If last night’s Twitter traffic is any indication, I missed a hell of a party.

That’s to be expected. I’m home in Seattle, while the party in question — that for the release of Jim Meehan’s The PDT Cocktail Book – was, obviously, in New York, the way many of the parties I’m really envious of missing seem to be.

But the celebration was certainly justified. In addition to being one of the world’s more talented and influential barmen, and co-owner of one of the core bars in the craft-cocktail universe, Jim Meehan is now author of a cocktail guide that’s bound to be so definitive of a mixological moment and so influential for bartenders current and future that I can only agree with Gaz Regan (while conveniently stealing his words) that the PDT book is “the best book of its kind to hit the shelves in the twenty-first century. The very best. Bar none.” (Thanks for the help, Gary!)

Okay, details: there are more than 300 recipes in this book, all sourced from assorted manifestations of PDT’s menu. There are a few familiar classics of the Monkey Gland and French 75 variety, but where Meehan’s book not surprisingly shines is in its wealth of contemporary recipes, many from Meehan and his colleagues and associates, for drinks such as the hibiscus-and-tequila Green Harvest; Don Lee’s Rite of Spring, made with pickled ramp brine; and the apple brandy and beer-based Great Pumpkin.

I first tried the Great Pumpkin at PDT three years ago, and I brought a happy, hazy memory of this rich autumnal drink home with me. I got a chance to run a recipe for this drink in the San Francisco Chronicle about two years back, and now that the stores are once again flooded with pumpkin ale –something I have a hard time getting too enthusiastic about, except when it’s a component in mixed drinks such as this one — it’s a suitable time to take a look at the Great Pumpkin again.

Great Pumpkin
created by Jim Meehan, Fall 2008

• 1 oz. Rittenhouse rye whiskey
• 1 oz. Laird’s bonded apple brandy
• 1/2 oz. grade B maple syrup
• 1 whole egg, as fresh as possible
• 2 oz. pumpkin ale*

Combine everything in a cocktail shaker and agitate to flatten the beer (it helps if you add the beer first, then splish it about to drive out all the bubbles so your shaker won’t pop open and spray booze and eggs all over the place). Shake well without ice to fully combine the ingredients, then add ice and shake like hell for 10 seconds. Strain into chilled fizz glass; top with grated nutmeg.

* Meehan recommends the pumpkin ale from Southampton; being in the PNW, I went with Elysian’s pumpkin ale, which worked pretty well.

The Great Pumpkin has a complexity of preparation that’s pretty much par for the course in the PDT Cocktail Book. While some of the book’s drinks call for bespoke ingredients — from simple preparations like house ginger beer or walnut-infused cognac, to more complicated items such as concord-grape shrubb, or tamarind puree — or for unusual ingredients that can take some work to track down, such as Boiron passion fruit puree or Abbott’s Bitters (though there are replicas now floating about), many of the drinks are relatively straightforward. Meehan frequently calls for particular brands of certain spirits or modifiers, which can be challenging if you intend to prepare that drink exactly according to the specifications, but if you exercise some flexibility with substitutes while keeping the drink’s final flavor in mind, a cocktail enthusiast with a reasonably well-stocked home bar should be able to tackle most of the book’s recipes.

And the drinks? Extraordinary. PDT has built a reputation as one of the world’s best bars not just because you have to go through a phone booth to get there and can get a hot dog with your Blood and Sand — the drinks developed by Meehan and his staff, which has included formidable talent such as Don Lee and John Deragon, are big in flavor, distinctive in character and reliably fantastic.

Here’s a very simple drink from Meehan that I mixed last weekend, and enjoyed very much: the Platanos en Mole Old Fashioned.

Platanos en Mole Old Fashioned

• 2 oz. Zacapa 23 Centenario Rum*
• 1/4 oz. Brizard Crème de Banane**
• 12 drops Bittermens Xocolatl Mole Bitters

Combine ingredients in a mixing glass and fill with ice. Stir well until chilled, 20 seconds or so, and strain into a rocks glass with one large cube of ice. Garnish with a pinch of ground chili.

* Did I say be flexible? Zacapa works really well here, but if you absolutely have none in the house but you do have some Zaya lying around, it’ll get you there.
** More on flexibility—the only banana liqueur I have is Giffard Banane du Bresil, which ain’t too shabby and worked just great in this drink.

