Month: December 2018

For anyone coming home from a truly taxing and stressful day on the job, the small but persnickety task of muddling the mint in a delicious mojito or crushing ice cubes for the perfect a Moscow Mule sounds seriously ambitious. 

So the good people at Keurig, the household name in single-serve coffeemakers, saw an opportunity and came up with a new single serving machine for cocktails, the Drinkworks Home Bar.

More from Delish:

[Drinkworks] a black and chrome box with a water tank (similar to the Keurig K Cafe espresso maker) that allows pods, which contain the ingredients for a cocktail, to make an instant alcoholic beverage—including the booze.

According to Keurig and their partner, Anheuser-Busch InBev, there are pods for 24 different kinds of beverages that include beer, cider, and over a dozen mixed drinks. Among some of the cocktails are an Old Fashioned, Cosmopolitan, Margarita, Moscow Mule, Mojito, Red Sangria, White Russian, White Wine Peach Sangria, Lime Vodka Soda, and Gin and Tonics.

Take that in for a sec. Simply grabbing a pod, popping it in, and just like that, something good for what ails ya.

Okay, but how good is it, really? The Keurig for coffee is tried and true. It was a mainstay in many workplaces as long as 18-19 years ago before being sold for home use, and now it’s just another appliance, often the favorite due to what a time-saver it can be. 

Engadget tested Drinkworks. They found that it’s just as easy to use as the coffeemaker, but things aren’t so simple when it comes to actually making a drink:

Obviously the big question, though is, how does it taste? And here’s where things get a little more complicated. I had an Old Fashioned and Moscow Mule: Both were perfectly serviceable, but neither was great.

The Old Fashioned was a little sweet for my taste and the Moscow Mule definitely would have benefited from being made with freshly squeezed lime juice instead of a concentrate.

But I’ve also been served much more offensive things at a bar and paid three times as much as Drinkworks is charging. (What kind of monster muddles both a cherry and an orange in the bottom of an Old Fashioned then tops it off with seltzer?)

In this way Drinkworks certainly sounds like the Keurig coffee machine as well. Some people just want to wake up and get moving and for them any old K-cup is probably fine. But coffee connoisseurs consider single-serve an abomination. 

So it’s likely that it’ll be easy to please a fairly large number of customers with the Home Bar, but those who consider themselves aficionados of top-shelf cocktails probably won’t be thrilled.

Leave them off the invitation list when planning Christmas or New Year’s party invitations.

Keurig began rolling these out in Missouri in early November and they are available on pre-sale now. The Home Bar will hit store shelves in 2019. 

It costs $299, but Drinkworks probably pays for itself in a few weeks, given a one-night bar crawl with friends can end up costing half that price.

One thing we already know is that the final season of Game of Thrones will be huge, basically a series of nearly movie-length episodes rather than regular episodes. That might be hubris for another TV series, but it’s a fit for GoT. Also a fit: massive, ultraviolent battle scenes that are destined to push the limits of what we’ve seen on TV before.

And actor Vladimír Furdík, best known as the blue-skinned, ice-bejeweled Night King, recently revealed that the show will not only outdo itself, but also maybe blow away every other TV battle scene.

Furdík was speaking at a Hungarian fan convention when he let the cat out of the bag and basically gave GoT obsessives a kind of timeline as to major plot events. Mashable reports:

Since Game of Thrones has the habit of letting the penultimate episode of the season be the most dramatic (see episodes “The Rains of Castamere,” “Battle of the Bastards,” and “Beyond the Wall” for reference), fans had expected the fifth episode of the six-part finale to feature the battle-to-end-all-battles.

But, according to Furdík, we won’t have to wait quite that long. Speaking at a fan convention in Hungary, the Slovakian actor said that the battle will take place in the middle of the season. 

“In the third episode of the last season, there is a battle that the creators intended to be a historic moment in television,” said Furdík, according to Hungarian site SorozatWiki. Mashable had a native speaker of Hungarian verify the translation of the quote.

There you go—episode 3 is where major stuff goes down. 

This is fairly big, as Thrones leaks go. There just aren’t that many. Mashable caught one in February, fan photos showing Winterfell on fire, and Maisie Williams, it turns out, totally spoiled the 2019 premiere date—or date range, at least. 

Otherwise so-called leaks or spoilers have basically been actors hinting at where their roles might go and describing their emotional reactions. Not too scintillating. 

The promise of the greatest Thrones battle ever, perhaps the greatest to ever air on any show—that’s enough to get the attention of even the most casual fan. 

We’ll finally know just how intense and deadly Season 8 truly is when Game of Thrones premieres in April 2019. 

The world is waiting to see if Tyson Fury will put his money where his mouth is. 

The brash British heavyweight put on a riveting performance against Deontay Wilder in a WBC heavyweight title fight that ended in a split-decision draw on Saturday, with Wilder retaining his belt. 

The pay-per-view slugfest was memorable both for the 6-foot-9 Fury’s impressively slick boxing skills and that he somehow got off the canvas and kept fighting after the extremely heavy-handed Wilder flattened Fury in the 12th round with a punch that would have put any other opponent to sleep. 

But in the lead-up to Fury’s biggest bout since returning from a three-year hiatus, in which he battled depression and substance abuse, the “Gypsy King” told the Irish Mirror that he plans to donate all of his estimated $10 million fight purse to the homeless. 

“I’m going to give it to the poor and I’m going to build homes for the homeless,” Fury said. “I don’t really have much use for it, I’m not interested in becoming a millionaire or a billionaire.” 

“I’m a boxer not a businessman and I’ll probably go down the same route as every other boxer—skint at the end of it all.”

“You can’t take it with you so I might as well do something with it and help out people who can’t help themselves,” he added.

The selfless intention earned him praise from countless Twitter users.  

Though some fans and analysts believe Fury should be the new heavyweight champ, the judge’s scorecard wasn’t what made the 30-year-old slugger’s showing so extraordinary. 

After winning multiple titles in 2015 when he upset longtime heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko, Fury fell into a drug-fueled depression that kept him away from the ring until his victorious comeback against Sefer Seferi in June. 

“I woke up every day wishing I would not wake up any more,” Fury told BBC Sport before the Seferi fight. “But I am living proof anyone can come back from the brink.”

As for his next opponent, WBA-WBO-IBF heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua said he’ll fight either Fury or Wilder on Twitter.

“What took this fool so long? Like we ain’t been interested?” Joshua wrote in reply to a news story that said Wilder was “very interested” in a face-off.

“Anyway well done Fury! They wanted to get you because they assumed you was finished. I’ll give you a fair one when you’re ready! Either one of you!”