American Drink

"First, the mindfulness-seeking bartenders in the workshop are asked to make a Negroni. The..."

sloganeerist — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 16:00:39 -0700

“First, the mindfulness-seeking bartenders in the workshop are asked to make a Negroni. The ingredients (gin, sweet vermouth, and Campari) have been measured out in advance. Moments later, the same bartenders are instructed to make a Negroni again, with the exact same ingredients, only this time with a twist: They must close their eyes for a minute and simply think about someone they love. That second Negroni is supposed to be conjured up with that object of affection in mind. “And that one always tastes better than the first,” Mr. Regan said. “You’d be amazed at how well this works. It makes a tangible difference. It just does.””

- I’ll Have the Enlightenment, Please, and Make That a Double - NYTimes.com

I don’t know if I buy into this whole mindful eating thing. But bartenders who actually give a damn what your drink tastes like? That’s a concept I’m willing to get behind.

Nice Job, Einstein

sloganeerist — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 20:22:00 -0700

In the early days of the Dry Era, nobody on the Federal Prohibition Bureau infiltrated and took down more NYC speakeasies than master-of-disguise agent Izzy Einstein and his partner, Moe Smith.

But sometimes it took more than clever deceit to fool a wary bootlegger. Sometimes it took cold, calculated honesty.

One of Izzy’s first assignments was to bust a Manhattan speakeasy that had a reputation for spotting revenue agents. With his badge affixed to his coat, he asked the proprietor, “Would you like to sell a pint of whiskey to a deserving Prohibition agent?”

The bar owner laughed and served him a drink. “That’s some badge you’ve got there,” he said. “Where’d ya get it?”

“I’ll take you to the place it came from,” Izzy replied, and escorted the man to the station.

Click through for a real nifty read from Smithsonianmag.com.

"You have your folk remedies or your comfort foods or your routine that all help just because they..."

irreverend — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 11:41:00 -0700

“You have your folk remedies or your comfort foods or your routine that all help just because they give solace … . But really a hangover is a physical process, or at least the result of one, and there do exist actual remedies that help reverse it.”

- Best day-after breakfast, according to science: eggs and a tropical smoothie.

Happy new year, Drinkers.

If you’re thinking about making a batch of Christmas gin,...

irreverend — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 13:00:58 -0700

If you’re thinking about making a batch of Christmas gin, now would be an excellent time to raid your neighbors’ juniper bushes. See those blueish-grayish berries? That’s what you’re looking for. Shake a branch and the ripe ones will fall right off.

For some reason, government landscapers seem to love this shrub. If you’re having trouble finding a good one, try the nearest public school (after hours, lest your motives for lurking in the bushes be mistaken) or courthouse (same).

A man, a woman, a caper and a bourbon

billbarol — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 10:00:00 -0700

“Tell it to me again,” Robin said. They were sitting in her kitchen with an open bottle of something called Black Maple Hill on the table between them. It was the color of very good, very expensive mahogany furniture and it tasted of cherries and caramel and wood smoke. They apparently aged the stuff for 21 years in white oak barrels down in Kentucky, and Albert paid about two hundred dollars a bottle for it. So far they’d downed a good hundred bucks’ worth. Finney had never cared much for bourbon, but he thought it was pretty much the most delicious thing he’d ever tasted.

That’s the introduction Ray Finney gets to Black Maple Hill bourbon in my just-published crime novel, Thanks for Killing Me. Finney’s a con man, and he’s good at it, but you could say he lacks what the professionals call “emotional intelligence.” That is, he’s the kind of guy who can be undone by a pretty face, and in Robin Tandy he’s more than met his match. Finney doesn’t know it yet, but Robin’s about to outsmart him, and all she needs is her brains and a bottle.

Not just any bottle, though. This is kind of a turning point in the story, and when I got to it in the writing I knew I needed a particular kind of spirit to make it turn. It needed to be smoothly, compulsively drinkable; it needed to be somewhat rare; it needed a flavor profile complex enough that Finney could plausibly spend a pivotal chapter trying to figure it out. There was really one spirit for the job, and I knew almost immediately that Black Maple Hill was it.

It’s almost incidental to this story that Black Maple Hill was the bourbon that turned me into a bourbon lover, because really, who cares? What’s much more relevant, and what made it a key player—the third character, in a way, in chapter five of my book—was this: Here was a drink that could plausibly mesmerize a guy who didn’t know anything about bourbons, as I hadn’t before I discovered it.