Anyway, I’m already running behind the release date on getting this post up, so I’ll can further chatter and leave it to you: grab a copy of The PDT Cocktail Book, and if you have particular luck with one or more of the recipes, let me know in the comments section.

Tags: Applejack, Books, Drinks, Rum, Rye by Paul
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Within the last 24 hours I’ve learned of two active participants in the cocktail blogosphere who are now, um, on unscheduled sabbatical as a result of the global economic crap-tsunami (and that’s not counting the geniuses like me who thought it wise to quit a job just before the financial sector went into a tailspin). But hey, it’s Mixology Monday, and that’s always good for celebratin’, right? Unless the theme is Hard Drinks for Hard Times, as suggested by host Matthew Rowley, one of those who has EXTRA time on his hands nowadays — then, it’s one more reminder that it’s time to slowly freak out as you check your bank balance and your work calendar, both of which are looking pretty grim.

In times like these, there are all kinds of ideas on how to drink cheaper — I initially played with the idea of marking MxMo by making my own pruno, until I was stopped by a sudden attack of good sense. Elsewhere during this month’s MxMo — see, there are benefits to putting your post off until the last minute — there have been plenty of ideas on how to stretch the booze budget, whether it’s by purchasing cheaper brands, or putting the leftovers and free samples to good use, or by making your own hooch.  These are all good ideas, but for me, there seems to be one basic approach that’s not discussed very often, but which has been painstakingly described by one of the foremost writers on booze: the time-honored technique of stiffing your guests.*

In his 1972 book On Drink (happily reprinted just last year as part of an expanded collection, Everyday Drinking), Kingsley Amis dedicated an entire chapter to what he described as “The Mean Sod’s Guide”. At the beginning of the chapter, Amis makes his purpose clear:

The point here is not simply to stint your guests on quality and quantity — any fool can pre-pour Moroccan red into burgundy bottles, or behave as if all knowledge of the existence of drink has been suddently excised from his brain at 10pm — but to screw them while seeming, at any rate to their wives, to have done them rather well.

This is cheapskatery in its most creative form — transforming the host’s mission of generosity into an insolent penny-pinching endeavor in a way that makes it seem, at least to some of the assembled, that you’ve raided your liquor cabinet for nothing but the finest of spirits.

To accomplish this, Amis gives several suggestions, starting with the advance preparations:

Vital requirement: prepare pre- and post-dinner drinks in some undiscoverable pantry or broom-cupboard well away from the main scene. This will not only screen your niggardliness; it will also make the fetching of each successive round look like a slight burden, and will cast an unfavorable limelight on any individual determined to wrest additional drinks out of you. Sit in a specially deep easy-chair, and practise getting out of it with a mild effort and, later in the evening, a just-audible groan, though beware of overdoing this.

And, for the pre-dinner drink:

Procedures vary. The obvious one is to offer only one sort of drink, a ‘cup’ or ‘punch’ made of cheap red wine, soda water, a glass of cooking sherry if you can plunge that far, and a lot of fresh fruit to give an illusion of lavishness. Say you invented it, and add menacingly that it has more of a kick than might be expected. Serve in small glasses.

After dinner, more desperate measures may be called for:

[...] offer brandy, explaining a good deal less than half apologetically that you have no cognac, only a ‘rather exceptional’ armagnac. This, of course, produced with due slowness from your pantry, is a watered-down cooking brandy from remote parts of France or South Africa. [...] Ask the ladies if they would care to try a glass of Strelsauvada, a ‘rather obscure’ Ruritanian liqueur made from rotten figs with almond-skin flavouring which admittedly can ‘play you up’ if you are not used to it. They will all say no and think highly of you for the offer.

