I can think of a dozen reasons why Bruichladdich (pronounced brook-LADDIE) is the most exciting distillery in Scotland. For starters, it’s one of only two independent distilleries left in the country (and the only one on Islay, where it’s helping to revitalize the local economy). Secondly, it’s shaking up the Scotch industry, creating a huge portfolio of lightly peated, floral Scotches that challenge the idea of regional styles and traditional distillation techniques. Thirdly, it’s reinventing the idea of barrel-aging: Head distiller Jim McEwan (who spent 40 years at Bowmore before helping Bruichladdich CEO Mark Reynier relaunch the shuttered brand in 2001) has created a system he calls “Additional Cask Evolution” (ACE), wherein he finishes his Scotches in select barrels from the world’s top wineries, including Chateau d’Yquem, Chateau Haut-Brion, Gaja, Ridge and Guigal. These barrels add a completely different body and flavor profile than traditional bourbon and port casks do, making Bruichladdich’s bottlings unlike anything the Scotch world has tasted before.

And now Bruichladdich is applying its ACE program to, of all things, rum. I recently had my first taste of its Renegade Rum at Manhattan’s Elletaria restaurant,  and the stuff is as aberrant as its whiskey. Reynier had the idea to produce the rum a few years back, when he noticed certain disheartening parallels between the rum and whiskey industries: Both are dominated by a few enormous companies with deep marketing pockets and a penchant for blending and consistency. Reynier picked out a few select barrels from the Caribbean’s oldest, family-owned distilleries (some now defunct) and shipped the rum back to Scotland, where McEwan ACE’d them in ex-d’Yquem and Latour barrels, among other things. I tasted all four of the mind-blowing, limited-edition rums in Renegade’s current rotation: an earthy 15-year-old Jamaican rum finished in ex-Latour barrels; a clean, fruity 10-year-old port-finished Panama Rum; and two rums from Guyana, one a robust 12-year-old ACE’d in d’Yquem oak and the other a lighter, fruitier 16-year-old enriched by Madeira casks.

The rums run from $80 to $110, which is pretty reasonable, given their cult status. Look for them online at K&L Wines, Morrell and Garnet.

It has recently been brought to my attention by my sister, the ultra-diligent Food Network research intern, that almost every day of the year is a national food holiday. Today is National Fudge Day. Tomorrow, National Cherry Tart Day. And if you are wondering, November 12 is Pizza with the Works Except Anchovies Day. There's even a full week devoted to egg salad! I find this totally amusing and wanted to share this finding with all the food lovers of the world (or at least you F&W blog readers).

My super plugged-in colleague Kate Krader is usually the one name-dropping celebrities and rock stars but this weekend I found myself uncharacteristically star-struck while out in Montauk, probably the least celebrity-filled town in the Hamptons.

I was there to volunteer at the second annual Beach Rescue Mission sponsored by the Surfrider Foundation and Barefoot Wine.  Picking up garbage alongside me at Ditch Plains – Montauk’s best surfing beach - was the much-buzzed-about-of-late singer/songwriter Tristan Prettyman and nearly 200 other surfers and eco-crusaders. Surfrider and Barefoot Wine thanked all of us do-gooders by throwing a killer after-party at the newly opened Second House Tavern with unlimited wine (The new Barefoot Moscato could not be restocked quickly enough!) and incredible performances from Tristan and headliner Garrett Dunton – better known as, G. Love from the eclectic hip-hop,funk, psychedelica, blues trio G. Love & Special Sauce.

The night before I was hanging with G. Love at the much-hyped (all of it well deserved) Surf Lodge where Sam Talbot, a fan favorite from season two of Bravo’s Top Chef, is serving serious, summer-style food in a space that’s a total throw-back to 70’s surf culture and Bruce Brown’s iconic Endless Summer movie. G. Love, surprised me with his sophisticated palate (his mom’s a cooking instructor and his sister works for wine importer Daniel Johnnes) and we shared notes on our meals: sweet corn, peeky toe crab salad got a major flavor boost from the brilliant addition of marinated nectarines; lobster rolls were untraditionally served on hamburger buns, making them less messy to devour; and striped bass prepared in an herb and roasted garlic broth was light, yet insanely flavorful.

The Surf Lodge’s excellent food, super laid-back vibe, lakeside bonfire and 3,000 square-foot deck drew our group back for an after, after party Saturday night which went into the late hours with dancing and endless, Endless Summer cocktails (a dangerously delicious concoction that mixes Snow Queen vodka, Chardonnay, seedless red grapes, simple syrup and fresh lemon juice). G. Love summed up the weekend best saying: “We cleaned the beach, we drank some wine and we rocked out in Montauk.”

