Except for occasional forays into the rumtacular world of tiki drinks, I’m ordinarily pretty skeptical about cocktails that have more than three or four ingredients. This is for a couple of reasons: As ingredients are added, there’s typically a point of diminishing returns, where the delicately flavored components are completely lost in the mix, and the more vibrant flavors start to clash or become muddied. Also — and this may just be a result of my diminishing brainpower as I creak my way into middle age — but if there are more than a few ingredients, I start to forget things while assembling the drink.

There are, however, exceptions to this rule, and here’s one I’m becoming quite fond of. Posted over at eGullet a couple of weeks ago, this drink was assembled by Phil Ward at Death & Co in response to a drink request from Avery Glasser, the mastermind behind Bittermens Bitters. Recognizing the horrific resemblance of this long list of complex-flavored ingredients to the gruesome spectacle of a car wreck, Phil dubbed this drink the Airbag.

What makes the Airbag so intriguing is its use of Batavia arrack as a featured ingredient. Arrack has a singular aroma and flavor that is at once ghostly and caustic, entrancing and offensive — there’s an alluring smokiness that encourages you to take a sip, and a sharp, serrated edge to the flavor that makes you feel like you just swallowed a knife fight.

But remembering that old Untouchables lesson — if they bring a knife, we bring a gun — Phil matches the arrack’s fire, throwing equally alpha-dog ingredients such as mezcal, Benedictine and allspice dram into the glass, creating a mix that — mediated by tequila and Carpano Antica formula vermouth (as if THOSE are restrained ingredients) — all balances out into a deep, smoky cocktail with layers of rich flavor that somehow, unpredictably, all work together. I don’t know if it’s because these ingredients complement each other in some bizarre alchemical way or if it’s because they’re locked in an eternal deathgrip like pitbulls clenched onto each others throats, but in this drink, the stalemate works.

Airbag, created by Phil Ward, Death & Co. and snagged from eGullet

• 1 ounce El Tosoro Reposado tequila (note: I used Don Julio, as it’s what I had lying around)
• 1/2 ounce Batavia Arrack (van Oosten — as if there are other brands on the market to choose from)
• 1/2 ounce Los Amantes Joven Mezcal (note: I used Los Danzantes — once more with the lying around thing)
• 3/4 ounce Carpano Antica sweet vermouth
• 1/4 ounce St. Elizabeth Allspice Dram (if you’ve got homemade pimento dram, go for it)
• 1/4 ounce Benedictine
• 1-2 dashes Bittermens Xocolatl Mole bitters*

Stir well with cracked ice and strain into chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a lit cherry bomb.

* Don’t have the Bittermens? In the short term, I’d suggest an aromatic bitters, but considering that Avery recently received TTB approval to produce the mole bitters, I’d suggest subscribing to Bittermens RSS feed and keeping your credit card ready for when they become available.

Lordy, that’s tasty. Scary as hell to contemplate while you’re pulling bottles out of the liquor cabinet, but very much worth the effort. If you give this a shot, chime in below and let us know what you think.

Tags: General by Paul
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Smirk all you like, ye denizens of New York, San Francisco, London, and all the other cities rich with bars serving nothing but well-crafted cocktails — but how often do you wind up with a bartender on the front page of one of your city’s daily newspapers?

Seattle can be a sleepy place at times, but at least our papers have their priorities straight. Above news about trivial stuff such as the upcoming election, climate change and the ongoing financial meltdown, the editors at the Seattle Times posted a photo of one of our fair city’s finer bartenders, Jamie Boudreau (bearing his self-designated title of “cocktail whisperer”) — a teaser for a story that appears in the Living section, titled “At Tini Bigs, a tale of transforming cocktails.”

