Friday Fun: Making your Cocktails a Little More Interesting this Weekend

I don't know about you, but a good story definitely whets my appetite to try new things.  Both of these liquor related stories excite the imagination and will give you something liquor related to talk about during cocktail hour this weekend.

Photo via NPR.org,  Antarctic Trust/AP

Did you hear that a case of 100+ year scotch has been uncovered in Antarctica under the cabin of a renowned explorer and slowly defrosted?  Of course you won't be able to buy any of it, but distillers are taking samples to recover its lost recipe.  My question is why didn't the explorer drink it himself?

Photo via NPR and Patrick McGovern.

Dogfish Head Brewery's Chateau Jiahu beer was developed using a 9,000 year old recipe from neolithic China.  Combining archeology with brewing beer = totally cool.  Apparently in neolithic times humans started to settle down permanently and discovered fermented beverages soon after.  The Jiahu beer is more of a combination of wine, beer and mead, which might seem a little weird to our modern palettes, but totally worth a try since it's the oldest known fermented beverage recipe in the world.  Of course the brewery has modified the recipe a bit to modernize it.  This isn't the first archeological beer the brewery has made either, their Midas Touch beer based on molecular analysis of 2700 year old beer from Midas's tomb in ancient Turkey.

Photo via dfour on flickr

Photo via dfour on flickr, modified to protect the privacy of the complete strangers in the photo.

And finally, because summer is starting to wind down just a little, I suggest you savor a little limoncello while it's still hot out.  Not only does this NPR story (it's an NPR day, what can I say) describe how to make limoncello yourself, but it gives many ways to use it too.  The first time I had limoncello I was sitting on the terrace above.  It was made into a sorbet, with an extra shot poured on top.  I can't drink it without remembering the five weeks I got to live in a villa.  Sigh.