Yesterday, I launched into a wandering and long-overdue meditation on the whiskies that, for me, made the long, grisly winter of ’12-’13 endurable. Yesterday’s post covered bourbon; today, it’s all about the Scots and the Irish. When looking back on brown-booze season, it wasn’t all a bourbony blur around here. These are a few approachable, [...]

Some people — okay, me — are of the mindset that brown booze is a year-round sort of thing, the kind of drink you keep in your glass on winter’s darkest evenings as well as summer’s brightest afternoons. But there are also people — okay, me again — who think that whiskey and other aged [...]

What, again?! It was only a year ago that I spent a December afternoon at Rob Roy, igniting the contents of a punch bowl and dispensing Tom & Jerry as I did my best to dispel the bibulous bogeymen of ignoble holiday drinks. The drinks were delicious (thanks to Rob Roy owner Anu Apte, who [...]

In the month-ish since I last updated, I’ve had thousands of visitors coming to learn more about ways to help Murray Stenson (a Twitter shoutout from Rachel Maddow and a link from the New York Times didn’t hurt), and an exponentially greater number of dollars have been raised to help this beloved Seattle barman with [...]

It’s not an exaggeration to say that if it weren’t for Murray Stenson, my career, and my life, would be disappointingly different. A longtime Seattle bartender — most recently at Canon, and for much of the decade before that, at Zig Zag Cafe — Murray first got in touch with me in the summer of [...]