Welcome to another week and the countdown to Christmas is upon us!
Busy as we are planning a hectic schedule of events for 2013, we still have time to pop along to the odd Christmas do and sample a tipple or several...
With this in mind, this week is all about drinks, ideas for drinks at parties and what to do, if that last drink has pushed you over the edge and you are suffering from a dreaded hangover!
One of the cutest Christmas Drinks around is a Cuppa Good Cheer which includes Skyy Infusion Cherry, White Creme de Cacao, Hot Chocolate, a little sugar to taste, some whipped Cream and a Cherry.
If its cold out there and you want to stay with the hot drinks idea then you might like to try the Red Hot Chocolate, which is delicious and so unusual its bound to surprise your guests.To make one of these, put milk, cream and chocolate in a milk frothing cup, like you would for an espresso and froth as you would for a cappuccino. When the milk is hot and the chocolate has melted, add Campari and Brandy and garnish with a large marshmallow or a red peppermint stick.
Staying Festive with the lovely red colour, then maybe a Candy Cane Swirl is more up your street and is designed to add a simple yet festive element to
your larger holiday parties, and you can make huge batches of this cocktail well in advance so its sure to be a crowd pleaser, and is easy to make.
Rim a martini glass with crushed candy cane.
Combine SKYY Raspberry Vodka, Peppermint Schnapps, Cranberry Juice and Grenadine
into a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake vigorously and strain into
martini glass. Top with Lemon Lime Soda and garnish with small
peppermint candy cane.
The Santa Shot is another great way to keep your drinks festive, as its a gorgeous little red and green layered shot that
tastes like a candy cane. It’s Christmas ascetics combined with
Christmas flavors, and it packs plenty of Christmas spirit. You might
even want to leave one out for Santa with his mince pies! This is a great treat for parties, especially as an aperitif. If you don’t trust your layering skills under pressure, you can pour these in advance, put
them on a serving tray and leave them in the fridge to stay nice and
chilled. When the times comes, just pull the serving tray out carefully
and carry it in to deliver the drinks to your guests. All you need is some grenadine syrup,green creme de menthe and peppermint schnapps and there you have it, a Santa Shot!
The Poinsettia is a champagne cocktail, which makes it ideal for
holiday parties. It’s light on the alcohol, easy to drink (even for very
occasional drinkers) and festive. It’s also a wonderful brunch drink, and the cranberry gives it a nice touch of Christmas flavour , as you simply add a little Cointreau and splash of Cranberry to a champagne flute and top with Champers or Sparkling Wine. If you want to give it an extra kick you can add a little vodka, or if you want to serve something non alcoholic then just change the champagne for Ginger Ale.
So, how big do you think your drink bill will be for the office Christmas do this year! It depends on where you take your team, but we are guessing that its probably best to avoid The Playboy Club in Mayfair where World-renowned bartender Salvatore Calabrese has broken the Guinness World Record for the most expensive cocktail with a Cognac-based drink priced at £5,500 a glass!
Salvatore’s Legacy”, concocted by in front of an audience of London’s top bartenders on 15th October, is also the world’s oldest cocktail, containing a liqueur from 1770 and Cognac from 1788, around the time of the American Revolution and Captain Cook’s claiming of Australia.
The cocktail, composed of 40ml of 1788 Clos de Griffier Vieux Cognac,
20ml of 1770 Kummel Liqueur, 20ml of 1860 Dubb Orange Curaçao and two
dashes of Angostura Bitters from the 1900s, was bought by a friend and
long term client of Calabrese.
Visibly nervous before the attempt, Calabrese asked his assistant to mop the sweat from his brow. Silence fell upon the packed room as he was presented with the first
bottle – 1788 Clos de Griffier Vieux Cognac, which took Calabrese over
five minutes to prize open with a combination of a knife, corkscrew and
metal tongs
The following three bottles proved easier to enter, with Calabrese
using his first ever shaker to mix the spirits in, pouring the result
into a vintage cocktail glass.
The successful attempt, to coincide with London Cocktail Week, was overseen by a Guinness World Records adjudicator. The record comes just three months after Calabrese was left “heartbroken” when a treasured bottle of 1788 Clos de Griffier Cognac worth £50,000 was accidentally smashed by a customer at Calabrese’s bar at The Playboy Club.
“I was devastated when the bottle smashed and thought my dream of
breaking the world record was over, but thankfully it has all worked
out,” a jubilant Calabrese told the drinks business after smashing the world record today.
The previous record for the world’s most expensive cocktail was held
by The Skyview Bar at the Burj Al Arab Hotel in Dubai, with a £3,766.52 a
glass tipple.
Calabrese, who has previously worked at Dukes Hotel in St James’s and
The Lanesborough in Knightsbridge, is a vintage Cognac specialist. He has built a collection of fine and rare Cognacs worth over £1 million, dating back to the late 18th century, many of which are displayed behind glass at Salvatore’s Bar at The Playboy Club.
Ouch!
So, what do you do the morning after? Hangovers rank right up there with drunk
dialing your angry ex as one of the least pleasant drinking-related side
effects. Stave off a hangover with these before and after tips—and skip
the hangover myths.
Hangovers
are no fun even if the events leading up to the hangover were a blast. so we're taking a look at the various preventive measures and cures
people undertake in the name of keeping hangovers away, highlighting the
good, the bad, and the worthless hangover "cures".