A good bourbon can do that to you. Black Maple Hill can do it in spades. Even in its base version, which is aged about eight years and sells for right around $40 a bottle, it’s smooth going down and rich in the sweetness that corn brings to its grain bill. There are also 14- , 16- and 21-year-old versions. (I picked the 21 for the book because it’s the top of the line, hard to find now, and would have plausibly been the choice of the guy who bought it, a fatuous oligarch named Tandy.) Really, any of the bottlings is delicious. Bourbon lovers will argue about whether the additional years in white oak give the 14 a perceptible edge over the 8, the 16 over the 14, the 21 over the 16. Discussions like these are, of course, part of what’s fun about a devotion to spirits. What all the bottlings have in common, though, is a satiny finish, a pleasantly light burn on the tongue (there seems to be less than the usual complement of rye, which gives some bourbons a more peppery character), and a balance of flavors and notes that can keep your palate enjoyably occupied for hours, or until you pass out. I taste vanilla, caramel, and something fruity that suggests apricot or black cherries. You might taste butterscotch, or honey. We might argue about it, in an amiable way.

“Are you getting, like, a hint of apple in this bourbon?”

“A little,” she said. “Keep going.”

“Right,” he said, slugging a big mouthful back. Maybe it wasn’t apples at all. Maybe it was apricots. There was also a definite burnt-nuts thing going on. You could spend your life trying to figure this stuff out, he thought.

This is exactly what I love about bourbon: It’s a puzzle of flavors. It spawns argument and analysis. At that, Black Maple Hill is more puzzling than most. There’s even controversy among aficionados about whose distillery actually produces the stuff. My friend Ron Givens, author of Bourbon at its Best, one of the indispensable texts on the subject, directed me to this post on Chuck Cowdery’s whiskey blog about Black Maple Hill’s provenance. Bottom line: It may or may not be produced by the distillers of Heaven Hill, which produces a wide variety of specialty bourbons. Ron further speculates that it may have been produced by other hands at other times.

Could there be a better spirit to use as the maguffin in a mystery novel? I can’t imagine there could. I only know that if it works at all in my book, and I encourage you to buy the book and judge for yourself, preferably in enormous quantities (the holidays are coming), it works because it’s a prime, delicious exemplar of the bourbon distiller’s art. Which is to say: You can study it, savor it, deconstruct it, as Finney does…

He was almost positive he was tasting a dash of brown sugar. And wasn’t that what butterscotch was, basically—brown sugar? But they melted it or something, he was pretty sure. The bourbon felt like a bolt of liquid velvet sliding down the back of his throat. Clearly, his palate was getting more and more sophisticated the more of the stuff he drank. There was only an inch or two left in the bottle, which struck him as very sad.

And maybe you’ll kill the bottle. But you’ll never get to the bottom of it.

Bill Barol’s Thanks for Killing Me is available now in paperback and ebook at Amazon, and also at the iTunes Music Store and barnesandnoble.com. More information can be found at thanksforkillingme.com.

Amazon and iBooks affiliate links

ourpresidents: Repeal of Prohibition - Elephants and Donkeys...

seoulbrother — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 13:49:08 -0700

ourpresidents:

Repeal of Prohibition - Elephants and Donkeys Celebrate Over a Barrel of Beer

During his 1932 presidential campaign, FDR promised to end Prohibition. The 18th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1921, prohibited the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors within the United States.

When Roosevelt took office in 1933, a constitutional amendment to repeal Prohibition was already making its way through the state legislatures. Roosevelt acted immediately to ease Prohibition with the Beer-Wine Revenue Act. Passed on March 22, 1933, this act legalized the sale of alcoholic beverages containing no more than 3.2 percent alcohol (this level was declared non-intoxicating). Prohibition was officially repealed by the 21st Amendment on December 5, 1933.

This large, glass bowl commemorates the end of Prohibition with a series of seven vignettes imprinted in white, including a “G.O.P.” elephant and a “D.E.M.” donkey celebrating over a barrel of beer. The etched caption reads, “At Last!”

-From the Roosevelt Library. More at Today’s Document.

jasonpermenter: 1950. Cocktail hour at the Spencer residence in...

seoulbrother — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 12:56:36 -0700

jasonpermenter:

1950. Cocktail hour at the Spencer residence in Santa Monica. Note the mirror-view television sunken into the table. Architect: Richard Spencer. Color transparency by Julius Shulman. (found at Shorpy.com)

superseventies: 1970s Canadian Mist advertisement. Update:...

seoulbrother — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 12:40:00 -0700

superseventies:

1970s Canadian Mist advertisement.

Update: Turns out Canadian Mist’s “Misting” campaign was groundbreaking for liquor advertising.

gordonshumway: I may never leave this restaurant. Not sure...

irreverend — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 11:25:17 -0700

gordonshumway:

I may never leave this restaurant.

