Carbon Chemist

Tag: drinks

  • The 6 Best Apps to Find Bars and Restaurants While Traveling

    The 6 Best Apps to Find Bars and Restaurants While Traveling

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    Upon arrival in a new city or country, that first drink or meal is always important. More often than not, travelers have excitedly hurried to a trendy neighborhood or must-see landmark without really thinking of where they should go for food or a beer.

    Then when they feel that first pang of hunger or desire for booze, they look around to see a variety of restaurants and bars, all of which look like tourist traps they’d immediately regret entering. With appetites growing, the pressure to find food can quickly intensify. The decision has to be right, too, as this is the meal that the rest of your food will then be judged against.

    The internet is here to help.

    There are now a number of apps that give visitors the definitive lowdown on where they should go. Which ones are worthy of being downloaded? Take a look below at the six best apps to find bars and restaurants while traveling, all of which will ensure that you make the best culinary and nightlife decisions while you’re away.

    World of Mouth

    World of Mouth might not give users every restaurant that’s available in their vicinity, but it will let you know the most acclaimed. Described as the ultimate insider’s guide to the world’s best restaurants, its list of more than 20,000 recommendations in 4,500 destinations has been curated by renowned chefs, cuisine critics, and food lovers from across the globe. More than that, they have specific lists that reveal the best pizza to try in New York, ramen to slurp in Tokyo, and tacos to consume in Mexico City. Rather than give each place a score that’ll help you speedily decide the best restaurant to gorge at, Word of Mouth’s experts provide precise and vivid descriptions of what you can get and why you should go. New aficionados are also being added on a daily basis, as its eclectic and all-knowing community keeps on growing. [iOS, Google Play]

    Untappd

    Untappd is the definitive app for beer lovers. Not only does it point drinkers in the direction of bars, pubs, and breweries with extensive beer collections from 75 countries worldwide, it also allows them to search through drinks and read descriptions so they can pick the best one to gulp. This also makes it a good app for locals to have at their disposal, as they can keep an eye on the beers they’ve already drunk and what they want to try next. Its review system can be a tad unreliable and hard to navigate, but its map feature and beer lists ensure you’re able to pick and choose which bars and breweries best suit you. [iOS, Google Play]

    Mapstr

    People who love to plan every minute of their travels in the weeks leading up their holidays will adore Mapstr. It allows users to save the places they want to visit to their own unique map, and lets them label and organize those locations with specific tags and colors so they know which days to go, which places, and how vital it is that they go there. Mapstr’s maps are also accessible offline, a bonus for international travelers looking to save on cellular data usage. Plus, it includes reviews from only its users—some 4 million users in 90 countries—which ensures their ratings haven’t been faked. Mapstr makes it easy to share your list of saved places with friends and family, so you can show off where you went and let them know that you basically became a local. Then, when you want to be transported back to your travels, you can go back to the map and relive your experiences all over again. [iOS, Google Play]

    HappyCow

    If you thought things were tough for travelers without dietary restrictions, spare a thought for people who are vegan or vegetarian, or who have to learn how to say “gluten-free” in various different languages. For them, HappyCow is a must-have travel app that has been providing a list of vegan and vegetarian restaurants the world over for 25 years. While it might cost people $3.99 to use, its huge list of more than 220,000 listings in 185 countries includes bakeries, food trucks, hotels, farmers markets, and juice bars. Plus you can filter and organize them by price, cuisine, vegetarian friendliness, and popularity. Its community section also allows you to connect and communicate with fellow users and easily check out their recommendations. [iOS, Google Play]

    Pao

    Pao is described as the best app to discover hidden gems in the world’s biggest and best cities. Its 100,000 users have uploaded more than 60,000 local places in 500 cities, each of which inform people where they can eat, drink, stay, and play. Pao helps travelers discover not only the hippest bars and restaurants, but also the go-to music venues, coffee shops, galleries, beaches, and hiking trails. It shows who has been boasting about being in these locations, as well as the information you need to get there. Its quick-finds menu also gives recommendations to indecisive travelers, letting them know there are speakeasies, museums, ice cream spots, and other surprises nearby. Unfortunately the app is available for iPhone only. [iOS]

    Yelp

    There’s a very good reason why Yelp is one of the top choices for finding out what’s nearby. It has a very easy-to-use interface, which allows you to define your options based on cost, reviews, location, and your specific desires. Sure, the customer reviews can sometimes be a little unpredictable, as people find the oddest reasons to hate a place. But there’s usually enough description, pictures, and information for people to make an informed decision. While at this point it really feels like it should be in more than 219 cities and 35 countries, it’s at its most comprehensive when used in the United States. Tripadvisor’s app can be a good alternative when you’re abroad, but its frustrating map and even more unreliable reviews mean you need to be extra diligent when using it. [iOS, Google Play]

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  • This Is How Johnnie Walker Made the World’s Lightest Whisky Bottle

    This Is How Johnnie Walker Made the World’s Lightest Whisky Bottle

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    Tradition dictates that to properly enjoy a premium whisky you pour it from an elaborately chunky crystal decanter into an unfeasibly heavy tumbler.

    Weight has long been an outward signifier of quality in the whisky industry, and the luxury industry in general, but this week, Johnnie Walker launched the world’s lightest glass whisky bottle, suggesting that the future might be more about cutting emissions that cut glass.