Rather than drink a similar slop, keep something special for your own drinks:

These must obviously not be allowed to fall below any kind of accustomed level, however cruel the deprevations you force on your guests. You will naturally refresh yourself with periodic nips in your pantry, but going thither at all often may make undesirable shags think, even say, that you ought to be bringing thence a drink for them. So choose between a darkly tinted glass [...] and a silver cup of some sort [...] which you stick inseparably to and can undetectably fill with neat whisky…

Fine ideas, all — but this is about cocktails. Fortunately, the same approach can apply. To adapt the “drink cheaper” motif, here are a couple of cocktails that appear to be the same thing, yet have a substantial difference in price per drink. First, for you–

CHEAPSKATE

• 2 ounces Blue Gin (~$3.18)
• 3/4 ounce Carpano Antica vermouth (~$0.66)
• 1/4 ounce St. Germain (~$0.33)
• 1 teaspoon Jade Edouard absinthe (~$0.52)
• 1 dash Regan’s Orange Bitters (~$.01)

Combine ingredients in bar glass and fill with cracked ice. Stir with a silver barspoon wrapped in a $20 bill to keep your fingers from getting cold. Strain into chilled cocktail glass. Grand total: ~$4.70

And for your guests–

UNWELCOME HOUSEGUEST

• 2 ounces Gordon’s gin (~$0.88)
• 3/4 ounce Martini & Rossi sweet vermouth (~$0.21)
• 1/4 ounce St. Germain (~$0.33)
• 1 teaspoon Kubler absinthe (~$0.33)
• 1 dash Regan’s Orange Bitters (~$0.01)

Combine ingredients in an empty beer can and fill with ice scraped from the sides of the freezer. Stir with a used fork and strain into a cocktail glass that looks something like yours so as to throw off any suspicion. Grand total: ~$1.76

In both cases you have a similar combo;but while in the former you’re accenting the rich botanicals of the Blue Gin and Carpano Antica with the cascading vegetal flavors of a good absinthe and enlivening the mix with elderflower liqueur, in the latter you’re using that same liqueur, as well as a more flat anise note from the Kubler absinthe, to pull the flavors up from the not-quite-as-exciting mix of Gordon’s and mainstream vermouth. Less vavoom than the former, of course, but still, not bad.

Times are tough; sometimes a little pampering is required, and $4.69 for a decent homemade cocktail is a bargain compared to an afternoon at the spa or a weekend trip to Vegas.

* Oh, and the “stiff your guests” part? C’mon, just joshing — unless you’re one of the hostile commenters that’s followed me over from the “Proof” blog, hopefully you figured that out before ripping me a new one in the comments section. Though as Amis noted in his final instruction: “If you think that all or most of the above is mere satirical fantasy, you cannot have been around much yet.”

Now head on over to Rowley’s Whiskey Forge and see what the other miscreants have been up to this MxMo.

Tags: Books, Drinks, Gin, Mixology Monday by Paul
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I’m back, still breathing, after an unplanned two-week hiatus. During this vacation from blogging I spent a whirlwind couple of days in San Francisco, ushering out Cocktail Week at Absinthe and sitting (briefly) at Neyah White‘s bar at Nopa, and then spent the rest of the time diving headlong into the freelance life. But now that my Sitemeter readings are starting to free fall, and after receiving a “Dude, What’s up?” e-mail from a reader wondering if I’d abandoned this thing (thanks for checking in, Joseph), I felt the need to get my act together for a few minutes and post about something worthwhile.

Like this: If you’re at all familiar with the cocktail blogosphere, you’re certainly aware of LUPEC-Boston. Now, the ladies of LUPEC-B have taken their cocktail wisdom to the print shop, and the result is the Little Black Book of Cocktails, a slim but serious volume with recipes for a selection of vintage and contemporary libations, and photos of the LUPEC-B ladies by Matt Demers.

I finally got my hands on a copy of the LBBoC, and I have to say what a fine job they’ve done. The book has recipes ranging from old favorites like the Monkey Gland to new favorites (around here, at least) such as the Jaguar, and after wandering through the pages I don’t see a bummer in the bunch. Buy a copy from the LUPEC-Boston site, and you’ll be rewarded not only with this well-considered cocktail guide, but with the knowledge that the proceeds are going to the Friends Boutique at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Reading the book also made me finally get around to mixing a drink I’d been planning to try for quite a while. While Ted Haigh addressed this in an issue of Imbibe and Erik covered it during his recent stroll through Savoy’s H’s, I’ve sadly been behind in my consumption of Hanky Pankys. But, with the LUPEC book in hand and a bottle of Fernet Branca staring at me from the liquor cabinet, I thought it finally time for a dalliance with Ada Coleman’s creation.