Not sure where this was taken, but here’s how they make a Bacon Old Fashioned at New York’s PDT.

oldhollywood: Dean Martin performs at the Copa Room (1957)....

seoulbrother — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 15:35:17 -0700

oldhollywood:

Dean Martin performs at the Copa Room (1957). That’s Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, Debbie Reynolds, & Jack Benny at the front table (click to enlarge) (via)

“In 1969, Orson Welles told me that he’d been backstage in his own Dean Martin Show dressing room when, before the taping, Dean knocked, then came in, drink in hand. ‘Hey Orson,’ he said, holding up his glass, ‘you want one of these before we…?’

Orson shook his head. ‘No, no, Dean, I’m fine, thanks.” Martin looked shocked. “You mean you’re gonna go out there alone?!” Welles roared with laughter when he told me the story. ‘Alone!’ he repeated loudly. ‘Isn’t that great!?’ Orson went on, ‘That’s the best definition of addiction I’ve ever heard.’”

-Peter Bogdanovich (via)

"One cold morning many years ago, a grouchy old New Yorker cranked out a letter to the editor of the..."

seoulbrother — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 13:06:00 -0700

“One cold morning many years ago, a grouchy old New Yorker cranked out a letter to the editor of the Times. Happens every day, I know, but listen: This was New Year’s Day in 1936, and this old timer—that’s how he signed the letter, “Old Timer”—unraveled a righteous jeremiad about the improper mixing of drinks. Writing three years after Repeal—and presumably typing through a hangover, with the hammers of an Underwood clacking at his temples—he surveyed the violence Prohibition had done to the martini, the Manhattan, and, foremost, the old-fashioned whiskey cocktail:”

- So begins the Slate’s Troy Patterson’s article on everything you wanted to know about everything you wanted to know about the Old-Fashioned. The good, the bad and the foolish.

The old-fashioned: a complete history and guide to this classic cocktail. - Slate Magazine

Perfect for your Instapaper or whatever.

Plenty of you already know the ins and outs of making an Old...

seoulbrother — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 11:48:17 -0700

Plenty of you already know the ins and outs of making an Old Fashioned, but let’s start the week out with a baseline.

Who better to set this standard than Chris McMillian. McMillian is something of a legend. He’s a fourth-generation bartender who’s been making classic cocktails long before they were popular (again.) This video was shot at the Library Lounge in New Orleans but you’ll find him at at Bar Uncommon these days.

New Olreans Best Cocktails: The Old Fashioned (by keithmarszalek)

You might want to click through to see the rest of his videos.

Happy Old Fashioned Week! Since there’s an extra hour to...

seoulbrother — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 11:42:00 -0700

Happy Old Fashioned Week!

Since there’s an extra hour to either stay out or sleep ~~it off~~ in, the week after Daylight Savings Time is perfect for Old Fashioned Week.

Last year’s stories: Old Fashioned Week 2010

Everyday Carry

New York has a problem

phyllis-stein — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 10:00:00 -0600

Save to Instapaper

California has wine. New Orleans has bourbon. The South has the mint julep. New York—New York, I submit, has a problem.

Its problem sauntered into a trendy downtown bar in highlighted curls and lowlighted roots and an inexplicable pink tutu in 1998 and didn’t leave until 2004 and spent all six goddamn years ordering cosmopolitans.

Because before Sex and the City made it humiliating beyond the pale to be a New Yorker who likes men and order a cosmo—Sex and the City very nearly made it humiliating to be a New Yorker who likes men period—the drink enjoyed enough popularity to stick to the city like it’d been spilled there. Carrie Bradshaw and the cosmopolitan will always be a part of New York.

Then again, so will the hot garbage smell.

The basic Sex and the City “thing”—viz., a group of Strong Women talking frankly about sex—had been done before and often better. As far back as 1939, George Cuckor had the all-female cast of The Women (tagline: “It’s all about the men!”) scheming and expertly backbiting over husband-theft and -recovery. From 1985 onward, Blanche Devereaux was the sexin’-est thing this side of an AARP discount. The girls in Steel Magnolias (1989), meanwhile, “went skinny dipping and… did things that scared the fish.” Sex and the City was just another way of satisfying the scopophilia that accretes around any semi-secret ritual like girltalk, and on that level, it was sort of unremarkable: anywhere between ten and sixty years late, a bit grating with the characters, generally slow on the uptake, etc. ad naus.

