Killing Time, murder consultants:
Blair Reynolds will complete his evolution from Tiki blogger to Tiki bar owner this fall, when he opens Hale Pele in Portland, OR. Just so long as I can still buy the syrups, Blair! Congratulations.
Maker's Mark's ownership of the dripping red wax seal was affirmed in court. Great moments in legitimate trademark protection. Why did this take nine years?
Richard Branson is now carving his own face into the ice served in Virgin Atlantic 1st Class. For the record, these intricate molds are unrecognizable after 10 seconds in liquid....
The Top Five Alcohol Related April Fools Stunts. Since I never got my act together to try one myself....
Extreme BoozeNerd Check Skipping. Four guys order Negronis in a bar atop a skyscraper. Skip out on the check by parachute.
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Posted by
Doug
under Basement Bar
Now see what happens if you build and run a really exceptional Basement Bar?
Just ask Blair Reynolds! (H/T: Blair Reyn…, er, Trader Tiki!)
Posted by
Doug
under Accessories, Basement Bar, Stuff
As a follow up to my post on Wall Art for your Basement Bar, I thought I’d throw up some examples of art that I have in the Pegu Lounge, and show some love to the artists who crafted them.
So in other words, you are sucking up to guys who you’ve done business with in the past, and want to do business with in the future?
Exactly. You get it so much better than the guy does, most of the time.
Of course!
Wait…
What did you mean,most of the time?
I think that there is something to be learned from each of these guys about how to buy fine art.
Incidentally, when selecting artwork, either make sure you can get it with the right frame for your bar, or get it unframed. If you have your painting framed at your local shop it will likely cost more than getting it already framed from the artist. Seriously. So get his or her frame if it is right.
Beau has several collections, all of which have potential for the Basement Bar. Aside from the cocktail series, such as the one I purchased, he also does chess pieces, wine bottles, and chess pieces with wine bottles. The cocktail series is his newest stuff, as far as I know.
Beau is a good example of the patience I talked about in the Basement Bar #8. I first saw and loved his chess work at an arts festival years ago. It wasn’t quite right for my needs, but I loved it. I always kept an eye out for him at festivals, and this year, I saw the new cocktail pieces. I was rewarded for my patience.
I have already mentioned my favorite sculptor, Mac Worthington, in my post on surfaces. Mac is a sculptor who works primarily in aluminum. I have bought entirely too many of his works over the decade plus I’ve known him, but I love every one.
You’ve seen my bar in other posts. Everything metal except the lights are his work. I chose a piece from his website to show on the left here for something different. If your tastes run modern, Mac has some incredible variety in his work. You should check it out.
The most important thing I learned from Mac is that you don’t have to be a Medici to commission
a piece of art. If you have an idea and a need, and find an artist whose work would seem to be a great fit for what you have in mind, don’t hesitate to ask if he or she can execute what you are looking for. In many cases, you will not have to pay much of a premium, if any, for a made to order piece of art. It depends on a lot of factors of course, but the idea is almost always worth exploring.
The final artist I want to highlight is a guy named Darrin Hoover. I’d say Darrin is a painter, but that would be fairly limiting. He held church services in a large movie theater for a while (and still may, I don’t know for sure), and has written a children’s book.
The piece on the right here is one of five I have that line the stairway down to the Pegu Lounge. I’d put up a picture of the stairs, but I haven’t figured out a way to show them all in a way that looks half as good as they do in real life. My lame best attempt is here, if you care.
In real life, that stairwell was very uninviting before I put up Darrin’s pieces. It still looks that way in pictures, but in real life it now looks like an Entrance, instead of a Hole. As I said before, don’t leave those walls blank! The other thing I learned from Darrin’s pieces is how powerful a series of works by an artist can be. The five pictures I have are not a set, but they fit together in both subject and style. Individually, each is nice and inexpensive, but small enough to get lost on a lot of expanses. Together they are still inexpensive, but they seem huge, and fill the space perfectly.
If you want to follow this specific series of posts on the Pegu Blog, you can subscribe to our Basement Bar feed here. Or you can just subscribe to the entire blog, with all its brilliant content, here!
