Monday, February 20th, 2012 will be the 64th Mixology Monday. I’ll be hosting it here at the Pegu Blog, and since February is Tiki Month in these parts, We’ve decided that the theme shall be TIKI!

The Tiki scene, like classic cocktails in general, is reviving nicely these days. The lush, decadent marriage of tropical flavors and exotic kitsch carries us away to a better, less dreary place. Please join in and add your words, images, and offerings to the Tiki Gods on the 20th. Since Tiki is more than just the drinks, feel free to post on whatever Tiki subject floats your outrigger canoe. I suspect most of you will want to offer up delectable drinks, but feel free to wax eloquent on aloha shirts, exotica music, decor, garnishes, food or whatever else moves you to enter the Tiki spirit!

As with most Mixology Mondays, the procedure is easy:

• Write up your exotic journey and post it to your blog or on eGullet, etc., on or before February 20th, 2012.
• If you are currently blogless, drop me a line, and I’ll set you up an author account and you can post your offering to the gods right here. If you don’t want to figure out how, you can even email me the text and pictures, if any, and I’ll post it. But please do it early!
• Be sure to include a link back to this post, and to the Mixology Monday site. Also include the regular MxMo logo, or you can use this thumbnail-sized version of the MxMo: Tiki logo at the top of this post. (You can steal the full-sized pic above if you like, too)
• When your post is done, add a comment to this post right here and/or email me the link at D o u g (at) C o c k t a i l c a p e r s . c o m.
• Check back to the home page here after a day or so to see all the glorious results.

Aloha, Y’all!

With all the recent brouhaha over intellectual property rights on the web here in the United States, I thought this would be an auspicious time to buckle down and finish this post, which I have been working on since Tales of the Cocktail 2011. It is a followup to my post on Eben Freeman’s session on IP issues in the cocktail industry. One of his panelists, Sheila Fox Morrison, took some time to add some thoughts on how cocktail writers can protect their work was well.

The question I want to address is whether it is useful and worthwhile to copyright your blog (on whatever subject matter). And assuming it is, how does one do so? This may get long, so my I suggest mixing up my delicious, original, intellectual property-themed cocktail, The Infringement™, before you read?

To begin with, your blog is already copyright protected. Each and every post you put up is protected by US Law (and the law of every nation that is a signatory of the Berne Convention) the moment you type it, before you even hit “Publish“. In fact, the protection of patents and copyrights is one of the bedrock, indeed one of the few constitutionally enumerated functions of the Federal government.

So that’s the whole post then!
You can just sit back and count on the awesome power of Uncle Sam to protect your work.

Um, no. Well, yes. But, no.

With automatic protection, your burden of proof that you’ve been infringed is considerable. It can be particularly difficult, even in this age of the Google Wayback Machine, to prove you wrote something first. Further, your ability to extract enough damages to make defending your property worthwhile can be problematic, as only actual damages can be awarded. And even if you aren’t looking to get compensation for someone using your work, there is no easy mechanism out there to just make them stop if they are insistent about appropriating your content.

An excellent way to address these issues is to register your copyright with the U. S. Copyright Office. With registration of your work, the government is essentially testifying that your ownership of the material is valid and true. Further, if someone scrapes your blog and you have a previously registered copyright, the law provides statutory (i.e. significant minimum) damages, as well as allowing recovery of attorney’s fees. In other words, if a scraper takes your registered content you have the means to ruin his day. Note, you do not need to register your copyright to file a DMCA takedown notice, but if the infringer contests the takedown, a registered copyright will make your case a lot stronger.

So, why wouldn’t everyone register their blog? It costs time and money to do so. Assuming you register your blog online, the cost for each registration is “only” $35, which may or may not be significant to you. The more undeniable expense is time. Filling out the required forms, and archiving and formatting your blog for filing with the copyright office adds up to several hours (with generous coffee breaks), especially the first time. Therefore, it may not be worthwhile for you to register your 12 post blog about little Jared’s adventures in PeeWee soccer. But if you are a semi-serious blogger, and have ever had the sensation of discovering your words or pictures gracing some ad-laden webpage that appears ahead of yours in Google searches, consider copyright registration to be a superior form of blood-pressure medication.

You said, “the first time”.
Once I register my blog, isn’t it copyrighted for decades?

Yes it is, but the only content that is registered is that which you included with your submission. So assuming you keep blogging away, your new content will not be so protected. So you will have to register your new content regularly. How often is up to you, but the minimum interval would be three months, and the maximum, five years. Your registration is only direct evidence in court if you made your application within five years of “publication”. And as long as you register within three months of either writing or the infringing act, you will be eligible for statutory relief.

Assuming you still think your work is worth this much effort to protect, let’s go through how you register your blog for copyright protection. While I have been through the process, it is important to remember that I am no lawyer, and certainly no expert, but I have been there, I have done that, and I do have the t-shirt Certificate of Registration.

Before you begin your application to the copyright office, you will need to prepare a copy of your blog as of the date of your application. It will need to be in a format that the office will accept, such as PDFs, Word files, rich text format (.rtf), among several others. I will concentrate on PDF format, because it is so universal, handles bloggy elements like pictures and formatting well, and because I know a good way to produce one. You can also print out your blog in hard copy and mail it in. When registering copyright on most things, the copyright office requires hard-copy only. But for things like blogs and other works published and viewed primarily on screen, we can do things the easy way.