But there was one innovation. It was four parts vodka, 1½ parts orange liqueur, 1½ parts lime juice, and three parts cranberry juice. In the glass it was a bright, cotton-candy pink; on the tongue it was as if the sweet, very sweet cranberry juice and the tarter lime were bickering over top billing; in the stomach it just burned and had a tendency to repeat unpleasantly; in a Sex and the City character’s hand it was magic.

It summoned the show’s first and most devoted fan base. The Oxford English Dictionary first finds the cosmopolitan in print in the 23 October 1987 San Francisco Chronicle: “Au courant bon vivants sipped concoctions like Julie’s Cosmopolitan.” And after the girls appropriated their cocktail, the kind of pink-drink-wielding men described as “au courant bon vivants” in San Francisco in the ’80s stuck with Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha in New York all through the late nineties and early naughties.

The cosmo also did one thing it’s well-known that alcohol does: it spiced things up a little. Being less a cocktail than a saccharine-subtle vodka delivery system, the cosmo gave us some of our raunchiest moments with our raunchiest characters. Ladytalk would have been one thing. Ladytalk with cosmos was a different—pinker—animal.

And introducing the cosmo introduced bars introduced restaurants introduced galleries &c., and so booze made it possible for Sex and the City to be as much about New York as it was about Carrie’s sex life. When the characters got dull—and the characters got dull—there was always the center of the Universe, the most interesting city in the world, to make them, cocktails in hand, seem engaging again. Rather than cheesecake in the kitchen when things looked bleak, there were cosmopolitans in SoHo. The drink invited the city into the frame.

So when the series premiered, is it any wonder that the cosmo was seized on as one of its hallmarks? Every film and T.V. show like it before had been stone-cold sober. I want to suggest that the cosmopolitan did a lot more in its capacity as drink of choice than we naturally pay attention to. Writing it off as just another semi-gross drink on just another semi-gross show, we ignore that it performed a great deal of symbolic work, was a complexly overdetermined dream-element that contained all of what held the show together, initially, and came to contain much more: a whole generation’s aspirational fantasies about New York.

The cosmopolitan is now dead, passé, even tourists are starting to figure out that its cool factor is finally nil. But the city is still here. Sex is still here—girltalk in SoHo hasn’t gone anywhere. And cocktails are still excellent signifiers, especially of sophistication and refinement. The question now is: in the absence of the cosmopolitan, which cocktail is to be the hallmark of NYC cool, which is the perfect accompaniment to the discussion of adult mysteries like sex and real estate, which is going to enclose, if not the real New York, then the dream-city that’s summoned sophisticates to itself since time immemorial? It seems that an NYC drunk’s most important job now is finding out.

I ask Erin what she thinks of people who order cosmos. She squints one eye piratically, thinking, and says, “Sometimes, people just haven’t had the right drink.” Diplomacy being apparently part of a bartender’s stock in trade, a tool right up there with the strainer and muddler. “You don’t mean to, but you always judge.”

Erin Barbour is bar manager at NYC’s Public. By merit of being an amalgamation of commoner ones, the NoLita hotspot is one of those rare miracles: a great, Michelin-starred restaurant, with a better bar, that manages to be both chic and approachable. In a neighborhood that can skew towards the fratty, Public caters to more adult tastes: grilled kangaroo, beet gnudi, snail and oxtail ravioli; a watermelon and tarragon gimlet, the Public 75; an endless and gorgeous wine list—served under low-hanging tubular bulbs rheostated down to “Pretty.”

Erin’s also, it’s pretty obvious, a total nerd, in all the word’s most flattering shades of meaning. Which is to say that Erin is unreservèdly passionate about her work. This is always a lot of fun to watch, someone who cares. She guides and recommends with a classically infectious-type enthusiasm that turns out to be pretty much the opposite of condescension, I think: it strikes me, watching her work with her charges, that part of really loving something must be wanting to give it away.

And she’s personally responsible for three totally unique items on the cocktail menu, way in the back, after the mixed drinks and beers and wines and whiskeys and rums: the cellos.

They’re three remarkable house-made riffs on the Italian digestif limoncello, an infusion of lemon rind and simple syrup in a high-proof neutral spirit. Limoncello’s popularity is a fairly recent development in the U.S.: the OED first picks it up in the engrossing-sounding 1993 book Lemons, which notes that it was mixed with barley water in nineteenth-century Italy and used to treat invalids. (Better days.) The “Mellow Cello” is an infusion of lemon rind and vanilla, the “Pompelmocello” of grapefruit rind and rosemary, and the “Bananas Foster Cello” of banana, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg—all three distinguished from more straightforward vodka infusions by their sugar content. “It’s not really a genre of dessert drink,” Erin says of her cellos, “but I’m making it one.”