Chin chin — and buy the book.

Hanky Panky

• 1 1/2 ounces gin
• 1 1/2 ounces sweet vermouth
• 2 dashes Fernet Branca

Stir well with ice and strain into chilled cocktail glass. Squeeze a piece of orange peel on top.

Tags: Books, Drinks, Gin by Paul
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“In the absence of certainty, bullshit blooms.”

David Wondrich doesn’t get around to stating this mixographical truism until page 292 of IMBIBE!, but the statement could well have served as a seven-word pitch to potential publishers, citing the need for such a volume.

In his magazine pieces and online articles (which now seem to have vanished into the digital wilderness over at Esquire.com), as well as in his previous two books dedicated to the craft of mixology, Wondrich has demonstrated his deftness as a writer and his authority as a researcher while tossing off short histories, anecdotes and observations about spirits, cocktails and the people who love them. Now, with IMBIBE!, the former English professor blows the roof off the joint, ranging unimpeded by tight word counts or the short-sighted demands of editors while exploring the sporting (read: drinking) world of the 19th and early 20th centuries, especially the times of “Professor” Jerry Thomas and his predecessors, contemporaries and successors.

While Thomas – the author of How to Mix Drinks, or the Bon-Vivant’s Companion, first published in 1862 – has long been celebrated as a Founding Father of mixology, the truth of the matter is his legacy is a hard one to warm up to. While groundbreaking in their era, many of the drinks in Thomas’ book lost their novelty many generations ago. But as Wondrich explains in his introduction, spending time with Thomas’ venerable recipes has a way of opening one’s eyes to the world as experienced by our shaker-slinging ancestors:

…while I often used Jerry Thomas’s book as a sort of historical backstop, a place to trace a particular recipe back to, I rarely mixed any actual drinks from it. At first glance, the book’s telegraphically phrased recipes seemed either uninspiringly simple or dauntingly complex; deeply weird or old hat.

[…]

Time after time, what seemed plain on the page turned out to be subtle; what seemed baroque or fussy, rich and rewarding. But this is only proper. The average nineteenth-century drinker was accustomed to having his drinks—based not on a thin and anodyne tipple like vodka, but rather on something robust and flavorful, like cognac, rye whiskey, Holland gin, or brown sherry—made with fresh-squeezed juices, one of several different kinds of available bitters, hand-chipped ice, and a host of other touches that are today the mark of only the very best bars. In presenting the recipes I’ve done my best to lay bare these touches; to transmit the techniques and competencies the bartender relied on in practicing his craft; in making a few cents worth of whiskey, sugar, and frozen water into a glimpse of a better world.

Wondrich pieces together not only the (scant) known details about Thomas’ life, but reaches back further, into the Colonial punchbowl and the Polk-era tavern, illuminating other masters of the craft such as Willard (whose first, or last, name is lost to history), the “first celebrity bartender”; and William Pitcher, “the Greek-spouting deity of the Tremont House bar in Boston.” He also looks into the future to bartenders of Thomas’s time and beyond, mixologists such as Harry Johnson and “The Only William” Schmidt. And while relatively little is known about Thomas himself, Wondrich fills in the gaps in Thomas’s biography by describing the life of the sporting fraternity—a member of which Thomas was in good standing:

[The sporting fraternity] didn’t look at sports the way you or I might. While it might maintain a general, conversational sort of interest in all species of contests of man against man, man against beast, beast against beast or anything against the clock, when it came right down to it there were only two sports that really counted, and you didn’t actually play either of them. You watched them from a safe distance, limiting your participation to the realm of speculative finance. The Turf and the Ring.

In this milieu, Thomas was a key player, and his career as a bartender was touched by what Wondrich terms the three ages of mixology, ranging from the birth of the republic to the onset of Prohibition: the Archaic (typified by drinks such as punches and flips, fortified with robust wines and spirits, sweetened with sugar cut from loaves and fleshed out with baskets of eggs and buckets of cream); the Baroque (which began around the time of Thomas’s circa 1830 birth, and was typified by iced drinks such as cobblers and cocktails – heavy on the brandy and Holland gin – prepared in shakers and bar glasses and served with the aid of strainers); and the Classic (beginning around 1885, coinciding with a profusion of glassware and bar tools, and marked by the growing use of vermouth and fruit juices in cocktails, which were increasingly mixed with spirits such as whiskey and dry gin).

