In celebration of our upcoming release of Cell and DNA, we invite you to try this delicious cocktail:

The Cell
3/4 oz gin
3/4 oz clear rum
1/2 oz lemon juice (strained of pulp)
1/2 oz dry vermouth (Noilly Pratt recommended)
1/4 oz green chartreuse
dashes of absinthe or pernod
Shake well with ice and serve up in a chilled cocktail glass.

This takes a cue from the Brown Cocktail and mixes rum and gin for the best of both worlds. The rum mellows out the gin and makes way for the chartreuse, while the lemon’s tartness balances out the sweetness of the chartreuse. I have been using more vermouth in my drinks lately, as I’ve discovered how much I really like Noilly Pratt’s influence on pretty much anything. It has a nice grapefruit and citrus flavor that goes particularly well with gin drinks. It’s also a good way to pad a cocktail in times of recession: even the highest quality vermouth costs a heck of a lot less than anything else you put in a good drink!
note: 1 oz ~= 3 cl

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news by Peter

Travis has been building a new CNC machine to cut the aluminum faceplates. We have been contracting this part of production out, but we are bringing it in-house when this machine is finished.
The ShopBot that mills the wood bodies isn’t fit for this job because cutting metal requires a cooling bath. In this video you can see the coolant dousing the bit, along with the source of coolant at the bottom:

Unfortunately, this test run ended in a bit of disaster, as Travis described in his email:

“After making all the modifications to stiffen up the z-axis and install the re-circulating flood coolant system, our new machine made its first quality cutting today. I made about 1/3rd of the cutouts and then, disaster. To no fault of its own, the top z-axis mount came loose and buried the bit in the table.”
The “fault” was an attempt at making do with a cheap bearing mount. Nothing $15 won’t fix!
We are looking forward to that fix so we can start producing!
Sadly, this video doesn’t have the disaster in it. But it’s pretty cool anyway.
Here’s a pic of the failure:

Metal cutter goes awry.

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news by Peter