Happy New Year, friends, and welcome to the fifth anniversary year of SLOSHED! It hardly seems possible that I’ve been sitting behind this keyboard banging out posts for five years, but the calendar does not lie.
My planned week off after the New Year has spun out into nearly three, thanks to a nasty cold and various other distractions. And, with what’s gone on and is continuing to happen in Haiti, blogging about cocktails hardly seemed like the thing that should be taking up my time. Speaking of which, I’d like to give a small plug for charity. I know everyone is texting their donations to the Red Cross, but I’m more than a little suspicious of non-profit organizations with CEOs paid over $400,000 a year. There are many other, less bureaucratic, aid groups out there who could also use your ever-more-precious dollars—groups like Oxfam International and Doctors Without Borders.
And now back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Since this is the beginning of our fifth year, I thought I’d do a little photographic flashback through the gradual development of the bar, and of the blog. After years of work, we finally have all of our bottles and tools housed safely and accessibly, a fact which I can only disclose after a lot of trial and error and messy, overcrowded solutions—namely, the single, large cabinet that has attempted to house our unwieldy collection of bottles since 2005. All the cocktail geeks will tell you that bottle, book and tool storage is a real problem, especially when you live in a tiny little apartment with no space for a wet (or even a dry) bar. Eventually we found the best solution for us, which you can see as part of the morphology below:
It’s a rather beautiful wall-mounted storage system, featuring six 8″ deep, 36″ long shelves—which adds up to quite a lot of bottle storage. Even more fortunately, the same system has baskets of various sizes which attach to the standards, one of which perfectly holds our twenty or so bottles of bitters, while another holds all of our shakers and tools. It’s pretty handy, given our space restrictions, and we’re quite happy with the results.
And since photos of bars only go so far, here are some random photos grabbed from the SLOSHED! archives, largely previously unseen, spanning the past five years. Enjoy, and we’ll be back with more cocktail posts soon.
January 19th, 2010at 8:06 am(#)
Fabulous. Just fabulous. Can you come sort out my home bar too?
January 19th, 2010at 10:28 am(#)
There’s no reason for your dig at the Red Cross. The American Red Cross actually has lower Administrative costs than Oxfam, and spends a higher percentage of its budget on Program costs than either Oxfam or Doctors Without Borders. This is not to say that any of these organizations is better than another–they all do good work, and presumably are all doing good work in Haiti–but it is shortsighted and often inaccurate to take one figure, such as the dollar amount of executive compensation, and judging the work an organization does by it.
January 19th, 2010at 11:28 am(#)
Thanks Kara! If you ever want advice if/when you tackle your bar I’d be glad to share. :)
Michael–Having worked at non-profits in the past and with the Red Cross in various capacities, I have my own reasons for suggesting other aid groups. The CEO salary was just one number for the purpose of my short write-up, as my point wasn’t to undermine the work of the ARC but to promote other groups who are less known but also doing good work on the ground. The substance of my objections is immaterial toward that end, and this isn’t a blog about politics or bureaucracy.
January 19th, 2010at 7:21 pm(#)
Do you worry about the freshness of the liqueurs? Something like Chambord – which might take me years to use up – I wonder about shelf life. Some people worry about vermouth and not much else – and others more fussy. Opinion?
January 19th, 2010at 7:33 pm(#)
Hi Lee—Honestly, it depends on the liqueur. Chambord has a low proof and a high sugar content, so it is shelf stable for a long time as long as you keep it out of direct sunlight with moderate temperature control. High-proof liquors like whiskey evaporate and are affected by oxidation at a much faster rate, so I try to use them up within three months of opening them.
As a general rule, I don’t worry about liqueurs at all. They’ll keep for a long time, and most of the time you don’t use enough of them in a drink that even if they were a little “off” that it would make much of a difference. (Though if you’re talking about a vintage bottle of Forbidden Fruit that was bottled in the ’60s, you should use it up as fast as you can—a bottle that old goes off much, much faster.)
January 19th, 2010at 7:44 pm(#)
Thanks Marleigh!
And I’d like to comment on the quality of the photos collected in this post as well – clean, sharp, stylish, colourful – well done! To me – a big part of the appeal of any cocktail blog – keeps me salivating.