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What is Negroni Week?  Negroni week is an annual charity event where bars and restaurants feature an Italian cocktail known as the negroni.  A portion of each negroni purchased will go to the charity of choice for each restaurant.   History of the Negroni The Negroni is a very old cocktail that dates all the way back to 1919 in Florence Italy.  Count Camillo Negroni concocted it by asking the bartender, Fosco Scarselli, to strengthen his favorite cocktail, the Americano, by adding gin rather than the normal soda water. The bartender also added an orange garnish rather than the typical lemon...

After a recent dinner conversation in Charleston, I realized that using staves to age alcohol had another distinct advantage over barrels.  Depending on the size of barrel you are comparing a stave to, staves use roughly 4-20 times less wood than a barrel does to age a given amount of liquid.  More specifically, a 53 gallon barrel uses 4x the wood as staves to achieve the same wood surface area to liquid volume ratio, and a smaller 1 liter barrel uses nearly 20 times as much wood as a stave for the same liquid volume.  These figures do not even...

There has been alot of talk over the years in the whiskey community about the differences between small barrels vs large barrels.  I have a few good links below for you to read through from well respected experts, so you can get more in depth information if you wish.   Long story short, smaller barrels produce inferior whiskey.  The main reason is that they have an un-ideal ratio of wood surface area to liquid volume.  The smaller the barrel is, the more charred wood surface area there is in contact with any given volume of liquid inside of the barrel....

Nothing in life is perfect, and neither are staves.  If properly done (like Beyond Barrels Bottle Aging Staves, and the staves used to make Makers 46) staves can produce excellent results, in some cases better than what could be produced with a barrel. They do, however, have their limitations. The primary limitation to using staves has to do with oxygen.  You can break down all the reactions, biological and chemical, that make up what we call "aging" into ones that require oxygen (aerobic) and ones that don't require oxygen (anaerobic).  Everybody reading this has thrown a dry stick into a...

John Aquino President, USBG Charleston Chapter Owner, Natural Blonde Bloody Mary Mix BS Bio-Chemistry I've been in the bar industry for 30 years this year, and I've seen all of the trends come and go, but the last 10 years have been SPECTACULAR! From molecular to the return of the classics, new tools and old ways (ice blocks, eg.), and the boom of hand crafted spirits, bitters, mixers and modifiers, it's not unlike comparing technological advances from 1900-1950 to 1951-2000. When the crazy stuff began 10 years ago, most of the innovators kept their secrets to themselves, and rightly so....