Hennessy Announces Latest Limited Edition Bottle Artist, Vhils
The street artist known as Vhils is the latest to create a label for Hennessy's Very Special Limited Edition Bottle series, following KAWS, Shepard Fairey.
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How "American Cognac" Was Born On Highway 101
Tom Acitelli's latest book, Whiskey Business, delves into the history and culture of spirit making in USA, including that of American Cognac.
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How To Make Sous Vide Butter-Poached Lobster
Lisa Q. Fetterman's book shows you how to pull off restaurant-grade fare at home. Learn how to make sous vide butter-poached lobster and wow your guests!
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Chefs, Artists Join Cross-Country Cognac Push From Rémy Martin
Rémy Martin, the French cognac brand, is setting out to Chicago and Los Angeles on a cross-country pop-up tour combing food, drink and art.
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Shake Up This Ice Cream Cocktail From The 1800s
Happy Ice Cream Week! Finding ice cream on the drinks menu of a cocktail bar can be a bit surprising. Though ordering a milkshake in the late 1800s would have gotten you a whiskey, cream and whole-egg flip, this changed in the early 20th century with malt shops and soda fountains hand-shaking and then using blenders…
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5 Homemade Cocktail Recipes Made With Different Base Spirits
Food Republic’s Brian Quinn has been all over the cocktail beat during the past few years, highlighting drinks from bars across the U.S., ranging from the simple to the difficult to the impressively unique. Have some extra mole bitters lying around your home and don’t know what to do with them? Care to immerse yourself in…
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Two Takes On The Elegant French 75, With Cognac Or Bourbon
A little bubbly never hurt anyone, but a few too many of these potent 75's might do some damage. Champagne cocktails — with the original incarnation employing only a sugar cube doused in Angostura at the bottom of the glass to produce a stream of bubbles — date back to before the word “cocktail” even existed. The…
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8 Essential French Spirits That Every Cocktail Fan Must Know
Jeffrey Morgenthaler is Food Republic’s Contributing Cocktail Editor and author of the occasional column, Easy Drinking. Jeffrey is an industry veteran, having worked at many styles of bars for the past two decades. He currently manages the bars Clyde Common and Pépé Le Moko in Portland, Oregon, and is the author of The Bar Book: Elements of…
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French Fare: Steak Au Poivre Recipe
Dana Cowin is the longtime editor-in-chief of Food & Wine magazine, so you might think her kitchen skills are as strong as her editorial prowess. Take it from a self-professed dish-ruining home cook: sometimes you need a real chef to step in and show you the ropes. Cowin's new book, Mastering My Mistakes In The…
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Apple Pie In A Glass: The Artful Dodger Cocktail Recipe
Fall may easily conjure thoughts of warm apple pie, but not as often the fruit-derived bounty found in spirits like French cognac and applejack — American apple brandy. Bringing those elements together, as well as notes of spice and smoke, Sel Rrose's Timothy Kiefer creates a riff on the Gold Rush, the modern classic three-ingredient cocktail…
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Step Up Your Aperitif Game With This Byrrh Cocktail Recipe
With so many once unattainable European amaros, liqueurs and aperitifs now available stateside, bartenders and enthusiasts have the ability to stock their arsenals with an incredible array of once old, now new flavors. Made from red wine, herbs, spices and quinine, the fruity Byrrh Grand Quinquina has been circulating for over 125 years in Southern…
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Shepard Fairey Hopes You Drink Hennessy
Shepard Fairey dropped by NYC's Soho House last week for a luncheon to introduce his new label design for a limited-edition bottle of Hennessy. Fortunately for street art and cognac fans, the term "limited" is being used liberally, as it's an edition of 315,000. Still, that shouldn't stop you from grabbing a bottle or two…
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A French 75 Cocktail With Cognac? You Better Believe It, And Check Your History.
