Wow, July came early this year. One day I’m moseying through my day, putting the kids on the school bus in the morning and sitting down at my desk to wrangle with whatever mess of projects I was working on at the time, and then all of a sudden HOLY SHIT! It’s July, and we’re less than a week away from Tales of the Cocktail.

In case you’re coming to New Orleans this year — and even if you’re not, but are bored and just want to poke around on the Internet right now — here’s where you can find me:

• On Thursday, July 9, from 10:30am - noon, I’ll be joining Haus Alpenz founder and all-around esoteric-booze madman Eric Seed and Nopa bar manager (and no-less an esoteric-booze madman) Neyah White for a wide-ranging, bare-knuckle debate about Vermouth & Aperitif Wine. Okay, it’ll actually be pretty mellow in all likelihood, and it’s a presentation rather than a debate, but how many times do you get the chance to put “bare-knuckle” and “vermouth” in the same sentence? Join us, and you’ll find out–
• Thursday afternoon, from 4:30 (VIP arrival) to 7:30, I’ll be shaking up a mess of Dunniettes during the Cocktail Hour, which appears to be SOLD OUT. Get ‘em while they last–
• Friday afternoon, from 12:30pm - 2pm, I’m moderating another SOLD OUT event, “Using Blogs and Online Tools to Promote Your Bar, Brand or Career“. I’ll likely prattle about my fellow bloggers o’ the booze for a bit, as well as share some insights both from my role as a blogger and as a journalist who relies on blogs and tools like Facebook and Twitter to see what’s going on out there, but the real fun starts when the panelists step in: Robert Heugel, who blogs at Drink Dogma and recently opened Anvil Bar & Refuge in Houston, one of the most ambitious new craft-cocktail bars in the country; and Steve Raye, who heads Brand Action Team and is a marketing consultant to the drinks industry. Robert will talk about the world of blogging bartenders and how his blog became an effective tool in building and launching Anvil (among other things); and Steve, who actually studies this stuff for a living, will unleash a mighty flood of information about the marketing side of things that should help better explain the blog world for brand managers and other industry types looking to utilize this young resource. But before I move on, I thought maybe I’d utilize this online tool to ask: Are you coming to this session (or would you, if you were at Tales)? And if so, what kinds of topics would you like to see addressed by the panel? I’ll try to address a few of the suggestions during our Q&A. Drop a note in the comments or shoot me an e-mail at paul{at}cocktailchronicles{dot}com. And in case you saw earlier coverage of this event, yes, Jeff Morgenthaler was originally on the panel, but he had to drop off when he realized it conflicted with his back-waxing appointment, or his audition as a Xante spokesmodel, or something like that — I’m hazy on the details.
• Immediately after that panel, until about 2:30, I’ll be in the Monteleone lobby, signing newly released reprints of Cocktails: How to Mix Them, by Robert Vermiere, published by Mud Puddle Books and including an introduction by … well, me, of course — why the hell else would I be standing there in the lobby?
• Friday evening, I’ll have my ass handed to me several times over by some of the top bartenders in the field as I participate in the On the Fly Competition. Why Morgenthaler, who’s emceeing the event, invited me to compete is a mystery to me, unless he anticipated my back-waxing and pull-my-finger comments and wanted to get back at me somehow. Regardless, I’ll be up against powerhouse bartenders including Neyah White, Eric Alperin, Misty Kalkofen, Todd Thrasher, Michael Glassberg and Giuseppe Gonzalez, plus David Wondrich just so I can’t take the “but I’m a writer, I don’t know what I’m doing” path. For extra humiliation, I’ll not only prepare my drink against these bartenders in public, but serve it to a team of judges that includes Dale DeGroff, Tony Abou-Ganim, Francesco Lafranconi, Bridget Albert, Xavier Herit and Antoine Gervais. I’d invite you to come watch me be shamed in public, but alas this event also appears to be SOLD OUT. That’s just great.

In between times, I’ll be downing Sazeracs and Pimms Cups, along with a muffaletta or two and a couple of more ambitious meals around town. Be sure to keep track of the whole boozy bliggety-blog gang over at Tales Blog while Tales is underway, and if you’re in New Orleans next week, I’ll see you soon.

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Before I commence with my full-on, panicked rush toward Tales of the Cocktail, I wanted to drop a few quick notes out there–

• First, the first piece I’ve written for Wine & Spirits magazine is now on the newsstand, in the August issue. Titled, appropriately, Tequila Cocktails, the story briefly touches on the work of bartenders such as Phil Ward at Mayahuel in New York, Julian Cox at Rivera in LA, and Casey Robison at Barrio in Seattle, who are helping to pioneer the relatively unexplored terrain of tequila mixology.
• Second, in Wednesday’s Washington Post, Jason Wilson extensively riffs on the Negroni, at one point mentioning Bastian Heuser’s sublime Agavoni and my recent blog post about it over at Serious Eats.
• And while I’m clearing out stuff I was too busy or lazy to post earlier, here are the two latest pieces I’ve written for the San Francisco Chronicle: an article on the growing trend of trans-city bartender exchanges, from May 24; and a more recent piece on specialized and high-quality bar tools, from June 14.

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No, it’s not the Dark & Stormy.

Though you could be forgiven for thinking that, based on the headline and on that notation on the calendar that today is Mixology Monday, which happens to be hosted this month by RumDood, who has chosen Ginger for this month’s theme. So, ginger plus rum (minus the dood), plus some boilerplate meteorological bally-hoo in the introduction? Surely I’m leading up to Gosling’s & Barritt’s, right? The classic Dark & Stormy? Or some close approximation, correct?