You could just print each page of your blog as a PDF, but for an established blog like this one, almost five years old and boasting more than 800 (long-winded) posts, this process would be laborious. I suggest using an excellent web service called BlogBooker:

BlogBooker will provide you with a PDF of your entire blog from any of three big blogging engines, Blogger, LiveJournal, and of course, WordPress. The service is free, which is awesome, but you should make a donation when you use it… because the whole purpose of this exercise is to ensure fair compensation when someone’s work is used by someone else.

For a WordPress blog like The Pegu Blog, you go to your Dashboard, and choose Tools -> Export. This tool will produce an XML file of your entire blog; posts, pages, comments, etc. But an XML document is not acceptable for the copyright office. Also, this file will include none of your photos, theme, or other media.
Once your export file is downloaded, click on the PDF button at BlogBooker. You will upload your XML file and enter your blog URL so BlogBooker will know where to find all your pictures, etc. Select each feature you wish to include, and set the time range of your blog. Click the Create Your BlogBook and wait… a while. For a large blog like this one, it took a chunk of time. But eventually, you will receive a PDF of your entire blog.

The resulting PDF will not look quite as pretty as your blog.
For instance, in the BlogBooker PDF of The Pegu Blog, you will never see my little face like you do here when I butt in, only my deathless prose.

You are now ready to register your copyright.

Go to Copyright.gov and click on the eCO Login link. Create an account. Then click on Register a New Claim. The application process is many pages long. Most pages are ridiculously simple, while others require some not-obvious decisions. I’ll take note of a few here to help you through. There is also a fairly good online PDF tutorial that steps you through an example registration that covers most, but not all things you need to know.

Type of Work
Choose a literary work. Even is you are a photoblogger, I’m guessing that your work will more easily fit into the Literary Work cubbyhole than Work of the Visual Arts. You may also be tempted to register your blog as if it were a magazine or other serial publication, but functionally, it is not.
Publication/Completion
You should consider your work as published, assuming you make it public and want people to read it, that is.. Also, when first registering your blog, choose the date of your latest post as your Date of First Publication, and that year as your Year of Completion.
Authors
List the blog-owner as the primary author, but you may add as many co-bloggers as you have as authors as well.
You create an entry for each author you list, in which you will detail which elements each author worked on. I’m chief cook and bottle washer here, so I credit myself with text, editing, photographs, artwork, and compilation (this is the work of gathering related materials, links, etc. and combining them in a new form. In most cases, if you are blogging, you are compiling).
Claimants
As the author, you are the default claimant. If your blog is the property of a business, or you have sold or are selling it to someone else, they may be the claimant.
Limitation of Claim
This one is complex. On your first registration, you probably have used photos or other material from other websites that are either public domain or covered under fair use. (If you have stuff yourself that infringes, may I strongly suggest that you remove it before archiving and submitting your blog?) Assuming you have such permitted material, check the appropriate boxes under material excluded. You can use the Other box to describe that there are various photos, quotes, etc. that identify themselves as such. Under New Material Included, check the boxes that apply to your work. I’ll talk about what you do here for subsequent registrations below.

A nice thing about this laborious process is that you can save your application at any point before submission and come back to it later. Once you have completed your application, you can go to the payment step. As I said, it is $35 per registration, and you can pay via credit/debit card, or direct bank transfer. Sorry, no PayPal, web generation!

The last thing you will do, once you have completed the application and payment, is to provide your copy of your material. To do so, you simply browse to find the file on your hard disk, and give it a name for reference. If you printed out your blog, you can mail it in, and bask in the thanks of America’s tree farmers. The copyright.gov site provides a form you can fill out online to include with a snail-mail submission.

Now you wait several months, in all likelihood.

“I’ve got nothing on the copyright office…” [Source]

I kid because I love.
It does take a while to get your certificate back, but the effective date of your copyright registration will be your date of submission, even if it takes three months to process, as my submission did. You can apply for expedited handling if, for example, you already are involved with lawyers, but that costs nearly eight hundred dollars for the same registration, only in time to say, “Exhibit A, your honor!”

That’s it. Once you complete your application, your work is done, and you are as protected as you may be. Aside from opening the envelope when it eventually arrives, and filing the certificate you will hopefully never need, you can kick back and glare happily at the world of scrapers at large…

…until you have written enough more to feel willing to go through the process again!

“Hey! Don’t register your blog with the copyright office angry!”
But you might want to do it at least every Groundhog Day….

Once you’ve done it, doing it again will be easier. You prepare your blog for export and submission as before, log in to copyright.gov with your existing account, and register your blog again. For Year of Completion and Date of First Publication, again use the date of the most recent post included in your archive.
The only serious change from the first time you did will be on the Limitation of Claim page of the application. This time, you will provide the registration number you got from the copyright office in the Previous Registration field. If this is not your first revision registration, include the last two registration numbers. On limitation of claim, make the same disclaimers regarding quotes and fair use illustrations of whatever kind, and add that all material up to your last registration date is under prior registration. When your form is complete, pay again and upload your new PDF archive of your blog.

Rinse and repeat this process as often as you like and can afford, but no more often than every three months. The copyright.gov site allows you to save a template of your application which will make it much faster for subsequent registrations.

As you can see, there are strong protections in place for creators who are willing to do the most rudimentary work and adapt reasonably to modern market and technological forces. Do your part to protect your intellectual property within the system we currently have. And if I may ask, educate yourself on the current efforts, with legislation like SOPA and PIPA, to grossly expand copyright enforcement to dangerous extents, and then if you agree with me, call your Representatives and Senators and express your opinion.

As a final word, here are three more posts from others who helped me through this process the first time, and who discuss one aspect or another in more depth:
Should you register your blog with the US copyright office?
Quick and dirty guide to copyrighting your content
Copyright sample forms and strategies for registering your online content

Over the Martin Luther King Holiday, I took my family to Chicago for the long weekend.

Wait… What?
You voluntarily went to Chicago… in January…
Why?

Because I have a nine year-old daughter, who absolutely had to have one of these:

She had saved up her money (a lot of money), so we took her to Chicago to the American Girl Doll store to buy the doll, and do the Experience, including brunch in the store’s restaurant.

We’d have done dinner instead, but I hear the cocktail program there is terrible….

This, however, left me with a powerful thirst each evening. Fortune smiled upon me in this in the shape of Sable Kitchen & Bar. I’ve written before of my fondness for the Kimpton chain of boutiquey hotels. We chose one of their Chicago offerings, the Palomar, because it has a pool, only to find from my “legion” of cocktail geek twitter correspondents that adjoining its lobby was one of the most highly recommended bars in the city!

I was surprised to such a nice hotel bar, Bambara, in the Hotel Marlowe in Boston. I was amazed to find not just an above and beyond hotel bar, but an absolute top-shelf craft bar in the Palomar. Really. It rocks.

Sable is a restaurant as well. And a delicious one. Chef Heather Terhune (@HeatherTerhune) runs a smooth and elegant operation. The menu is an eclectic mix of range of dishes from sides such as duck fat french fries and all sorts of game entrees, to things like sweet corn creme brulee and bacon jam with toasted baguette points. They offer fried chicken on waffles for both dinner and weekend breakfast. Most of the larger dishes are offered in half-portions to facilitate a Tapas-like sharing experience.

And it is all really very good, though I’ll admit that while the bacon jam was as tasty as I expected, it had more of a novelty appeal for me. Still, you know if you go, you’ll order it, because, well, bacon jam.

Terhune is a contestant in the current season of Top Chef. I don’t watch the show myself, but I was told by some fellow guests that she is being given the “villain’s cut” by the show’s editors… poor girl. But that probably means she’ll be around til the end. Regardless, I don’t care. I’d eat at Sable often if I lived anywhere near.

But the bar….

The room is on a corner of the hotel, with solid glass walls on two sides of the very large space. The decor is modern, all dark leather and wood with metal accents. The bar itself is huge, about 40 feet long, with a massive liquor wall behind, boasting an impressive selection of all manner of spirits, rather than the 73 identical bottles of Grey Goose you find behind too many bars.
The bar has a design element that I’ve not really seen before and which works very well. Most of the bar is dark wood, and fronted by large, comfortable bar stools. But two segments of the bar, about 6-7 feet long each, are glowing blocks of white marble. There is no seating here and these spaces are for patron standing, rather than server access. For all its high-end nature, Sable is not an intimate environment. It is a hotel property after all, and well situated in downtown Chicago, so I’m imaging it is packed to the gills with power ties after regular workdays. It was plenty full every night we were there on a holiday weekend. (Yes, I had at least one drink there every night. Shut up.)
Crowds suck especially hard for a cocktail geek, as once the seats at the bar fill up, it is ordinarily impossible to interact with the bartenders without looming over or squeezing between other patrons. If they will put up with you trying. These blocks of standing room only at Sable’s bar go a long way to fixing this. Yes, they can fill up too, but people who are standing are more likely to make room happily, and the crowd in these segments naturally turns over much faster. The bottom line is, even on a busy night, you can still get to the bar staff.

And at Sable, getting to the bar staff is well worth the effort. Lead Dog Mike Ryan (@gastronautmike), who is currently sporting a lot more hair than in his picture on Sable’s website, is a star. A former chef, I’m guessing he just liked people too much to stay in the kitchen. Mike has a terrific resume, including Violet Hour; can carry on a cocktail geek conversation with the best of them; mixes drinks with care, craft, and style, while somehow also being swift; and has allegedly read this blog before. So what more can I say? Oh yeah, he also has what I consider the most important quality in any manager, bar or otherwise: He attracts good people.

Mike Ryan, now with 250% more hair.

I drank there every night, but Friday night Sable was the only place I drank. I spent a couple of hours bellied up to one of those glowing marble sections of the bar, trying to find the limits of former Pittsburgh bartending fixture, Fred Sarkis (@FredSarkis), and failing. This is how the Official Illustrator of the Cocktailosphere™ told me on Twitter to recognize Fred: “Reddish mustache, powerful build, probably wearing a vest. Moving swiftly & smoothly, making shakers beg for mercy.” Accurate but incomplete, as Fred has added a gigantic bartender’s beard since Pittsburgh.
I felt like being a pain in the ass, as usual, so I just kept describing elements I wanted in my drink and letting Fred decide what to make me. Everything he returned to me was not only essentially what I asked for, it was good too. He made me an Old-Fashioned with yellow chartreuse and cinnamon syrup that was particularly good.

