Beverage

Legend has it that American mining engineer Jennings Cox first mixed rum with crushed ice, lime juice and a spoonful of sugar to create what he called the Daiquiri, named after a small town near Santiago, Cuba. But because limes, sugar cane and rum are three things the island produces in abundance, it's also likely that the drink was already being served in Cuba before Cox arrived. 

Every café, restaurant, bar and resort professional knows that although no two customers are alike, there are certain types of customers who seem to walk through the door on any given day. Why not create customized smoothies for these characters? 

Customers at Waterman’s Surfside Grille in Virginia Beach, Virginia, know the best way to quench a thirst is to order the beachside bar’s famous Orange Crush. This signature frozen drink is made with fresh-squeezed orange juice, orange vodka, triple sec, and a splash of Sprite.

According to Waterman’s owner Mike Standing, the drink was created 20 years ago, but took off in 2002 when a friend suggested Standing make the Orange Crush with fresh-squeezed juice. Today Waterman’s is one of most popular places on the boardwalk, and Standing said that the bar and restaurant have had an increase in revenue every year.

For dieting or diabetic customers, or simply for the growing number of Americans concerned about their sugar intake, sugar-free virgin drinks offer a sweet indulgence. The key to making a mocktail taste good lies in the primary ingredients, particularly the sugar-free syrups used to make the drink taste like the real thing.

Is the strawberry a fruit or a vegetable?  While many speculate that it is a fruit because it has seeds, others say that the seeds of the strawberry are fruits and the body is a vegetable. Actually the strawberry is a hybrid species known as an aggregate accessory fruit, and it's loaded with Vitamin C, folate and fiber. In North America, strawberries are plentiful—they're grown in every US state and also in Canada.

How long does it take a pineapple to reach maturity? A typical pineapple takes approximately 18 months to mature.Most of the world’s pineapples don’t come from Hawaii but rather from Thailand and the Phillipines.

The difference between a perfect cocktail and a mediocre one often comes down to ice, which, once melted, can account for half of a drink’s volume. With so much riding on frozen water, it’s not surprising that there’s more than a little ice mythology in the mixology world. Add a blender into the equation and it becomes necessary to call on science to make sense of it all.

The Tempest is finally receiving the attention it deserves. No, not Shakespeare’s incomparable play, which has been justly heralded for centuries, but the hard-working Hamilton Beach Commercial® blender by the same name. The Tempest® Blender is modestly priced for a commercial blender—so much so that it was a top pick on Consumer Reports’ 2013 list of best blenders. 

But its modest price may camouflage its true value as a commercial blender. As blogger Stana Peele points out, the Tempest “cannot be compared to other blenders due to its specially designed features.” Here are just a few of those drool-worthy attributes: a 2-speed jump cycle that provides precise and thorough blending every time, a timer with automatic shutoff that lets the user step away and tend to other tasks, patented quad-angle stainless steel cutting and mixing blades, and a temperature gauge that alerts the operator if the blender is starting to overheat.

A sidekick of the comfort food trend, boozy milkshakes are appearing across a broad range of bars and restaurants, from posh clubs to burger chains. The Powder Room in Hollywood, California, offers the Velvet Goldmine, a $500 concoction made with dark chocolate ganache, cognac, English lavender split black bean Tahitian vanilla ice cream and chocolate caramel fudge, topped with fresh whipped cream and edible 23 carat gold flakes. It includes a Swarovski Crystal Nirvana ring for every customer.

There are many stories about the invention and naming of the margarita. Two of the most popular accounts locate the cocktail's beginings in Mexico and Texas. According to one legend, Pancho Morales was working at Tommy's Place in Juarez, Mexico, in 1942, when a woman ordered a "magnolia." Morales could not remember any of the ingredients in the drink except cointreau. After mixing in tequila, he named the new concoction after the daisy, "margarita" in Spanish. The second story says the drink was created by Dallas socialite Margarita Sames for her 1948 holiday party. Sames wanted to combine tequila and cointreau to make a soothing drink that was neither too sweet nor too sour.  Eventually she added lime juice and a little salt on the rim to give it a kick. 

Grown-up gourmet milkshakes, some spiked and some not, are all the rage. For many adults, a milkshake is an instant trip to childhood, a comfort that can be innocent and inexpensive, like the $3.49 Birthday Cake Milk Shake from Steak’n Shake, or indulgent and decadent, like the The Powder Room’s $500 Velvet Goldmine.

Industry insiders have called the milkshake “the new cupcake,” and many creative chefs and amateurs alike are putting cupcakes into—and on top of—milkshakes. The new “cupcake milkshake,” which lets the indulger drink a milkshake (into which cake as been blended) through a straw impaled in the crowning cupcake, is really a culmination of many years of creative exploration and accompanying improvements in mixers that have made it easy to add cakes, pies, cookies, candy—just about anything—to the classic milkshake.