Tag - liquid-culture

 
 

LIQUID CULTURE

Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / LIQUID CULTURE
Jun 25, 2010
Drink infusions: from fungi to bile
Fourteen years ago in a parking lot in the aptly named city of Lebanon, Tennessee, a gentleman who called himself Jellybean and claimed to have killed 26 people allowed me a swig of his homemade whiskey. His drink had a nose, palate and finish of ethanol. He may have forgotten to malt his grains, he may have been using an ill-proportioned still, or he may have been drinking ethanol.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / LIQUID CULTURE
Dec 25, 2009
Japan's favorite hangover cures
Tis the season to be jolly. And when you've finished being jolly, tis the season to wake up with veisalgia, more popularly known as a hangover.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / LIQUID CULTURE
Nov 27, 2009
Society's whiskies hit the high notes
I've found a new whisky to love. It's a 26-year-old single malt from Hokkaido's Yoichi distillery. It's got oak and a gentle, sweet smokiness, a touch of leather, cherries, toasted almonds and I'm just making this up now, because after "oaky" and "a bit smoky," I ran out of vocabulary.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / LIQUID CULTURE
Oct 23, 2009
This obscure liqueur may save your soul
This isn't a story about Chartreuse, but let's begin there.
LIFE / Food & Drink / LIQUID CULTURE
Sep 25, 2009
Nixon's chosen cocktail and other things you didn't know about rum
* Captain Morgan was a real person. Sir Henry Morgan was a rather bloodthirsty 17th-century Welshman who blurred the line between privateer and pirate, plundering ships in the Caribbean.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / LIQUID CULTURE
Sep 25, 2009
Tokyo bars toast the sugar cane
Thank God for the Crusades, so to speak.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / LIQUID CULTURE
Aug 28, 2009
Crawling back down Center Gai
My Little Pony and Throbbing Gristle make strange bedfellows. No, not in that way. The plastic horse and a poster of the industrial noiseniks both decorate Shirokuma, a funny little bar on Shibuya's Center Gai.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / LIQUID CULTURE
Jul 24, 2009
A bar crawl up Center Gai
Shibuya, I once wrote, is the heart of Young Japan, and the street named Center Gai is its throbbing artery. Some people pay handsomely for cliches like that.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / LIQUID CULTURE
Jun 26, 2009
Bamboo: Japan's sherry amour
At the Sea Guardian II bar in Yokohama's historic Hotel New Grand, a laminated addendum to the menu offers thoughts on selected drinks. Of the Bamboo cocktail, the writer asks, "Is this the foreigners' image of Japan?"
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / LIQUID CULTURE
May 22, 2009
A purist at work behind the bar
"A bar is no place for a woman. The important characters are always men."
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / LIQUID CULTURE
Mar 27, 2009
Taste-testing a brew for the recession
There's a good reason that beer-makers use barley as a base ingredient. Fermentation only works on sugars, and grains don't contain any. But when a grain gets moist, it germinates, and its sprout contains an enzyme that converts starch into sugar. Some grains have tough husks, others sprout too meekly, but barley is the Goldilocks ingredient, just right for malting.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / LIQUID CULTURE
Jan 30, 2009
An intoxicating temple in Kyoto
Evil cometh from the north, they say. Maybe it was sunlight streaming from the south that gave ancient theologians such a notion. Or perhaps the Arctic is gushing malevolence (compare and contrast: Australians and Scandinavians). Regardless, it was a fear of southbound evil that prompted the construction of Kanga-an, a small but majestic temple north of the old Imperial Palace in Kyoto.
LIFE / Food & Drink / LIQUID CULTURE
Jan 30, 2009
An intoxicating temple in Kyoto
Emperor Go Mizuno reportedly loved fucha ryori, and likely partook of it at Kanga-an Temple in Kyoto as he gazed at the enchanting green and gravel garden.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / LIQUID CULTURE
Dec 26, 2008
Hot and tasty to keep you toasty
"Basically, no," said the bartender at one of Kyoto's ritzier drinking establishments when I asked if he could make something hot. I could have fancy juices, cream, egg whites or yolks in my cocktail, but I could not have heat. Even in winter.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / LIQUID CULTURE
Nov 28, 2008
Brown rice befits chef's cake, beer
"He was a wise man who invented beer," said Plato. It wasn't his greatest line, but it sets this story up nicely: the tale of a talented man who sort of reinvented beer.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / LIQUID CULTURE
Oct 24, 2008
Stir up memories in bars of yore
In hard times such as these you can always find solace in a drink; just make it one that reminds you of better days. Here are eight great Tokyo bars that ooze nostalgia. Some serve classic cocktails, some survived the war, and most of them seem to have served author Yukio Mishima.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / LIQUID CULTURE
Sep 26, 2008
Red Carpet treatment
Like Da Vinci or Mozart, every bartender wants to make something that lives on after they die," says Takahiro Watanabe of the Keio Plaza Hotel's Polestar bar. "A bartender's dream is to make a cocktail that appears on every bar's menu."
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / LIQUID CULTURE
Aug 22, 2008
The perfect gin and tonic
"A gin and tonic is an entry-level drink," said the ladyfriend recently. It's easy to understand, she said, easy to drink. Like Kahlua milks and Moscow mules. A drink for people who haven't graduated to whiskeys or rickeys.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / LIQUID CULTURE
Aug 22, 2008
Ten things you never knew about gin
1. Gin derives its name from jenever, the Dutch word for juniper.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / LIQUID CULTURE
Jul 25, 2008
Cooling it down with Tokyo's best
"Go around the beaches and let's have a list of the best seaside bars," said my editor. In this heat? Not a chance. But here's something better: five refreshing cocktail recipes from a quintet of great bartenders. Each of these invigorating drinks was designed to zap your summer indolence and clear the sweat from your brow. As they say, alcohol can't solve all life's problems — but it can sure sort out some of them.

Longform

A statue of "Dragon Ball" character Goku stands outside the offices of Bandai Namco in Tokyo. The figure is now as recognizable as such characters as Mickey Mouse and Spider-Man.
Akira Toriyama's gift to the world