The top cocktail lounges, retooled salons, and neo-speakeasies that are raising the bar on how we drink. In this era of hand-carved ice, house-made bitters, and $50 shots of microbatch bourbon, it’s hard to get anything approaching a bad drink. We’re thrilled about that, but the downside of the cocktail revolution is too many cookie-cutter | Read More

The top 14 cocktail-making secrets bartenders don’t want you to know. But we got the best ones to spill. While the state of the American cocktail is better than ever, you’d think yo need an advanced degree in mixology to decipher the drinks menus at some of the more pretentious lounges. You know, places where | Read More

Barrel-Aged Cocktail Kit: Aging cocktails like the Boulevardier mellows them to a deep deliciousness. This kit from New York’s Tuthilltown Spirits features a charred-oak honeycomb stave for wood-aged flavor. $12.50; tuthilltown.com “We age drinks that have a wine component, such as vermouth or Sherry, because the wine will oxidize a little bit. That brings out a lot of nutty, | Read More

What to eat, drink, and cook in 2013. #14: What Your Bartender is Drinking “It’s weird, it’s black and bitter, it’s minty and strange, and, quite frankly, it tastes like burning,” says Jeffrey Morgenthaler, bar manager at Clyde Common in Portland, Oregon. The Italian digestivo Fernet-Branca is the after-work shot of choice among those who | Read More