I blush to say that I can’t remember the name of the bartender who served me Sunday before an early bedtime, but he too knew his drinks and his drink talk.

The cocktail menu is lovely, as you can see in the picture above, with a thick cover and page after page of about half original cocktails and a listing of spirits. The word “vodka” appears but twice. And while they put a certain cocktail on the menu, they have the puckish balls to refer to it by its proper name, the Kangaroo. The menu is also liberally sprinkled with a variety of excellent quotes of cocktail jokes and aphorisms. Many of these I had not read before, which is saying something. I was able to resist stealing one only because it is available online.

Sable is a wonderful cocktail bar, earning a spot in the overall top echelon of bars I’ve been to around the country. It bests a number I can think of with far wider reputations. It isn’t intimate, but the noise level is reasonable, and the crowd surprisingly manageable due to the innovative bar layout. There are no crazy high-end Ice Programs or Soda Programs, but I could perceive nary a corner cut either. Most importantly, should your fancy extend beyond the menu, the staff has the inventory and tools, and moreover the knowledge and inclination, to take you there. If you live in Chicago, you really need to explore Sable for yourself. And if you travel to the city, Sable alone is enough to put the Palomar on your short list of places to stay.

In recent days I have been doing some serious damage to a new bottle of OYO Stone Fruit, the fourth product to come out of Ohio’s first microdistillery, Middle West Spirits, located here in Columbus. OYO Stone Fruit is based on the same rich winter wheat neutral spirit that makes up Middle West’s flagship vodka and fresh, tart Montmorency cherries. It is rounded out with a range of yellow peaches, and apricots, thus giving it the stone fruit moniker. In addition, the flaovr is enriched with almonds and sweetened with hibiscus and wildflower honey from local fields, not China. The result is a deep, complex liquor that is lightly sweet but carries considerable bite.

As with all their products, Stone Fruit is made almost exclusively with local products. The cherries are from the Niagara region, and the apricots are necessarily from further afield, but everything else is Ohio grown, allowing them the best freshness and control over quality.

The guys at Middle West call Stone Fruit an infused vodka. I don’t think this is a good idea, from an accuracy or a marketing standpoint. Like their OYO Honey Vanilla (my absolute favorite among their products), this is much too rich and nuanced a liquor to let be confused with the sea of infused vodkas on the market. And for such a small-run product aimed at the high-end cocktail maker, I think that’s a sales suppressant. This is a serious product, not some shelf-space expander.

Regardless of how you categorize it, Stone Fruit is a lot of fun to mix with. It holds its own as the primary spirit in a cocktail, yet also mixes very well with a variety of other liquors. It works particularly nicely with a soft bourbon like Four Roses or Maker’s Mark, as you’ll see in a moment. It pairs with good rum, depending on the variety, in ways either interesting or disastrous. I don’t have a rum solution good enough to offer yet, but I will suggest a bourbon pairing that I like quite a bit, another cocktail where the Stone Fruit is the primary spirit, and a third with champagne.

The Rolling Stone is my favorite creation so far with the Stone Fruit. You can up the ratio of Stone Fruit to bourbon to as much as 1:1, but I think you get a more balanced result with these ratios. Four Roses works best for me with this, but try Maker’s for a little softer, sweeter result. Bigger, more robust, super-premium bourbons are both a waste and get a little titchy with the Stone Fruit. The drink leaves an interesting impression of passion fruit, or all things, without the distinctive electric vibe that fruit always leaves behind.
My bartender buddy, Cris Dehlavi, who also happens to be Middle West’s brand mixologist, suggested the Cointreau. Without it, the drink is still delicious, but that electric Passion Fruity effect is very pronounced. Don’t overdo the Cointreau, however, as it easily overwhelms the subtler flavor elements.

The Stone Fruit works nicely with different citruses, though I haven’t tried orange juice yet and make no warranty there. My second cocktail uses only the Stone Fruit which, when by itself, likes lime juice much better than the lemon I used in the Rolling Stone. I wanted to play up the almond notes in it and used a bit of BG Reynold’s excellent orgeat for a nice, funky sour.

The last cocktail I’ve come up with so far that is worth sharing is the serendipitous result of New Year’s leftover champagne that was much too good to pour out and a Twitter discussion I had with a reader who wanted something like but unlike a Bellini. I’ve also been on a French 75 kick lately, and things kinda clicked.

A few notes here. Do not use Fee’s Cherry Bitters here, as was my first instinct. They bring out the cherry flavors of the Stone Fruit far too strongly. The Peach Bitters instead highlight the supporting flavors. And this is one of those cocktails where the bottled juice just won’t do. Squeeze your limes fresh or don’t bother. Really.

OYO Stone Fruit is available all over Ohio, as well as online nationally at The Party Source out of Kentucky. Middle West also hopes to have retail distribution in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and Maryland/DC by the end of February. If you can get ahold of some, I invite you to try it out.

