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Originally Posted by Paulipbartender
Dood, for those of us less techno aware, would you explain how the Mixoloseum works? I've never understood it...
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Mixoloseum is basically a site run by a collection of cocktail/spirits bloggers (including myself I suppose). The original idea was to create another
recipe repository and
blog. At some point Gabe (cocktailnerd.com) added a chat room which can be found at
http://bar.mixoloseum.com and suddenly people started hanging out there.
The chat is generally cocktail-focused, although with the number of bloggers there it can divert off to general blogging/web topics.
On Thursday nights the chat room hosts Thursday Drink Night (TDN) starting at 7pm Eastern and running until one of us West Coasters (usually me) wraps it up. The premise of TDN is just to have everyone sit around and suggest drinks, usually centered around a theme. The drinks are supposed to be original and preferably created "on-the-spot" rather than something you've been carrying around in your little black book of recipes for years, although people will occasionally break out a recipe that they've been thinking about for a while to get group feedback. The participants were originally just the usual cocktail bloggers, but as of late we've started having various bartenders show up from all over to either take part or just watch.
So, as an example, a few weeks ago
we did gin as the theme for TDN. No one seemed eager to suggest the first drink so - while sitting at my desk at work - I suggested a drink and then the participants that had all the ingredients went and made the drink and tried it and then provided feedback. Sometimes the entire group will sit around trying to tweak a suggested recipe for quite a while, other times the drink is just too perfect to need altering or too horrid to merit any further attention and gets "sinked" (as in "poured down the sink"). Sometimes someone comes up with a partial idea and several people will all contribute to the recipe (such as the last 3 drink recipes from
a TDN in September). All recipes end up in the
Twitter feed for Mixoloseum.
Really the hardest part of TDN is pacing yourself because in one night the group can generate upwards of 25 recipes, some good, some bad.
After TDN, the host will collect the recipes, make them all over the weekend and pick a "winner." The person that created the best recipe receives some sort of prize, such as a bottle of celery bitters, a tincture made by one of the participating bartenders/bloggers, or even a bottle of booze. The winner is announced on the Mixoloseum blog, along with the recipes that were not sinked.
So really the Mixoloseum site is a 3 headed monster of cocktail recipe database (still being built and populated, I think there are only about 100 recipes in there at the moment), a blog, and the chat room. I enjoy spending time there to bounce both drink and blogging ideas off of the other members, and being a contributor to the blog gives me an outlet for non-rum-related writing (I know...it's scary to think that I might occasionally drink whiskey or gin instead of rum...I swear they're only momentary lapses!).
Thursday Drink Night In Las Vegas
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