Style Rule #7
Tall, slender men: avoid stripes

Style Rule #23
Your sports coat and trousers should not match, but should complement each other

Style Rule #37
Your tie should complement your jacket, not strictly match it .

No matter how many artisanal whiskeys hit the market, it seems there’s never one that matches your idea of smoky, caramel-hued perfection. So why not make your own?

The Whiskey Your Way program at House Spirits Distillery in Portland, Oregon, lets you tailor an entire barrel (about 100 bottles) to your exact specifications. And just to make sure you know what you’re doing, the process kicks off with a tasting seminar, which will help you explain to you drinking companions back home why a Port finish and Oregon oak barrels are the only way to go.

Read more here.

Here’s a tip for your next trip to your favorite watering hole: find the ice machine. The state of a bar’s ice machine speaks volumes about the establishment’s overall attitude toward the customer experience and, sadly, most bars fall frighteningly short. I remember a particular ice machine at a local bar that was crammed in the corner of a perpetually too-hot storage closet. The cooling vents looked like my dryer’s lint collector and sheets of ice would fall into the bin speckled with black dots. I stuck to pints (at least the beer lines were cleaned regularly).

But times, they are a-changin’. Upscale joints are now paying closer attention to their ice, ice, baby, (had to be done—just be glad it wasn’t this post’s headline), according to an article in the L.A. Times. Triple-filtered, custom-cubed, hand-chunked ice is becoming all the rage in places from the Windy City to all the way across the pond in London. But come on, just how important is ice to a cocktail? As long as I can taste the booze, does it really matter where my ice comes from or what it looks like?

You’re damn straight, it does. Ice impacts a cocktail in a number of ways:

Continue reading

What makes a boss great? It’s a question that’s been researched for a while now. I’ll avoid giving any advice that isn’t rooted in real proof of efficacy; I want to pass along the techniques and behaviors that are grounded in sound research. It seems to me that, by adopting the habits of good bosses and shunning the sins of bad bosses, anyone can do a better job overseeing the work of others.

At the same time, I’ve come to conclude that all the technique and behavior coaching in the world won’t make a boss great if that boss doesn’t also have a certain mindset.

My readings of peer-reviewed studies, plus my more idiosyncratic experience studying and consulting to managers in many settings, have led me identify some key beliefs that are held by the best bosses — and rejected, or more often simply never even thought about, by the worst bosses. Here they are, presented as a neat dozen:

Continue reading