I’m big into logistics. It’s in my blood. Most of the useful work I’ve done in my life (as opposed to killing people or cocktail blogging) has been in transportation or logistical support. But even I find the logistics of leaving a bar a pain in the backside. And whatever your background, I’m guessing that we have at least that in common. Moreover, your bartender is of the same opinion as well.

There are a lot of moving pieces to paying your check, and each has to happen in the correct order. You have to get the check, look it over, pay the bartender, wait for change or for your card back before you can finally move on to the next stop or to home. At any point in this process, your bartender may be in the weeds, or maybe he’s just down at the other end of the bar, flexing for the group of young ladies with questionable virtue but unquestionable cleavage. It is frustrating. And it is for the bartender as well. The time she spends running your tab, finding your card, or making change, is time she can’t spend with other customers who are still producing revenue and need service. Most times, things go pretty smoothly, but even the occasional hiccup is a memory you don’t want, and can be a disaster for the bartender and his employer.

But technology rocks logistics, and there is a new company out there that aims to radically ease this particular burden on both patron and bar. It is called TabbedOut and it would seem to offer a really great way to nearly eliminate this scourge from our lives, through a nifty little app on your smartphone and some add-on software to common Point-of-Sale systems.

When she turns around to that POS system, she isn’t helping any thirsty customers.

TabbedOut is incredibly simple, and like many simple things, incredibly powerful, too. Here’s how it works:

• You enter a restaurant or bar that supports TabbedOut. The app uses location services to tell you whether your chosen watering hole is hooked in, and if not, which places nearby do. You tell your app you’d like to open a tab, give it your password, and it returns a short code. You show this to your bartender, and they enter it in the POS system. Your tab is open.
• From now until you leave is the same as any other way of operating. Order drinks just like usual, and they go on your tab.
• When you are ready to go, open your TabbedOut app, review your tab online on your phone, select the amount of tip you’d like to leave, and walk away. That’s it. You’re bill is paid, your tab is closed, you can go, and your bartender can go right on pulling Budweisers for the crowd of Steelers fans drowning their sorrows down the bar.

The ease and convenience of TabbedOut’s basic features alone makes it well worth checking out, but there are more considerations here than meet the eye, as well as more functionality.

This is a very secure way of doing things for everybody involved. Most importantly, you never let the credit card you pay with out of your possession, much less have to leave it in some plastic index card box behind the bar all evening as you must in some places. TabbedOut’s servers send your card number from your phone securely and invisibly to the POS system.
I once had my Amex card skimmed. I hadn’t used it anywhere for a while, so I knew it had to have happened in one of two bars I went to the previous weekend. I called both places to give a friendly heads-up to management about my suspicions. One was apologetic and thankful for the opportunity to watch out for the problem. The other was defensive. I’ve never been back to the second place, despite the fact that it was (is) a great bar here in Columbus. My point is, credit card fraud is a disaster for both the patron and the bar. With TabbedOut, your chances of a security failure are significantly reduced.

“Let’s see… Phillip, you had the Chateau Mouton-Rothschild and three Jager Bombs…”

There are other very nice features beyond that bare-bones description, too. The biggest one is check splitting. The only people who like this process are those who revel in arguing their share down to the last twenty five cents on a four-hour dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse. And yes, I have sat next to those people. I hated every second of that process and it wasn’t even my check.
TabbedOut offers several very easy ways to split the check. You can split the check in equal parts. You can manually split it into shares. Or best of all, and this short-circuits the quarter-pinchers, you can bring up the tab on your phone and pick which items each guest had. If your friends are also on TabbedOut, they can get your tab code from you and add themselves to your tab. Then they can pay their portion, as determined above, any time they want to. Or they can go through the hassle of paying the bartender directly, and their portion will be taken off your tab. Regardless, all the information and tools you need to easily split the check are always in your pocket.

There are a few other handy features for customers of TabbedOut too, such as CabbedOut, which will find a cab company for you whether you are in an unfamiliar city, or just so drunk you can’t remember your own.
For the social media addicts out there, TabbedOut has all the hooks needed to Tweet, post to your FaceBook wall, or check-in with Foursquare automatically whenever you open or close a tab.
The system also facilitates a really good pubcrawl, as you can keep a number of tabs open simultaneously in different bars. Incidentally, this and other factors make TabbedOut more popular in areas where there is some density of establishments that offer it, but that doesn’t mean it cannot work just fine at only one place in a city.

And TabbedOut has much to offer bartenders and owners as well. Foremost, it saves a lot of the bartenders’ time. That is time that can be spent taking care of customers (or flexing for the attractive barflys). This can mean significant extra revenue at time periods like Last Call, or the end of a ball game. In restaurant bars, a patron won’t have to delay to get their check when their table becomes ready. Also, like with OpenTable, patrons who get used to using the app will prefer to go to places that support it, and the app provides a very nice feature to help them find bars that do.

There are significant financial protections for the bar as well. The reputation of the bar and its honest employees are protected should a bad apple slip in. More importantly, should a customer just walk off, there is no need to chase them down. The bartender can close out any tab any time they want, or just at the end of the night. Or should the customer forget to close the tab, they can still close it themselves from home or the next bar over.