I wouldn’t say that the Mellow Cello is a “variation on” the classic—it’s more properly an elaboration of limoncello’s familiar flavors. It doesn’t alter the taste of the Italian liqueur; rather, it completes it. It’s very much in the spirit of the spirit. The lemon and the vanilla interact complexly on the nose: the scent is somehow smooth–sharp, like a whetted blade. Both have an intensity to them. But the cello tastes mostly of lemon, with a sort of gentle and soothing undertaste that must be the vanilla. It tastes full: complete: what lingers in the mouth after each sip is like a fruit entire. I keep trying to chew the aftertaste, which pretty obviously doesn’t work.

Erin reports that grapefruit and rosemary is “a classic flavor combination,” which is news on this front. “Sometimes,” she adds, “an old classic really is good—for a reason,” an opinion which the chronicler and editors endorse. The Pompelmocello smells just like rosemary: it’s crisp, and clean, and generally very wholesome-seeming for something with a proof. Indeed—is this sort of embarrassing to admit?—the first thing I associated to, tasting it, was a pediatrician’s lollipop, which jives nicely with limoncello’s historical use as a restorative. The natural-tasting sourness of the grapefruit cuts the cello’s sugary sweetness, and the burn of the spirit keeps the flavors from being cloying. It doesn’t linger in the mouth in the same way that the Mellow Cello does, but that’s an effective invitation to drink more.

And then there’s the Bananas Foster Cello. In case I haven’t been totally clear: all three of these are divine. But the Bananas Foster Cello is my favorite—and, I think, the most interesting. Erin came up with it as the result of an—abortive, I assumed but felt it was impolite to journalistically confirm—attempt at a raw diet that had her dehydrating bananas. After letting the fruit sit in the dehydrator for about fourteen hours, she tried the result and immediately had two thoughts: “This is so fuckin’ delicious—I gotta put this in vodka.” (This is another line of thinking that the chronicler and editors heartily endorse.) Because the cellos are house- (i.e., Erin-) made, the flavors all vary from tasting to tasting—Erin reports that the Pompelmocello has indeed an observable life-cycle to it, in which the tastes of the rosemary and grapefruit wax and wane and wane and wax, respectively—which becomes an especially complex problem when there are so many flavors in play: banana, clove, cinnamon, and nutmeg. The banana is a consistent background note that’s more or less easy to identify depending on the other ingredients—it lends the cello a smooth, fruity flavor, but mostly acts as the space in which the other ingredients interact. The strongest taste is of either cinnamon or cloves, depending, and a sharper palate than mine was able to pick up the hint of nutmeg after a few sips. And it’s delicious: slightly thick, rich enough to be satisfying as a complete dessert but light enough to work into a cocktail, a flawless reproduction of the dish that inspired it, with the alcohol supplying the fruit and the fire at the same time.

And this, I submit, is what makes the Bananas Foster Cello the most remarkable: it’s a whole recipe deconstructed and reconstituted, distilled, as it were, a transmogrification of structure and form that leaves content surprisingly intact. If the essential magic of the cocktail is the magic of transformation, transubstantiation, whole-greater-than-parts reconstruction—if the essential magic of the cocktail is sublimation, then the Bananas Foster Cello is notable for performing that magic on an even more fundamental level than is usual.

Which is perhaps all a little highfalutin. Here, here’s another way to think about it: Why is the sandwich not a cocktail? There’s a fair number of structural similarities. They’re both admixtures, of elements that can be discretely disgusting (imagine a spoonful of mayonnaise), ontologically different when assembled than when disassembled—the sandwich seems to have all the makings of a good cocktail. So where’s the magic? Why do I think of Erin as more an artist than an anything-, let alone simple one-plus-one-is-two mix-, ologist, but “sandwich artist” is the kind of joke that only a multinational corporation could conceive of straight-facedly? Why do we pay attention to historical artists’ favorite liquors but not their favorite deli meats? Why, in short, is the cocktail so intoxicating?

Well there’s the obvious answer: alcohol. Sandwiches do not get you drunk. Whereas alcohol is one of the very few more or less legal U.S. intoxicants. This seems to me not wholly satisfying, this answer. It wouldn’t be hard to find, in the darkly glittering panoply of street drugs extant, a more fun high—indeed, if instant gratification is where the magic comes from, then by all accounts it should be crack cocaine with the complex artistry and rich history. And there are even alcoholic drinks that will do the job but are decidedly unmagical. Beer comes to mind.

