For Nicholas Coldicott's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
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 ...
Espresso "has the potential to deliver more of the incredible taste and aroma of roasted coffee than any other method (of brewing)," wrote Jeffrey Steingarten, food critic for U.S. Vogue magazine. Science says the torrent of pressurized water captures more of the aromatic oils than ...
I ordered a shot of George T. Stagg's fiery Hazmat III in Shot Bar Bourbon, a tiny subterranean bourbon paradise in Ginza, and the bartender served it in a wine glass. I asked why. "For the flavor," he said, and to demonstrate, he tipped ...
In the early 20th century, when society types in England and the United States pranced around drinking pink Champagne, they loved the coupe. The saucerlike glass showed off the colorful bubbly and came with a naughty, but probably apocryphal, story that it was modeled ...
A tawny port pairs wonderfully with Stilton. Grand Marnier tastes great on vanilla ice cream. Chianti seems to suit a Margherita pizza. And whisky? Well, that goes with haggis. But haggis is a sheep's stomach stuffed with a mash of its offal, and tastes just ...
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. The punishment begins when alcohol reaches your brain and tells your pituitary glands to stop producing a hormone known ...
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 ...
This isn't a story about Chartreuse, but let's begin there. In Voiron, near Grenoble in southeast France, Carthusian monks distill a liqueur from 130 medicinal herbs, roots and leaves. The recipe is a tightly guarded secret, known only to three holy brothers. It was conceived ...
* 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. * Vice Admiral William Penn, whose son later founded Pennsylvania, was the first captain to make ...
Thank God for the Crusades, so to speak. On their 11th-century romp through the Holy Land, the Christians came upon a fabulous new foodstuff: sugar. A few centuries, some genocide and a slave trade later, Europe had commandeered most of the Caribbean, turned cotton and coffee ...
