After spending a great Christmas at home, gorging on seafood and Tom & Jerry, and wondering if the snow was ever going to stop, I roused myself this morning to go online and do a little self promotion. While things have been pretty quiet here on the blog, I’ve been extremely busy this past month, and some of the projects I’ve been working on are now coming out.

First, the new: I’ve got a piece posted on the New York Times‘ opinion blog, Proof. The blog covers “Alcohol and American Life,” and my piece, “Drinking Outside the Temple,” is a brief and personal look at the country’s cocktail landscape (be sure to check out the comments to see the kind of visceral reaction engendered by any discussion of alcohol — especially a discussion that deals with enjoying the moderate and responsible consumption of alcohol; and please, leave a comment of your own). And as happy as I am to have contributed something to this conversation, I need to offer a mea culpa to many of the country’s bartenders: as with any other time when you try to describe an entire city or region’s cocktail scene in the course of one or two sentences, I made gross generalizations, and I’m sure that there are plenty of bartenders in San Francisco, Seattle, New York and other cities who’ll take issue with the way I’ve depicted their region’s approach to drinks (or failed to depict them — as much as I’d like, there’s no way I could mention every city’s bar scene). Apologies if my comments seem to overlook or ignore your work; my intent was to paint a broad picture of the country’s cocktail patterns for those outside the mixology loop, in hopes that they might start exploring and discovering the same things I’ve come to enjoy about so many of your establishments. The tool may have been blunt, but my intent was a good one; please get in touch and let me know if you have questions, comments or rants.

UPDATE: The comments section at Proof must be experienced, if only to see the vitriol that’s laid on by self-described recovering alcoholics (who apparently have plenty of time to troll alcohol-related sites on the Internet). My favorite comment so far, though, is from someone named Tim, who if I should ever have the pleasure to meet, I’d be happy to buy a drink; read Tim’s comment here.

Second, I wrote a story on hot (boozy) drinks, “A Warming Trend in Winter,” that appears in today’s San Francisco Chronicle. Thanks to Craig Lee, the paper’s photographer, for getting such a cool shot of a Bishop with a flaming clove-studded orange shell in the serving ladle.

Third, and I’m running a bit late on this, but last Friday a story I wrote on unconventional American whiskies came out in the Chronicle; read the story here: “Newfangled American Whiskies go beyond rye, bourbon.”

Fourth, and I’m placing this down the list because I haven’t even seen the magazine yet (the mail truck is probably stuck at the bottom of the hill — thanks, Seattle, for your near-total inability to clear the city’s streets), I have a short article on Cherry Heering in the January issue of Imbibe. Article, sans recipes, is here: “Cherry Crush“.

Apologies for the extended silence here at the blog, but as you can see, I’ve been really freakin’ busy. Hopefully things will even out in the New Year, but in the meantime, happy holidays to all–

Tags: General by Paul
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Before I screw anything up with a mangled literary reference, let me get this out of the way at the beginning: I never read David Copperfield.

Oliver Twist? Sure, a couple of times. A Tale of Two Cities? Certainly, though not so recently that I can recall much of the story. A Christmas Carol? Hell yeah — as recently as last Christmas. But way back in college, when I was skinny and had hair, I flirted with the idea of majoring in English, only to recoil from the subject during my sophomore year after a sudden and brutish encounter with mid-19th century English novelists (nothing against them, really — it just wasn’t my thing back then; if anything I was even more masochistic, given to forcing myself through Ulysses for the fun of it). I can’t blame David Copperfield directly, though I do recall weighing its heft in a university bookstore one afternoon, then placing it back on the shelf before going rummaging for some Nabokov.

What does this have to do with anything, much less Mixology Monday (which is hosted this month by Craig at Tiki Drinks and Indigo Firmaments, with the chosen topic of Spice)? Well, in my last-minute digging through drink books for a suitable concoction that could be assembled on the fly — sorry, very poor planning around here — I picked up a book that I’d been meaning to introduce during the Christmas season: Drinking with Dickens.

Written by the author’s great-grandson Cedric and first published in 1980, Drinking with Dickens is a fun little breeze through the author’s works, touching on characters and story lines associated with alcohol. While there are suitable spice-laden punches such as a Christmas Punch (somewhat similar to the recipe I list), what caught my eye was this: simply listed as “Gin Punch“, and noted as “Mr. Micawber’s favorite.”

Gin was no stranger to Dickens, nor to his mid-19th century world. The “Gin Craze” had swept London a century before, and gin was still a staple spirit for the lower, working classes, and mixing it in punch, whether hot or cold, was a not unusual method of consumption. In A Christmas Carol, fuddleduddy Bob Cratchit returns home after his rude encounter with Scrooge to compound “some hot mixture in a jug with gin and lemons, and [he] stirred it round and round and put it on the hob to simmer.”

Cedric Dickens notes that Mr. Micawber, a luckless yet perpetually optimistic character in David Copperfield based on the author’s father (thanks, Wikipedia!), also had a great fondness for gin punch. After one trying disappointment, Micawber goes to prepare some:

His recent despondency, not to say despair, was gone in a moment. I never saw a man so thoroughly enjoy himself amid the fragrance of lemon-peel and sugar, the odour of burning spirit, and the steam of boiling water, as Mr Micawber did that afternoon. It was wonderful to see his face shining at us out of a thin cloud of these delicate fumes, as he stirred, and mixed, and tasted, and looked as if he were making, instead of a punch, a fortune for his family down to the latest posterity.

