Automate Your Home Bar with Mixology Technology

RK [The Jakarta Post – Friday August 7, 2015 | Stephen Pulvirent- Bloomber| Newyork]

WHETHER you want a robot to mix you a Manhattan when you get home from that grueling desk job or a Japanese-invented contraption to sculpt the perfect ice sphere for your rare whisky, it’s all doable.

Some of these inventions can be in your kitchen tomorrow, while others require a little waiting. Either way, the future of inebriation is here.

#bloomberg| somabar

SOMABAR

Of the many cocktail mixing machines out there – yeah, there are a bunch, surprising not all in Sky-mall or the Hammacher Schelemmer catalog – Somabar is the only one I’d want to surround with my house guests. Six pods holds your spirits and mixers, and the entire contraption is controlled with an app on your phone or tablet. Drinks are fully mixed anc chilled in the Somabar before being dispense into the proper cocktail glass. There’s even a special bitters infuser to keep your cocktail snob friends from sneering. US$429 pre-order.

#bloomber|cirrus

CIRRUS ICE BALL MAKER

Leave it to Japan to take something like drinking a glass of whisky and turn it into an art. Chilling whisky with spheres of clear ice, instead of quickly frozen cubes, has been popular there for more than a decade – and ubiquitous at most any high-end cocktail bar. Why? Less surface area means more chill and less filution. Now you can bring that cocktail cred home with Cirrus ice ball maker, with no carrying technique required. You load a chunk of ice and the steel and aluminum press turns it into a perfect sphere. It might seem basic, but this is a serious piece of machinery. Just look at that carrying case $1,099

# Bloomberg|PicoBrew

PICOBREW ZYMATIC

Maybe you’re not much of a cocktail person and you’re looking for a new summer beer to drink instead. With the PicoBrew Zymatic, you can make your own. The self-contained brewing machine eliminates the clumsy mix of kettles, tubes, and fermenters that you traditionally need to home brew. It handles whole hops and malt, so you’re not limited to extracts and concentrates, either. Best part: You can program it with recipes fro mteh Web and take all the credit when your friends love the suds. US$1,999

#Bloomberg | Sodastream

SODASTREAM

If you own a Sodastream, you’ve definitely played the “let me see if I can carbonate that” game – and then blown up your machine. (Don’t lie: been there, done that, and no, the wine stains didn’t come out). Luckily the engineers at Sodastream are as bubble-obsessed as you. Behold, the Mix. With a beautiful touch interface, the Mix lets you program the on-demand carbonator to put just the right amount of fizz into whatever you want to carbonate. Turn a bottle of white wine into makeshift Champagne or a Martini into, well, a sparkling Martini. Let the fun begin. Pre-orders starting soon.

#Bloomber | Jevo

JEVO

The days of having to laboriously fill plastic cups with a slurry of powder and vodka hours before guests arrive are almost behind us: Jevo is an on-demand maker of Jello shots. It’s a simple idea, albeit one that cost US$3 million to create. The commercial version will crank out 20 chilly Jello shots from a mixture of booze, water, and Jevo’s flavor pods in 10 minutes. The home version is sleek-looking and while the website markets it primarily as a way to make gelatin snacks for your kids, we know you’ll have more fun using it for yourself. Pre-orders starting soon.

#Bloomber | Vaportini

THE VAPORTINI

You can now breathe your cocktail instead of drinking it – and you don’t even have to go to London’s newest pop-up bar. The Vaportini lets you heat up an ounce or two of your spirit of choice and sip the vapor with a straw. The set up is pretty simple: a glass globe sitting on top of a pint glass with a tea light candle. It’s a lower-tech (and less impressive) version of the Le Whaf vaporizer, but the latter doesn’t seem to be for sale any more. The Vaportini website contains some faux scientific hokum; ignore it and just enjoy your cocktail vapor. Kits from US$35.

#Hennessy 250 Special Collector Blend

HENNESSY turns 250 with Special Collector Blend

When your cognac house turns 250, you kind of have to do something big. Hennessy has chosen to mark this milestone with the bluntly named 250 Collector Blend, a limited-edition bottling that brings together spirits from four different decades in one elegant bottle.

If we set aside the big anniversary, the 250 Collector Blend is really all about master blender Yann Fillioux.

He started training at Hennessey when he was only 19 years old and he’s now been with the company for 50 years. He’s created some super limited cognacs before, including the Paradis Imperial and Richard Hennessy blends, but this blend represents a middle ground: It’s a special blend that’s still limited-edition, but it’s not so limited that only a few dozen people will ever taste it.

Think of it as the entry point to Hennessy’s super premium offerings.

Work on the 250 Colelctor Blend began almost a decade ago, with Fillioux creating a preliminary recipe from his then 40 years with the masion. He then blended enough cognac to fill 250 Limousin oak barrels, each of which held 250 liters.

After marrying in these new casks, the liquid was pulled out, diluted down to 40 percent alcohol, and filled into 1-liter glass decanters with hefty metal stoppers, packaged in custom-designed display boxes.

While the cognac has a reddish tone in the decanter, it’s much more golden in the glass. The nose is heavy on orange peel, cloves, milk chocolate, and cinnamon, with hints of bubble gum and cherries developing with time. It’s extremely viscous, and when rolled around in the glass, it clings to the sides with almost no tears running down.

That texture translates clearly as you take a sip, with cocoa powder, stewed fruits, and peach skin flavors hitting you first. As you swallow and exhale, a soft menthol flavor lingers. Which is something I’ve never tasted in a cognac. It’s great

While Hennessy isn’t releasing the details of the recipe or exactly how many bottles are out there, the cognacs in the blend are all between 15 and 40 years old and distribution is limited. When it’s sold out, it’s sold out, and no more will be made.

While you can try and do some math (250 barrels, with 250 liters in each), evaporation, dilution and some other factors make getting an exact number impossible.

While customers picking up bottles at their local liquor stores is a part of Hennessey’s strategy here, the 250 collector Blend is also at the bars of restaurants like New York city’s Polo Bar and the St. Regis, San Francisco’s Farmers Union and Bijou, and London’s 5 Hertford Street and the Berkeley.

If you don’t want to shell out for the whole bottle, a single glass will set you back between US$100 and $150. The Hennessy 250 Collector Blend is a limited edition and is on sale now. It is available only in 1-liter bottles and is priced at $600.

We’re also told there’s something even bigger coming later this year, and we’ll have more on that for you soon.

Related posts :

Keywords :  somabar,jevo,hennessy,vaportini,sodastream,picobrew,cirrus.

Tags : cirrus ice ball maker,Hennessy 250 Collector Blend,picobrew zymatic,sodastream mix, Vaportini website.

Description:  Drinking is hard work. There’s all that mixing, bottle opening, and pouring. Luckily, the distance between us and a blissful Jetsons-like future of automated imbibing is quickly closing.