The reason Jamie’s in the paper? Let me explain something for you non-Seattleites. For many years around town, in circles devoted to finer things in food and drink, Tini Bigs was considered something of a punchline bar — occupying prime real estate between the Downtown / Belltown core and the densely populated Lower Queen Anne, Tini Bigs has always been a very busy place, and certainly has had its share of devoted fans over the years. But despite its popularity, Tini Bigs was never a bar that was seriously in the running for turning out paradigm-shifting cocktails (proof? check out their bar menu, now apparently defunct but still on their website; plus there’s the name: Tini, as in martini, as in everything that goes in a cone-shaped glass is one; and Bigs, as in the size of your drink, as in their signature 10-ounce glasses). While it was probably the place to go in town to get a Dirty Girl Scout or a Copa-Banana Martini, in terms of quality drinks it was light years away from what was going on at Zig Zag, Vessel, Licorous, or any of a number of other bars around town.

Until recently. Back in August, I ran into Jamie at Zig Zag less than half an hour after he’d been offered the job at Tini Bigs, which he took with the assurance that he could work to transform the bar into a place where well-crafted, appropriately proportioned cocktails would be served. Sworn to secrecy until he’d had a chance to work up a new menu and get things rolling, I managed to keep my silence — even though others blabbed about it publicly — until pretty recently. Now, with the new bar menu posted on Jamie’s site and with front page attention in the Seattle Times, the cat is well out of the bag, and Tini Bigs has become the newest (though possibly also the oldest) addition to Seattle’s burgeoning quality cocktail scene.

I may even have to move out of my downtown / Capitol Hill comfort zone and head over to First and Denny sometime soon. And while my initial impulse would be to try to make some kind of snide remark about Jamie — such as pointing out the quote from the Times story that I used in the headline — I’m mature enough to let it slide, and instead wish him and Tini Bigs the best of luck in becoming another fixture in Seattle’s culinary cocktail landscape.

Tags: General by Paul
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There are so many new food and drink sites coming online that it’s hard to keep up — while my online reading is mostly oriented toward spirits and cocktail-related blogs and sites (those, and news feeds to satisfy my political junkie side), the world of cocktail blogs has erupted so much over the past year or so that I long ago lost track of all that are out there.

Here’s a new food-and-drink site that I’m going to be sure to keep up with, though: Table Matters. Edited by Jason Wilson, who covers spirits for the Washington Post (if you were at Tales of the Cocktail, Jason was the guy wearing a press pass, walking around with a drink in his hand), and with a group of immensely talented writers that includes Jordan Mackay and Maggie Dutton, Table Matters is a wider-ranging magazine-style site that’s more in the realm of online venues such as CHOW than the ever-growing arena of the blogosphere. While it’s certainly a food-oriented site, spirits and cocktails already have a significant showing; considering that many culinary sites give spirits a short shrift, this is a very encouraging sign.

I’ve already added Table Matters to my feed reader; be sure to head on over and take a look.

Tags: General by Paul
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I’m prone to exaggeration from time to time, but I say with all seriousness that the results of this round of Mixology Monday — hosted by Stevi at Two at the Most, with the theme Guilty Pleasures — may truly frighten me. But not for the uppity reasons you might expect from a card-carrying cocktail snob such as me; no, rather than sneering disdainfully at many of the drinks that are suggested (okay, I’m sure I’ll sneer at a few of them), I fear that some primal sugar-and-booze element in me may covet a few of those cocktails, and add them to my own list of shameful libations.

Though I also have to admit that I’m much the booze snob I come off as; my formative alcohol years were built more around cheap beer and wine rather than the harder stuff, and I managed to make it through college and my 20s without ever having an Irish Car Bomb, a Red-Headed Slut, or many of the other mixological monstrosities we bolgers o’ the booze rail about the other 364 days of the year (though I do have to admit that as someone who came of age in the ’80s, I did tip a few Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers along with a Fuzzy Navel or two, and while working nights at a record store during my senior year I found myself enamored with the compact horsepower of a Long Island Iced Tea ordered in that slim window between the time I got off work and last call).

Today, I don’t dip in that pond very often. A notable though unseasonal exception takes place around the holidays. I’ll find myself bored and lazy some night, and snag the carton of eggnog I bought for my kids out of the fridge and pour myself a cup, then fortify it with a hearty dose of Myers Dark, which thins it out enough so that all that cholesterol and saturated fat will pass through my system without clogging an artery anywhere, or so I tell myself while I’m drinking it. I usually don’t care for the Myers Dark all that much, but there’s some kind of alchemy with that carageenan-thickened stuff from Organic Valley, and it keeps me happy until that queasy feeling of having eaten an entire cheesecake starts to come over me.