Eh….maybe. I came across this drink a little over a year ago, while working on the cover feature for the July/August 2008 issue of Imbibe, about liqueurs. One of the products I was covering was the relatively new (or newly reformulated, depending on how you look at it) Domain de Canton ginger liqueur. Desperate for a new and, above all, tasty use of the liqueur, I sent a feeler e-mail out to my good friend Jim Meehan at PDT in New York. Jim pointed me to a colleague of his, Tona Palomino, who was managing the bar at WD-50, and Tona unleashed this drink on me.

Noting that the Stormy Weather is a spin-off of the classic Dark & Stormy, Palomino told me how he swapped Domain de Canton for the ginger beer in that drink, matching it against a good, rich, vanilla-heavy rum like Angostura 1919. For complexity and a peculiar alchemical property, he added a hearty dose of Carpano Antica vermouth, which contributes a firm foundation of flavor but also interacts with the ginger notes in the liqueur. With a touch of effervescence from a splash of soda water, the Stormy Weather is somewhat like a mature version of the Dark & Stormy, though as I’ve continued to enjoy these over the past year I’ve come to view the Stormy Weather as something like a worldly Cuba Libre, due to that interaction of ingredients that produces a flavor I can only describe as cola-like.

Here’s Palomino’s recipe, which I included in my Imbibe piece last summer. One note: as listed, this makes a fairly large drink. You can easily scale it back by nudging the rum back to 1 1/2 ounces and the vermouth and liqueur to 3/4 ounce; scale back the bubble water accordingly, but don’t skip the lime twist — those bitter oils provide another layer of complexity to an already blammo drink.

Stormy Weather

• 2 ounces amber rum (Palomino recommends Angostura 1919; I typically use Bacardi 8 to good effect)
• 1 ounce Carpano Antica vermouth
• 1 ounce Domain de Canton ginger liqueur
• 1/2 ounce soda water

Combine first three ingredients in a mixing glass and stir well with ice. Strain into a double old-fashioned glass filled with fresh ice. Cut a thin piece of lime peel and twist over the drink; discard. Add club soda and lightly stir.

I keep coming back to this one, especially during the warm months. To see what other kinds of ginger goodness folks are mixing up this Mixology Monday, head over to RumDood’s place for his roundup post.

Tags: Drinks, Mixology Monday, Rum, Vermouth // 2 Comments »

Almost a year and a half ago, after straying across a mention of a prototype spicy chocolate bitters at Cocktail Virgin Slut, I dropped a message to the bitters’ creators to see if somehow, some way, I could take a sample through its paces. Four sample bottles and a couple of explosively good cocktails later, I found myself a Bittermens evangelist, telling every cocktail geek I came across about the durable and versatile flavor of the Xocolatl Mole bitters — I mean Jesus, this stuff was MADE for tequila and rum — and about how the hops in the grapefruit bitters gave the flavor an amazing hang time in a cocktail. (And it wasn’t just me going on about the bitters — the San Francisco Chronicle picked up the story at about the same time.)

The one thing I couldn’t pass along, however, was instructions on how people could try these bitters — Avery Glasser, the creator of Bittermens, was working through the regulatory process, and as the months passed it seemed that Bittermens might never make it to market.

Well, guess what? Here they are. Working in partnership with Stephan Berg and Alexander Hauck at The Bitter Truth — whose bitters I’ve also gushed about before, and who cap the package by being really great guys as well — Bittermens is putting their Xocolatl Mole and Grapefruit bitters into commercial production; the official release is in July, but you can place pre-orders now through The Bitter Truth’s online store. Soon, hopefully, you’ll soon be able to pick up a bottle at a store near you — TBT has been expanding their distribution most impressively — but for now, grab a bottle online so you can try out a Camerone or a Theobroma for yourself — or, maybe, a Bittermens drink created by an actual, y’know, bartender.

It’s about time for these bitters to hit the market — I’m down to my last quarter-ounce of the Xocolatl, and was really getting worried about what I’d do once they ran out.

Wait — you’re still reading? Go on, ORDER ‘EM–

UPDATE: U.S. customers wishing to purchase only a few bottles can avoid paying overseas shipping charges by purchasing from The Boston Shaker (I believe wholesale orders must still go through Germany).

Tags: General // 7 Comments »

I’ll avoid all the obvious XL jokes in this post, because we’re one scant week away from June’s Mixology Monday, which — in case you couldn’t figure it out from the headline — takes place on Monday, June 15.

Hosting this round of MxMo is RumDood over at, yep, RumDood.com. And as you might expect from the blog’s name, for this round’s theme the Dood has chosen … okay, it’s not rum — we’ve already had one of those. So, instead he’s going with the next-best theme: Ginger.

Here’s how to play:

• Find or concoct a cocktail recipe that uses ginger in one of its many forms as an ingredient.  This can be muddled ginger, sliced ginger, ginger syrup, ginger beer (commercial or homemade), ginger liqueur, ginger candy, or pieces of a shredded photo of Ginger from Gilligan’s Island.
• Make this recipe, take a picture of it, and then post the recipe, your thoughts about the recipe, and your photo on your blog or at the eGullet Spirits and Cocktails forum.
• Post a link to your submission in the comments here, or send an email using the “Contact” form.

And that pretty much says it all. So, Monday, June 15, be here in Internet-land with some kind of gingery drink, and inform the host so he’ll know what you’ve been up to. See you then–

Tags: Mixology Monday // Add Comment »