The Beverage Breakdown

For the float:

6 ounces crème de mûre (blackberry liqueur) 7 grams (1 packet) Knox unflavored gelatin 1 package (3 ounces) grape-flavored Jell-O gelatin 1 cup hot water

I must admit I have dunked a tea bag into hot water and called it tea. I have even made Darjeeling tea, sometimes called the champagne of teas, from a tea bag.

For tea gurus like Anindyo Choudhury, that is sacrilege. “I wouldn’t even touch it,” he says.

Most tea bag teas are chopped and cut by machine instead of being rolled and twisted, hand-plucked and hand-processed. The best Darjeeling tea is loose leaf, steeped for a couple of minutes in hot water — it’s light and bright.

When Choudhury describes it, he sounds as if he’s talking about wine. He gets excited about what he calls the “muscatel,” a “nice fruity flavor” that he says is “very hard to come by.” He talks about tea “maturing” over a week or two, its flavors deepening.

Choudhury drinks a lot of tea. For almost two decades, it has been a part of his job at J Thomas & Co. Pvt. Ltd., the oldest and largest tea auctioneer and broker in the world. The first public sale of tea took place in its Calcutta offices in 1861.

Darjeeling 2.0: India’s Tea Auction Goes Digital

Herb Citrus Cordial (makes 4-5 pints)

Ingredients:

6 cup sugar

Zest of 6 citrus, in large pieces of peel

4 cups fresh citrus juice

2 cup water

8 cups loosely packed fresh basil or 2 cups lavender or 20 stalks of rosemary or some other herb you want to cordialize.

Method:

In a large pot bring sugar, zest, juice, and water to a boil, stirring until sugar is dissolved. Remove from heat.  Add the herbs and let the syrup infuse for at least 15 minutes.

Meantime prepare your canning jars.

Strain syrup through a fine sieve, squeezing out as much syrup as possible from the herb leaves before discarding them.

Boiling water process for 10 minutes.

With more than 1,300 breweries producing some five-and-a-half thousand different types of beer, Germany is serious about the amber nectar. There’s even a word for it – bierernst – which means “deadly serious” and translates literally as “beer serious.” This sober attitude applies particularly to the German beer purity law known as the Reinheitsgebot. Introduced in 1516 by Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria, the decree allows for only hops, barley, water and, later, yeast in every Stein. For 500 years, this recipe has served Bavaria very well, and for the last century, the rest of Germany. But as 48-year-old Karlo Schorn, a patron at a Berlin bar, admits, tastes are changing. “German beer isn’t as good as it was 20 years ago” he bemoans. “Brands of beer have the same taste, or nearly the same taste. And good beers with awards now are not from Germany, they are from America or somewhere else.”

Germany’s Beer Purity Law Is 500 Years Old. Is It Past Its Sell-By Date?

now that we’ve found another skeleton mosaic in turkey, i feel it’s a good time to post my ever-increasing collection of mosaics of ancient skeletons about to have a real good time

image 1: reclining YOLO skeleton reading “εὐφρόσυνος” (”be merry”), antioch, 3rd century bce

image 2: skeleton doing what appears to be a “draw me like one of your french girls” pose reading “γνῶθι σαυτόν” (”know thyself”), rome, 1st century ce

bucky:

steve: 

tony: