I do most of my cocktail inventing around the holidays. The reason for this is twofold. One, I always visit my parents and they possess a liquor cabinet that shames some bars, not only in actual number of bottles, but also in the array of top-shelf and/or rare liquors. Two, when does one find oneself in need of a drink more than the holidays?

Whether it's the merriment of celebration, the release of stress, or simply the desire to take a breather from all the socializing by indulging in a brief respite behind the bar, December is the time for mixing. And also for giving, so allow me to give you my two newly-invented cocktails for 2008: the Ginger-Pear Cocktail and the Nihilist.

We've all been there: You save 20¢ buying generic at the grocery store only to blow $10 on two beers at your favorite bar. Or even more guilt-inducing, you forgo a first-rate happy hour special in favor of a pint of your favorite imported or craft brew. Such examples are especially apt during the U.S.'s recent economic downturn when saving money has become top priority for many Americans.

But don't worry. You're not the only one. As reported by the AP, people are saying: "Recession? Eat, drink, and be merry." Jane Wardell reports that Anheuser-Busch turned a profit despite the rising costs of things such as barley, wheat and fuel. "The company is so confident that consumers won't abandon beer," she continues, "that it plans to increase prices for popular brands like Budweiser and Bud Light to stay ahead of the higher costs." Yikes.

File beer under "affordable luxuries" -- those mini-spending sprees we all occasionally need to keep us feeling sane. Milwaukee's Kate Brozovich said: "I'd rather spend $4 or $5 on quality beer than $3 on hopped up water. It's worth the extra buck or two to get quality." Hear, hear!

Long story short: No need to feel guilty about your beer splurging. Turns out you're just normal. (But feel free to read the long story too.)

Interesting side note: I read a study last year about "jet-setters" (people who own their own jets) that concluded that the average jet-setter spends more on alcohol each year than the median American income. Now THAT is splurging!

[via the Associated Press]

Are you an avid tea drinker looking for a different way to enjoy your tea this summer? A lot of tea drinkers go iced in the warm summer months, some even adding lemonade to their iced tea, but there is an even colder way to enjoy your tea in the summer months if you enjoy green tea: smoothies!

Below you will find the recipe for my personal summer tea concoction, which will require matcha (powdered green tea). Matcha is high in caffeine content compared to regular steeped tea, so you may not want to indulge in one of these smoothies too late in the day.

INGREDIENTS
1 tsp matcha (powdered green tea)
4 oz. cup of fruit-flavored yogurt (Light 'n Fit works well, low in sugar)
frozen strawberries (or other desired fruit)
frozen peach slices (or other desired fruit)
apple juice

France's Environment Minister and Resident Party-Pooper Jean-Louis Borloo is pushing a proposal that will force bars open later than 2 a.m. to administer breathalyzer tests to patrons before they leave the establishment.

The move is in response to a spate of fatal car accidents involving drugs or alcohol.

Some immediate obvious questions: Who will be in charge of administering the tests to everyone who leaves? What happens if a patron argues, or refuses to take the test? Will he or she be chased down and fined?

What do you think? Are mandatory breathalyzer tests a good idea, or an invasion of privacy and a waste of time? Would you agree to take one, even if you'd had one beer, or weren't driving home?

It's hard to resist a drink that's emerald green, slightly illegal, and known for making 19th century Parisian artists go insane.

Absinthe has always been a hit with a certain, artsy, Bo-Ho crowd. And it's lately been making a comeback, since being legalized in this country for the first time since 1912.

But until recently, finding the good stuff has always been hard. Too much of what's been smuggled into the country tastes like radiator fluid. Indeed, for a long time now, absinthe has been more a party favor than the edgy beverage of sophisticates it's supposed to be.

No longer. A small candy company in (where else?) San Francisco has created absinthe lollipops. According to its website, the inspiration for these grown-up treats came around Halloween last year, "When we found ourselves with a lot of absinthe and no candy."

Snooth.com will flock to your rescue.

Log onto the site and access over two million reviews from both professional wine critics and average wine lovers to choose the perfect accent to tonight's dinner.

You have to sign up to be a member if you want to write your own, but anyone can search for reviews. The simple interface makes it hard to screw up - just type in your search term and you're immediately inundated with dozens of potential choices.

Not sure what to search for? Snooth suggests using terms like "Cab Sauv," "good with pork," or "spice," and if the responses are too overwhelming, you can further narrow your results by price, year, type, region, or varietal.

...But don't blame us if you walk away more indecisive than when you started.

My grandfather, who died in 2001 at the age of 91, used to proudly announce that he had been subscribing to the New Yorker since its inception in 1925. Whether or not that tidbit was exactly true, that magazine lost a loyal customer when he died, as he did subscribe as long as I knew him (and I was nearly 22 when he made his exit). I used to love to sort through the stacks of back issues that lived on the coffee table in my grandparents' den whenever we visited them, for the old food issues as well as any that featured fiction from authors I knew.

The folks at the New Yorker have put together a slide show of 21 covers that feature food, drink and dining that range from 1925 all the way up to September 2007. It's an interesting thing to take a peek at, because it gives you a glimpse at how our cultural perspective on food has shifted.

[via Serious Eats]

I have to say that I am fed up with all the energy drinks crowding the market. Personally I don't need energy, I have too much as it is, and they give me the jitters. What I want to do is relax! Part of my plan to relax is moving to a less stressful environment surrounded by beauty and nature, where life is a bit slower. I can always visit the big city for work or play, but don't have to live there. The other thing I can do is drink a Blue Cow Relaxation Drink, if I can find any near me. Or I could order it online direct from the company.

