Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Welcome to Canucktail!

Canucktail is a blog dedicated to the great wide world of cocktails. (Mmmmm.... delicious cocktails) But with a twist, no not that kind of twist (lemon, lime). The twist is: the struggles of the cocktailian in Canada.

You see, if you're not from Canada, you will not realize that liquor in our fair nation is controlled by the various  provincial liquor boards who effectively get to decide what kind of liquor we are allowed to buy and put in our cocktails. They make a LOT of money from being our booze pushers which is fine (they are all broke, and, lord knows, there are potholes to fill) but the tragedy is that we cannot get things, SO essential to our existence, such as maraschino liqueur, yellow Chartreuse and many other key ingredients in classic cocktails, not to mention St. Germain, Allspice Dram, Creme de Violette, Swedish Punsch, Old Tom Gin, white dog, (on it goes...I cry into my Classic Pegu as I write this) et cetera. Yes, it is downright Soviet, the way we are treated by our provincial governments.

If you are from Canada and enjoy a good cocktail, you have probably never heard of the above ingredients and the wonders they can impart to a good drink. Boy, do you have a lot to learn. Stay tuned.

So here's what we're up to. We will talk about yummy cocktails. This is not new to the internet, by a long shot: many of the best and most sophisticated blogs (we will link them) on the net are cocktail blogs. Many of them are gorgeous and written by talented, erudite, funny, sloshed people whose knowledge of these things goes WAY beyond what we could ever hope to match. Indeed, cocktails was a subject of discussion on the internet back in the days of AOL and billboards and the internet is probably responsible, directly or indirectly, for the re-introduction of some cocktail ingredients.  Would old tom gin have reappeared after 50 years were it not for the internet? Maybe not.  What we will do is talk about cocktails in our own context of the frosty soviet north.  We live in Stratford, Ontario and we will talk often about the glimmers of hope in our own little neck of the world. And we will talk about the Ontario cocktail scene AND we will talk about the cocktail scene in all nine other provinces and 3 territories of this, otherwise, fabulous country of ours.  Cool, eh?

Like I said,  stay tuned.

3 comments:

  1. Well done sir!
    As first follower let me say I am an empty vessel looking to expand on my beery ways.

    Mix on!

    "We've got to get some booze. It's the only solution to this intense cold."

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  2. Ah, Hoptical, let this be a journey of discovery for all of us. All Withnail references welcome, of course.

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  3. Welcome to the Cocktailosphere!

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