Could it be how the cocktail is represented—that its magic comes from its portrayal as magical? This seems to be Erin’s intuition. She avers that the liquor industry “is like a machine”: “If someone wants to promote something, it’s amazing what they’ll do. If you could get a couple of football players drinking something, or get it placed in a TV show….” Which makes sense, of course, that the industry responsible for selling something would also take a great interest in managing our perceptions of that thing. It also seems true that more and more, liquor companies are promoting their products by inviting bartenders to submit recipes using them: this is especially true of newly-available liquors, like absinthe.

But there’s always a “but,” and a few problems with this thesis occur to me. First off, it would seem that a liquor company’s true objective is to get the consumer to want to consume only that liquor, in which case promoting a cocktail, which to a greater or lesser extent masks the flavor of the liquor and makes the particular brand used less important, would be counterintuitive. There’s no difference between a cosmopolitan made with well vodka and one made with Stoli, and anyone who claims otherwise is lying to you. And, too: it strikes me that the trick to good marketing lies not in inventing a new perception, which is more difficult and costly and more likely to fail, but in latching on to an old perception. Not in making the cocktail magical, in other words, but in exploiting the magic that was already there. Plus there’s the fact that the perception of the cocktail as magical benefits all liquor companies, so it’s in no one company’s interests to spend the time and money required to reinforce that perception. Finally, if representing something as containing magic were enough to create that magic, then how come nobody remembers Marcel’s tea? Everyone knows that Proust wrote about Marcel’s madeline, but who remembers that the magical madeline wasn’t enough—he had to crumble it into the equally magical tea? Proust could surely summon fascination with a thing better than any advertiser, and even he couldn’t imbue tea with the cocktail’s divinity.

Maybe the difficulty here is that “magical” is a slightly messy word. Because I certainly don’t mean to refer to the practice of shouting “Abracadabra” and yanking rabbits out of tophats. More accurate might be the word “mystical,” which refers to what is enigmatic but also to what is interpreted. Which word, interpretation, will always summon Freud—and appropriately enough. For the cocktail is constructed in the same way as the dream.

The dream is the fulfillment of a wish. This is one—in many ways the—distinctive truth of psychoanalysis. The dream is the fulfillment of a wish. It is what it enacts and it enacts what it is. It is all at once desire and its object and their resolution.

So too with the cocktail, “that once mystifying set of names which [the drinker] can never now pronounce without taking secret pride in the worldly initiation that has entailed their correct usage, or—what is the same thing—without feeling deep relief, whenever he orders a ‘screwdriver,’ a ‘grasshopper,’ a ‘greyhound,’ a ‘Manhattan,’ that the bartender does not scowl, smirk, or give any other sign of being asked to bring forth from his shaker a tool, an insect, an animal, the whole metropolis.”1 Like the abracadabra, the cocktail invokes; but as in the dream, it is at once the resolution of its own invocation—it will, for example, “bear the supplementary mark of sophistication”2 as it itself produces the same mark, wishing and fulfilling in one fell swoop.

The cocktail is a fulfillment. Hold it in your hand and be older, smoother, more sophisticated. But the fulfillment only makes sense in relation to its own wishes: to grow, to seduce, to learn. Hence the pathos of the cocktail and the dream, which both reach at once deep down into and far beyond themselves—and are truest in the grasping, not in the holding.

Hence also the absolute perfection of the Bananas Foster Cello, which literally distills each of its singular ingredients to its purest essence while striving for the completeness of a dish. It goes deep into itself, allowing the subtlest flavors from its ingredients to imbue the vodka, but also far beyond itself, becoming in its fullness an objet d’art, a fulfillment of its own promise.

The dreamlike quality of hanging out in a bar has a lot to do with the basic, formal features of most bars—they’re closed off, classically low-lit, in perpetual late twilight (the dream state par excellence), immune to the passage of outside time—but really unfolds from the cocktail itself. Imagine a city flowing, melting into a martini glass from the cocktail shaker. Or a screwdriver. Or a Mr. Collins. All emerging smooth and entire, albeit Dalí-style, from the bartender’s most famous tool. Surely only in a dream could a plate of flaming bananas be frozen at the moment of their conflagration, as in crystal, to be poured later into cut glass.

In a dream, or in an NYC bar.