    At 180 grams (6.35 ounces), the teardrop shaped 70-centiliter glass bottle is considerably lighter than the 850 grams of the current Johnnie Walker Blue Label bottle (without the liquid and the stopper), coming in at one-fifth of the conventional weight. It contains a limited-edition Johnnie Walker Blue Label Ultra whisky. The design has been five years in the making, and it breaks with the brand’s traditional square bottle for the first time.

    Designed with the help of Turkish glassmakers Şişecam—a company in the top five of glass producers globally—the new lightweight bottle has the potential to impact both transport and production emissions. Parent company Diageo suggests that for every gram of glass reduced, around half a gram of carbon is saved in production. This doesn’t sound all that impressive, but given Johnnie Walker sells an estimated 130 million bottles annually, the carbon savings could, if upscaled, be considerable.

    Image may contain Bottle Alcohol Beverage Liquor Food Honey Chair and Furniture

    As it cannot stand upright on its own, the record-breaking teardrop bottle is housed in a bamboo cage.

    For now, however, only 888 bottles of the record-breaking Johnnie Walker Blue Label Ultra whisky will be released, costing $1,250 each—which, as eco-statements go, feels a little tokenistic. Limited-edition spirit releases are commonplace in the premium sector, but for this innovation to make a meaningful impact it will need to be implemented across more Diageo brands.

    At present, the lightweight bottles cannot be scaled up, but Jeremy Lindley, global design director at Diageo, tells WIRED that the company is already applying the newfound light-weighting knowledge to other bottles. “We have brought down the weight of the Johnnie Walker 18-year-old by 35 percent, and we’re working on reducing the weight of our standard Johnnie Walker Blue Label bottle by over 25 percent,” Lindley says.

    In the development process for the Johnnie Walker Blue Label Ultra, Diageo was granted four UK patents, and, in a laudable move, the license has been made available on a royalty-free basis to help encourage other drinks brands to innovate.

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  • The 30 Best Energy Drinks, Tested and Reviewed

    The 30 Best Energy Drinks, Tested and Reviewed

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    Buying energy drinks in public is embarrassing. Every time I see someone scanning the cooler for their favorite flavor of Monster or Ghost, I guess which accompanying vape flavor they’ve picked out, and I know others are making the same assumption about me when I’m scoring a can of Celsius to beat back a hangover or get lifted before a 10-hour bartending shift.

    The good news is that it’s easier than ever to purchase your favorite cans from Amazon, and the great news is that you don’t need to put on your Crocs and Cookie Monster jammies to do it. Throw in a nice little discount for buying in bulk and setting up auto-delivery, and you’re basically being paid to not leave your house. The future is here, and it is jacked up on B vitamins, red dye, and taurine.

    As a devoted coffee drinker, I often feel like the misquoted New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael when I see neon-colored tallboys of high-octane energy drinks usurping shelf space from my favorite Dr. Pepper and Mountain Dew variants at my local Sheetz. Energy drinks are big business—they raked in close to $20 billion in the US alone in 2023—yet I don’t know a single person who drinks them on a regular basis.

    A good cup of coffee is hard to find at odd hours in the middle of nowhere. Energy drinks, on the other hand, are as no-fuss as it gets. At any hour of the day you can pick out an eye-catching can that boldly advertises its caffeine content, plunk down a few bucks, and shoot into space in just a few swigs. Homebodies and deal junkies don’t even need to leave their domiciles to cop excellent deals with lightning-fast shipping on their most beloved brands, provided they’re Amazon Prime members.

    I love value, convenience, and caffeine, so I finally caved.

    Still thirsty? Check out our other drink-related guides, including Best Coffee Subscriptions and Best Nonalcoholic Wines.

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    How We Tested

    Across the span of 21 days I sampled 30 different energy drinks from an amalgamation of readily available gas station staples, brands the Amazon algorithm was pimping extra hard that day, everything in the Whole Foods end cap that advertised its caffeine content, and a couple oddballs from the past you probably don’t remember.

    I graded on taste, which is obviously subjective, and the palpable effects of the caffeine after knocking back a can at 8:30 am every day, after my daily 1.5-mile run with my dog. The extra cans were deployed two hours into shifts at my part-time bartending gig. I took one day off from the experiment due to gut-wrenching stomach pain and horrible night sweats. If there’s a Ghost-addled gamer in your basement as you read this, please consider offering them a wellness check, or a refill on their tendies at the very least.

    1. Celsius Functional Essential Energy Drink

    Though it has less carbonation than most energy drinks, Celsius is punchy without a cloying aftertaste and it does wonders in masking the medicinal notes that are present in similarly potent drinks. This is an absolute unit when it comes to the caffeine-to-volume ratio, and not a single flavor I tried was objectively bad.

    Celsius is a hot up-and-comer for a reason, and it’s not shocking to see entire fridges stocked with its whole portfolio right next to the checkout counter at a growing number of gas stations. The can has a whole lot of text I will never read, but it’s attractive and not too much in the extreme gaming or health-nut quackery camps to dissuade potential buyers who care about being seen in public with an energy drink. Like the Beatles or In-N-Out, this is a consensus pick everyone agrees on.



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