This episode’s featured cocktail is a simple one: the Champagne cocktail. And I bring it up now because it’s the cocktail I most often recommend to folks who really want to spice up their New Years Champagne toast.
To make a Champagne Cocktail, you’ll need:
- 1 sugar cube (Domino’s works great)
- 1 flute of Champagne
- A good bottle of Lavender Bitters
Now, notice I didn’t mention any measurements here. That’s because this is about the simplest cocktail you’ll ever make, and it adapts well to glassware of different dimensions.
Let’s assume you’re making a tray of these to present to your guests for a New Year’s Eve toast. If that’s the case, you’ll need to drop a sugar cube into each Champagne flute, and saturate that sugar cube with lavender bitters, the same as if you were using aromatic bitters when making an old fashioned. Then, all you have to do is top up each glass with Champagne or some other dry, sparkling white wine, and serve.
The sugar cube acts as time-released flavor capsule for the lavender bitters, and it provides a beautiful, fizzing presence at the bottom of the glass. So if you have an extra couple bucks to spend on an easy, DIY New Year’s spectacle, I think you can’t really go wrong with a batch of Champagne Cocktails.
And of course, I have to plug our Embitterment Lavender Bitters here, which are absolutely perfect for a cocktail that begs for a little dash of spring in the depths of winter.
2018 By The Numbers
In 2018, we published a total of (including this one) 50 episodes – that’s pretty darn close to one per week.
And if you’re wondering, those 50 episodes contained over 2300 minutes of audio, for a total of over 37 hours of air time. So if anyone wants to take the Modern Bar Cart Podcast challenge, you can totally binge our 2018 episodes if you have a day and a half to spend with earbuds in.
More importantly, I want to talk downloads. This year, we received almost 20,000 downloads.
And to the NPRs, and the Gimlet Medias, and the Radiotopias out there…you know…those places where the rest of your podcasts come from…this might not be that big of a deal. They throw hundreds of thousands of dollars at their shows.
But for us, a small dedicated group of people who are here to provide extremely nutritious content, those 20,000 downloads mean more than you can imagine. It’s proof of growth, it’s proof that people are coming back week after week, and to all of those folks who have come up to me in person at events and told me how much you enjoy the show, it’s proof that we’re making a real difference in the lives of real listeners.
