Aperitif

Dear Subscriber,

A special birthday edition this month. We are 3 on the 2nd February! This happens to be a Tuesday, so we will have a very special Tuesday Tasting lined up for you. Be sure to sign up quickly as places are limited. See below for more details.

We're using the birthday party as an excuse to buy in some block ice to carve into your drinks. It's something we've wanted to do for a long time, so we hope you like it. It has also provided a subject for our Digestive below. Random ramblings on frozen water.

As well as our birthday, February also marks Valentines Day and Chinese New Year. Both fall on the 14th - a Sunday - so we'll conveniently be closed; however, expect to see the Chinese Year of the Tiger making an appearance in our Spring cocktail list, coming soon.

Cheers,

Paul

Tuesday Tastings

Our Tuesday Tastings cost £10 per person. Tastings start at 7pm and last around 2 hours. They are a mixture of tasting, talk from one of us, a wine maker, spirit producer or expert of some kind, general chat, plus a little bit of food to pair with the tastings.

They are held in our back room, so we are limited to 25 participants on a first-come basis. We can take reservations for the tasting. Please let us know if you would like a table in the bar afterwards as well.

Tuesday 2nd February 2010, 6pm (no charge)
Our 3rd Birthday

To celebrate 3 years of bartending at The Hide, we will only have a short menu, but it will be a fantastic one containing our most popular cocktails. There will be cocktail making instruction, demonstration, and tasting!

On top of that:

- A separate bar making Martinis & Old Fashioneds in the classic manner with hand-cut ice.
- Limited edition birthday beer from our friends at Meantime Brewing. An individually numbered, delicious IPA.
- Free birthday snacks to accompany the drinks.

The party starts at 6pm. Unlike normal tastings, there's no charge

Tuesday 9th February 2010, 7pm
Galliano

Not just the Vanilla flavoured liqueur, Galliano have a range of products now that are great in cocktails. All in that distinctive (and to be honest, as a bartender quite awkward) bottle, they are authentically Italian - which is why we have an Italian from the brand coming to show them to you. We'll be making the cocktails though, so you can expect to try some things from our existing cocktail list, as well as a few that might find their way on there shortly.

The range includes Galliano l'Authentico - natural flavourings and a little more alcohol, Ristretto (coffee) and Balsamico. Yes, Balsamic vingegar flavour. They're good in cocktails - honestly! 

Tuesday 23rd February, 7pm
Tequila Don Julio and Jose Cuervo

A rather spendid bartender by the name of Tom will be coming from Diageo's "World Class" brands to talk through some of the finer tequilas of their range. This includes the great Don Julio,  as well as some of the more interesting Cuervos. The 'gold' stuff will not be included...

Not only will you get to taste some fine agave distillates, we have been promised some molecular mixology into the bargain. Quite what form this will take we're not sure, but we aren't expecting snail porridge.

Click here to reserve a space at a tasting

Digestive

Ice

In keeping with some of the world's more particular (read geeky) cocktail bars, we've recently become more interested in our ice.

In fact that's not true. We've long been interested in our ice, but feel that there is more widespread appreciation amongst drinkers as well as bartenders these days, and that it might be fun to play with our water to a greater degree. With that in mind, here are a few of my thoughts on ice...

My rather simplistic view is that there are three main schools of thought when it comes to ice:

i)       That it replaces some of the mixer in my drink, therefore I am getting a raw deal and should ask for less of it. It's also watering down my liquor.

ii)       That ice is a requirement in my drink, dilutes it and makes a nice noise in a cocktail shaker, but I haven't given it much thought beyond that; that the drink is slightly diluted is a good thing. 

iii)       That the ice in my drink is almost as important as my choice of spirit and needs to be handled with some degree of know-how. Using mediocre ice is like putting bottled lime juice in my daiquiri.

The first of these schools is rarely found at The Hide, but does occasionally wander in late on a Friday or Saturday when other establishments may have closed. The individuals invariably order a well-known brand that we probably don't stock, and object to the inclusion of fruit/bitters/women into the bar environment. We shall politely refer to them as the traditionalists.

The second school (or university at this point) contains the majority of The Hide's customers and most cocktail and spirit drinkers the world over. We appreciate that the ice obviously affects the temperature, and that different drinks ideally need different temperatures (a frozen whisky will be rather bland, a lukewarm martini downright unpalatable). We largely choose to drink our whisky straight (or with water of the liquid variety) and our whiskey with a couple of cubes of ice to take the bite off. We like our martinis stirred and our margaritas shaken (very) hard and served up. Watery shards of ice from a bucket that's been sitting on the bar all evening don't really cut the mustard and leave your Manhattan waist deep in the Hudson.

Finally we have the doctorate students of solid H2O; the freeze experts. The majority of these blue-handed individuals live in Japan, a country that takes its cubes very very seriously, and where the ability to carve a perfect sphere of crystal-clear cold stuff is considered enough to get you on to one of Simon Cowell's money-spinners. Excitingly, some of this expertise has spread out of Asia and can now be seen in specialist bars in London or New York; funnily enough, exactly where cocktail making (with ice) started. It's not just sphere-shaping that's involved here. Super-large ice cubes, rods, shaved ice and crystal cuts that Swarovski would be proud of are all made with a variety of carving tools that would make a sculptor jealous. But that's just the decorative aspect. The origin of the form lies more in the characteristics that the ice imparts to the drink than the prettiness itself. Take three examples:

1)       'wet' ice from a mediocre ice-maker (for example the kind that makes those annoyingly-shaped cubes that you can fit your thumb inside). This melts on contact with the spirit, rapidly diluting it and leaving funny crunchy bits in your drink. If you don't inhale your G&T, it's flat and insipid.

2)       Shaved ice, scraped off a large block. This ice will be super-cool as the large block has a small surface-area to volume ratio and remains colder for longer. Very cold shaved ice will cool a drink very rapidly, and while it will initially melt quickly, it's so cold that it will largely remain frozen. This makes for a wonderful caipirinha or flash-frozen Mojito. It's great for rapidly cooling a Sazerac glass or crisping up a Crusta.

3)       A sphere of clear ice carved from a big block or at least a large chunk. Again very cold, but retains its low surface area. This means it cools, but doesn't melt nearly as quickly as standard cubes. Ideal for cooling your drink without too much dilution.

To give you a chance to taste the difference, and see if there's anything discernable in this, we've got a big block coming for our 3rd Birthday on the 2nd February. We hope you'll enjoy it so we have an excuse to buy one more often.

If you'd like to try making your own, my lengthy experimentation would suggest this: buy a large bottle of cheap mineral water from the supermarket. Warm slightly (near a radiator or something), then cover most of the bottle with a sweater or thick socks, leaving only the very bottom of the bottle exposed. Place upright in a freezer so that the water freezes very slowly from the bottom up. After a few hours when the bottom has started to freeze, slide the sock/sweater up to ensure the water freezes from the bottom. You should eventually end up with reasonably clear ice, but will have to cut the bottle away to release. The principle is to make sure the dissolved impurities and gas bubbles are pushed to the surface of the ice where the gas can escape. Standard freezing traps these in the centre as the ice freezes from the outside-in, resulting in pressure cracks and minute opaque bubbles.

Let us know if you can improve on it though!

  Paul