Outdoor Swing Top Bar/ Liquor Cabinet

To coin a phrase, there's always room for drinking outside. We've found a nifty weatherproof outdoor bar with chairs from Brookstone that will look great on your porch, deck, or the sidewalk in front of your house. Just make sure you order it soon enough that you can enjoy it while it's still summer.

Product Description
Bar folds up and rolls against the wall for space-saving storage of your favorite beverages. Open, it reveals a large cabinet space with shelves for wine, liquor bottles, glasses and more, and two drawers for openers and accessories.

Smooth-rolling casters make it easy to move and position the bar where you want it. When not in use as a bar, it doubles as a liquor cabinet. Matching bar chairs fold for easy storage (Sold Separately). Arrives Fully Assembled. Open: 70 w x 19 d x 40 h. Closed: 30 w x 19 d x 41 h.

Outdoor Swing Top Bar/Liquor Cabinet at Amazon.

Waring Professional Ice Crusher

Big old ice cubes have their place, but there are some summer drinks that need crushed ice in them. Whether you think crushed ice completes the look, makes your home bar seem more professional, or you subscribe to the "smaller pieces means more surface area of coldness" theory, it's time to start crushing your ice.

For a while we were just putting cubes in a sandwich bag and smashing them with the toaster, but we've discovered a sweet ice crusher at Amazon that simplifies things immensely. When we checked, it'd been marked down from $130 to $79.95...nothing wrong with that.

One note - people are complaining that this thing doesn't shave the ice small enough, but we've been happy and think about it...we're not here to make snow cones, we're here to get messed up.

Amazon Product Description
The Waring Professional Ice Crusher can hold up to 12-cups of ice and crush up to 30 lbs of ice per hour. It features a brushed stainless steel housing, an ice chute attachment and sharp stainless steel blades for commerical mechanism.

via Amazon

Cocktail Vibe Cocktail Glasses Review

We've been seriously stress-testing the Cocktail Vibe glasses that arrived at the Liquor Snob offices last week. The interns have been scurrying around like ants as we sequestered ourselves near the liquor cabinet...err, in the testing lab...bringing us the crushed ice and limes we needed to perform our strict diagnostics.

So do Cocktail Vibe glasses live up to our expectations, and make it worth it to cash in on the 10% discount or free shipping offers they're currently running? Read on to find out.

Continue reading: "Cocktail Vibe Cocktail Glasses Review"

Advanced Drinking Gear from Cocktail Vibe

Generally, it takes more than a cool shot glass or highball to make us sit up and take notice. In fact, we're much more interested in the contents of the vessel than the vessel itself, and nine time out of ten you can serve our drinks out of a chipped coffee mug or old tennis shoe if it's going to get us where we're going. But sometimes we come across some barware that really catches our eye, and the glasses over at Cocktail Vibe have done just that.

Not only does the site carry striking barware from cocktail glasses to highballs to shooters, it also accompanies each with a recommended drink recipe for when it's "down the hatch" time. From the "Bond. James Bond" that accompanies the Conical Martini glass to the Bronze Twilight you'll find with the Portofino Goblet, this is an idea we could learn to stand behind. Don't just sell us the glass...tell us how to fill it up!

We'd show you more, but they really don't make it easy to link to their individual product lines, so you'll have to check out all the different glassware varieties, from Martini Vibes to Bubbly Vibes to Shot Vibes, for yourself at Cocktail Vibe. Oh, and if you're wondering about the test tubey shot glasses pictured above, they're called the Laboratoria Shot Set...you'll have to do your own experiments to find them.

The Poker Drinkware Collection

We're not huge gamblers here at Liquor Snob, mostly because we like to keep a limited number of addictions. We do, however, like to play the odd game of poker, and we know quite a few folks who enjoy getting a little blind while they play Texas Hold'em. We've found an interesting set of cocktail implements with poker themes, so you can jazz up your next poker night or just spend your winnings.

Each piece is sold separately at Target, and you can also buy them at Amazonfor the poker player in your life. Read on to learn more about this interesting set:

Your monthly poker night started out with a folding table and some paper cups, but it’s grown into quite the snazzy event. Serve your full house of players with this Poker drinkware collection. The pieces are made of glass and embellished with red and black suit symbols. The set includes beer mugs, highballs, double old-fashioned glasses, shooters, martini glasses and shaker, olive picks, swizzle sticks and coasters. Each sold separately. Dishwasher safe. Imported. Bullet: Poker-theme drinkware Bullet: Glass with black and red suit symbols Bullet: Beer mugs, highballs, double old-fashioned glasses, shooters, martini glasses Bullet: Cocktail shaker, olive picks, swizzle sticks and coasters Bullet: Dishwasher safe; imported

Plus, if you're interested in mixing your gambling with your boozing, check out the Roulette Shot Glasses we found.

Lazy Drinker

Since the dawn of time, man has yearned to find an easier way to get his drink on. Well, maybe not since the dawn of time, but at least since the invention of the Kegbot and the AI Bar, and our newest discovery, the Lazydrinker. It's basically a cooler hooked to a laptop so you can mix drinks without getting out of your La-Z-Boy, or you can build your own and install it in a fridge, mini fridge, baby stroller, whatever.

The Lazy Drinker quite simply is a computer controlled mixed cocktail dispensing device. It's designed to hold 16 ingredients and multiple units can be chained together to get more. By using a series of pressurized valves, the ingredients are mixed automatically by your computer perfectly every time. With a database of over 5000 drinks, you'll have plenty to choose from.

The Lazy Drinker comes assembled in a cooler or as a do-it-yourself kit which can be installed in any manner you desire. Requiring only a Co2 tank and a PC with a serial port, the Lazydrinker can be set up anywhere: from a portable dispensing unit, to a bartop installed unit, to a refrigerator mounted unit, the possibilities are endless.

Most likely to be a Lazy Drinker was our superlative in our college yearbook, so we're definitely interested in trying this guy out, though we're still a little nervous about the introduction of a computer into our drink mixing. With our track record, our laptop would end up soaked in nine kinds of booze...maybe we'll have to get a couple of the interns to stand guard, towels at the ready. Anyway, check out the Lazy Drinker site while we figure out how to waterproof electronics.

Friday Fun: The Book Bar

Love to drink? Hate to read? Have a crapload time on your hands? Maybe it's time to take all your books and turn them into a bar? Introducing the Book Bar. This thing was created by some Stanford types, so they're probably all philosophy or engineering books or something - if you ask us, you should make yours out of naughty books.

Over the past summer a number of Vestal Designers lived in the same house, a 70s-era ranch west of Palo Alto. As it was on a golf course, and had an actual vineyard attached, we referred to affectionately as "The Vineyard" and had a lot of social gatherings there.

One of our non-Vestal housemates worked at the Stanford library, and his job included the task of throwing away old books, which apparently the other librarians couldn't bear to do. We decided to rescue these books from that awful fate - and what better use for them than a bar from which to entertain our frequent guests?

Check out the process and see more photos of the Book Bar.

via B3TA Newsletter #212

Ice Shot Glasses Are Frozen Genius

There are some shots that need to be as cold as possible in order to be truly great. A certain herbal liquor springs to mind...we won't tell you the name, but we'll tell you it starts with "Jager" and ends with "meister." Sure, you can freeze the booze; you can even throw your shot glasses in the freezer. But if you want to achieve true Hoth-like temperatures, why not drink your shots out of an ice cube?

With the ShotRock ice shot glass, you can chill your shot, slam it, and smash it against the wall while you're still in the midst of a freezerburn headache, all without fear of reprisals or broken glass. Here's what the ShotRock site has to say:

A ShotRock is a shot glass made out of ice! Imagine lifting a solid block of ice to your lips and drinking a freezing cold shooter...so cold and so good! ShotRocks are the best way to drink Jagermeister, Goldschlager, Aftershock, Southern Comfort, Cuervo, and more. Any shooter which should be served cold, tastes better and goes down faster when served in a ShotRock!

You can make four glasses at a time, and they take about 4-6 hours to fully freeze...not quite in time for New Years, but if you get your set now you'll have like 364 days to manufacture glasses for next year. Hope you have a big freezer. Learn more at ShotRock.com.

Octopus: Tap A Keg Six Ways From Sunday

OK, so the title of this article is a bit misleading, because the Octopus beer tap can really only tap a keg three ways from Sunday. But hey, that's two more than that lame tap you rent with the keg. One beer line per keg...that's so Fall 2004. Actually, this thing kind of reminds us of the Ubertap, but without the foot pump and $50 cheaper.

Keg lines are killer. You stand there and stand there and when you get to the tap you notice someone has sucked the beer straight out of the barrel and puked Cheetos on the top of the keg. At least that’s how I remember my Confirmation. Anyway. This is a four-spout tap for kegs that encourages sharing and faster beer handling.

via The Sporting Life; learn more at OctopusTap.com.

Bottlefly: The Bruce Lee of Bottle Openers

Remember that kid in your high school who thought he was a ninja? Like Napoleon Dynamite without the llama or the dancing skills, he was never without his nunchaku, his throwing stars, his butterfly knife. Yeah, that guy was totally weird, but you have to admit...butterfly knives are pretty damned cool. A few twists and a flick of the wrist, out pops the blade. Another flick, the blade's inside the handle again.

Now, some genius has had the amazing idea of combining the geeky panache of the butterfly knife with the utilitarian necessity of the bottle opener. Yes, the Bottlefly bottle opener is a true case of East meets West, and you can add the flair of a Kung Fu movie to every single beer you open. You'll be the Chuck Norris of cerveza every time you flick out the bottle opener "blade." Plus, you know everyone's going to want to play with this thing after they've had a few, and you won't have to worry about anyone cutting themselves when they show off their skills.

You can get the Bottlefly, AKA the Balisong Bottle Opener or the Bottle Ninja, at quite a few bartending shops on the Web. We found one site, BottleflyUSA.com, which claims to be the "home" of the Bottlefly, but their order form doesn't seem to work. Shoot them an email at the address on the page to find out about ordering one, or you can Google Bottlefly bottle opener or Balisong bottle opener to find the best place to get your hands on a Bottlefly of your own.