The worlds of whiskey and beer come together again for the release of Chicken Cock Ryeteous Blonde

When I was a kid, I remember my mother always watching musicals. West Side Story, The Sound of Music, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, there seemed to be one on every time my mom had control of the remote. One of the ones I remember seeing and liking immediately was Singing in the Rain. Watching Gene Kelly dancing on the flooded sidewalk and swinging around a light pole while, well, singing in the rain. I hadn’t thought of that movie in a long time. Maybe decades. That was until a few weeks ago when I was on a trip to Fort Lauderdale and I heard about a cocktail called the Don Lockwood, a riff on the old fashioned named after Kelly’s character.

Now, as a huge fan of the old fashioned, I am leery of the riffs. I am the same way with pizza, burgers, and macaroni and cheese. They’re already perfect. Stop messing with them. However, when I saw the recipe, I decided to give it a shot. I went to multiple bars and restaurants and asked each one if they had heard of the cocktail and I got a lot of blank stares and shaking heads. So, when I got back to the city, I had a very clear first priority, hit Saint Tuesday in Tribeca and try their Don Lockwood.

As the year winds down, the flavored coffee world gets extra busy. From pumpkin spice in the fall to gingerbread and pecan praline around the holidays, flavored coffee always seems to shine toward year-end. As we look ahead to 2027, Christophe Ernotte, VP of North America at La Cimbali, shares his thoughts on where beverage flavor is headed next year. From nutty, green flavors like matcha and pistachio to brighter, more acidic, citrus-forward drinks, here’s what Ernotte believes may become 2027’s hottest coffee flavor trends.

Coffee and espresso flavor trends to gain momentum

Dry January might be the most popular month for taking a break from alcohol, but Sober October is a close second. If you’re spending this month sans alcohol and you’re getting tired of simply drinking sparkling water, there are options aplenty, especially if you’re usually a beer drinker.

If you didn’t know it already, the non-alcoholic beer world has improved a lot in the last decade. When I first started writing about alcohol twenty years ago, I wrote an article where I taste-tested NA beers and the results were fairly brutal. While I won’t name the beers, pretty much all were fizzy, yellow, and at best fairly flavorless. In essence, they didn’t really taste like beer. That’s definitely not the same today. It’s a whole new world of non-alcoholic beer.