My colleague, Nick Fauchald, and I kicked off summer in similar spirit—with some pulled pork. But unlike Nick, who made his own sandwich (from our June 2008 issue), I had mine at the new Park Slope barbecue joint, Lookout Hill Smokehouse (I should have stuck to the recipe in the issue—Lookout's version was topped with a nice, crunchy slaw, but the pork could have been more flavorful). Still, I'll definitely go back to try their eccentric beer list, which has a bunch of local brews like the hard-to-find Southampton Secret Ale (a German-style ale brewed in the Hamptons), or maybe one of their cool-sounding whiskey flights, like "Touch of a Feather," with Old Crow, Fighting Cock, Eagle Rare and Wild Turkey 101. The playfulness continues: There's also Genesee Cream Ale—a lowbrow beer from upstate New York—and for even more nostalgia, RC Cola. But the John Deere insignias on the sauce holders=hipster overkill.

Patrick Watson and his wife Michele Pravda are very good at naming stuff. First was their Carroll Gardens wine shop, Smith & Vine, a name that would make Hemingway proud: simple, direct and packed with information (location plus trade, separated with an ampersand). They took more of a Gossip Girl approach for their next business, a nearby cheese chop called Stinky Bklyn: sassy and smart, with allusions to the txtmsg era and a cheese head’s weak spot.

If Stinky Bklyn is Gossip Girl, then the couple’s latest venture, The Jake Walk, is John from Cincinnati. Its name is obscure—“jake walk” is 1930s slang for the partially paralyzed gait exhibited by Prohibition-era vagabonds who drank Jamaica Ginger, a highly alcoholic (though legal) patent medicine found to be loaded with, whoops, neurotoxins—and, like John from Cincinnati, you’re not quite sure how to describe Jake Walk , except for “singularly awesome” (if you disagree with me about JfC, don’t hold it against Jake Walk).

You can’t simply call Jake Walk “a bar,” because its carefully curated wine list (50 by the glass) is too good—seriously, I think it’s Brooklyn’s best. But you can’t call it a “wine bar,” either: A selection of 120 whiskies and eclectic, pre-Prohibition cocktails says you can’t. And “restaurant” isn’t quite right, though the place is a charcuterie- and cheese-aficionado’s Disney World, with an expansive selection of both. So let’s just call it what it is—a gastro wine-cocktail lounge and charcuterium—and leave it at that.

Oh, I almost forgot: Jake Walk is also the place’s signature drink, courtesy of David Wondrich:

The Jake Walk
Makes 1 drink
Ice
3/4 ounce reposado tequila
3/4 ounce J.M. Rhum Blanc (or other white rum)
3/4 ounce St-Germain (elderflower liqueur)
3/4 ounce fresh lime juice
2 dashes Peychaud's bitters
Candied ginger, for garnish
Fill a shaker with ice. Add everything except the ginger and shake vigorously. Strand into a chilled coupe and garnish with the candied ginger.

I'm well aware of how good Jim Meehan's drinks are—the guy who created the drinks at everyone's favorite walk-through-the-phone-booth-into-the-bar bar, PDT in Manhattan's East Village, is also the editor of F&W's awesome new indispensable resource Cocktails 2008 (just out! order your copy now!). He's responsible for more of my hangover headaches than I care to talk about. Well, it turns out Mr. Meehan, or at least his acolytes, score well among a jury of his peers, too. At Tuesday's 3rd Annual Rhum Clement New York Cocktail Challenge, which took place at the Astor Center, PDT bartenders swept the top three awards. First place went to Daniel Eun's Bitches Brew (a mix of white rum, dark rum and lime juice, and then some secret ingredients). The Sargasso cocktail from Don Lee took second place (aged rum, sherry, aperol and bitters). Third place had my favorite name of the night, Sweetie Pie (aged rum, allspice liqueur, apple juice, pinch of sea salt): It was created by Lydia Reissmueller, who moonlights at PDT even though she serves Sweetie Pie at Elettaria in the West Village. So it was a very good night for Jim Meehan, who (coincidentally I'm sure) was one of the event's judges, and who had a huge major headache the next day. Which seems only fair to me.

It's a little late in the season to start (re)discovering the joys of whiskey—but the last couple of nights have been more like late-fall/early-winter evenings, the kind that make you want to sit in a library and drink wistful-looking, amber-colored things.

I don't exactly have a library in my Manhattan apartment—a few toppling bookcases, yes—so the other night I went to the Brandy Library in Tribeca. The clubby, autumny vibe was in full effect, and the shelves upon shelves of Scotch and brandy bottles were crammed with exactly the kind of study materials I had in mind.

My more whiskey-savvy friend and I dedicated our brain cells to figuring out what was in Smokehouse, a hauntingly smoky Scotch made by a secret distiller in Islay. Even the Brandy Library's "spirit sommelier," Ethan Kelley, doesn't know who makes the mystery malt, whose bottle is slapped with an intrigue-heightening bare-bones label. It's one of 300 single-malts on Kelley's list, and soon he'll be adding a bunch more private-label bottlings to the fat, leatherbound volume. Over an order of piping-hot cheese gougères, my friend and I drank our way through a half-dozen more whiskies, via an exquisite tasting flight called the Peat Promise: six Scotches like the ultra-peaty, alluringly named Benriach Curiositas and the hard-core Connemara Cask Strength.