The company says that Blue Cow is made with "Chamomile, Hops, Passion Flower, Hawthorne Berry, Lemon Balm and most importantly, and Suntheanine®." Suntheanine® is a brand of pure L-Theanine, it is "the primary amino acid found in green tea" and this green tea derivative "helps relax without creating drowsiness."

Well the interesting ingredient list does have several herbs that do in fact help you to relax. Chamomile tea has been used for millenia to calm you down, as have the other ingredients. Although I have found that Hops can give you some pretty vivid dreams at night. The list of things it doesn't contain is interesting as well: zero calories, zero caffeine, zero carbs, and zero sodium.

It isn't really fair to call this review a "taste test," because I have basically resigned to the fact that any energy drink, no matter who makes it, tastes horrible. Even Diet Coke, which could be considered an energy drink if you take into account the caffeine, is an energy drink, and the taste is starting to wear on me. A lot. That's what two to three cans of soda a day will do to you. It wears you down.

G Pure Energy comes from Norwegian Ole Sandberg, the maker of high end water, Voss. If you didnt' know that intellectually, you'd certainly be able to sense it from the bottle's design. The bottle, like Voss' bottle, is made of glass, and is topped with the signature large silver screw-on top. This bottle, however, has a curve, which could be interepreted and sexy and gorgeous, or maybe a little scary -- you know, like someone drank a little too much G Pure Energy and gripped the bottle too hard. (And that with the bottle's even being glass!)

Two 14-year-old New Zealand girls made the news recently when their school science project revealed that Ribena, the popular black currant drink, did not have the high levels of vitamin C it claimed to. According to a story published yesterday in The Guardian, the girls were testing a variety of beverages, expecting to find that the less expensive ones had less vitamin C, when they discovered the opposite. Their results were picked up by a local news show and then eventually a national watchdog group. Today, The Guardian reported that GlaxoSmithKline, the drink's producer, is being fined almost $160,000 for misleading ads, which stated "the black currants in Ribena contain four times the vitamin C of oranges." A GSK press release says that that fact is true "on a weight for weight basis," but also admits that it could be misleading. There's also some discrepancy about the differing vitamin C levels in the concentrate versus the diluted product. On a personal note, I was a Ribena drinker for a while. I think it's tasty stuff. I don't think I ever believed it was good for me, however.

Nutritionists and researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston set out to try and discover whether dairy foods in general had any effect of fertility on humans, as there was "pretty strong evidence" that an excess of lactose in animals could have a negative effect on the ability of females to conceive. Everyone was surprised to find that the same result was not found in humans. The records, taken from 1991-1999, of nearly 19,000 women from the ages of 24-42 were examined.

It turned out that they found that women who ate two or more servings of low-fat/non-fat dairy foods and no whole fat dairy had an 85% higher risk of becoming infertile. Eating one serving of whole fat dairy per day significantly reduced the odds of developing infertility. The type of infertility most commonly found in this study was anovulatory, a failure to produce eggs. One possible reason for this result is that low fat dairy foods tend to have more lactose in them than full fat products, but scientists say that more research is needed before anything can firmly be concluded. And they do "not recommend that women trying to conceive use this as an excuse to eat "buckets and buckets of ice cream."

Following right in the footsteps of Coca Cola, Pepsico has just announced that they, too, will be adding caffeine content labels to their drinks. The labeling change comes conveniently at the same time as Pepsi is changing the look of their cans in general.

With two major beverage companies on board this new labeling trend, it sets the standard for other soft drink (or "sparkling beverage") manufacturers to add caffeine amounts to their packaging, as well as just to their ingredient lists. Making this information easily available draws attention to the fact that the FDA regulates the amount of caffeine that can be added to products (.02%), as well as to the fact that there are many groups that recommend an upper limit foe caffeine consumption per day The American Dietetic Association recommends no more than 300mg per day, for example.

We don't necessarily think that caffeine will become the next "hot" issue, as there is simply too much to worry about with foie gras and trans fats at the moment, but you never know...

Diet Coke is slightly higher in caffeine than regular Coke. Both are higher in caffeine than Pepsi, which has slightly more caffeine than Diet Pepsi. Either out of a desire to get consumers to sit up and take more notice of their brand, or simply as an attempt to jump on the energy drink bandwagon, Pepsi is rolling out a new, more caffeinated, diet "sparkling beverage." The new soda is called Diet Pepsi MAX.

Pepsi MAX is a diet soda that has been sold outside of the US for almost 15 years, so the fact that the name of the new drink is extremely redundant (a diet diet soda?) shouldn't be entirely confusing because US consumers aren't that familiar with it. The drink is sweetened with a blend of aspartame and acesulfame potassium, both artificial sweeteners, and will contain roughly 5.95 mg of caffeine per ounce of liquid. This puts at a much higher level than Diet Coke (3.8mg) and regular Diet Pepsi (3.0mg), and in the ballpark with Coca-Cola Blak (5.75mg) but not as high as Enviga (8.3mg), Red Bull (9.64mg) or coffee (13.44mg).

Diet Pepsi MAX is being targeted at 25-34 year olds and will hit stores in June

Advertising companies and politicians like to play with semantics for the purpose of changing images. Big soda companies seem to be heavily invested in changing their images this year - with Pepsi completely revamping their packaging and Coke teaming up witt Jay-Z to promote Coke Zero - so it isn't entirely shocking to hear that they no longer want soda to be thought of as "carbonated soft drinks." Instead, they're "sparkling beverages."

In what some might describe as a blending of advertising and politics, the name change represents some social climbing on the part of soda companies. They are trying to distance themselves from their high-calorie, junk food roots, which politicians and other people in positions of power continually hold against them. Unfortunately for the cola companies, soda is so popular that no matter what Coke and Pepsi executives decide to call it, changing the name for the product to "sparkling beverage" is like trying to change the word for "beer": it's just not going to happen.