Tag: Apple

Cocktail of the Week: Cranapple Cider Cocktail

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Expect to see a lot of apple cocktails in the coming weeks as we move further into fall. Good guesses for other themed cocktails this fall would include:  pumpkin, pomegranates, cinnamon, and spice. I apologize now for using the atrocious portmanteau, cranapple, but cranberry apple cider cocktail is even more of a mouthful and so beauty concedes to brevity.

The ingredients
The ingredients

Cranapple Cider Cocktail

  • 2 oz. cranberry juice
  • 1 oz. fresh orange juice
  • 1 oz. vodka
  • 1 bottle chilled hard cider

Fill glass and cocktail shaker with ice. Add cranberry juice, orange juice and vodka to shaker and shake until chilled. Strain into glass. Top off with hard cider and garnish with apple slice.

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This looked so good when I first heard of it and I double-checked to make sure it called for just cranberry juice (most cranberry juices are a mix of grape, apple, and cranberry concentrate, with the cranberry making up the smallest portion). It did. But, and this has been my experience every time a cocktail has called for actual cranberry juice, the cranberry flavor ends up overwhelming everything else in the cocktail.

The Cranapple had the sour tart of cranberry and not much else. The cider I used (Crispin) is a particularly strong variety but then only thing from it I could discern in the drink was the carbonation. In the future I’ll reduce the amount of cranberry juice and increase the amount of orange juice. I might not shake it either but try to layer the liquids into the glass.

Not a bad cocktail, especially if you like cranberries. I was just a little disappointed.

If you had bought Apple stock instead of a PS3…

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You’d have made a hell of a lot of money.

Sony announced their next console, the Playstation 4 today. They didn’t unveil the actual machine or give its cost. But, it got the internet buzzing with hype, argument, and discussion.

But, unlike every other time a next generation console has been announced the news left me unphased. On twitter I attributed this to growing up. Some people took offense to that. I didn’t mean it in the sense that video games are for kids but more that I’m growing out of them perhaps.

After being told about the announcement and reading some articles I still couldn’t care much about it. Instead I found myself thinking about what I could have done with the money I earned instead of buying a new console. Or what I could have done with the money I have used to buy consoles in the past.

And so a thought experiment was born! The Playstation 3 came out on November 11, 2006 in two version. A 20 gig rig that retailed for $499 and a 60 gig version that sold for $599. On that same date a single share of Apple’s stock was selling for $83.12.

With the money you would have spent on the 20 gig version you could have bought six shares of Apple stock (we’ll round down and say 7 stocks if you sprang for the 60 gig version.) Seven years go by. Today, I can go on ebay and buy a 20 gig original PS3 for between $40-$70. Sixty gig versions go for around $100. A deprecation in value of  84 to 92 percent?!

As of the writing of this posts Apple’s stock was selling for $448.85 per share. So, your six apple stocks would be worth $2693.10 for an increase in value of 540 percent! Quite the deal!

Of course in 2006 I wasn’t married or working full time or contemplating buying a house. Still, if I had bought the stocks then I could have made money and bought a PS3 now and still come out ahead. Just think about that this fall when you rush out to buy the new one…

*this is all of the cuff maths so if I made a mistake I apologize. Regardless, the stock purchase would have done you a lot better than the PS3 one.

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