For those who doesn't know their way around a 300-bottle list (who does), Kelley will be teaching a class at the new Astor Center this Saturday, called "Whiskey for Wine Lovers."

It seems I never again have to leave my beloved Brooklyn to have sophisticated cocktails. Which is a good thing, since cab fare from lower Manhattan can add as much as $30 to an already pricey evening out. In my little four-block radius, I now count four bars—a fine ratio of walk to drink. There's Flatbush Farm (a personal favorite—try the Mo' Stormy), Soda (a good selection of Irish whiskey and the best burgers in Brooklyn), Barette (burlesque every Tuesday and Friday night) and the newest of them all, Weather Up, which is owned by Kathryn Weatherup and has the Sasha Petraske (Milk & Honey and East Side Company Bar) imprint. It's a good thing Brooklynites are a laid-back people, though, as it took nearly 45 minutes and a whopping $55 to get four drinks at Weather Up—but if you deduct the cab fare, it's worth it in the end. 

Ever since the concept was born in 1934 —when Ernest Gantt opened Don the Beachcomber in Los Angeles—tiki bars have always been a West Coast thing. Sure, there’s a tiki room or two in most major cities, but even the ones in a cocktail kingdom like New York have been awful, serving unbalanced, high-octane bastardizations of the Mai Tai and the Zombie—jungle juice garnished with a paper umbrella, essentially—to frat brothers who wouldn’t know grog if it were dumped over their heads. But recently, some of New York’s top cocktail carpenters—at bars like PDT, Death & Co. and the Krader-endorsed Rusty Knot—have begun honoring the tiki gods with their own Polynesian potables. Last night I attended a tiki-themed party hosted by the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States at Oser Bikini Bar, an appointment-only shop in Tribeca that sells custom-made surfboards, bespoke swimsuits and vintage tiki tchotchkes and furniture.

However, a couple of weeks back, the burgeoning trend almost had its torch blown out. I received a phone call from Eric Seed, an importer of esoteric and long-lost spirits (see our January 2008 issue or click here). He was trying to track down a bottle of Velvet Falernum for Elettaria, a new restaurant/bar in the West Village, and wondered if I wouldn’t have an extra bottle around my office (I didn’t, having just depleted my supply on one of these). A sweet almond- and lime-flavored liqueur from Barbados, Velvet Falernum is an essential ingredient in tiki drinks like the iconic Zombie Punch (limit one per customer, thanks to its deceptively high alcohol content), which Elettaria bartender Brian Miller had added to the list, in addition to a few other tiki-lounge classics. Anticipating this trend, Seed had just signed on to be the liqueur’s new importer, but his first shipment had yet to arrive. After calling every liqueur store in town, Miller found a few bottles at Morrell & Company and bought their entire stock—just in time for opening night.

Every time I go to Berlin, I love it a little more truly, madly, deeply. I just got back from the annual ITB travel-industry trade show, and—while I may not love the overwhelmingly huge conference center madly or deeply, or even slightly—the event is at least a fantastic excuse to be in Berlin.

I spent the post-conference weekend exploring and hanging out. Based on a tip from our star European contributor Gisela Williams, who lives in Cologne, I stayed in a one-bedroom run by T&C Apartments, which rents extremely affordable (roughly 60 euros a night) flats in high-demand areas like the gentrified-hipsterville of Prenzlauer Berg, where there are virtually no hotels. My apartment was spotless, minimalist (in a non-ruthless way), and near the area's countless cafes, parks, shops, restaurants.

Other highlights:
At the brand-new Tausend bar last weekend, I had one (actually three) of the most perfect Dark and Stormys—rum, ginger beer and lime—and watched a Macy Gray-ish vocalist rock the house.

Lunch the next day was an outrageously delicious pizza—made with pillowy naan bread topped with arugula, olive tapenade and Parmigiano Reggiano—at W Imbiss, a snack bar on Kastanienallee run by an eccentric, highly entertaining Canadian musician who goes by the name Gordon W.

One of my new favorite bistros anywhere is Café Jacques, in the scruffy-cool Neukölln area—across the canal from the lively Turkish-bohemian hood of Kreuzberg. I ate an intensely rich, Taleggio-cheese-and-walnut-slathered tagliatelle, then hit a couple of illegal bars nearby. Berlin has lots of those: fun bars with cheap beer and great DJs, in old apartments or abandoned spaces. I won't give away any addresses here; just a hint: Look down quiet residential streets or keep your eyes open for second-floor spaces with dim lighting and crowds just barely visible through a smoky haze.

I flipped through old family scrapbooks and ancient CDs at the Sunday flea market at Mauer Park in Prenzl'berg, then sat on the grass eating a juicy bratwurst and watching dogs run around, people throw frisbees, and locals generally kick back on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon.