Category Alcohol

• Nori rolls

  THIS USED TO BE a good blog, a food blog. What happened to that? I got a job, obviously, and the impetus to post food subsided. So here are the nori rolls I like to make on Fridays (in an exercise of quasi-Catholicism) after I go and get some fresh sashimi.

  Posted 3 December 2024 · Author Liam Hogan

• Manning Bar

  SYDNEY UNIVERSITY'S MANNING BAR is to close to day trade. Sic transit gloria mundi, I spent a great deal of time there in my own early adulthood, drinking, and arguing about politics and history, and drinking some more, and watching the votes of student elections come in. When I began a PhD I used it as an office, because nobody would give me a desk, and it was usually quieter and calmer than the library. The kind of fruitless, restive underemployment being there represented turned out to be something of a motif in my adulthood. It was a formative place for me, though nobody can claim anything I or anyone did there has made the world a better place. Quite the opposite, when I'm honest with myself.

  Posted 19 February 2020 · Author Liam Hogan

• Assessment

  THE FOLLOWING ARE INDIVIDUAL assessment instrument steps in the assessment plan, produced to the requirements of the unit of competency, and mapped against its elements and their performance criteria, contextualised for the learner and properly validated for effect according to the rules of evidence established by the Australian Skills Quality Authority (AQSA) as part of the Australian vocational education and training (VET) system. Workplace risks have been identified and controlled, and communication with appropriate stakeholders has been established at the outset of the assessment process.

  The brief to participants is as follows:

  1. bourbon
  1. scotch
  1. beer

  All participants, please have your third party reports filled out for recognition of competency by recognition of prior learning (RPL).

  Posted 23 November 2019 · Author Liam Hogan

• Rum

  MODERN DRINKERS RECOGNISE RUM as a spirit distilled from sugarcane (more often specifically, molasses). These days, unlike those of Australia’s original penal settlement, you can’t drink it in jail. Eddie Obeid, formerly New South Wales Minister, formerly member of the Legislative Council, formerly OAM, will have none for a period of at least three years, and up to five. That’s not likely to concern Eddie, who is reportedly not a big drinker, or indeed, anyone else. That Obeid has been sentenced is justice, no more or less. But how much does our current political culture owe to the rum days?

  Posted 16 December 2016 · Author Liam Hogan

• Cup Day Spew

  THE FIRST TUESDAY IN November, Melbourne Cup Day, is marked not by the excessive consumption of food and drink, but rather, by its regurgitation. The race that stops a nation also stops it in mid-sentence (‘um, hang on a minute’), bends it at about forty-five degrees at the waist, puts its hands on its knees, then floor-pancakes its lunch across the footpath, or bus floor, or office carpet. There, doesn’t that feel better out than in?

  Posted 1 November 2016 · Author Liam Hogan

• Cooking without eating

  NOT ALL COOKING IS for eating. In fact some of the most satisfying and useful recipes don’t involve food at all. Mixing two-stroke oil and petrol, let’s say, or concrete, sand and water, these are two favourites of people who like putting together or deconstructing the built environment. If you want an article for The Australian, mix fear, uncertainty, and doubt; for the Sydney Morning Herald, property prices, Sydney Grammar’s first XV, and a beach; for the Daily Telegraph, hard working mums, Muslims, the welfare system, and any given arterial roadway in western Sydney. Much, much, easier than cooking. It’s a source of national shame that our apprentice chefs and bricklayers’ labourers are paid less for their routine mixing than the trowel-wielding wordsmiths of our newspapers. But to the recipes! Here are two old favourites I’ve put together recently.

  Posted 7 January 2015 · Author Liam Hogan

• Red Red Wine

  IT’S BEEN A DAY for all of the ex-Labor staffers I know to relish. Premier of New South Wales is becoming one of those jobs you just don’t stay in very long, like the Chief Taster to the Sultan, or the coach of an AFL side coming ninth. We kept losing ‘em to the loathsome effects of Parliamentary crooks and it’s hard not to bleakly laugh when our right-wing friends and family complain that ‘he was one of the good ones brought down’. Yeah, aren’t they all.

  Posted 17 April 2014 · Author Liam Hogan

• Guest Post by the Devil Drink: Choc Hops Chocolate Stout

  

  GLUTTONY, AS ONE OF THE main canonical Sins, is pretty encompassing. There’s a lot to it and if you want to do it properly, it needs hard work. It’s not quite like Lust or Wrath which you can get done in a morning, or—so I’m told, if you’re into that kind of thing—have them together, bash out a couple of hundred thousand words and publish the results as an erotic fan fiction bestseller. No, to be a Glutton one has to put in the hard yards.

  Posted 30 August 2012 · Author The Devil Drink

• Guest Post By The Devil Drink: Espresso Stout

  

  THE OWL IS EITHER A symbol of wisdom or bad luck, depending on which pagan tradition you prefer. The eyes on this one also stared out at me from the “Assorted” fridge at the local bottleshop, where the curious are tempted by the unfamiliar and challenged to test themselves against Beer Lotto. When the going gets tough the weird turn pro, as Hunter S (pbuh) remarked. Owl Stout went straight to the counter. Hitachino! Espresso! Hoooooooo!

  Posted 19 October 2011 · Author The Devil Drink

• Four Pines Stout (Guest Post by The Devil Drink)

  WHAT IS THAT THING ON the side of the bottle? I think it says “Certified Vostok Space Beer”. I’m reading it right, but what on earth can it mean?

  Posted 17 September 2011 · Author The Devil Drink