But while a survey of the drinks of past eras can be enjoyed from an academic angle, this is mixology, an interactive form of art best appreciated by those with open gullets and unquenchable thirsts. After spending the first 48 pages re-creating the mid-19th century world Thomas inhabited, along with the evolutionary path the drinks followed, Wondrich chalks up his cue with a short but immensely valuable survey of spirits and bar tools, then runs the table for the rest of the book, working methodically through chapters on punches; “the children of punch;” egg drinks; toddies, slings & juleps; and, ultimately, cocktails (a couple of chapters on current drinks and bitters & syrups are tacked on for good measure).

It’s in this latter section of the book where Wondrich really cuts loose. Several of the old standard sources are here – Harry Johnson, check; Jacques Straub, check; George Kappeler, check – but relying on old cocktail manuals would be way too easy, and inefficient, for what Wondrich has in mind. From the Steward & Barkeeper’s Manual from 1869, through the Brooklyn Daily Eagle to the Police Gazette to obscure 19th century plays and novels – The Adventures of Harry Franco, anyone? – Wondrich reaches for any and all sources that may offer a whiff of information regarding the time, manner and style in which a particular drink may have been prepared. Through it all, he weaves in stories and anecdotes related to the drinks – such as the use of a Whiskey Skin to blind a bartender in 1855 as part of a dispute between the assailant, Pargene, and the bar owner, “Bill the Butcher” Poole (if you’ve read Asbury’s Gangs of New York — no, the movie doesn’t count (though Daniel Day Lewis rocks as the Butcher) — or Luc Sante’s Low Life, the name should ring a big, scary bell) – that reveal the world of the barroom in the hard-drinking 1800s.

That world was big and brutal, and a few drinks were certainly needed to give it a little luster. While a bowl of punch or a glass of port might suffice for citizens of the old country, America was a fast-growing and fast-moving place, and time and effect were things to be considered when moistening the clay in Thomas’ time. Here, Wondrich explains how the cocktail epitomizes America, both historically and in the modern day:

It’s quick, direct, and vigorous. It’s flashy and a little bit vulgar. It induces an unreflective overconfidence. It’s democratic, forcing the finest liquors to rub elbows with ingredients of far more humble stamp. It’s profligate with natural resources (think of all the electricity generated to make ice that gets used for ten seconds and discarded). In short, it rocks.

But if the Cocktail is American, it’s American in the same way as the hot dog (that is, the Frankfurter), the hamburger (the Hamburger steak), and the ice-cream cone (with its rolled gaufrette). As a nation, we have a knack for taking underperforming elements of other peoples’ cultures, streamlining them, supercharging them, and letting ‘em rip – from nobody to superstar, with a trail of sparks and a hell of a noise along the way. That’s how the Cocktail did it, anyway.

After making the archaic world of punches, cobblers, fizzes and egg drinks a bit more user-friendly for the modern-day reader, Wondrich rolls up his sleeves and addresses the cocktail, using the recipes from Thomas’ landmark book as guides, while elaborating on the themes using drinks from Thomas’ contemporaries and successors. Starting with the plain gin (or brandy, or whiskey, etc.) cocktail and stepping through successive levels (improved cocktail, old fashioned cocktail), then really starting to roam with drinks such as the Morning Glory Cocktail, the Widow’s Kiss, the Daiquiri and the Metropole, Wondrich creates a flavor history of the cocktail’s golden years. In the process, he not only paints a background for each drink but cites the historic recipe and the source, along with updated measurements, notes on ingredients, and suggestions for preparing the drink using contemporary spirits and tools. In this way, Wondrich manages to translate the sometimes maddeningly vague or complicated recipes found in vintage bar manuals, and render them not only useful, but interesting, for modern-day mixologists.

