Wednesday, September 26, 2007

As good a reason as any to be up at 2am

So why am I up at 2am again? Well this time my insatiable appetite for unnecessary but exciting knowledge has lead me to drink mixes. Yes, drink mixes. I found this site while searching around for wine types, reading reviews on Grey Goose Vodka from France (and trying to determine why it got a 96 on some taster rating, and how in the world one Vodka can taste different from others, and why this warrants a $30 price tag, over a standard cheapo one like Smirnoff which is at least 1/2 or 1/3 of the price.)

Why do I care about all this stuff? Well I was inspired by my co-worker Ciaran at his housewarming/birthday party, he had a whole set of shakers/sugar solution/mixed drink creation possibilities, and he made a Mojito as good as I had on the shores of the river in Rome. So I figure it's kindof a cool skill to be able to make a mixed drink for your friends, and I figure that now I am entering "adult" land I should probably figure out how to make a Martini. Next time I have a business guest over (and by that I mean, Matt Lausch), if he demands a chocolate appletini, who am I to refuse, or call him a girl/Zach Braff? Sorry Matt, had to use someone as an example.

Anyhoo, this is all really quite interesting. I know it's kinda silly really but actually it's kinda cool to see how technical this gets. It seems to me though that basically every drink recipe was probably created by some moron mixing something together with something else, getting their friend to drink it on a dare, watching them get sick, and then changing the recipe so it didn't make their friend sick on round 2. But there is some interesting chemistry going on here to mix all of the potential ingredients together, shake them with ice or pour them through a strainer or something random. Feels like high school Chemistry class (pour 1 beaker of basic solution into 1 beaker of acidic solution...), so it sounds like it'll be fun. Plus, Ciaran's Mojito was pretty much legendary, and I want to see if I can do that too. Anyway, this site seems pretty interesting, and was the first link on Google. http://www.drinksmixer.com/ Interesting stuff.

In my refusal to go to bed at a decent time I also learned what all the different sizes of measurement are, like a "shot" is 1 oz and a "jigger" is 1.5 oz (haha). Apparently some people measure in cl, centiliters?!?! It's like being in Europe and trying to figure out how large the bottle of Coca Cola is!!

So yeah, I'm up, it's 2:20am, and I've been reading passionately about how to mix white russians and mojitos and black russians and amaretto sours and what the sizes of measurement are and how to make your own sugar solution and sour solution, used for Mojitos.

Oh yeah, also a cool Autodesk Event coming up that I am going to have to miss cause I am seeing Oliver Stone talk. :)

In other news, I just got my Jelly Belly Gumball Machine from Ebay!!!!!!!!!!

Oh night of random stuff. I gotta go to bed. Happy mixing to all.

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