Turned On

**This product is only intended for consenting adults**

The folks over at Epic Meal Time have made a product that will make your privates smell like whiskey - Whiskey Dick Lube. "Ewww! Why would I want that?!" Maybe your lover is a booze hound? Or maybe you want to try something new to spice things up in the boudoir. "Um, no." Okay, okay, maybe you just want to give an embarrassing gift to one of your friends or your idiot sibling. "Hahaha, now you're talking!" 

Have fun!

Get Baked

No, seriously, let's do some baking. This is a great gift for the confectioner in your life. Cookie cutters from Cakes Under the Influence. 

* Photo from Cakes Under the Influence

And to go with those cookie cutters, the folks over at CUI have recipes for cut out cookies and miniature cakes that look like classic cocktails - yum!

 * Photo from Cakes Under the Influence

Cheers!

Stone Cold

Sometimes we want a cold drink without it being watered down by ice. There are many products on the market to help us chill our beverages. We picked out a small handful from the folks at Uncommon Goods.

Wine Pearls for your vino lovers.

  

Double Whiskey stones.

A rocks set made from New England granite.

Drink Chillers that are a coaster with a stone inset giving you a two-for-one way to keep drinks cold, and rings off your tabletop.

Shot glasses made of stone.

Cheers!

A Taste of New Orleans

Here we present a set of gifts that are inspired by a famous New Orleans cocktail that was created in the 1800's by a Creole immigrant named Antoine Peychaud. Folks that enjoy the flavor of Absinthe are well acquinted with the Sazerac cocktail. The Sazerac is a staple here at the bar. You can get your hands on almost everything you need to make a great cocktail at the Sazerac Gift Shop - recipe, bitters, glassware, and mixing tools. The spirits will have to be procured from your local liquor store. For the best flavor we suggest using Sazerac Rye whiskey and Absente absinthe. The absinthe will last you an incredibly long time, so we suggest getting resealable beer bottles from a home brewing store and splitting it up between several people. A bonus to buying a case of resealable bottles is you'll have extras on hand to store your homemade syrups.

 

So what does a Sazerac taste like? "Delicious" Well, yes, we think it is very tasty. The rye whiskey, black licorice flavor of the absinthe, sugar, and bitters make it a lot of sweet and a little spice.

*photo from the Sazerac Gift Shop

Cheers!

Tools of the Trade

Any good craftsman will tell you that good tools are key to producing a quality finished product. We could not agree more. We have a countless supply of tools and gadgets behind our bar. Just in time for holiday gift giving, we put together our list of must haves for making cocktails.





Cocktail Shaker - We much prefer to use 2 shaker tins for their low cost, ease of use and good seal they provide. Many are familiar with 3 piece shakers, but we are not big fans. Our experience has been that they tend to leak and are more difficult to use. We recommend getting a 18 ounce and 28 ounce shaker tin from BarSupplies.com. 

Hawthorne Strainer - You may not know the name, but you probably have seen this indispensable tool before. Used for straining liquid from ice or other ingredients for cocktails served up or those served over a large ice chunk. We really like this one from OXO available at Target.










Juicer - Fresh citrus juice is essential to a great cocktail. We have tried several juicers with mixed results. Some did not do a very good job of extracting the juice, others were not very easy to use. We much prefer this juicer from Williams and Sonoma. 





Measuring - Proper balance of ingredients is key to a great cocktail. Unless you are have been trained to free pour with accuracy and have pour spouts on all you liquor bottles, you are going to need some way to insure you are pouring the proper amount. We really like these 2 jiggers from OXO.  Available from many local retailers and online merchants, is it a small investment to make in order to be certain your cocktails a consistent and delicious. 

                                

Peeler - We have found a y peeler to be the easiest tool for making cocktail garnished. The volatile oils released by squeezing fresh citrus peel over a cocktail provide a vibrant freshness that is sure to complete any cocktail. The OXO y peeler makes easy work of stripping of the peel without removing the bitter pith. We got the professional version from Amazon.com.  

Sneaky Sneaky

Holiday parties starting to get to you? Is your family driving you to drink more than usual? Or have you found yourself stuck somewhere and the only drinks are *gasp!* non-alcoholic? We have scoured the interwebs for a variety of flasks that range from classic to kind of sketchy. Cheers!

The crafty folks at Etsy have over 13,000 options for flasks. We were overjoyed :-)

The Bev-Brush, Bev-Cam, Bev-Burry, & Binoculars from Binocktails

 

A 64 ounce jumbo flask

     

Tampon flasks... um, yeah we don't know what to say about these...

Christmas ornament flasks! Now that is friggin' genius! The only bad part is we can't find someone currently selling these. Guess we just have to hide some small flasks in the branches.

A mustache flask.

And finally for your snappy dresser, a flasktie.

Cheers!

Squeaky Clean

We like to keep our bar in good order as well as maintain good hygiene. That stash of Everclear that is sitting on the back shelf of the closet from our college days works very well to clean off our bar tools, but we've found a couple items for our grown-up selves. The wine towels work as guides to pair food & libations, as well as serve their original purpose of being towels. The Whiskey soap is barrel aged and charcoal filtered, kind of a novelty but still useful. And the Barchitecture towels have designs for the classic wine and martini glass construction (great for that nerd in your life).

 

Of course it is just as important to keep ourselves in pleasant form. We love the classic smells of Bay Rum soaps and Anise scented soaps and hand creams, both of which remind us of barbershops and Sazeracs. This year we have found some items to satisfy our whiskey fetish.

Old fashioned wet shave soap scented like whiskey.

Bar soap for the shower & sink that has the aroma of our favorite barrel aged brown spirit.

Cheers!