In which vein, I present with great vicarious pride to any and all bartending comers:

The Basic Recipe for a Cello

Acquire a fifth some good vodka and whatever you’ll be infusing it with. For basic limoncello, this means peeling off the rind of a lemon but not the pith, which is the white, bitter part of the peel. Erin notes that an orange cello infusion that included the pith might be an interesting combination, however—experiment.
Drink a little bit of the vodka. (N.b.: Not strictly necessary, but it makes the next step—along with most everything else—a little easier.)
Cram your ingredients on into the bottle.
Seal the bottle tight and store it in a cool, dark place for ten days.
On the ninth day, acquire a handle of something. Drink it all, then wash out the handle. (N.b.: This is the chronicler’s suggestion. There are surely other solutions to the obvious problems of volume presented by #6 sub. They are all surely less fun.)
On the tenth day, pour your infusion into the empty handle, and fill the remaining half with simple syrup.
Place your handle in the cool, dark place you found for #4. Wait another ten days.
Open up and enjoy immoderately.

D. A. Miller, Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 29–30. ↩
Ibid., 29. ↩
Picture by Kim Lisagor ↩

Drinking Games

seoulbrother — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 13:41:56 -0600

Drinking Games by Malcolm Gladwell

“So we go in,” Dwight went on, “and there was a couple of little white-haired guys there. And they said, ‘You’re tanned. Where have you been?’ And I said Bolivia. And one of them said, ‘Well, can you tell me how they drink?’ ” The building was Yale’s Center of Alcohol Studies. One of the white-haired men was E. M. Jellinek, perhaps the world’s leading expert on alcoholism at the time; the other was Mark Keller, the editor of the well-regarded Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol. Keller stood up and grabbed Heath by the lapels: “I don’t know anyone who has ever been to Bolivia. Tell me about it!” He invited Heath to write up his alcohol-related observations for his journal.

After the Heaths went home that day, Anna said to Dwight, “Do you realize that every weekend we were in Bolivia we went out drinking?”

Malcolm Gladwell may not apply the same academic rigor as an actual scientist. Some would say that many of his theories have all the tenacity of a bar-fact or just plain obvious. One thing he does well, though, is write the story of how an idea came to be. In Drinking Games he tells the story of Dwight Heath, a graduate student in anthropology who accidentally wrote a groundbreaking paper that showed that the abuse of alcohol is as tightly coupled to culture as it is biology—an idea that wasn’t always so obvious.

Back to School Special

irreverend — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 11:24:46 -0600

At the end of a busy school day, kids need some love from a relaxed, supportive parent. At the end of a busy work day, some of us need a little help to become that parent. Here’s what to do when the closest mixer is a juice box.

Playground Vacation

1 box tropical fruit juice
2 oz. rum
squeeze of lime

Pour ingredients into a sports water bottle packed with ice. Shove bottle in diaper bag; will self-shake en route to playdate.

Mommy Needs a Minute¹

1 box apple juice
2 oz. bourbon
dash Angosturra bitters

Build over ice. Stir gently with a pen, crayon, finger or any other stick-shaped object. Garnish with tears.

Sippy’s Surprise

half-full sippy cup (contents unimportant)
2 oz. liquor (type unimportant)

Take whatever liquid your kid refused to drink. Add booze and ice. Replace lid. Keep out of reach of children.

Emergency Mimosa

Citrus flavored drink mix
Vodka
Any carbonated beverage

Recommended only under the most serious circumstances. This is a terrible drink.

Goldfish Corpse Reviver

1 oz. gin
1/2 oz. Lillet Blanc
1/2 oz. Cointreau
1/2 oz. lemon juice
splash of absinthe
small bowl of fish-shaped crackers

Scoop your child’s dead goldfish out of fishbowl and flush discreetly. Shake gin, Lillet, Cointreau, lemon juice and absinthe with ice and strain into a chilled martini glass. Give cracker bowl to child while explaining, “While you were at school, Goldie turned into a delicious snack for us to enjoy!” Drink cocktail.

Pee-Wee’s Playhouse

1 box pink lemonade
2 oz. tequila
1/2 oz. grenadine
squeeze of lime

Fill highball glass with ice. Add lemonade, tequila, grenadine, lime to taste. Stir with crazy straw.

h/t to our friends at You Look Nice Today ↩

kellydeal: St. Paul’s finest.

seoulbrother — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 17:22:33 -0600

kellydeal:

St. Paul’s finest.

It’s National Vodka Day, apparently. If there’s...

irreverend — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 14:55:10 -0600

It’s National Vodka Day, apparently. If there’s anything to celebrate about a spirit that aspires to have no taste, it’s its willingness to soak up the flavors of whatever you toss into the bottle.

My favorite way to enjoy a bottle of vodka: Turn it into gin.

I call this “cheater gin” out of respect for the craft distillers who start with some produce and a still. Legally, however, gin can be made “by mixing neutral spirits, with or over juniper berries and other aromatics.” So call it whatever you like.