Hey, punch as a fortune — I can get into that.

Ignoring the fact that the author’s recipes are sometimes suspect — Cedric Dickens never really reveals where he sourced them, and there’s a slapdash element to some — and that my own experiments with drinks of yore have occasionally resulted in spectacular failure, I decided to give this Gin Punch a crack. Here’s the recipe I’m working with, from Drinking with Dickens:

Gin Punch

• Juice 1/2 lemon
• pinch ground cinnamon
• 1 clove
• 1 teaspoon brown sugar
• 1 teaspoon honey
• 1 large measure sweet dark Madeira
• 1 large measure dry gin
• grated nutmeg

Into a warm tumbler put the juice of half a lemon, the cinnamon and clove, and the sugar and honey. Threequarters fill the glass with boiling water, add the madeira and gin and stir with a stick of cinnamon. Grate nutmeg thereon and drink quickly.

I’m choosing to ignore the “dry gin” reference in favor of a fuller-flavored and perhaps more historically appropriate genever, so Bols Genever is my gin of choice in this drink (and speaking of gin, during my Google-driven Micawber research I discovered that in the 1935 film version of David Copperfield, Micawber was played by W.C. Fields).

I’d post a photo, except my camera recently gave up the ghost and has yet to be replaced, so you’ll have to make due with this description: Okay, that’s weird. It’s not bad, definitely not, but the malty funkiness of the genever and the richness of the madeira — along with the little quibbles around the edges from the cinnamon, nutmeg and clove — combine to produce a flavor that nobody this century, or last, would likely have come up with.

It’s frigid and icy in Seattle, so a drink like this is not undesired on a night such as this one. I’m not sure if I’ll venture back down this exact path, but there’s room here for tinkering; Micawber’s gin punch is wanting, but there is hope in it for future experimentation.

So that’s what I got — the spice is relatively meager, but it sounded like a good idea at the time and I hope I get points for being adventurous enough to drink hot gin. Head on over to Craig’s joint to see what everyone else is up to.

Tags: Drinks, Gin, Mixology Monday by Paul
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Just a reminder that this coming Monday, December 15, is Mixology Monday. This round is hosted by Craig at Tiki Drinks & Indigo Firmaments, and Craig has chosen Spice as the theme. Craig has his announcement post up, and in it he says:

Spice should give you plenty of room to play – from the winter warmers of egg nog, wassail and mulled products to the strange and interesting infusions of pepper, ceubub, grains of paradise, nutmeg — what have you! I would like to stretch the traditional meanings of spice (as the bark, seed, nut or flowering part of a plant used for seasoning) to basically anything used for flavoring that isn’t an herb. Salt? Go for it. Paprika? I’d love to see you try. I hear that cardamom is hot right now.

So get your spice drinks posted on Monday or sooner, and notify the host at craig \at\ nwtiki \dot\ com.

Tags: General by Paul
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In Wednesday’s Dining Section, the New York Times turns the features over to booze, and there’s a lot of interesting stuff to explore.

First up is “White Russians Arise, This Time at a Bowling Alley,” a feature on what The Big Lebowski has done for White Russians, replete with quotes from David Wondrich, Ted Haigh and Martin Doudoroff.

Next up, Eric Asimov continues his long, in-depth series of tastings and explorations of different spirits with a walk through 21 single-malt scotch whiskies.

A breakdown of 8 schools of bartending philosophies follows, ranging from “Pre-Repeal Revivalists” to “Molecular Mixology”; the story mentions many of my favorite bars and bartenders, including Julie Reiner at Clover Club, Jim Meehan at PDT, Daniel Hyatt at Alembic, Murray Stenson at Zig Zag, Kevin Ludwig at Clyde Common, Daniel Shoemaker at Teardrop Lounge, John Gertsen at Drink, Toby Maloney at The Violet Hour, and Martin Cate at Forbidden Island. Plus, the story mentions those media darlings Boudreau and Morgenthaler, and to top it all, there’s even a photo with the caption: “NEO-CLASSICIST Murray Stenson making magic at Zig Zag Cafe in Seattle.” Get it while it’s hot.

The features are rounded out with Jonathan Miles’ story, “A Brotherhood Formed with Cocktails and Ice,” a piece about, for lack of a better term, cocktail geeks, that quotes sources including Don Lee, Sam Kinsey and, um, me. When the paper of record calls you a geek, you’re pretty much branded for life; fortunately, I embraced my geekishness years back — makes sense, considering all that time I spent devoting myself to geekish pursuits while not dating during high school — so it pains me not that Miles quotes me in the story, and it ensures that anyone Googling for “cocktail + geek” will likely come across my name fairly quickly.

Though I have to admit there are two things that dismay me about the piece: first, it sounds like Dale DeGroff has just about had it with those of my ilk (though really, there are people who are WAAAAY worse about this stuff than me, so I’m not taking it too personally); and second, I’m left wondering, “Who do you have to !*%# to get a mention of the blog’s name in the NYTimes, never mind a freakin’ link????” Ah well, maybe Asimov will commemorate the second (or so) anniversary of me first linking to The Pour (or maybe the second link I’ve given it in this post) by reciprocating with a link in his blogroll.

Though as a geek, I’m accustomed to disappointment, so I’ll just suffer in silence. Just me and my Last Word, which apparently my name will also forever be linked with via Google; I wonder what neo-classicist bartender revived that drink, anyway….

Tags: General by Paul
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