The Wandering Bitters: It's cocktail time.

As 66 Gilead's Wandering Bitters make their way around Ottawa, we're going to post recipes for any interesting drinks that take advantage of any of them, and this one is courtesy of Stephen at The Black Tomato:

 The magic ingredients:

• Seed To Sausage double-smoked bacon-infused Wild Turkey bourbon
• Coffee and cardamom simple syrup
• 66 Gilead Black walnut bitters
• Cedar and star anise wood smoke

 You want one now, don't you?

Dear Ottawa: Say hello to 66 Gilead's "Wandering Bitters."

It was just a few weeks ago that I was thinking of showing off some of the nifty bitters from my buds at 66 Gilead Distillery in Prince Edward County to some of my barkeep acquaintances in the Market, but also appreciating the inconvenience that that sort of sampling involves -- the synchronizing with folks when they're not busy, the rushing them through the tasting when they'd like to sit and ponder and experiment, possibly for a day or two or three, and so on.

And then it hit me.

Crowdsampling.

That's the word I'm using here -- "crowdsampling" -- and here's how it works.

We're loading up a small bag with a delightful collection of 66 Gilead bitters, at which point I'm simply going to hand it off to my favourite local Market barkeep, cocktail wizard Stephen at The Black Tomato. Inside the bag will be a short set of rules for how this will work, and I paraphrase and condense thusly:

• When you receive the bag, you drop me an e-mail telling me you have it.
• You can experiment to your heart's content for, say, 4 or 5 days.
• You pass on the bag to someone else, and e-mail me telling me where it's gone.
• Repeat.

Crowdsampling: letting the crowd decide where the bag goes next without any assistance from me. Brilliant, n'est-ce pas?

And let me introduce you to the boys, all 12 of them:

They would be:

• Black Walnut
• Cherry
• Orange
• Lavender
• Violet
• Silk Road
• Snake Root
• La Fee Verte (Absinthe)
• Smoke
• Hops
• Ambrosia
• Rose

You can find brief tasting notes on all of these at 66 Gilead's online store, the bitters page. And if you're interested, you can follow along on social media, tracking one or all of:

• Twitter handle "canadiancynic"
• Twitter handle "66gilead"
• Twitter hashtag "#WanderingBitters"

Heck, we might even set up a Facebook page, because we're high-tech like that.

In any event, the Wandering Bitters have officially started wandering, and we will be tracking their migration pattern as they make their way around town. This should be interesting.

The Canadian Ginic spherical ice ball maker -- because you need one.

Once upon a time, I blogged about spherical ice ball makers here, and now it's time to give you lucky Ottawa folks the chance to get your very own ice ball maker. From the creative designer-type minds of the gin-sipping intellectuals here at CC HQ, we have solid aluminum ice ball makers that, through the modern miracle of basic thermodynamics, churn out 50mm ice balls for your favourite cocktails.

Behold:

The process is not hard -- if you can make ice and lift stuff, it works like this. In the pic above, you're looking at the two available finishes -- anodized aluminum and a wicked cool matte black. (There was a copper finish but ... yuck, no, that didn't work out, sadly.)

If you're not quite sure what the fuss is about, there's something magically sciency about spherical ice in a cocktail, as explained here. At the moment, making 50mm spheres is fairly easy since you can easily buy silicone ice cube trays that make 2-inch cubes, which is just the size you want for these makers. But we're about to get more ambitious. A couple bartenders have already said they want larger spheres -- 60mm, or possibly 65mm -- which means we'll have to figure out how to conveniently produce chunks of ice that are appropriate. Even more of a challenge is how to produce perfectly clear ice and, trust me, that's not as easy as it sounds, but we'll figure something out. Eventually.

Questions?