Here’s a list of the other articles in this series that have been posted so far:
Posted by
Doug
under Accessories, Stuff
This new sub series on Basement Bar design is going to focus on various design elements you can consider for decorating your lounge. Today I’m going to talk about lighting and lit elements on the wall behind your bar. The wall behind your bar is going to, as they say in advertising, get a lot of eyeballs
. Your friends will be leaning over your bar, and since your physical perfection is too awesome to behold for long, they will inevitably let their eyes rest on what is behind you. Use that space to set the desired atmosphere. In the Old West™, the usual back wall decoration was either a huge mirror or painting of a naked lady (see every old film and vintage Esquire cartoon). These options still hold a certain appeal to this day, though if your friends look like mine, the mirror option may not be for the best. But they lack a certain… contemporary modernity. I may come back later to post on back walls inspired by Narcissus or Bacchus, but for now let’s go with walls that feature light.
As will be the case with most of these posts, this one is prompted by a particular product or article or blog post. Scrounging around the Internet, I ran across Let’s Get Lit Candles (H/T: Liqurious) that makes candles out of used booze bottles.
This collage of photos made me think of some of the cool back walls of bars and lounges these days. You can do a lot with colored light, and various treatments of glass or plastic to diffuse that light. One of my favorite bars in Columbus is the massive one that overlooks the main room of M at Miranova, downtown.
The room is usually darker, which makes the colored wall stand out more. Also, the color shifts very slowly over time, from one jewel tone to the next. As an added feature, there is a flatscreen TV in the middle of the wall that shows environmental DVDs, but that is another post. It is beautiful and very atmospheric.
This would not be very hard to do in a high end Basement Bar either. (I haven’t done this, so do not take my word as gospel here!) Large sheet plexiglass can be purchased from places like here or here. You could get a 4 foot by 8 foot sheet of frosted plexiglass for about $200. Frame it in with space behind for low power, low heat, long life LED lights (with color changing feature if you like). Then mount your shelves in front for a striking display.
A slightly less elaborate method is illuminated (har!) in this blog post at Landchark, another blog doing a series on Basement Bars.
These shelves are constructed in the same vein as the wall I proposed earlier. (Note the beer tap built into the wall. You can see it in the post.)
And for another idea, you could buy an old rear-projection television from your neighborhood technophile who wants rid of it so his wife will let him get a flat-screen. Build a platform behind your bar. Get nine very strong friends to help you lift it into place, then frame it in so only the screen shows and use this like the backlit wall I proposed initially. You could do color change DVDs, environmentals, or… um… the NFL network as atmospheric software. Treat it like a wall and put shelves in front of it. But make them removable for the World Series.
There are simpler methods of using light to highlight the wall behind your bar as well, such a spots, downlights, uplights, or shelves with lit candles from folks like Let’s Get Lit (Their candles are scented, so be careful of the olfactory cocktail you may be creating with several different bottles!).
I’ll leave you with one other back bar wall design that many of you will consider cool, and be tempted to riff on. Resist this temptation if you are single and wish to ever get laid, or married… and ever wish to get laid!
(Oh, and if you can make that sucker play the game for real, then I say forget my above advice and go for it!)
If you want to follow this specific series of posts on the Pegu Blog, you can subscribe to our Basement Bar feed here. Or you can just subscribe to the entire blog, with all its brilliant content, here!
Here’s a list of the other articles in this series that have been posted so far:
Posted by
Doug
under Basement Bar, Basement Bar Factoids, Stuff
Now, this is not an endorsement. I just want to get that out of the way right up front. That said, I’ve found what is a pretty cool Basement Bar product and service. Go this route and you can stop reading my series on building your own.
Behold the Authentic Guinness® Home Pub! (H/T: Uncrate, where I get all my best freaky deaky product ideas)
Thay will design and construct a genuine Irish pub in your home, complete with authentic historic Irish crap artifacts crap (Sorry, I stick with my original wording. If it’s not Scottish, it’s crap!). And since we all know how much a of a pain in the keister it is having people building stuff in your home, they will fly two of you to Dublin, Ireland (First Class, natch) to tour the Guinness brewery in the interim. As a fact-finding mission, I must say this beats gaining twenty pounds eating fish and chips at every faux-irish pub in town while you try to garner ideas for your do-it-yourself Irish Basement Pub.
The price tag here is $250,000. Neiman Marcus always offers the cutest little trinkets, don’t they?
If you want to follow this specific series of posts on the Pegu Blog, you can subscribe to our Basement Bar feed here. Or you can just subscribe to the entire blog, with all its brilliant content, here!
Here’s a list of the other articles in this series that have been posted so far:
Posted by
Doug
under Basement Bar
In this post, I want to talk about countertops and bar tops. You need a place to work and a place to serve in your bar. In simple designs, they will be one and the same; in more complex bars, you will have a featured bar top and one or more counters on which to mix and prepare.
