rant: fine dining

[33anda3rd]

That’s how you overdilute. Get chips of ice in there to melt over time.

[Michael]

When I'm a solo diner I'm one of those 2/3 seat offenders. If I don't leave a gap I feel like a person who uses the urinal next to you despite other openings. Being a solo diner makes the weirdness even more pronounced. In the past I've always just moved if folks are looking for an open seat and I prioritized seats at the end of the bar. Very educational

[haltz]

That’s how you overdilute. Get chips of ice in there to melt over time.

Well sure, but that's what they're asking for, a drink that's cold and watered down that they can't taste.

[haltz]

When I'm a solo diner I'm one of those 2/3 seat offenders. If I don't leave a gap I feel like a person who uses the urinal next to you despite other openings. Being a solo diner makes the weirdness even more pronounced. In the past I've always just moved if folks are looking for an open seat and I prioritized seats at the end of the bar. Very educational

As a solo diner, if you can help it, just try and leave two seats. For instance, if there are five, sit in the middle one. A pet peeve of mine is when the seats are so jammed in that it's uncomfortable to sit next to someone. Bar staff and management should always be respacing and pushing in chairs as soon as people get up so they don't get all out of wack as customers come and go if possible.

[G. Keenan]

I love dining at the bar. As a fan of it, def a pet peeve when you walk into a place and can't get two seats because others are sitting in some goofy ass configuration. I hate the couple that will sit at one of the ends of the bar, but leave the last seat empty, even if that is a perfectly good seat to use. It has a domino effect.

Micheal makes a great point. As as solo bar diner you cannot sit right next to someone else if there are empty seats to utilize. If you did you would look like a psycho.

[lukethedrifter]

When did extra old become a thing in cocktails?

[Michael]

A bar pet peeve of mine is when someone rests their big ass purse in the seat next to them when it's busy. That makes it really to tell if someone is sitting there or not.

[G. Keenan]

A bar pet peeve of mine is when someone rests their big ass purse in the seat next to them when it's busy. That makes it really to tell if someone is sitting there or not.

There's nobody sitting there. It's like when someone puts their bag on the seat next to them during rush hour on the bus.

This aggression will not stand, man!

[Diddy]

When spirits are made, a mash is made, you make beer basically. Soak grain in hot water to get the mash. That mash is then distilled. Bourbon must be at least 51% corn, rye must be at least 51% rye, rum is molasses, rhum is sugar cane juice, tequila is the juice of a blue Weber agave, etc. Vodka can be anything--corn, wheat, barley, potato, millet, anything. It has no rules like most other spirits in that regard. Bourbon cannot be distilled above 160 proof, by law. Distill to 161 and you can't call it "bourbon". Distillation purifies and removes congeners, little flavor bugs. The higher you distill the more congeners go out, and if bourbon went over 160 too many of them would be lost and too much flavor would go away. Vodka, on the other hand, must be distilled to at least 190 proof for the label to read "Vodka." It is then watered down to reach the bottle proof of at least 80. This is because vodka is neutral, so it must have virtually all of those little flavoring congeners removed--all the flavor is stripped out. So someone saying they prefer the taste of Ketel One is either one of like 2 people in the world with a palate freakishly good enough to detect it, or is fooling themself. Someone who tells you that they don't get as bad a hangover on Ciroc as they do Stoli is full of it. A person who drinks Tito's because it's gluen-free is only drinking it because Tito's has good marketing and uses "gluten-free", convincing the consumer that other vodkas have gluten. They don't, the act of distillation removes the proteins that cause people with celiac to react to it the way they do. Really, all vodka could just come in a clear bottled labeled "Vodka", but because it comes in a lot of bottle shapes and sizes and colors with different marketing tag lines ("Distilled only from Euorpean Winter Wheat") the public has generally been tricked into thinking there are differences.

So your saying there is no difference between top shelf vodka and well vodka?

[33anda3rd]

So your saying there is no difference between top shelf vodka and well vodka?

There's a difference in where they start. Tito's is corn, Grey Goose is wheat, and so on. But the distillation process renders them all the same, flavor-wise. Doesn't matter if they say it's "distilled 5 times" or if it comes from "Organic Washington Island Winter Wheat", unless you live in Wisconsin and want to support you local organic wheat farmer.

By and large people who have their own brand of vodka, like a MGD drinker drinks MGD, are responding to packaging or just going with that brand out of habit. They've always grabbed that long tall frosted-looking bottle of Grey Goose and they always will and that bottle gives them the impression they're getting a luxury product. Sometimes, the drinker is buying marketing that's either a Trump-level bald-faced lie or a little white lie or something in between. Templeton Rye got in a lot of trouble for saying they were the "original Prohibition recipe favored by Al Capone" and Templeton didn't even distill their own juice--a bald-faced lie. Or Tito's "Handmade" Vodka. There's a magazine ad with Young Tito like 25 years ago next to his still in Austin, and a pic with Current Tito at the same still now. The advertising and image in it and even it's very name insinuate that Tito hand-makes this vodka in his little pot still but it's literally impossible, Tito's produced like 60 million bottles last year. Tito would have to extend the days to like 100 hours and not sleep ever and work all of those 100 hours/day to make all that vodka by "hand" in his little pot still. Tito's is a big factory that takes up like 25 acres in Austin and the marketing that Tito hand-makes it for consumers is a lie.