LARC

So, Guy Kawasaki and Facebook are on a tear to have a crowdsourced beer flavor, which they plan to debut at SXSW. No worries, I’ll be a guinea pig, but my prediction is that it’ll be somewhat bland. Here’s a photo from their Facebook group.

/LARC - Carla

I love this entire photo gallery!

“This is a picture taken near the end of Prohibition,” Okrent says, “and what%u2019s notable about it is that you see respectable people in plush surroundings. This is not a fly-by-night place where the cops are going to come in and bust everybody. Maybe, being in New York, it’s a little bit fancier than it would have been in a some other places, but in San Francisco, New Orleans, Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, Boston, this is the way people were drinking while Prohibition was still in effect, in its last years. And nobody cares that their picture is being taken. It was absolutely socially acceptable to drink at a speakeasy by 1928 or ‘29.”

I am a fan of this article! Particularly this quote:

Park Avenue women in cloche hats and ermine coats gripped bottles of wine with one hand and wiped real tears with the other.

And then this:

They believed that props—a string of fish, a pitcher of milk, trombones, a fishing rod, a big pail of pickles—were essential to success.

Why is this not a movie?

/LARC - Carla

americandrink:

In the early days of the Dry Era, nobody on the Federal Prohibition Bureau infiltrated and took down more NYC speakeasies than master-of-disguise agent Izzy Einstein and his partner, Moe Smith.

But sometimes it took more than clever deceit to fool a wary bootlegger. Sometimes it took cold,…

(Source: Smithsonianmag.com)

LA cocktail culture & the martini.

/LARC - Carla

For those of us who live in the Bay Area, constantly bombarded by messages around seasonal/local/organic, reading an article about how GMO (genetically modified) corn impacts bourbon can be depressing. It’s something that I have been choosing to ignore up until now.

It is rather shocking there’s not an organic bourbon on the market — and according to the article the only two brands that don’t use GMO ingredients are Four Roses and Wild Turkey. Sigh. Guess that means drinking what we have and being extremely careful about what we buy next.

I hate giving the large seed companies my money — and don’t want to ingest the crap that comes from these grains. It is fascinating to note that it is primarily the international markets that care whether or not there are GMO in the ingredient list, while those in the US are less so.

The article quotes Colin O’Neil, regulatory policy analyst at the Center for Food Safety.

“To assume that the only real risk is contamination of genetic material ignores the fact that these crops by and large either produce an insecticide (which has been shown not to break down in the human gut) or they are engineered to withstand exposure to herbicide.” And farmers are spraying an increasing amount of Roundup and other weed killers as a result of herbicide-resistant “superweeds,” he points out. 

Grist has another article about the search for organic spirits - which yielded only Scotch.

/LARC - Carla