On St. Patrick’s Day some of us were sitting around the bar drinking green beer and downing green Jello shots, and one of my drinking buddies grabbed a straw and started slurping his beer with it.  “You know, you get drunk faster if you drink beer with a straw,” he told me.  Of course, I’ve heard that ever since college.  Is it true?  I decided to do a little research.

The best answer I could find was on this forum, and according to the post’s author, yes, you do get drunk faster with a straw.  He gave two reasons:

• When you sip beer through a straw, it creates a vacuum that lowers the boiling point of alcohol below the normal 79 degrees C.  Therefore, more alcohol vapors get into the lungs, and these vapors get absorbed into the bloodstream much more quickly.
• Because the beer enters the mouth via a very narrow jet, it has more surface area.  Therefore, more alcohol can evaporate before the beer is swallowed.  The palate, rich in blood vessels, absorbs these vapors, again getting more alcohol into the bloodstream more quickly.

So you do get drunk faster, although the overall amount of alcohol consumed is the same.

Whether you use a straw or not, be sure to sip your beer from some of our fine beer mugs.

Yesterday I posted about a bartender who showed me a mind-reading trick.  I hid a penny under one of 9 cups, in 3 rows of 3, while she had her back turned.  When she turned around, she was able to consistently guess which cup contained the penny, as my drinking buddy on the stool next to me and I gazed in astonishment.  What was her secret?

Well, I gave you a hint at the end of yesterday’s post, when I told you to check out our supply of cocktail napkins.  Does that help, now that you realize it’s a hint?

This was her secret:  My drinking buddy on the stool next to me was in her confederate in the game.  He’d take a sip of beer as I hid the penny, then place the beer on his cocktail napkin in such a way to indicate where the penny was.  If I placed it in the upper middle cup, he’d put his beer on the upper middle of the napkin.  If I placed it in the lower right cup, the beer would go on the napkin’s lower right.

“What if I tried to trick her, and not place the penny at all?” I asked him.

“Then I’d place the beer completely off the napkin, and she’d still know,” he told me.  There was no way I was going to win the game with him sitting there.  Good thing I didn’t place a money bet on the hide-the-penny game.

Check out The Professional Bartender’s Handbook for more tricks and games.

A few years ago, I was a regular at Sunday brunch at a bar called The Blue Monkey about a mile from the Mid-South Alcoholic Supply World HQ.  I liked their $12 bottles of champagne, with orange juice set-ups for make-your-own mimosas.  One day I was sitting up there, drinking mimosas and watching whatever football game was on at the time.  It was a slow day and the bartender came over, and laid 9 cups in front of me, in 3 rows of 3.

“Do you have a penny?” she asked.  I did.

“I bet I can read your mind,” she told me.  “I’m going to turn my back, and I want you to hide the penny under one of the cups.  Tell me when I can turn around, and I bet I can guess which cup has the penny.”  So she turned her back and I hid the penny.  She turned around, thought for a second, and guessed the correct cup.

“Okay, she got lucky,” I commented to the guy sitting next to me drinking a beer.  “Let’s do it again.”  She turned her back a second time, and I hid the penny.  “No way she’ll get it twice in a row,” I told the guy on the next bar stool as he took a sip and set his glass down.  “The chances of that are 1 in 81.”  But she got it again.

I looked at the bar behind her.  She wasn’t in front of the mirror, so she couldn’t see what I was doing.  I made her move a couple of liquor bottles that I thought were casting a reflection.  But she got it again.  And again.  She even put on a blindfold and got it yet again.

How did she keep guessing where the penny was?  Answer tomorrow.  In the meantime, why not browse our collection of cocktail napkins?

When I was in fifth grade, one of our class projects was terrariums, little miniature ecosystems inside an enclosed space.  First we’d lay down a layer of dirt.  Then we’d plant grass seed.  Once the grass was growing, we’d add crickets.  Once the crickets had time to adjust to their new home, we’d add a frog.  Man those crickets stank.  At the end of the semester we turned the frog loose in the woods.

This Lifehacker article teaches you how to turn an empty wine bottle into a terrarium.  You aren’t going to be able to fit a frog in there, but with a little work you can get moss and similar plants growing.  Works best with clear or light-colored wine bottles, obviously.

Our bookstore can give you many more ideas on cool things to do with booze and booze products.

Singer/songwriter Sting is venturing into a new business enterprise this year.  He’s launching his own red wine, made with grapes grown on his estate in Tuscany.  He bought the estate in 1997 because he wanted to grow food to feed his family.  Now, he’s going to share a product of the estate - great red wine - with his fans.  About 30,000 bottles of Sting’s wine will go on sale in September.  More info here.

Be sure to enjoy Sting’s wine in one of our many fine wine glasses.

Looking for some drinks to mix tonight to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day?  YumSugar.com has recipes for 5 beer cocktails. There’s the Michelada, a Mexican cocktail (which could serve as a Cinco de Mayo drink too); the Clara, a combination of light beer and lemon soda; the Black Velvet, made with stout and sparkling wine; the Liverpool Kiss, a berry-flavored cocktail made with stout and Creme de Cassis; and the Broadway, a Japanese favorite which is one part Coke and one part beer.

I’d like to add a couple of variations to the Black Velvet recipe.  One of our local bars here prefers to mix pear cider with the stout, rather than sparkling wine.  They also have a “Blue Velvet,” which is a Black Velvet topped with port.

Be careful out there celebrating tonight!  One of our pocket breathalyzers can help keep you safe.

Looking for a dish to serve at a St. Patrick’s Day party tomorrow night?  Corned beef is a traditional Irish favorite.  This recipe, courtesy of the Los Angeles Times, makes corned beef even better by adding booze.  It’s easy to make - only 30 minutes total prep time - and features a delicious bourbon flavored brown sugar sauce that you spoon over the beef.

I’m off to enjoy some Irish cooking with booze myself… the chef at the Majestic Grille, one of the best restaurants downt the street from the Mid-South Alcoholic Supply World HQ, just happens to be Irish, and he’s offering Irish lunch specials all this week.  He has a beef and mushroom pie with vegetables and Murphy’s Stout inside a puff pastry crust… sounds good to me!

Check out our bookstore to find plenty more recipes that use booze.

WikiHow.com recently ran an article on how to make your own vodka.  Basically it’s a 13-step process that guides you through the creation of a still, and then a mash.  Then you have to add yeast, distill, filter, and dilute.  Wow that sure looks like a whole lot of work.  I think I’d rather just drink vodka instead.  By the time I finished with the vodka-making process, I’d sure be ready for some vodka.

Learn how to make other forms of booze in Mid-South Alcoholic Supply’s bookstore.

Two wine links for you today.

First of all, Forbes.com recently had a good article about horizontal wine tastings.  These are tastings where all the wines are from the same year.  You may want to narrow it even further, the article suggests, sampling wines that are all from the same region and year, to sample variance in taste.  For example, the article suggests that you could do a sampling of 2005 Napa cabernets.

A vertical tasting, on the other hand, is one in which you sample different vintages (different years) of the same wine.

Once you taste that wine, you’re going to need to describe it.  This article on SouthCoastToday.com suggests that you avoid using standard wine description terms if they don’t have meaning to you - a lot of people can’t relate to words like “tannic,” for example.  One taster couldn’t relate to “cherry” tastes in wine, but she did think it “tasted like Luden’s cherry cough drops,” so that’s how she described it.  You’ll get more out of your wine tastings if you use your own descriptions, rather than conforming to other people’s standard descriptions.

You’ll also get more out of tastings when you use Mid-South Alcoholic Supply’s wine glasses - thousands to choose from.

These two recipes sound like they would go well together.

First up, we have a recipe for bourbon banana pudding with glazed pecans, courtesy of Gourmet.com.  Who doesn’t love a big bowl of banana pudding with some vanilla wafers all crunched up… and adding booze is a great way to make it even better.

You’re going to need something to drink with your pudding.  Although winter’s almost over, most of us still have a few chilly nights to look forward to… so how about a nice mug of hot chocolate with banana rum.  Recipe is from the Chicago Examiner.

Enjoy!