Ever since it was published in The Savoy Cocktail Book and infiltrated the top bars in Paris and New York, the French 75 has reigned as one of the most elegant Champagne cocktails. Though some today try to serve it with gin as the base, Cognac is not only a far better choice in terms…
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What It Feels Like To Drink A $22,000 Bottle Of Rare Cask Cognac
There are a few defining moments in every man’s life – and yes, we’re keeping things PG-rated here. There’s his first childhood crush. His first job. And his first sip of $22,000 cognac (sales tax not included). Last week, I was lucky enough to be invited to sample from one of these very bottles of…
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La Danse Diable Cocktail Recipe
We've put it all on the table when it comes to Fernet this week. (You can check out all of our coverage here.) To cap off our surprisingly popular Fernet Week, our barkeep-in-chief Brian Quinn stirs up a Fernet cocktail recipe. Yes, a Fernet cocktail recipe. Rarely found in cocktails, Fernet can be unwieldy and…
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Thinking Beyond Brandy: 5 Table Wines From Armagnac
You guys, you know Armagnac. It’s cognac’s older and better-value cousin, a brandy made in Gascony, in southwestern France. Its base is a still wine that usually includes some combination of the high-acidity grapes: Baco Blanc, Ugni Blanc, Folle Blanche (which, by the way, translates loosely as “crazy white female”) and Colombard. The wine made…
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Between The Sheets Cocktail Recipe
Cognac has to be one of my favorite spirits, blending both a complex range of fruit flavors from its distilled grapes and the vanilla, caramel and spices from the oak it's aged in. While there are myriad cocktails that employ this elegant spirit, the Sidecar definitely stands out as one of most appreciated and influential.…
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Vieux Carré Cocktail Recipe
Most cocktails, shaken or stirred, carry a fairly short expiration period for drinking them before they start to fall apart — either from over-diluting in ice or getting too warm. Many patrons, however, do not intend to down their drinks in three sips, but rather enjoy them in sips over the course of a conversation…
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Hotel Cocktail Bars Make Their Big, Expertly Shaken, Comeback
Not many think of hotel bars today as the pinnacle of imaginative craft cocktails. Imagine trying to order even a basic Manhattan at a Holiday Inn. Shudder. But the fact is that hotels were once the home to some of the best bartenders in the world. Ago Perrone is one of our favorites in London.…
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Salvatore Calabrese Lets You Drink History
When it comes to cocktails, Simon Ford is the guy to know. After earning a Wine and Spirits Education Certificate in the UK, he went on to work for Seagrams and now holds the heady title of Global Spirits & Cocktail Brand Expert for Pernod Ricard USA. For real, it's on his business card. In…
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This Guy Is Selling His Really Old Booze
When Bay van der Bunt first started buying old and rare bottles of Cognac and Armagnac, he didn’t quite realize he’d started a collection. He grew up in the Netherlands with a father and grandfather who liked to partake of old spirits – some of their preferred Cognacs were 100 years old or more –…
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What Did Kim Jong-Il Eat?
The weekend’s news of the death of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il shook the world. Kim had been revered as a god by his people thanks to his, and his father’s, iron grip over the populace. Now, what’s going to happen next? Can Kim’s youngest son consolidate power? Will he overcompensate and do something aggressive…
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7 Creative Negroni Spins
Three components—all equal parts—combine for the complex marriage that is the Negroni. Campari is the anchor. It's a mysterious spirit, bottled in such a deep shade of red that beetle blood was once rumored to be one of the main ingredients. (Fact: Not true). The secretive Milanese producers will only say the complex aperitif is…
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The Parisian Negroni
This twist on the Negroni swaps out the gin for Cognac. The 106-proof spirit from France ensures that its flavors come through, even when mixed in a cocktail. Of course, the warmth of the Cognac makes this a comforting drink during the chillier months. Read more about the history of the Negroni Also see: El…
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Cognac Came Early This Year
A funny thing happened in Cognac this year. The grapes came early. At least that’s how Guillaume Lamy, Vice President at Cognac Pierre Ferrand, puts it. An unusually warm spring and rainy summer resulted in an early harvest in the French brandy-producing region – the earliest in some 40 years, in fact. Lamy explains just…
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Sazerac Cocktail Recipe
At one point absinthe was so popular in France that happy hour was actually called "l'heure verte," or the green hour. The spirit, so beloved amongst poets and artists for its supposedly hallucinogenic qualities, was banned for much of the mid to latter 20th century throughout the world, and only was legalized again in the…
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