TabbedOut is easy to setup for most establishments, as it hooks in to most of the major POS systems, such as MICROS, Focus, Future POS, Dinerware, Jumpware, and others. It does require some additional training, which can be a consideration in such a high-turnover business. But the system is so simple and transparent, I imagine much of the process is taken up by simply convincing a new employee how easy it is going to be.

The last thing I’d like to address with this system is tipping, something that is important to both patron and employee alike.

Tipping is also made easier with the TabbedOut model. When a customer chooses to close their tab, there is a percentage slider to set the desired tip amount, and that is it. There is no math to trip up or embarrass you after three Pegus and a glass of Sauvignon Blanc. Each restaurant sets its own default tip percentage, and if the customer forgets to close his tab, that default amount will be applied for him when the bar closes it. The default amount is also a minimum amount, so the staff will not be stiffed on any tab run through TabbedOut any more than they will be stuck with a walked check.

I’m really very excited about this product. TabbedOut appears feature-rich, easy to use, a little fun, and offers value to both customer and establishment alike. I suggest downloading the free app from the iTunes store or Android Marketplace and seeing what bars near you are set up to use it. And if you are a bar owner or manager, may I suggest giving them a call?

Three hot, dusty camels trudge across a nighttime desert waste. Their hotter, dustier riders slump tiredly in their seats. Each occasionally looks up at a particularly bright star in the sky ahead of them.

Melchior: <Straightens and begins to sing>We three kings of Orient are, bearing….
Gaspar: Oh cripes! He’s in the mead again, Balthazar!
Balthazar: Melchior, will you please quit it with the kings bit? No one believes you.
Gaspar: Seriously. If we are supposed to be kings, where are our entourages?
Melchior: Like I told that barmaid back in Jerusalem, Gaspar: “With the economic downturn, we’ve had to make cutbacks in the sycophant budget.”
Gaspar: And how’d that line work out for you, your majesty?
Melchior: Shut up.
Balthazar: And why do you need to pump yourself up, anyway? We’re astrologers—the best astrologers in the world. We can look into the sky and divine the purposes of God.
Melchior: <Yodels>We are the Kings of Astrology!
<Balthazar and Gaspar shake their heads>
Balthazar: Speaking of kings, I woke up this morning with the unmistakable impression that once we find this kid, we should go home some way other than back through Jerusalem.
Gaspar: Gee, you think? That Herod character seemed a bit too eager to hand over the keys to the palace to a replacement he never heard of.
Melchior: I’m happy to go home another route. Herod smells worse than ol’ Camile here. <Slaps his camel’s flank affectionately>
Gaspar: That, and the fact that that barmaid’s father will have had all this intervening time to sharpen his scimitar….
Balthazar: <Coughs on some sand>Well, whatever Melchior’s thinking about kingship and whatnot, he’s got the right idea about a drink. <Starts to rummage through his camel’s pack. Finds a present and pulls it out> Hey! My gift for the kid! Did you guys remember to bring yours?
Gaspar: Don’t you think you might have asked that question earlier, when we were still able to turn around?
Balthazar: I got him a batch of Frankincense.
Melchior: Still on with the incense? It’s a baby. You’ll give it colic.
Balthazar: Look, my reading still says the kid’s gonna be a god. He better get used to people waving incense around his face. What’d you get him, Gaspar?
Gaspar: Gold.
Melchior: Cash? You got him cash? You might as well have gotten him a Target gift card!
Gaspar: My reading is that it’s going to be a king, not a god…
Balthazar: Something you might have kept to yourself around Herod…
Gaspar: <Overrides Balthazar’s interjection>… and gold says, you’re the king.
Melchior: Gold says, Here’s some cash, I couldn’t be bothered to think of anything appropriate to get you.
Gaspar: <Makes a rude gesture a Melchior>OK, Miss Manners, what did you get the child?
Melchior: <Mumbles something>
Gaspar: What’s that? You didn’t really forget your gift, did you? You’re not adding your name onto my tag, like you did for Balthazar’s last birthday.
Balthazar: I remember that. You still owe me a gift.
Melchior: I didn’t forget my gift. It’s secure in my pack.
Balthazar: Then what is it?
Melchior: Look, my reading just doesn’t end well for this poor kid. Doom, Gathering Gloom, Death, and all that.
Gaspar: Melchior, you cannot give a shroud for a baby shower gift.
Melchior: No! No. I just got to thinking and Myrrh popped into my head.
Gaspar: Perfume? You bought a baby perfume?
Balthazar: Maybe the mom will like it.
Melchior: I didn’t actually get pure Myrrh…. That’s kind of expensive, and I’m a little short this month.
Balthazar: Then what are you… Wait! You didn’t, Melchior.
Melchior: <Defiantly>Yes I did. What of it?
Balthazar: You brought a bottle of Fernet Branca?!?
Gaspar: I’d have gone with the perfume.
Melchior: Come on, it’s got Myrrh in it! And we love it.
Gaspar: We are bartenders.
Balthazar: We are astrologers.
Gaspar: We are astrologers who tend bar to make ends meet. Together, that makes us the wisest men on Earth.
But after a long shift kissing the backsides of arrogant camel brokers in their red power keffiyehs, we need something exotic to cleanse the pallet. Fernet Branca gets rid of every bad taste you got in one shot.
Balthazar: Leaves it’s own rather… imposing set of aftertastes. Like the Myrrh, for instance.
Melchior: I brought a case of Canada Dry Ginger Ale too.
Gaspar: Oh… well… that’s fine then. <Pauses> Except have you forgotten it’s a gift for a freaking baby?
Melchior: Look guys, like I said: My reading says this kids got a rough road ahead. I figure he’s going to need to fight off a lot of bad tastes in his mouth. I’m just trying to equip him properly.
<Tired, companionable silence>
Gaspar: <Spits>Ugh, all this sand… Look, Melchior, I’ve got a lot of gold here. It was a good month for tips for me. Let’s stop off at the next town, and we’ll buy some real Myrrh for your gift.
Balthazar: Perfume would be more appropriate for a god than booze….
Melchior: <Suspiciously>And why, pray tell, are you suddenly feeling so much like sharing, Gaspar?
Gaspar: Well…. <rubs his throat> If you are going to give real Myrrh when we find the kid, then we can crack open your bottle of Fernet Branca right now….
<Fade to black>
Balthazar: Um, Melchior, I don’t suppose you brought any Moxie, did you?

