Greetings, Motifians! We missed y’all in the Spring Alcohol Issue, but we had to pass on the intoxicating fun and assume the role of designated driver after our attempts to get a virtual roundtable discussion with the state’s brewers failed to ferment (see what we did there?). But we’re bellying up to the bar this […]
Dave’s Coffee, which is not to be confused with Dave’s Market or Dave’s Bar & Grill or Dave & Busters or Dave, the Kevin Kline movie about a president’s look-a-like, is a well-known local coffee company that you can usually find in Dave’s Market. Well, now you can also find it in Grey Sail’s Dave’s […]
Do you feel that? In the air? It’s time. Cocktail menu changes are upon us. For SPRING. Yes, despite March roaring in like a lion and, uh, out like a frozen lion, we still believe spring will spread over New England. While we wait for the weather to turn warmer and green things to sprout, your […]
Rum. No other liquor has stronger connotations of tropical paradises, lofty sea breezes and thanks to certain movie franchises, pirates. Rhode Island even has its own rum brewed by the folks over at Newport Storm, Thomas Tew, named after a swashbuckling pirate of the same name who sailed the seas, allegedly founded an anarchist pirate […]
Cocktail modifiers might not just be for cocktails anymore. Lately, many bars have taken to serving mixers, such as vermouth or bitters, by themselves, without any hard liquor to accompany them. This has apparently been a large part of drinking culture in various parts of Europe, but the US is only recently catching on. One […]
You can’t make a good drink without proper skill and technique, and these bartending skills are tested in the Speed Rack competition, which pits bartenders from all around the country against each other in a fun competition. Rhode Island’s own Leishla Maldonado competed in this all-female competition this month in Boston, after months of training. I […]
My original pitch to the hardworking, hard thinking, patient editor and publisher of Motif went like this: “Millennial drinking habits are different!” They were intrigued, but, really, why should we care about the idea of Millennial drinking habits being so different from the drinking generations preceding them? Because, drinking readers, these things impact beverage production, […]
BARTENDER PROFILES 1. Audrey King Troop PVD a. How did you get into bartending? I began bartending at Foxwoods, of all places. While it was a crazy and fun environment, it wasn’t exactly the type of bartending I wanted to be doing. It involved making a lot of appletinis and chocolate martinis with chocolate syrup […]
If we were playing Family Feud and the question was, “Name the phrases and feelings conjured by 100 people who were asked to free associate with the liquor gin,” we can guess at the top answers on the board. “And tonic.” “Tastes like liquid Christmas.” “With my mind on my money and my money on […]
At one time, you could fit all the brewers in Rhode Island into a well-lubed phone booth. Now, you wouldn’t be able to cram them all into a medium-sized Dunkin Donuts without sincere apologies to the fire marshal. There’s a new brewery in Portsmouth, and Buttonwoods I hear is online, so it’s well past time […]