From the bartender’s corner – the Mezcal story
After about a year and half of researching into gins – and trying out 42 bottles from 17 different countries and 100+ gin cocktails, I had started the journey on mezcal. This took me a year and half too. 16 bottles, about 50+ cocktails and one country (Mexico is the only country that makes this alcohol).
I need to figure out what I want to focus on next but here are my key learnings on mezcal…
1. I have never been to Oaxaca. And I cannot possibly close the chapter on mezcal before making one trip there. I will get it done.
2. Mezcal is not a cocktail drink. The best way to enjoy mezcal is how they do it in the villages of Mexico – slowly sip it from copitas (earthen cups), with naranja (oranges) and sal (salt). This is not meant for cocktails – regardless of what those new fad in American bars are these days.
3. Surprisingly, most parts of Mexico – at least the American tourist friendly places like Cancun and Cabo do not have much mezcal. You can get as much of tequila as you want. Mezcal is few and far between.
4. The following captures the essence of mezcal, if you truly focus on the drink…
“Para todo mal, mezcal.
Para todo bien, tambien.”
I will let you research the translation of this.
What do you think? Should I post in Facebook?
Eighteen long months back, I started an experiment. I got myself off all social media groups – Whatsapp groups, Facebook groups etc.
I have a slightly mixed feeling of the experiment but overall, I do not feel any need to go back to the groups. I certainly regret the fact that I did not realize one of my schoolmate’s dad died or another friend had met with an accident – all of these were discussed in groups. I found those out during my birthday calls with those friends. And occasionally, some friend who was aware that I was not in any group informed me of those incidents.
As a slight aside, somebody let me know that people were showering me with a lot of birthday greetings on my birthday in my MBA classmates’ Whatsapp group. Not sure how many of them realized that I was not even in the group.
I re-joined my middle school Whatsapp group about four months back. Lasted less than 48 hours.
I am thinking about Facebook now. As many of you know, I actually do not post on Facebook. I write (some might even suggest way too much) on my blog – www.rajibroy.com. It then gets crossposted to FB thru a plugin of the platform that I use – WordPress.
The original purpose of my blog (which is in its 16th year and predates when I joined Facebook) was to leave a journal of my life – if anybody in my progeny or even current times ever wanted to know who I was/am and what life I led/lead.
While Facebook has been a great vehicle for me to get those posts out to so many of my friends and find out connections that I was not even aware of, my original purpose was never to try to make my stories popular. I just needed a place to write my stories.
I am wondering whether I should just stick to my blog like I used to and not cross post ever to Facebook. What do you think?
(This is not to say I will quit FB. Every weekend, I catch up with news. I will catch up with some of my FB friends’ posts too – of course, depending on what FB lets me see)
Evening by the lake side with socially distanced friends :-)
Interesting cloud formations at sunset
Sunset by the lake last evening
Seen during my run this morning
From the bartender’s corner – Mango Cooler
Picked this up again from the book Murali sent. It was sunny but cool last evening in Atlanta. Had some mango juice. Some freshly squeezed orange juice, lemon juice, vodka and cointreau – voila! We had a mango cooler!
The book advertises this as a great aphrodisiac. I was snoring by the time I could get to the second one!!
Book Review: Loonshots
This book came by recommendation of Soumyadipta. Overall, a very enjoyable book. The basic theory is about how the best ideas that won wars or conquered diseases were rejected for many years as completely lunatic ideas before they got accepted. Hence “Loonshots” (lunatic + moonshots).
The book has some incredible anecdotes and stories. Sometimes though you might get lost in the intrigue of all those stories and lose the basic point of what the author is trying to build up to. I had to go back thru the book and skim it a second time to tie all those points he was making into the overall roadmap he had planned to establish.
Some great case studies of radar, insulin, Apple, Polaroid, Pan Am and such success or failure stories. One very interesting conclusion is that to support really large loonshots, you need the support of government. Nobody has as much money and capacity to digest failures. The author takes us thru the glorious days of American breakthroughs when government and science came together.
You will learn about the magic of power of 2.5. Did you know that a lot of things – e.g. casualties in civil war and the frequencies of them or forest fire size (area) and occurrences are all correlated by a factor of 2.5?
You will also learn how the optimum size of human groups is 150. We naturally tend to congregate in that size. Apparently, the neocortex size and the social group size of all primates follow a fairly strict straight line. And if you extrapolate to homo sapiens neocortex size, you will arrive at 150!!
If you are an organizational leader, there are some thought provoking ideas here – about how to keep an organization viable and productive as it goes thru transitions. The example of molecules of water and ice co-existing at 32 F and freely intermixing is a powerful one.
You will also learn about the power of systems thinking (understanding why we took a decision in the past) versus outcome thinking.
And even if you are not an organizational leader, you will find a lot of Aha! moments in this book.
Now, I have to say that before I picked up this book, I read up the reviews and there were a lot of scathing ones (some sounded very personal). After reading the book, I do not think the author deserves any of that. Certainly, as I mentioned, the diversity of examples and theories the author gets into – and there are lots of them – makes you forget how they relate to the original roadmap but a simple re-read solved that problem for me.
Thumbs up from me.
From the bartender’s corner: Azalea
Murali sent me a 1000 cocktails book. Well timed. After about 15 bottles of mezcal, I was wondering how to mix it up when it came to my cocktail repertoire. Came home, randomly went to a page and picked this drink.
Good drink but since I do not like citric acid, I will probably not do this too many times. Or perhaps go down on the lime juice and increase gin (what can go wrong, right?)
This was pineapple juice, lime juice, grenadine and gin.