And that, children, is the real story of Epiphany!

No, not that kind of Blender Pr0n….

Tiki Month is coming. Yup, February, 2012 will mark the Fourth Annual Tiki Month here at the Pegu Blog, which means I have been doing this blogging thing for a hell of a long time. It also means my mighty BlendTec has returned to its place of honor at the end of my bar to help me begin testing recipes for the Mid-Winter escape to the South Pacific atol of Tikiana.

And as so often happens, serendipity (in the form of Instapundit) brings me a collection of Blender Pr0n from Popular Science, including this video Christmas Card. You can’t explore Tiki drinks without crushed ice, and thanks to a Phantom ultra-slow-motion camera, this is how that magic gets made:

This gives me a good idea for a post this Tiki Month: What size ice is best to put in your blender for crushing? Is it different when you are blending the drink, rather than just crushing ice? I’d appreciate any advance intelligence on this matter from any of you who’ve looked into this.

Among the other blender videos PopSci has, is a predictable, if slightly visually disappointing, battle between a Pomegranate and a VitaMix. There is also this one which shows just how quickly a drink is actually mixed in a blender. (Remember is it ultra slow-mo.) All the time we spend listening to the whir we claim is so annoying to us is really just spent enjoying the power of the blender….

And the reverse portion of that video is cool. It sure would be nice to really reverse the process and take back out that Pimento Dram that ended up ruining your new drink, wouldn’t it?

Of course, that’s just not really possible…. Or is it?

Deploying advanced new in-flight EggNog resupply technology.

A happy Yuletide to you all.
Just like Santa, you need plenty of eggnog today, so my gift to you is a bunch of links to friends who know eggnog better than I.

• Paul Clarke: General Harrison’s Eggnog
• Darcy O’Neil: Eggnog Recipies (1898)
• Camper English: Eggnog Goes Bananas
• Kevin Gray: Holiday Cocktail Recipies
• Lance Mayhew: Kahlua Cinnamon Spice Eggnog
• Andrew Bohrer: The Cocktail Advent Calendar-Eggnog
• Jeffrey Morgenthaler: Egg Nog

Many great writers put away a bottle or three. Many are known for it. And a few are known to be fueled by it. Men like Kingsley Amis and of course, Ernest Hemingway are forever associated with drinking, and doing it with the same epic skill as they wrote. This week, we lost to cancer one of our day’s greatest writers, one for whom alcohol also loomed large in his legend, Christopher Hitchens.

How good a writer was Hitch? An unabashed lefty and an outspoken atheist, he was admired by, beloved in some cases, by most writers on the Right, even the religious conservatives. His atheism was matter of fact; a simple, calculated, decision. While he often defended his lack of faith the only way he wrote anything, powerfully, he never begrudged others their faith. And throughout his long, horrifying battle with a cancer he knew he would not win, he dealt with it in a manner consistent with how he had lived his life before. He did not turn to God in desperation. Nor did he rail against a deity he professed not to believe in, in order to defend his professed lack of faith. He just was who he was. To the end.

And Hitchens was a larger than life man, not just a larger than life writer. In 2009, he got into a street brawl in Beirut with street thugs in the pay of Syria. While walking down a street with two unfortunate friends, he spied a poster of theirs and took exception to its message. He drew his pen and granted them a sample of his writing, “No, no, fuck you”, I believe….
Eloquence takes many forms, changing with the circumstances. Hatred of eloquence usually takes more uniform shape. In this case it took the shape of six or seven bad guys who showed up, took exception to Hitch’s “contribution” to their Jew-hatred, proceeded to try to beat the holy hell out of him until a cab driver more brave than smart stopped and let him and his friends in. This was at three in the afternoon, and they had been on their way to a bar.

While most of what Hitch wrote was political, he did contribute to the assemblage of written words on drink itself. I’d like to share some quotes from two pieces I found. The first is a bit on staying healthy through drink.

I’ll be 54 in April, and everyone keeps asking how I do it. How do I do what? I’m never completely sure what the questioner means. I *hope* they mean how do I manage to keep producing books, writing essays, making radio and television appearances at all hours, traveling all over the place with no sign of exhaustion, teaching classes, and giving lectures, while still retaining my own hair and teeth and a near-godlike physique which is the envy of many of my juniors. Sometimes, though, I suppose they mean how do I do all this and still drink enough every day to kill or stun the average mule? My doctor confesses himself amazed at my haleness (and I never lie to a medical man), but then, in my time I’ve met more old drunks than old doctors.

