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HAKUTSURU Excellent Junmai Sake

My Fellow Inebriates,

I’m so happy to have tasters share their liquor faves with me, and I was delighted to receive the following tasting notes from my friend Sophie:

LB, I started early and tasted something called sake. I am told it is a rice wine. I prefer to drink it hot. They pour it in little cups and you slam them down in one gulp. At least I did. Here’s what I’d say: Warms you up going down, makes you happy, tastes like booze. Oh, and you can drink a lot of it.

I love the fact that Sophie started early. Every day I wake up with a big jones for alcohol but sometimes feel a tad constrained by social mores and fail to get drinking early enough for my tastes. I think sake is a superb breakfast accompaniment, or substitute really—there’s something light about it that suggests morning.

I don’t know if Sophie started with HAKUTSURU Excellent Junmai Sake but it’s my first choice among the Japanese wines. It’s inexpensive and boasts a quite sufficient 15.5% alcohol content. But how does it taste?

Sake’s a tricky drink because preference is so individual about correct temperature. For Sophie it’s “hot” and for me it’s “very warm.” This is because I am so terrified of overheating it and accidentally burning off some of its valuable alcohol. But let’s say you have your little cup at the perfect temperature. Well, it’s going to cool down pretty fast, so you have a small window of time to drink it in its ideal state. So you slam it like my friend Sophie, and next thing you know, you need a refill. This can go on for quite a while, especially if you buy your HAKUTSURU in the 18L cubic container.

This rice wine is full-bodied but tastes deceptively light and dry. Whether you drink it warm or cold, it warms you as it goes down. Oh yeah, and it tastes like booze. As Sophie says, you can drink a lot of it, precisely because it is so subtle and inoffensive.

A lot of people recommend pairing sake with food, particularly spicy and savory food, and if you do so you’ll be able to get away with drinking more of it. But it’s a lovely beverage on its own.

Of course, overindulging in sake can lead to all sorts of inappropriate situations, so be careful, and make sure, when you go on a sake bender, that you’re with someone you like.

DIY Irish Cream

My Fellow Inebriates,

This bear plays with fire.

As my friend Blackie often reminds me, it’s bad for us bears to get involved in cooking because we’re so easily mistaken for the oven mitt. Now, this might just be liquored-up paranoia, but it’s been enough to keep me away from the stove since we moved to our house. I don’t have anything to do with that thing. In fact, when it’s on I cower in the liquor cabinet.

But an urge is coming over me to make my own Irish cream liqueur, or at least order my mum to make some. She’s a real lush when it comes to high-cal liqueurs, so it shouldn’t be a hard sell. But what recipe do we use, people? There are HUNDREDS of them on the net, and I have no idea what to go with. Some of them use full cream, some half; some use raw eggs; some use coffee, some don’t…I have no idea how to pick the right recipe.

My second problem is lack of appropriate booze. We don’t have any whisky in the house, Irish or otherwise, so my question to you is: Is it okay to substitute Malibu? Will I still end up with something reasonably like an Irish cream? Or what if I use Bacardi Big Apple?

Ultimately it doesn’t matter because I’ll drink whatever results and then engage in all kinds of nighttime wildness. But I figure if I’m going to give some of my homemade hooch away to pals for the holidays, I should try and get it right.

What do you think? Do you have a favorite Irish cream recipe?

There’s a bear in my bed!

Friday Randomness: The Best Local TV Commercial Ever Made (For Dead Animals).

Thanks again to the Beer & Whiskey Brothers for this bizarro piece of randomness.