Get out your tequila for National Cocktail Day

Wilderness Trail Distillery, based in Danville, Kentucky, has released two limited-edition whiskeys to mark co-founders Dr. Pat Heist and Shane Baker’s induction into the Kentucky Bourbon Hall of Fame’s 24th annual class.

Heist and Baker built the actual distillery from scratch in 2012, starting with a single 250-gallon pot still capable of producing about a barrel a day.

One of my favorite tricky-to-translate Japanese words is mottainai. The term roughly echoes the old chestnut “Waste not, want not” but more broadly expresses the Japanese knack of turning trash into treasure. Nowhere is mottainai more elegantly expressed than in the kitchen. Sake lees become kasujiru, a delicious winter soup; fish heads and skeletons simmer into rich stocks; and vegetable peels reincarnate as pickles, preserves, and garnishes.

Among New York City chefs, the grand master of mottainai hails not from the Land of the Rising Sun but the land of soccer and samba. Sherry Cardoso, a young chef from Minas Gerais, has made low-waste cooking a central pillar of Cynthia, her new restaurant in the West Village. Her tasting menu, changing with the seasons, might include caramel flan with a haunting sulfurous kiss from onion peels, a Negroni enlivened with oil extracted from lemon rinds, or a wondrously funky XO sauce conjured from a hodgepodge of veggie unmentionables. After stints at Per Se, Brooklyn Fare, and Top Chef, Chef Cardoso has discovered the culinary Philosopher’s Stone—the alchemical sorcery to transmute the base into the precious. 

Cosori, a trusted name in kitchen appliances known for its precision-engineered products, just dropped an exciting new way to perfect your pour-over coffee brew. The Juni, an automatic pour-over coffee machine, delivers an exceptional cup of coffee using the same technique often associated with slow, technical hand-brewing. The technique, which rewards patience, is now automated with Juni’s unique brewing system, which runs the bloom, pour stages, and extraction automatically to Specialty Coffee Association (SCA)-certified standards.

“Pour-over is defined by the hands that guide it – it’s a ritual of precise movement, gentle pours, and rising aroma,” shares Pierce Barnard, Head of Product Innovation at Cosori. “We spent 18 months studying the science and mapping each step, not to automate it away, but to replicate it faithfully. The moving nozzle, rotating basket, vibration, and open brew deck were all deliberate choices to preserve that experience.”