I’ll get into dimensions and construction in detail in other posts, but I’ll throw out a few rules of thumb here to define the terms I’m using. Your Bar Top
is the long counter where drinks sit in between sips. The standard height for most bar tops, in both home and commercial bars, is approximately 42″. This is the rule of thumb because it is a comfortable height for most adults to stand beside and lean against. And even if all your friends look like Shaquille O’Neil or Billy Barty, you probably should stick with this height, since virtually every barstool you can buy is made to work with a 42″ bar top. Also, a bar top that is counter height just looks silly.
But a 42″ high surface, while a great place to set your finished drink, it is uncomfortably high as a working surface. If you have the space and budget therefore, you should also put in a second Countertop
behind the bar, at regular kitchen counter height (36″). This height is most comfortable for prep work, and the difference in height lets you make your working mess less obtrusive. As it happens, this is the height you will get if you put a standard counter atop standard cabinets.
But to get to the meat of this post, out of what do you make these surfaces? You have a lot of choices, and I’m going to spend the rest of this post running down a bunch of them. As we go through them, keep in mind the hard realities of what they will have to put up with. You and your guests will be leaning, banging, moving, eating, drinking, and in some cases smoking, on and around them. There may even be cases where you may even be slightly intoxicated while doing so, shocking as that is to contemplate. There will be spills, sprays, and spots. And lots of the ingredients in a well-stocked bar, like Angustora Bitters or pomegranate juice, will stain very quickly and easily. You need to choose surfaces that not only look good when you first install them, but will still look good years later.
(more…)
Posted by
Doug
under Basement Bar, Biographical
I haven’t put up a post in this series for a while. Sorry, but real life has gotten in the way. (I got that sentence from The Blogger’s Style Guide, Chapter One, “How to Make Excuses for Not Blogging”.
I’ve meant to go over what I exactly have for my own Basement Bar, and it was pointed out to me recently that I have an easy way to do so. I did a television advertisement for my own business (you can see it atop the right sidebar) a little while ago. We shot it in my basement bar, and it gives a good overview of what it looks like down there.
If you want to follow this specific series of posts on the Pegu Blog, you can subscribe to our Basement Bar feed here. Or you can just subscribe to the entire blog, with all its brilliant content, here!
Here’s a list of the other articles in this series that have been posted so far:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Posted by
Doug
under Basement Bar Factoids, Funny
Ok, not a factoid, but a list. If you are going to have a great Basement Bar, you will be expected to have parties therein. Holy Taco has a cautionary list of who not to invite. (H/T: List of the Day, who lifts Taco’s entire post, but at least links back to it!)
I’ll give you one as a taste, but read the whole thing.
THE POLITICS GUY
WHERE YOU WILL FIND HIM: At the beginning of the night he usually stands right next to the front door where he overtly shows off his political button or T-shirt that says something like “Once You Go Barack, You Won’t Go Back” or “McCain = McStupid.” Then, after everyone shows up, he stealthily mingles from group to group while nonchalantly dropping lines like “Did you see what those fatcats tried to pull?” anytime there’s a lull in the conversation.
HOW HE WILL RUIN YOUR PARTY: No one in the history of parties has ever changed their political beliefs based on some asshole screaming about health care reform in the kitchen of a two bedroom apartment. His endlessly tiresome factoids and statistics about how much oil we consume and how the death penalty doesn’t work will make your guests either leave or kill themselves where they stand.
The comments on both posts have some excellent additions, but they inexplicably neglect to include this chick….
If you want to follow this specific series of posts on the Pegu Blog, you can subscribe to our Basement Bar feed here. Or you can just subscribe to the entire blog, with all its brilliant content, here!
Here’s a list of the other articles in this series that have been posted so far:
Posted by
Doug
under Basement Bar, Glassware
It is wise to bring some water, when one goes out to look for (drink).
Arab Proverb
If you wish to drown, do not torture yourself with shallow water.
Bulgarian Proverb
Est in aqua dulci non invidiosa voluptas.
Ovid
I think I alluded to this before, when talking about ice, but to have a really great Basement Bar (or Garage Bar, or Shed Bar), it has to be a wet bar. About the only absolute I will issue in this whole series is that you must have running water in your bar, or you might as well not bother.
Running water means both faucet and drain. The stuff that passes between them is really more important as hardware, than as software (as Alton Brown
Now, if your bar is a place to put your kegerator,
Listen to the Ice
Diageo World Class Princess Cruises Training Program
A Jigger of Blog Wanker of the Day
Chemistry of the Cocktail Tiki Classics: the Captain's Grog