The only 100% effective hangover prevention
is to drink conservatively or not at all, and the only 100% effective
hangover "cure" is time and fluids, but lets take a look at The Myths, Hair of the Dog and Other Not So Great Ideas!
In every culture with access to alcohol, myths abound about how to cure a hangover. In Ireland it used to be said you should bury your friend up to his neck in wet sand
to help him through his hangover. A Haitian myth has it that turning
the cork of the hangover-causing-bottle into a voodoo doll and sticking 13 pins in it
will keep the hangover at bay. Other strange remedies from around the
globe include breathing in the smoke from a coal fire and rubbing limes
on your arms. We won't spend any time debunking why rubbing fruit on
your body isn't going to cure a hangover, but we will look at the most
common remedy claims.
Drinking More Alcohol, aka Hair of the Dog:
This is quite likely the most heavily toted hangover cure in the
boozin'-recovery handbook. Unfortunately it's completely ineffective.
Drinking when you're suffering from a hangover makes
you—temporarily!—feel better simply because alcohol dulls your senses.
You could just as easily prescribe a double-shot of Tequila as a
"remedy" for bashing your thumb with a hammer.
You might achieve
temporary relief from your hangover—if it works at all—but you'll just
prolong the agony. Your body has to process all the toxins you spent all
night shoving in it (delicious or not, alcohol is no wheat-grass
smoothie when it comes to being body-friendly), and giving it more just
extends the timetable.
Drinking Juice/Coffee Afterward: The base premise
behind both of these seems to be that drinking lots of juice or coffee
will speed up your metabolism and thus the processing of the alcohol.
The problem with juice is that it would take gallons of juice to get
enough sugar in your system to really change your metabolic rate—an
already suspect line of reasoning since researchers in the 1970s
established that drinking lots of juice slows down the metabolizing of alcohol. Then, even if the questionable trick worked, you'd have to deal with
the massive insulin spike and sugar crash that followed—which can be
just as nasty as a hangover. Hydration is important, especially after
drinking it up, but juice doesn't do anything special to help you.
Coffee
fails in a related fashion. If you drank enough coffee to speed up your
metabolism enough to effect the processing of alcohol you'd give
yourself heart palpitations and the side effects of mega-dosing on
caffeine would dwarf the side effects of your hangover. Even worse, one
study suggests that coffee-plus-hangover is a bad bad idea!
If
a glass of Vegetable Juice or a strong cup of coffee makes you feel better/sober up
then sure, drink some. Just don't expect it to magically absorb all that
vodka. Between the two, the veggie juice is the superior choice—coffee is a
diuretic and light on any nutritional value, whereas your juice is packed
with vitamins and salt, both of which you could use some more of after a
night of drinking.
Pain Killers: Don't load up on
over-the-counter pain killers before bed. Not only do drugs like Aspirin have short windows of effectiveness in the
body—you'll be asleep for their most effective time—but they're hard on
your stomach and liver. That's not normally an issue when you're sober,
but now is the time to pay attention to those bottle-warnings.
Acetaminophen is especially harsh on your liver—thus the big warning on
the box of Tylenol about not taking it along with alcohol. Save the pain
killers for the next day and only if you really need them—again, you
need to let your body focus on purging the alcohol.
So what does work? Just because drinking a gallon of orange juice and jamming pins into the cork from a bottle won't cure your hangover doesn't mean you're out of luck. Like we pointed out above, the only fail-safe to a hangover-free life is to drink little or no alcohol. For those times that a good time and a good bottle get the better of you, you can armor up with these tried and tested tips.
Drinking Water: Water is a magical elixir that makes your body function. You can never go wrong drinking lots of it and it's the absolute best thing to keep yourself from getting hungover and speeding up hangover recovery. Even better than just drinking a lot of water after the fact is drinking water throughout the prior night.
Eat Up:
Drinking liquids doesn't close the valve in your stomach or jump start
the metabolic process—one of the reasons drinking cola fattens you up so
quickly—so make sure you eat well before you start drinking. The myth
side of this tip is that food some how absorbs alcohol and locks it up
until your body digests the food. The real reason is the valve in your
stomach closes to start the digestion process and it takes longer for
the alcohol to absorb into your system—a huge cheeseburger is a
metaphorical whiskey-sponge, not a literal one.
A solid meal will
cause your stomach to focus on slowing the movement of food and liquid
through your body so the digestive process can occur. If you skip the
pre-bar-hopping meal, the alcohol you drink is essentially boarding a
speed train to your blood stream. Focus on fat and protein-loaded foods
to provide a nice slow-burning meal that will help regulate the
absorption of alcohol.
Don't neglect a good breakfast, either. You may not feel like eating in
the morning, but the last thing your body needs is you stumbling around
like a zombie on and empty stomach. Mopping up the mess you made with a
bottle of Tequila—just because it's lighter colour
doesn't always mean it'll protect you from a hangover—is hard work, and
you'd be a jerk not to feed the help. Get a solid breakfast with
complex carbs and some protein—a case for a bacon sandwich if ever we have heard one!
You'll be able to discard hangover cures that
are outright ineffective, will give you food poisoning, or worse. It's
no fun being hungover but it's less fun ending up in the hospital
because your friend convinced you that the perfect cure for too much
Tequila would be raw eggs followed by a jog to a smokey sauna.
So there you go, all things Drinks!
Where ever you are celebrating your Christmas Bash this year we hope you have a great time and remember that we can still help you organise a Christmas do on the cheap!
Have a great week and don't overdo it...!