Otherwise, it’s pretty much Rittenhouse and Carpano Antica all the time — except when I’m feeling like slumming, and that’s when I reach for the cocktail that got me started on this whole thing several years ago: the Gimlet.

The gimlet isn’t exactly a guilty pleasure — it’s got bonafides as a genuine classic, and as long as you don’t mix it the Raymond Chandler way, you’re not hitting it with a huge dose of sugar. But here’s why I’m including it for this theme:

• It’s made with Rose’s Lime Juice (or Cordial), a substance that is otherwise anathema to the concept of a quality cocktail. Sure, you can make a similar drink with fresh lime and simple syrup, or even a homemade lime syrup, but it simply isn’t the same thing.
• While on the topic of gimlet orthodoxy, I break it by adding an equal amount of fresh lime juice as Rose’s. I know, a gimlet is simply gin and Rose’s and nothing else — back to Chandler again — but a dab of fresh just brightens it up a bit.
• Gin? Yes, I drink gin gimlets, but to my taste, and to the memory of that original cocktail that got me started, I actually prefer them with vodka.

Yes, vodka. While I’m not swilling the vanilla stuff out of the freezer like Darcy, or swapping shots of it with those of Jaeger like Jeffrey, I think vodka has an occasional role in the bar, and for me, a big chunk of its role (discounting its utility as an infusing medium) is in mixing gimlets. I was first introduced to gimlets by a column in the New York Times by William Hamilton, and I took my vodka-wielding approach based on Hamilton’s thoughtful assessment:

I prefer vodka, for its understatement. Gin talks too much, with its juniper bush-berry accent. And what you want, as everyone knows, is a drinking companion who listens.

Even after I came to appreciate gin and found vodka lackluster, and after I embraced the freshness mantra and disdained prepared mixers such as Rose’s, I still loved gimlets. They’re not fancy, and that fits their mood perfectly — this is a slumming drink, a cocktail that you mix when the day’s been a bit grim and you need to reassess. Such is my love for the gimlet that I spent way more time and effort than I should have putting together a study of the drink for the premiere issue of Mixologist: The Journal of the American Cocktail, and learned way more about Rose’s Lime Juice than any one person should know.

I don’t drink gimlets that often nowadays — not a change of heart, just absent-mindedness — but thanks to the seemingly endless stream of vodka that comes into the house in sample packages (along with that family-size bottle of Rose’s cordial I picked up in Canada a while back), when the mood hits, I’m more than ready.

Gimlet (variation)

• 2 ounces gin or vodka
• 1/4 ounce fresh lime juice
• 1/4 ounce Rose’s Lime Juice

Shake well with ice and strain into chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a lime wedge.

That’s it for Mixology Monday — head on over to Stevi’s place to see what everyone else came up with, and prepare to be astounded and probably a little bit ashamed.

Tags: General by Paul
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God, I love whiskey.

That shouldn’t be surprising to readers of this blog, but I felt the need to point that out while packing for my trip to San Francisco, which will host its second annual Whiskyfest on Friday night.

Created by the good folks at Malt Advocate and now swinging into its second year with the sponsorship of the Wall Street Journal, Whiskyfest features more than 200 whiskies full of superlatives — some of the finest, the rarest, the most expensive in the world will be at the San Francisco Marriott on Friday night, along with many that are more accessible to people of my pay grade.

I attended the event last year and had a grand time (even though Jimmy Patrick was there, and now tries to avoid me), and I’m really looking forward to sampling some of the bottlings that will be poured this round, as well as stopping at a few of San Francisco’s bars to try out a few (dozen) of the drinks mixed in one of the best damn cocktail cities in the world.

If you’ll be at Whiskyfest, I hope to see you there, and if not…well, why not?

Tags: Events by Paul
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