You can buy your juniper berries online or pick some ripe ones from a shrub (look for blue-black berries with no bug holes; the green ones taste like paint thinner). Add herbs, spices, citrus peels, cucumbers, flower petals or whatever else you’re into, and let the vodka do its work.

Ian Knauer’s Kitchen Gin is a solid starter recipe, but the juniper tends to hide behind the other botanicals. If you like a stronger gin flavor, add the spices first, strain them out, and let the juniper enjoy a long, solo soak. Taste it every day because that’s the sort of sacrifice you’re willing to make for your art. Two to ten days later, it will be cocktail ready.

“My machine converts words into cocktails. And, yes, it...

irreverend — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 14:01:20 -0600

“My machine converts words into cocktails. And, yes, it does work. Now I can literally taste the flavor of my words.” - morskoiboy.com, inventor of the best useless contraption in the history of D(rambuie) + R(ye) + I(solabella) + N(ewcastle) + K(ool-Aid)

Free the hooch!

irreverend — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 14:44:22 -0600

Imagine if America’s bars had nothing but Bud on tap, and restaurants only poured Gallo. Or if you had to ignore your hankering for carne asada and onions on a fresh tortilla because the only taco allowed this side of the border was Taco Bell.

Scary and un-American, right? But that’s pretty much been this country’s liquor situation for decades.

The U.S. booze industry is dominated almost entirely by corporate behemoths—Diageo, Brown-Forman and a handful of others account for 99% of domestic liquor sales. When the American Distilling Institute started counting craft distilleries in 2003, there were only 65 in the entire nation.

Why so few? For starters, budding booze makers can’t practice their craft at home. Unless you live in a few enlightened states, it’s illegal to make even small amounts of moonshine in the comfort of your own kitchen.¹

Also, most states don’t allow direct sales of craft liquor to the public², and they require outrageously expensive bonds to operate a commercial still.

For all of those reasons, it warmed my cockles to see this Made By Hand documentary about Breuckelen Distilling Company³, Brooklyn’s first gin distiller since Prohibition.

“Now is the easiest time since Prohibition, basically, to start a small distillery,” Breuckelen owner Brad Eastabrooke says in the film. He opened the gin distillery in July after a year and a half of planning, building and convincing people to take him seriously.

That Breuckelen exists is a sign of progress for craft distillers. New York recently introduced small distiller licenses that cost just a few hundred dollars a year (standard licenses cost more than $20K). Other states have also lowered their fees in recent years, and the federal government has reduced paperwork to speed up permit processing times.

In its latest count, the American Distilling Institute logged 340 craft distilleries, with 3 or 4 more opening each month.⁴

ADI’s Bill Owens, who teaches whiskey distilling workshops in Petaluma, Calif., says the recent boom is an offshoot of the agritourism movement. “We’re just part of that renaissance that’s happening. There’s a growing awareness that you can have a viable business on a farm using value-added products like cherries, wheat and rye.”⁵

Breweries and wineries are also getting into the game, distilling their fermented grains and grapes to make whiskeys and brandies.

Predictably, plenty of impostors have entered the marketplace as well, bottling and relabeling someone else’s cheap, commercial booze and selling it at a markup. But the phonies are easy to spot, says Owens: “Go to their website and if you don’t see a still immediately, don’t buy their product.”

If you’re thinking of giving distilling a try, don’t be discouraged by the legal hurdles. ADI is one of many groups that now offer courses for beginners (Google “distilling workshops”). Also, the rumors about danger are overblown. Spend a few minutes on the Safety page at homedistiller.org to learn how to keep your eyesight and your eyebrows intact.

I am living proof that any idiot can distill with some success. This past year, I spent 7 months in New Zealand, one of the few places in the world where it’s legal to home distill. I bought a tiny still made a few batches of “cheater gin” (more on that later). It tasted great, and it blinded no one.

If you’d rather leave the distilling to the pros but you’d like to buy and drink more boutique booze, now is a good time to get political. ADI and the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States would love to tell you how.

That said, you don’t hear much about hooch busts these days. Law enforcement shifted its priorities to drugs a few decades ago—cops are looking for meth labs, not pot stills. ↩
Massachusetts, Missouri, Virginia are the exceptions. If SB 1068 passes in California, one more will join the list. ↩
You can buy the gin and other handmade goods at http://thisismadebyhand.com/shoppe/ ↩
For comparison: the Brewers Association says there are 1,753 U.S. craft breweries, 603 of which opened in 2010. ↩
Much of this is still under the radar, so if you see something that looks like a still at your local apple farm, it can’t hurt to ask. ↩