Espresso Old Fashioned

Add all the ingredients to a mixing glass. Add ice and stir until cool. Strain the drink into a rocks glass over large ice cube. Garnish with a few coffee beans.

In our first attempt, I used 1/2 oz. of the Demerara Syrup, per the original recipe. However, we both found that to be a little too sweet. It was so good that we did decided to make another right away, this time reducing the sweetener. That change allowed the espresso flavor to shine even more. If you like your espresso on the sweeter side, the extra sweetener may suit you.

I made the espresso a short time before mixing the cocktails and it was still warm when I used it. In the future I think I'll brew it in advance to reduce the dilution from the ice while mixing.

I used George Remus Bourbon to make the cocktails. I thought the 94 proof bourbon was enough to be noticeable over the bitter espresso. A lower proof bourbon may not suffice. However, I have no doubt we'll experiment with both lower and higher proofs in the future.

Cheers!

This article about a 50 year old GE radio that still works isn't really about the radio. It's not even about the fact that nothing we use today will still be functional in 25 years, let alone 50. It's about how a piece of technology can connect across 3 generations of a family that used that radio to listen to baseball or get the early morning school closing report.

It reminded me about something I did about 22 years ago, also involving baseball and radios. Streaming the radio feeds of baseball games was technically possible in the 90s. It made Mark Cuban a billionaire when he sold his streaming radio company to Yahoo. Sometime around 2002 MLB started streaming the radio feed for WEEI from Boston. 2002 was well before we all had super computers in our pockets. So I built a FM transmitter from a kit and plugged it in to my PC. That enabled me to sit on the porch with a drink and a radio and listen to the Red Sox on WEEI, in Virginia. It was a big deal at the time. Today I just take my phone to the porch.

I do still own a traditional AM/FM radio. I keep it in the camper. It's useful for weather updates when camping somewhere with no cell signal. Also, when camping I just like to find a local rock radio station and listen throughout the weekend while I'm camping in the neighborhood. I've got a couple of hundred hours of music on my phone, so I'm not hurting for musical entertainment when away from the Internet. We listened to the radio when camping 40 years ago, and I still like to do it today.

Sometimes the old ways, if not better, are at least just fine.

Often, when I buy a new NA beer I'm not sure what to expect. Sierra Nevada was in the same league with Guinness for me. I poured the beer expecting it to be damn good. I was not disappointed.

One thing they've done exceptionally well is nail the mouth feel. NA beers typically feel a little thin, but this finishes like you'd expect an IPA to finish. The flavor is mildly hopped West Coast IPA. It's a solid beer, not just a solid NA beer.

Blackeyed Susan was formed by former Britney Fox lead singer Dizzy Dean Davidson, and also featured ex-Cinderella keyboardist Rick Criniti. Melodic.net wrote about the only album, Electric Rattlebone, on Facebook today, which reminded me I owned that CD. However, it apparently never made it to my MP3 library. I hit YouTube Music to stream it, and was immediately reminded of just how good this album is.

If you like the direction that Cinderella went with Still Climbing, you'll like this. It's a fun, mostly uptempo record of blues rock tunes with plenty of harmonica, horn fills and keyboards. It was a commercial failure on release in 1990 and the record company dropped them while they were touring to support it.

They did not deserve that fate. I'm not sure why it failed. 1990 was still in the glam rock era, and even though this is more bluesy than glam, it's got plenty of glam rock flourishes and should have appealed to the Britney Fox / Cinderella / Motley Crue crowd. It certainly appealed to me, and I was solidly in that club.

Anyway, I'm spending $10 to rebuy the record, because it's one that I want to own. It'll get plenty of virtual spins.

Sympathy - Blackeyed Susan

We made the 90 minute drive up to Colonial Beach this morning for the annual Osprey Festival. Colonial Beach is right on the Potomac River, and there dozens of Osprey nests around town. It's early nesting season so the birds are building nests now. We saw a couple of dozen (at least) active nests, plus a variety of other water birds that you would expect to see on a large river. We also saw a pair of mute swans, which were lifers for us.

It's a volunteer run one-day festival with a low $10 entrance fee. That fee got us a private golf cart tour of the nesting sites. It was totally worth it.

The town square area was taken over with vendor tables selling jewelry, art, and promoting other local natural resource focused organizations. The state and national parks in the area were also represented. There were also a few food trucks. We were tempted, but since we are eating out tonight we were good and ate the sandwiches we brought with us for lunch.

It's a neat day trip and totally worth the effort if you are in central Virginia and have an interest in birds.

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