These are blog posts that didn’t fit into one of the three categories I typically write about: Recipes, Ingredients, and Techniques. Let me know if you think something’s wrong with this.
October 25, 2025
Earlier this year, my friends over at the Portland Art Museum reached out to me about doing something to support Everybody Is an Art Person, part of their larger connection campaign which includes the new Rothko Pavilion expansion. The goal is to open the museum up – literally and figuratively – by celebrating Portland creativity | Read More
March 31, 2025
Every so often, I get to work on a project that reminds me why I fell in love with this industry in the first place. The Carbonation and Dispense Pressure Calculator is one of those projects. I built this tool with my friends Bart and Valentino from Crossroads Consultancy, the brilliant duo formerly behind Crossroads | Read More
September 19, 2024
Ever since I started building webapps this summer and sharing them with the world, I’ve been (pleasantly) bombarded with requests from people who want more. Which is awesome and I promise I’m going to get to many of the ones I haven’t gotten to yet. However, I have gotten a lot of requests for tools | Read More
August 19, 2024
I made this for you guys because I love you – the Batch Cocktail Calculator. Designed for both professional bartenders and folks who make drinks at home, this calculator takes your single-serving cocktail recipe and turns it into a batch of any size. This project kicked my ass a more than the Universal Syrup Calculator | Read More
July 20, 2024
This is for those of you who aren’t super comfortable with spreadsheets (and I don’t blame you) and would prefer to have a much easier solution. I spent waaaay too much time getting real granular (no sugar pun intended) this morning creating a handy webapp that will now create a perfect 1:1 or 2:1 syrup | Read More
November 12, 2023
My first real fancy bar job was at a French restaurant. I’d been working for like six years in dive bars and clubs already but this was like, black tie, crisp white shirt, starched bistro apron, the whole thing. Pouring wine and TONS of Martinis. At least once a night someone would order a Martini | Read More
Okay, so I grew up eating artichokes – my family lived not far from Castroville, California, and they were a regular part of dinner for me. So when we opened Pacific Standard in Portland, with a food menu that serves as a tribute to West Coast cooking, I knew I had to put a steamed, | Read More
March 23, 2023
Yesterday I bought a new hand juicer that someone shared with me, and I bought it because it was something I’d never seen before! (To be fair I do believe it was just released this year – someone let me know if this is incorrect) It’s a hard plastic, flat hand juicer. That’s right, it | Read More
February 8, 2023
The Keoke Coffee is one of those drinks that I got a lot of orders for back in the late 90s and early 2000s when I was first starting out making cocktails. And I never really gave it much thought back then, because it seemed like there were a hundred coffee drinks that all seemed | Read More
October 12, 2022
This post is long overdue, but I’ve been very, very, very busy these past four months. In case you haven’t heard, I’ve finally opened my own bar – with my good friend, business partner, and former lead bartender at Clyde Common, Benjamin Amberg. And now that I’m finally able to come up for air a | Read More
April 25, 2022
LATEST UPDATE: This calculator is, well, not obsolete – but there is a much better version that I’ve finally finished building for you over at syrupmath.com – it’s a much easier, and much more robust version of this old syrup calculator that you’ve been using for the past several years. Unlike the spreadsheet in this | Read More
February 4, 2022
I started tending bar when I was in school, back in 1996, at a corner bar called The Tiny Tavern, located in the Whitaker district of Eugene, Oregon. It was (and still is) kind of a rough-and-tumble part of town, full of working class people, families, musicians, artists, you name it. I met a lot | Read More
January 11, 2022
Something occurred to me recently: Why are we still banishing low-alcohol and no-alcohol drinks to their own dumb section of the menu, like they’re sitting at the kids’ table at dinner? Think about it for a second, doesn’t it seem a little barbaric in this day and age – when we’re all consuming more low-proof | Read More
I love being pleasantly surprised by bar-related knowledge, and this is the most recent surprise I learned while doing a staff training last week here in Portland. Head bartender Jared Miller shocked me by telling me that he cuts his citrus peels with one of the cheese slicers they use at the wine bar he | Read More
August 12, 2021
Back in 2019, I wrote a little piece about how liquor companies could be better about supporting the next generation of working bartenders. It was really well-received by both the bartending community and by the brands who truly care about the people who are on the front lines, selling their products. Dozens of brands reached | Read More
These are the books and tools I use every single day to make drinks at home and behind the bar. Clicking on a product takes you to Amazon, which helps me keep this site running, so thank you in advance!
