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We met Steven Stone when Sound Spirits was still just a twinkle in his eye. He was still just working at Boeing and tinkering around with distillation, but he still only had a name and a passion for booze to work with.

Fast forward to last week, where we got a chance to meet up with Steven again, this time for a tasting of his first spirit, Ebb and Flow Vodka, in the Sound Spirits tasting room on 15th Avenue.

Sound Spirits is the first licensed distiller in the city of Seattle since Prohibition. If you happen to be looking for the building it isn’t hard to find: it’s on 15th, before the bridge on the way to Ballard. The logo, a huge tentacle wrapped around a bottle, adorns the side of the building. If you happen to miss that, it’s the …

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The holiday season is upon us once again. Thanksgiving is a week filled with sights, scents, and memories that take us back in time. Grandma’s traditional stuffing and sweet candied yams, your Auntie’s addictive pistachio-marshmallow salad, wondering which family member will be caught tearing a piece of crispy buttery skin off the turkey before dinner and hoping someone remembered Dad’s mustard. New dishes infiltrate the tradition like warm Brie with herbed cranberry sauce and cheesy shredded potatoes. Getting hungry yet?

It is truly a meal focused on everyone’s favorite flavors while at the same time having little focus at all. What I mean by that, solely from a culinary standpoint, is that the dishes run the gamut of palate emotions, usually all at the same time: sweet, salty, rich, creamy, light, heavy, briny, herby, tangy and so forth. The most common …

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Snooth has recently come out with an iphone app that makes finding that bottle of wine as easy as snapping a picture.

Snooth Wine Pro ($4.99) can recognize a wine bottle from a picture you take of the label with your phone. You can then add the wine to your virtual cellar, see more info about the wine itself, find the closest store that has it in stock, or even compare prices at locations that carry the wine with the help of a map. Not near a store? You can also purchase the wine through a Snooth retailer, all with a few taps on your phone’s screen.

It’s pretty easy to use, but we did notice that when we took a picture of our favorite wine label, it couldn’t be found in the database. Also when we ran a search for some …

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We were mighty bummed when we didn’t get a chance to skip down to San Francisco and attend the SF International Wine Competition or  Spirits Competition this year. It’s a chance to try the best the world has to offer up in our industry, and we imagine it to be a bit like a grown up version of FAO Schwarz for booze lovers.

But we missed it. Then, about a month ago, we got an email from Tasting Panel Magazine saying that they were taking the Double Gold winners on the road, and would be in Seattle. Needless to say, we were there last week at Vessel, glass in hand and salivating, ready to try the winners.

While all the winners weren’t represented, there was a smattering of liquor selections from almost every group. (The one notable exception was whiskey, not a …

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A little birdie informed us today that the popular theory that eventually we will run out of cork for wine bottle might just be a myth. It seems that the 2010 Cork Harvest in Portugal and Spain was at record levels, due to the excellent growing conditions present in the last growing season. Not only that, but cork may just be a better alternative to those fake corks or screw tops.

A very rainy winter and spring, (30% higher than average) made for a late, long harvest season running until the end of August. This record harvest produced 300,000 metric tons of cork, which is about 36% more than 2009′s production. According to Jochen Michalski, president of Cork Supply, a leading global supplier of premium natural cork wine stoppers, “This news couldn’t be better as it has restored raw material levels …

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Every once in a while, one receives a unexpected delicious boozy present. Such was the case yesterday, when a bottle of Krupnik, a Polish Honey Liqueur, arrived on our doorstep via a savvy fellow drinker.

Honey liqueur has been used in cocktail for a while. If you look in older recipe books, you can find several cocktails calling for “runny honey”, or honey that has been purified and is less viscous. Krupnik and other honey liqueurs are an excellent substitute for this ingredient.

For those of us who enjoy a bit of booze in our daily lives, Krupnik is a nice addition. Off a tip from a fellow imbiber, we slipped it into our morning black tea, and it started the day off right! But since 8 am is usually too early to be hitting the sauce, we thought perhaps finding a …

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First of all I would like to thank everyone that made the Fall Tasting a huge success. Seventy wines from around the world were enjoyed while raising support for the Central Area Senior Center. Several volunteers donated their time to help set up, pour wines, and replenish snacks. I always enjoy catching up with customers as well as meeting new ones. A fun time was had by all. Thank you again for all of your help in making this event one of the best of the year.

Last year around this time we examined the age old questions heard commonly in the wine aisle: “Why is this so significantly reduced in price?” “What’s the catch?” and “What’s wrong with it?” and most importantly: “Is it any good?” With Halloween around the corner, I thought it would be a great time to …

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One of the most hyped premiers of the season, Boardwalk Empire, will be airing tonight on HBO. Directed by Martin Scorsese, starring Steve Buscemi, and adaped from  Nelson Johnson’s book, Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City by Sopranos writer Terence Winter, there are very few reasons why this series won’t be yet another home run for HBO.

Why are we here at DrinkGal so excited about this show? The show centers on Atlantic City, right after the beginning of Prohibition. Fortunes were won and lost during this dark era of our nations history, and the currency of the time was hooch. Prohibion was also the golden age of the American gangster, and we can’t think of a better reason to cozy up on the couch with a cocktail for an hour and thank our lucky stars …

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Rum is hot right now. Tiki drinks are making a comeback, a sipping rum is now a staple for cocktail bars in the know, and bartenders are increasingly using it as the new “it” liquor for cocktail bases. And honestly, after a couple Tiki parties we attended lately, we enthusiastically support this trend with a slightly slurred “hooray!”

Perhaps all this hoopla is why we are starting to see Rum migrating from the Caribbean and popping up domestically. New England (which was the epicenter of rum production for a time, believe it or not) is showing some growth, as well as Hawaii. But the most interesting one we found recently was a little distillery out of Colorado, called Montanya.

Montanya is nestled in the Colorado Rockies, just a little south of Telluride, in a town called Silverton. It seems an unlikely place …

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Happy National Lemonade Day! In honor of this momentous occasion, Sweet Leaf Tea is going to give away a case of their delicious, organic Lemonade to one lucky DrinkGal reader!

How do I win, you ask? All you have to do is follow Sweet Leaf Tea on Twitter, then tweet the following:

I want a (fill in your favorite recipe here) made with @SweetLeafTea! @drinkgal, send me a case of SweetLeaf Lemonade!

While you are at it, follow us too, (if you don’t already!) as we will be announcing the winner via Twitter later on today.

Choose your favorite recipe and get tweeting! Good luck!

Rosemary Lemon Fizz

1 part Vodka
1 tablespoon Lemon Rosemary Syrup
3 parts chilled soda water

For syrup:

2 parts Sweet Leaf Original Lemonade
1 part sugar
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice (per serving)
2 rosemary springs

Bring sugar, lemonade, lemon juice and rosemary to a boil in a …