: Christmas Carols. We LOVE Christmas Carols (yes, they even occasionally come up in an iTunes mix on Kate's phone in July). We decided to make a list of all our favourite carols as well as those with an interesting story that would lend itself to a cocktail. Somehow, we managed to narrow that down to 25 carols.

    And then we grouped the carols into themes (because who doesn't like a theme?): the Christ Child, Mary, Spirit of the Season, and Family. So week 1 of Advent, all about Jesus. He is the reason for the season after all.

    We learned a lot last year about bitters, booze infusions, and the chemistry of cocktail making. This year, we're continuing our exploration of mixology as well as trying a few new techniques (though no bacon-washed bourbon this time).

    So welcome to our 2014 Advent adventure .. we look forward to the next 25 days.

  • Day 22: Kaspar

    We're down to the final three of our calendar, and we wanted to finish with a flourish. So we're invoking the legend of the Three Wise Men of the East, aka The Magi, as the theme for our remaining cocktails. According to the Bible, wise men visited the Baby Jesus after his birth and presented him with three gifts.

    Kaspar-cocktail-ingredients

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  • The Bishop .. She Smokes!

    We had some of The Ebenezer Scrooge left, so yesterday we took a mug of it outside and tried to snap a picture while it was smoking. Yup, that's steam – not a lens flare or anything 🙂 Also – festive!

    Scrooge-cocktail-smoking

  • Day 4: The Jack Frost

    Winter holidays mean winter weather – whether we're talking about Buffalo or Vancouver. It only seems right to pay homage to one of winter's naughty boys, Jack Frost. All that nipping of noses and whatnot. As you would expect, there are several versions of Jack and his story (including a modern movie where he is a serial killer turned snowman!), but one of our favourites is the modern rendition of Jack in Rise of the Guardians. In this movie he's a sullen teen (kids, only drink this cocktail if you're of age), but a fun-loving and ultimately redeemed sullen teen. For girls (and guys) who like a bad boy, this Frost is for you.

    Jack-frost-cocktail-ingredients

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  • About the Calendar

    When we were planning our initial 2013 Cocktail Advent Calendar (we’re now in year three, with a 2014 version and a 2015 version), we came up with a few rules or ideals that we would try to stick to:

    • no food colouring
    • if we can make it easily (like vanilla vodka) we should try to make our own; however, no one is going to go crazy if we need to use a commercial product (like lemon drop schnaps)
    • we believe that all our recipes are original, but we would often use other cocktails as a starting point to riff on (like jazz) – we’ll acknowledge those starting points in the notes

    For all the recipes, we used an ounce measure OR we use the relative “part” measure. That’s important primarily because you’ll then know the relative amount of non-booze ingredients (bitters, syrups, etc) to the booze measurements we used. However, you should be able to scale up and/or modify the recipes to suit your needs and/or measuring device.

  • About Us

    Since our earliest days, we (Kate and Drew) have been fans of booze and cocktails. We grew up in the era when rubbing whiskey on your teething child’s gums to soothe them was expert parenting (actually … that should still be considered expert parenting!).

    This blog, A Bitter Spirit, is a chronicle of our exploration of making, drinking and enjoying cocktails. It could be a new drink we’ve tried, a new infusion we attempted to make, or a crazy cocktail-themed project we thought would be fun – we hope to document it all here.

    Thank you for reading. Cheers!

    Kate-and-drew-2

  • Welcome to our cocktail advent calendar

    Since we started this blog at a festive time, we thought our first project should be a holiday-themed one. Of course, we can't start small. So we're doing an advent calendar of cocktails. That's right – 24 days, 24 cocktails.

    This advent calendar has been a month in the making. Spreadsheets have been involved. Multiple spreadsheets and many late-night video chats. But it's December 1st and we're ready to launch and share our first cocktail.

    But before we get to that – a bit about how the calendar is organized. Every good advent calendar needs a theme. And we didn't want to just do "Christmas-related" – so we came up with the idea of choosing our favourite holiday characters from film, TV and literature and creating a cocktail that would suit each of their personality or back story.

    Within our theme of Holiday Characters, we have six sub-themes (are you keeping up?). We won't reveal them ALL now .. but the first group are folks you would find on Santa's naughty list. And who's at the top of the list? The Heat Miser.

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