Autumn really is a delightful time for drinking. Especially this autumn, which has wavered between ridiculously cold and unseasonably warm. As such, it provides for a wonderful mix of seasons that supports a wide variety of refreshment-delivery options. But of course, perhaps my partner and I have been a little blind to the possibility that there are things out there to drink other than beer. This is, after all, a blog called "Bicoastal Drinking," and not "Bicoastal Beer Drinking." So here it is: a few things that aren't beer, but are still well-worth trying out.
Last Saturday, a very good friend of mine came to town, and having heard not 24-hour prior that we had both passed the New York State Bar Exam, we were both in the mood for a celebratory drink. Thankfully, the Greater Boston Metro area is more than willing to oblige.
The Friendly Toast, near MIT, is pretty new, but it's already made quite an impression on the Cambridge crowd. A lot of folks love its hipster-bohemian decor. Not me. A lot of folks love its amazing vegetarian alternatives to their meat-laden offerings. Not me. A lot of folks love that it has a liquor license and a heavy hand with the alcohol. Bingo.
This is a full pint of bloody mary.
I can't really complain about a restaurant that sees fit to offer a bloody mary on a beautiful saturday morning in a pint glass. Not some 10.5 oz. collins nonsense so packed with ice it's a fight to put the celery back into the drink, but a nice, hefty, and strong pint. It's really spicy, with a wonderful kick of horseradish, thick specks of black pepper you can crunch between your teeth, and two nice, fat pimento olives - one that stays on the toothpick for a mid-drink nibble, and one that slides off into the drink so you have something to look forward to at the end. Plus, the food is amazing.
Now, it was warm enough last month that ice cream wasn't a total pipe dream, and J.P. Licks in Harvard Square is a staple. A lot of folks, myself included, like their black raspberry, and almost every Boston ice cream shop has coffee oreo. But last month, I had their cream stout ice cream. J.P. Licks makes all of its alcohol-flavors with real booze (November's flavor is Wild Turkey Bourbon), and this one had an awfully strong alcohol flavor for an ice cream.
J.P. Licks: Cream Stout & Coffee Ice Creams
Its sharp alcohol bite was balanced by caramel malt sweetness, but I wasn't sure if I was really tasting "stout." It really wasn't bitter enough to be stout (right, like you'd expect bitterness in ice cream?), so it really had more of the character of a stout in which a scoop of vanilla had been floated. Incidentally, that is delicious. The pairing was really a necessity: the coffee ice cream provided the absent bitterness while accentuating the roasted flavors of the "stout."
Finally, it's not really fall in New England until the cider comes out. I've already posted a photo of , but the cider itself becomes the star later in the season. A good, crisp, hard cider can be really refreshing, and my girlfriend and I thought maybe we'd found a winner or two at the store. We might have been wrong.
Is this a urine sample or a bit of hard apple cider?
Sam Smith's Organic Cider was crystal clear and the color of very, very dehydrated urine. It was really dry dry and therefore incredibly refreshing, and furthermore dangerously easy to drink. It had a lot of clean apple flavor but was a little one-dimensional. Lots of apple, not much else. Which I guess is fine if that's all you're looking for. It was, sadly, a little more like a sharp apple juice than a cider.
Hornsby's Amber Draft was like an alcoholic version of Martinelli's sparkling cider, which again, is much more of an apple juice than a cider. My girlfriend described this as a "starter" cider. For kids, I think she was referring. Terrifying. The start and finish to each sip might be called medium-dry, but the heart of the sip was basically an alcoholic jolly rancher. Ew.
Finally, Hornsby's Crisp Apple was even lighter in color, and even lighter in flavor. Gross.