A few swift tips here, to show that I am perfectly serious. On the whole, observe the same rule about gin martinis — and all gin drinks — that you would in judging female breasts: one is far too few, and three is one two many. Do try to eat the olives: they can be nutritious. Try to eat something, indeed, at every meal. Take lots of fresh or distilled water. Don’t mix from different bottles of red wine: Dance with the one that brung ya. Avoid most white wine for its appalling acidity and banality. (Few things make me laugh louder than the ostentatious non-drinkers who get plastered when they condescend to imbibe a glass of toxic Chardonnay, and who have been fooling themselves for so long.) Avoid Pernod and absinthe and ouzo. Even if it makes you look like a brand snob, do specify a label when ordering spirits in particular. I once researched this for a solemn article and found that if you just ask for, say, vodka-and-tonic the barman is entitled to give you whatever he has on hand, which is often a two-handled jug labeled “Vodka” under the bar. It can be even worse with scotch, where imitation blends are rife. Pick a decent product and stay with it. Upgrade yourself, for Chrissake. Do you think you are going to live forever?

There is much more there, all of it great.

His memoir Hitch-22, written around the time of his diagnosis, ends up an eloquent goodbye that too few great writers get the chance to make. You can read excerpts of it at Slate, including this one on the grape and the grain. From that excerpt, conservative curmudgeon Smirkdirk excerpted a list of Hitchens’ 11 Rules on Booze.

1. Making rules about drinking can be the sign of an alcoholic.
2. Watching the clock for the start-time is probably also a bad sign.
3. Don’t drink on an empty stomach: the main point of the refreshment is the enhancement of food.
4. Don’t drink if you have the blues: it’s a junk cure.
5. Drink when you are in a good mood.
6. Cheap booze is a false economy.
7. It’s not true that you shouldn’t drink alone: these can be the happiest glasses you ever drain.
8. Hangovers are another bad sign, and you should not expect to be believed if you take refuge in saying you can’t properly remember last night. (If you really don’t remember, that’s an even worse sign.)
9. Avoid all narcotics: these make you more boring rather than less and are not designed—​as are the grape and the grain—​to enliven company.
10. Never even think about driving a car if you have taken a drop.
11. It’s much worse to see a woman drunk than a man: I don’t know quite why this is true but it just is. Don’t ever be responsible for it.

Smirkdirk’s post is entertainingly illustrated (illustrations I won’t steal) and worth visiting.

Like everything Hitchens, there is much there that is true on the face of it. And there is some that I question, but that is presented in a manner that is hard to argue with. In similar fashion, we find his wisdom on a product that is the reason (finally) for this post. As a cocktail writer, among the wages of my sins is a steady parade of email press-releases filled with material that does. not. interest. me. But every so often, there is one that strikes my fancy, such as the one from Perrier Water I received yesterday, leading me to this little article.

…a section of Hitchens’ autobiographical 2010 tome Hitch-22 in which he details his everyday alcohol agenda. ”At about half past midday,” writes Hitchens, “a decent slug of Mr. Walker’s amber restorative, cut with Perrier water (an ideal delivery system) and no ice.” He also enjoys “At luncheon, perhaps half a bottle of red wine: not always more but never less. Then back to the desk, and ready to repeat the treatment at the evening meal.” Clearly, this was a man who knew how to drink with class.

As I said, eloquent advice that I don’t entirely agree with. I, Scot that I am, put a bit of ice in my whisky. Why? Because I am also an American, and we put ice in everything, dammit.

As for Perrier, I go through a lot of the stuff, especially in the Summer. But never in Scotch. Among the things that distinguish scotches from one another are the unique properties of the water at each distillery, so using Perrier, with all its own distinct character, alters the whisky irrevocably. But Perrier is indispensable for Gin Rickeys. Nothing else is as good, marrying perfectly with good gin. And I mean Perrier specifically, not mineral water in general. Pellegrino, for instance, just does not work at all.

Regardless, raise a glass of whatever you like, with Perrier or without, alongside me to a man whose departure impoverishes us all.

The Striding Man knows his marketing. Johnnie Walker, makers of damn fine blended scotches and the greatest liquor ad video ever (you rock, Robert Carlyle) have hired a new spokesperson to promote their product.

No show has more concisely embodied the retro appeal of the modern cocktail renaissance than Mad Men. Johnnie Walker has nabbed perhaps the show’s biggest star as its new face of entertaining.

Which star, you ask? Surely it is the icon of cocktail cool, Don Draper’s Jon Hamm? Sorry Jon. The Scotsmen know how Rule 5 works. Behold Jonnie Walker’s hostess with the mostess, Christina Hendricks! (She even better in Firefly, folks….)

Click to embiggen. (If that’s possible…)

Thanks to Ace, who so, um, pithily drew this major announcement to my attention.

Thanks for the link from The Other McCain, originator of Rule 5, who notes in his headlines that this is likely Johnnie Walker’s clever attempt to bring back the concept of The Double….