Drink anyone?

From the desk of Craig Glenday, Editor-in-Chief

While enjoying a cocktail or two at the Groucho Bar of the Hotel Arts in Barcelona, where we’re staying while printing Guinness World Records 2008 edition, I challenged the bar staff to create the world’s most expensive cocktail. The rules are fairly straightforward:

1. The value of the cocktail must lie inherently in the key ingredients. This means no diamond rings in the bottom of flute glasses, or white-gold cocktail sticks holding a diamond-filled olive.
2. The cocktail must be commercially available, at least until stocks last.
3. The name of the cocktail must be printed on a menu (and not just a one-off).

At some point last year, I found myself in the Windows on the World bar atop the Park Lane Hilton, where the Lord Bowmore cocktail was sold for £799 (then $1,431). (The service charge of 12% to bring it to your table added up to over £95 ($180)!! It contained 50 ml (1.75 fl oz) of 40-year-old Bowmore malt whisky and 15 ml (0.5 fl oz) of pure, dark melted chocolate. But the following day, when I called back to confirm the cocktail’s record-breaking status, it had been taken off the menu, never to be seen again!

So, for the past few years, the official most expensive cocktail was the Hemingway Sidecar sold at the Hemingway Bar at the Hotel Ritz, Paris. There, bar manager Colin Peter Field (dubbed the "world’s greatest bartender" by Forbes, a title I’d be more than happy to bestow on GWR’s behalf, if only it were truly quantifiable) created a version of the classic Sidecar cocktail using an 1865 pre-phylloxera Cognac.

"I may as well serve a cocktail on top of a mink coat and call it my $20,000 sidecar," says Duncan Halden, Gordon Ramsay’s bar manager at the London in New York. He serves up a $550 Sidecar upon request that, he says, "out-luxes" Colin’s version at the Ritz. It features Hennessey Ellipse super premium cognac - poured from a decanter specially designed by Tomas Bastide, a designer at Baccarat - and Grand Marnier 150. But who cares who designed the decanter… and if it’s not on the menu…?

So, what will the Hotel Arts need to compete with? In the forthcoming 2008 edition, we’ve listed a cocktail – on the menu and worth its price – that beats the Hemingway Sidecar. I’ll say nothing more than the fact that it’s a Mai Tai made with 17-year-old Jamaican rum and that it sells for a whopping £750 (currently about $1,483). The gauntlet is down – now, just let’s hope that, should the Groucho Bar at the Hotel Arts rise to the challenge, I get a chance to taste it! Cheers…

CRAIG GLENDAY’S HEMINGWAY SIDECAR (with apologies to Colin Peter Field):
5 parts Cognac (the most expensive you can afford)
3 parts Cointreau
2 parts freshly squeezed lemon juice
Fill a cocktail shaker two-thirds with ice and add all the ingredients. Shake vigorously for 20 seconds (and no less) and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a glace cherry in the bottom of the glass and, if you're trying to impress, an orange slice on the rim.

-CG

Welcome....

From the desk of Craig Glenday, Editor-in-Chief...

So, welcome to OFF THE RECORD, the first ever Guinness World Records Editor’s Blog. I’m typing this now in my fluffy white dressing gown, looking occasionally over the top of my laptop and very freshly made gin and tonic to enjoy the Mediterranean view from my room at the Hotel Arts in Barcelona. I’m in heaven… and, at 28 floors up, almost literally. I’m not long out of the rooftop spa – where it felt like a hundred fat mice were having had a disco on by back – and I’m smelling unusually, pleasantly fragrant; talking of BO, a Beethoven piano sonata tinkles away quietly on the Bang & Olufsen stereo, and the only other sound is the ice creaking and cracking in my glass. If I were any more relaxed, I’d be dead.

Why the decadence? Well, it’s something of a tradition. We like tradition at GWR. Every year, for the past 20 years, the world’s biggest-selling copyright annual has been printed at Printer Industria Graficá in Barcelona, and over the past 10 years, whenever we visit this beautiful city in the northeast of Spain, we stay at the Hotel Arts, which has to be the best hotel I’ve ever stayed in. And I guess that’s something, considering the amount of travel GWR staff have to do every year to create the famous book.

Stephen King fans will remember how Misery author Paul Sheldon celebrated the end of each of his books by smoking a single cigarette and drinking a glass of Dom Perignon; well, here at GWR, we stay at the Arts, a guest of Printer Barcelona, and enjoy a massage and a G&T. (Thankfully, we don’t have a psychotic Annie Wilkes bearing down on us with a hatchet and a blow-torch!)
Yesterday, I watched as the first copies of the USA edition glided off the press – an incredible, new, hanger-sized monster of a machine just recently installed at Printer’s sci-fi-like industrial complex outside the city centre; the space-age feel is augmented by the little men in blue crawling all over the mothership, still proudly buffing its panels with their greasy shirt elbows as if tending to their own new car.

Alongside me were GWR’s Head of Production and Publishing VP Trish Macgill and Production Exec Jane Boatfield. (I stress the "were" – they’re not here now beside me in my towelling gown!) Jane had taken over press duties from Ben Way, the Deputy Editor who had helped me read through the final plotter proofs the few days before. It’s an awesome responsibility reading the final proofs – it’s (almost) the point of no return; the only other chance for a change comes when you yell "Stop the press!" and the vast machine is brought to a halt for a plate change. (I’ve always wanted to do this, secretly, like shouting "follow that car!" or "hold the front page!")

Anyway, today, everyone else has gone home, leaving me to enjoy the book on my own in the Hotel Arts and contemplate next year’s edition. My role as Editor-in-Chief is to get thinking about 2009 already. This book is going to be a hard act to follow, I have to say. I’m biased, of course, but what an edition! I’ll drink to that…

-CG