Hire a professional to help you learn to mix and stock your home bar. more ›

Brazil's national spirit is more versatile than you think. Best known as the stuff in a Caipirinha, cachaça has been appearing outside those traditional confines lately, as the star of imaginative spring cocktails at several Chicago restaurants and bars. more ›

Making the rounds of Chicago's vanguard cocktail dens is never boring work. We're poured novelty, creativity and surprise with astonishing regularity. Then there are the changes of season. During these precious brief moments, things get really interesting. Flavors, textures, ingredients and preparations are shelved, while others are brought out and polished until they shine like new. Several cocktail menus around the city are undergoing deep springtime-inspired revisions; a few joints are even opting for complete reboots. The Exchange Bar recently did its spring cleaning, and on Friday debuted a roster of well-crafted new cocktails. more ›

A standing-room-only crowd descended on WaterShed Bar Monday night for its inaugural stint as host of the monthly cocktail series Shift Drink. Held on the first Monday of each month, Shift Drink pairs a chef with a mixologist and charges them with devising a creative menu of cocktails and serving them up for the event. This month Sepia's chef, Andrew Zimmerman, and head bartender, Josh Pearson, collaborated on a cheeky menu of four signature drinks that turned a favorable light onto some of cocktail history's dimmer nooks. more ›

If you had any doubts that mixology has become a lofty subject as of late (and, depending how you feel about it, that's for better or for worse), you must not have known that it's currently being practiced in space. more ›

Derek Alexander and his colleagues minding the bar at Logan Square's Longman & Eagle are unveiling a stunning set of new cocktails as part of a broader overhaul of the beverage menu. Not to worry, L&E's cherished whiskey collection isn't going away; the menu change - apart from the new drinks for spring that will be tagging out some of the hot winter cocktails - is largely textual in nature. more ›

The National Restaurant Association is calling all bartenders, both amateur and professional, to enter its 2011 Star of the Bar competition, which will take place during the NRA's International Wine, Spirits & Beer Event at McCormick Place May 21 to 24. To enter, you must submit a two-minute video to YouTube in which you demonstrate making an inventive, original cocktail that includes at least one product made by Bacardi, the competition sponsor. Six semi-finalists will be chosen to showcase their drinks at the IWSB event, and the grand prize winner will walk off with 5,000 bucks. more ›

312 Dining Diva noted yesterday that Southern Wine & Spirits' Bridget Albert was named the official mixologist of Redbook magazine. A protege of "Modern Mixologist" Tony Abou Ganim, Albert is one of the cocktailers most responsible for the current mixed drink craze around town with her focus on market fresh ingredients and premium spirits. more ›

Pocket Cocktails launched a new app for Mac computers this week that aims to school the home bartender. It's not just a bunch of recipes, but also a primer on how to mix drinks with skill, illustrating techniques like layering and garnishing. The Toronto-based company has developed cocktail-centric apps for the iPhone before, most notably its eponymous "Pocket Cocktails" app; now that Apple has launched its Mac App Store, which sells programs for use on Mac computers like the iMac and Macbook, app developers like Pocket Cocktails are refitting and expanding on their iPhone apps for Macs. more ›

The videos that Grant Achatz and Craig Schoettler have been putting out showcasing the cocktail offerings at the Aviary have us foaming at the mouth, in the best possible way. The things they are going to do with cocktails have never been done in Chicago before. Until we can actually taste the drinks (and believe me, once they open, you will have to pry us out of their chairs with a crowbar) we can watch the gorgeous videos. A new one, posted yesterday, shows guests mixing their own drinks, combining a carbonated negroni with a classic white lady gin cocktail. Afterwards, guests swizzle a sidecar (with ginger ice) with a stalk of lemon grass, melting the ice and combining the flavors. Our only questions? How does this audience get invited, and why aren't we there? more ›

Home bartenders, "You can do a lot with a little." That's a taste of the sage advice of the Whistler's Paul McGee, who this week held the second session of Cocktails 101, the new Sunday-afternoon series of bartending classes he's teaching at the Logan Square cocktail bar. Always in earnest pursuit of mixing wisdom, we attended this week's class to learn from one of Chicago's best. more ›

Author Sarah Deming is bothered by "mixology." She says so in the winter 2011 issue of literary magazine The Threepenny Review. She argues that the term has come to stand for a series of affronts and frippery she's suffered in innocent pursuit of her "usual" drink. I feel Sarah Deming's pain, as I too am bothered; but in my case, it's this essay of hers that has me pissed. more ›

For a city that raises its bartenders to the level of some chefs, Chicago put on a decidedly weak display last year for World Cocktail Week. The anemic list of events was not lost on Drinks Over Dearborn's Kyle McHugh, whose "Speakeasy Over Dearborn" was, by default, the best of last year's events. more ›

Ah, the Gimlet. The classic drink of tropical breezes, summer heat and sunny days. Why, you may ask, are we featuring it now? When it's 30 degrees and there's a freezing rain advisory, we need all the hints of summer we can get. All you need is a lime - suddenly you feel warm all over again. more ›

A couple months back we wrote about Hum Spirit a rum-based liqueur infused with hibiscus, cardamom and ginger. Seger is ready to foist Hum Spirit on the rest of the world with a launch party at Pops for Champagne (601 N. State St., 312-266-7677) the Hum Spirit launch will feature cocktails crafted by Seger, Charles Joly of the Drawing Room and the Violet Hour's Stephen Cole. If that doesn't draw you over to Pops, maybe the $3 PBRs and $5 Jameson shots will. this is all part of Pops's "Shift Drinks" series featuring guest bartenders every Monday night in their downstairs bar. more ›

Before Adam Seger, Bridget Albert, John Kinder, Peter Vestinos, Lynn House and all the other great mixologists in town, there was Joe Danno, owner and proprietor of the Bucket O' Suds. That old bar became the stuff of legend. Like Disco Demolition, the Bears' Super Bowl XX victory parade, and viewing the body of Harold Washington lying in state in City Hall after his death, more people actually say they went to the Bucket O' Suds than actually visited. more ›

It’s rare that we actually invent anything new here at Chicagoist cocktail labs. We have our hands full most of the time testing out recipes and trying to figure out the perfect ways to make classic cocktails – besides, with so many recipes out there, inspiration is hard to come by. However, freezing our butts off is the mother of invention (or something like that). more ›

Cocktail books are everywhere. Every time we walk into a big discount bookstore, the bargain bin is full of books with titles like “The Drunken Idiot Barman’s Encyclopedia of Cheap Spirits” (or something like that) with 1000 not-very-precise recipes and uninspiring photography. The cocktail books that we bring home with us show off the character and ideas of a single mixologist, with a few innovative new recipes combined with the best of the old favorites. Bridget Albert has created just such a book in “Market-Fresh Mixology: Cocktails for Every Season”and we’ve been working our way through the drinks in the book just as fast as we could. more ›

It doesn't bear repeating, but we're doing it, anyway. Here at Chicagoist we're big fans of the Art of the Cocktail. If you aren't getting your fix from the "Properly Sauced" series, you can taste for yourself impeccably crafted cocktails while watching silk screen exhibitions and enjoying artwork. Starting Thursday night and running through October 9, Campari and Swindle Magazine are teaming up to host "The Art of the Cocktail" exhibitions throughout the city. more ›

We had the good fortune to attend a cocktail mixing event at La Madia last week led by their mixologist, Jennifer Contraveos. Jennifer is a Chicago cocktail-ing star, winning regional and national competitions and being named one of the top mixers in the city by Metromix. Formerly the head mixer at Graze, she’s taken over the helm at La Madia. more ›

Today is National Piña Colada Day. Naturally it makes sense to focus on the Colada for this installment of "Properly Sauced." Originally, the piña colada was nothing more than ripe pineapple juice, either strained (colada) or unstrained (sin colar). Visitors to Pilsen's Fiesta del Sol sample it in this version annually. According to Wikipedia, the earliest known reference to the piña colada as a rum-based cocktail was in a Travel magazine article about Cuba from 1922: more ›

While browsing at O’Gara and Wilson in Hyde Park, we stumbled across a copy of Trader Vic’s Book of Food and Drink – a first edition from 1946, signed by the Trader himself. As lovers of classic cocktails, we couldn’t let this one go, and we’ve had fun making the various 1940s rum-based cocktails and reading the dated and sarcastic prose. One recipe for “Pondo Punch” was named after “Our Filipino Boy” who apparently used to make them for the Trader. Another, the Mahukona, is described thusly: “There’s a good story about this drink, but sitting here trying to remember it, I’m stuck. I know I got the drink some place, because I still have the scrap of paper I scribbled it down on, but dammed if I can remember where it was.” more ›

Recently, during our visit to RL Restaurant, we came across two old favorites that aren’t often found (at least in non-fusionized form) on restaurant cocktail menus: the Sidecar and the Champagne Cocktail. RL’s cocktail list is filled with old favorites, but any good bar should be able to make either of these drinks. Both drinks are slightly sweet but not cloying, and both are based on brandy, a liquor not often seen in modern cocktails. The brandy lends both of these drinks a depth that vodka cocktails too often lack. more ›

Over the holidays we received some lavender tincture from John Kinder, the sick talented bartender/mixologist at mk (some readers might remember Kinder from his days at moxie). more ›

It's easy to forget that, with all the hype recently bestowed to the Violet Hour since it opened months ago (much of it warranted, we'll preface), that this city was already teeming with master mixologists before Toby Maloney blew back into town. Case in point, at the recent "Chicago Iron Bartender" competition, Sepia's Peter Vestinos beat out a packed field including Nacional 27's Adam Seger, Tim Lacey of Spring Restaurant Group, and Otom's James Macknyk... more ›