Last Orders, Please.

I remember back in the '80s visiting a little pub in the back country of the west of Ireland that served nothing but Guinness and Irish whiskey and was like an embassy from Heaven.

Now all one with Nineveh and Tyre, I fear.

We Will Sell No Wine Before Its Time

Which will be in about half an hour.

Evolution Mobile Bar

A complete cocktail bar that folds into a single container.

I have just found the next thing I'm putting in the car against the day of the zombie apocalypse.

Balvenie 1964 Single Malt Scotch Whisky

Balvenie 1964 Single Malt Scotch Whisky; a neat little tipple that retails for £7100 a bottle.

I'm sure it tastes like a dram of heaven, but I think I'll give it a pass. With my luck I'd turn around and the next thing I'd see would be my Scotch being decanted into a bowl of sangria.

Memory Drain

A review of the Red Lion pub in Westminster, which I include because it was the first pub I visited when I moved to London back in the '80s.

Don't worry. I shan't include London's other 6000 I had a pint in.

Oh, The Humanity!

Never mind oil prices; the rising demand for corn has produced a looming tequila shortage.

The Prime Minister calls for calm. UN in emergency session. Pope leads prayers for deliverance.

Sowine

EuroCave's Sowine wine bar allows you to keep an open bottle of wine fresh for up to ten days.

An interesting invention, but I'm still having trouble with this strange "not finishing the bottle" concept.

A Solution Without a Problem

If you feel it to be a prudent investment to drop €5000 for this handmade gimballed champagne holder for your Perrier-Jouët Grand Brut 1996, then you're not drinking it fast enough.

Super SideBar

The $499 Super SideBar is the answer for the amateur barman for whom lifting those heavy bottles is just too much effort. A touch of a button and you can dispense the contents of any of five bottles stored in its cabinet.

Frankly, I'm voting close, but no cigar. When they add ten more bottles and make it so it can not only pump out the booze but mix it and cut the limes, then I'll be impressed.

Le Grand Frère Vous Observe

Planning a night on the town in Paris? Then plan to be breathalysed–even if you're not driving.

Good to see that the French police have so much spare time now that the "youths" torching cars problem is under control.

The Booze Bra

Progress marches on.

Another nail

From the Telegraph:

Beer drinkers could pay £4 for a pint this year following an "unprecedented" rise in the cost of producing and distributing beer.

It's enough to drive a man to drink.

Bunsen Burner Barman

In the past few years something called "molecular gastronomy" has become all the rage in the same way that nouveau cuisine of a generation ago taught diners that you can drop a packet on a meal and still come away starving.

Basically, molecular gastronomy is cooking combined with chemistry that translates into dishes that are far too over-prepared. When most people hear the word "Frankenfood" they think of genetically modified crops. I think of a chef with a test tube and an Erlenmeyer flask churning out repellent foamed sauces to go on foodstuffs that resemble nothing meant for the human pallet in either taste or texture.

Not content with ruining people's dinner at a premium price, kitchen sadism has spread to the quiet refuge of the lounge, where there is now something that could be called molecular bartending, of which the Times has a frightening example:

“Take the Super Soda, for example. Really it’s a classic Tom Collins,” (says Tony Conigliari of London's Shochu Lounge), putting in front of me a tall glass of viscous liquid with green bubbles suspended in it. Alongside it is a paper perfume swatch. What he has done, he explains, is re-created the notes of the perfume – Soda by Comme des Garçons – by cooking lemon grass, lime and geranium essence in a vacuum with Tanqueray, lemon juice, sugar and gelling agents, and then stirred in frozen grapes and small pearls that he has made by syringing liquid cinnamon and nutmeg into a calcium base. At least I think that’s what he said. The result is like no Tom Collins I’ve tasted. You smell the perfume swatch and take a sip.

Then dash for the gents before the gag reflex becomes overpowering.

We used to laugh at the Romans with their hummingbird tongues dipped in honey, but 21^st century Britain has definitely done them one up in the decadence stakes. I remember when a cocktail was having a splash of tonic and in your gin and bitters. And if you were really on the cutting edge of depravity you might ask the barman if you could have a piece of ice with it.

If no one was looking, of course.

Tipple of Choice

Russian men have taken to drinking aftershave.

As opposed to those half-litre bottles of vodka with the foil tops that just taste like it.

Carts & Horses

Britain is faced with an epidemic of drunken young louts downing 18 pints of lager in an evening and then going on mindless, vomit-spumed rampages of smashing and yelling in the High Street. The solution?

Middle-class wine drinkers will be the focus of government plans to make drunkenness as socially unacceptable as smoking, The Times has learnt

Classic Blairite solution: When faced with a violent, recalcitrant enemy, go after the harmless and law-abiding. They're a softer target.

According to Vivienne Nathanson, the head of science and ethics at the BMA,

It is not the nanny state.

Translation:

It is the nanny state

Cheers

Labour party chairman Hazel Blears via a BBC headline:

Britons 'not ready to drink less'

I'm no fan of Britain's yob culture that thinks that the only way to have a good time is to drink until you throw up and pass out (and not necessarily in that order), but given that this story is about the failure of New Labour to impose a "European drinking culture" on the country with all the consideration that Dr. Pavlov gave to his dogs, I think I shall race my glass.