Then, there’s the bullshit factor. As Wondrich notes in one of the book’s appendices (while discussing the origin of the word “cocktail,” a bullshit-laden subject if ever there was one), it’s tempting to try to nail down a place, date and rationale for the naming of the cocktail (not to mention the creation and naming of every drink in the canon), but for the most part we’re talking about stuff that happened in bars. While some of the explanations expounded by well-intentioned aficionados certainly sound reasonable in the misty glow of a Manhattan or two, much of what gets cast about as fact or common knowledge is totally bunk. “It’s funny how we’re willing to kick common sense out the door when it comes to thinking about the past,” Wondrich writes, dismissing the theory that cocktails were named for some archaic practice of garnishing a drink with a rooster’s tail-feather. “How would you react if someone stuck a feather yoinked from a bird’s ass in your drink? Precisely.”

Fortunately, Wondrich’s bullshit detector is well-calibrated, and when coupled with a post-doc’s capacity to research a topic until it calls you “daddy,” the result is a near bullet-proof volume that explores its topic in more depth and detail than any other book on mixography I can call to mind (one of the closest is another recent book, Jeff Berry’s Sippin’ Safari, which required years of interviews and primary-source research in order to chronicle and understand the mid-century Polynesian phenomenon).

If you’ve skipped over all my blather to see if I actually have a point, I do, and it’s this: buy the damn book. It’s a good read; the recipes are user-friendly; and it’s going to redefine the way cocktail fans and booze geeks talk about what we talk about in much the same way that books such as William Grimes’ Straight Up or on the Rocks, Ted Haigh’s Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, and – of course – Wondrich’s Esquire Drinks have guided our ongoing conversation. I’d like to tell Mr. Wondrich myself how much I value this new book, but my preternatural shyness dictates that every time I run into him I wind up fumbling with my notebook while making vague pronouncements about the weather. So David, if you’re procrastinating on a deadline and wind up slumming about the boozy blogosphere: Thanks for your hard work. IMBIBE! provides the much-needed certainty to mulch down the blossoming bullshit.

[IMBIBE! will will be available November 6, according to Amazon, though apparently nobody told Powells, which has already been shipping volumes out.]

Tags: Books by Paul
13 Comments »

As Michael pointed out this weekend, Imbibe magazine has now passed the one-year milestone. That’s a big deal, folks — around 60 percent of new magazines fail in their first year (and I’ve seen other figures that peg that closer to 90 percent), so Imbibe is really bucking the trend. Having been a contributor to the magazine for almost every issue, it’s been really exciting for me to hear people talk about it and to see it mentioned in online forums, and to know that it’s really getting some traction among people who give a damn about what goes in their glass. If you haven’t yet, please subscribe, and for those industry types out there — c’mon, people, I know you’re reading this, I see your domain names flashing past — buy a freaking ad, already.

This month’s issue contains a salvo from Dr. Cocktail on what’s possibly my favorite summer cooler, the gin rickey, and a step-by-step from Robert Hess on how to make his house bitters (which I’ve got to try again sometime, having somehow screwed up my last batch through a measurement misinterpretation). It also has a profile I wrote of Jeff “Beachbum” Berry, the reigning king of the tiki bar and the author of three tomes of tiki drinks and cuisine, Grog Log, Intoxica! and Taboo Table. I’d been looking forward to working on this article for quite a while, not only because of the wonderful experience I had interviewing Jeff in New Orleans last summer during Tales of the Cocktail, but also because his new book, Sippin’ Safari, is coming out in June, and I had the chance to take a peek at a few of the chapters.

From my reading of these sample chapters, Sippin’ Safari promises to take the extensive research Jeff has done for books such as Grog Log, and present it in a longer-form, much more detailed package. For people who like to know a little bit about the history behind their drinks and the people who first created them, this book fits the bill in spades. And since secrecy about recipes was held to such importance among the owners and bartenders at the old tiki bars, Jeff didn’t have much printed material to work with — instead, he had to rely more on extensive interviews with bartenders, gradually working to gain their trust so they’d share the old stories and, most intriguingly, the old recipes. Of the 67 recipes in Sippin’ Safari, 46 have never before been printed, and from the few I saw and put together myself, they include some of the very best drinks to have come out of the old Polynesian palaces from the 1930s onward.

Sippin’ Safari comes out in June; you can pre-order your copy from the publisher. I can’t wait to read the full book once it’s released.

Imbibe‘s one-year anniversary and a new book from the Bum — that’s a lot to celebrate at one time.

Tags: Books, General by Paul
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