Barrel Aged Blog

This blog is intended to be a resource for those who love and respect the craft and history of the cocktail. That's it. And I choose those words carefully. First, and foremost, this blog is a passion project. I'm a home-bartender. I have no formal training in any area of the food industry, but I love good food and good drink. David Embury said the following of the cocktail in his The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks (1948):

“It should stimulate the mind as well as the appetite. The well-made cocktail is one of the most gracious of drinks. It pleases the senses. The shared delight of those who partake in common of this refreshing nectar breaks the ice of formal reserve. Taut nerves relax, taut muscles relax, tired eyes brighten, tongues loosen, friendships deepen, the whole world becomes a better place in which to live.”

For all of these reasons, I want to make the best cocktails I can, and the Internet is a great resource for figuring out how to do so. However, over the past few months as I've been searching for information on making homemade bitters and tinctures and about barrel-aging cocktails, I've not been able to find one place that had all of the information that I desired. I ended up bookmarking dozens of sites and going from place to place in order to synthesize all of the data that I had come across. This blog is an attempt to answer and address that void. I will be sharing my findings, experiments, successes, and failures, and I'll be linking to helpful information that I find along the way. I have a lot of projects going right now (barrel-aging, tincture- and bitter-making, etc.), and I will write more about them in the coming weeks. In the meantime, follow my twitter account @BarrelAgedBlog and look for more in the near future.