Obsessive About Cocktails

So my friends think I can be a wine snob?

Apparently, there are more than a few cocktail aficionados who put me to shame.

This N.Y. Times article talks about people who are obsessive about their cocktails -- so much so that in at least one case, they decide to make their own ice:

Mayur Subbarao is a serious drinker. This isn’t to suggest that Mr. Subbarao, a 34-year-old environmental lawyer in Manhattan, drinks to excess — he’s openly disdainful of “binge drinking”— but rather that he drinks cocktails with a seriousness that, even he admits, sometimes borders on obsession.

He makes his own block ice, daily, by freezing water in a loaf pan and then carving it into oversize chunks for use in cocktails, and he sometimes travels to Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, to harvest colder, more esteemed cubes of ice from a friend who owns a Kold-Draft ice machine.

. . . While cocktail geekdom is nothing new, the latest faction revels in the same kind of fussiness that inspires home cooks to faithfully replicate Thomas Keller’s chicken stock recipe.

“It all starts with an innocent experimentation with pomegranate juice, trying to make a passable grenadine,” explained Paul Clarke, a Seattle-based cocktail blogger. “The next thing you know, your refrigerator is full of homemade pineapple and raspberry syrups, gomme syrup, made with gum arabic to give it an extra-luscious mouth-feel.”