Over the past few years at Imbibe, I’ve had the chance to write about the cocktail situation in Las Vegas and San Francisco, Los Angeles and Vancouver. But it wasn’t until the current issue (which appeared in mailboxes last month — hey, I’ve been busy) that I finally had the opportunity, or the excuse, to officially roll through many of the craft-cocktail bars in my own hometown of Seattle. (The November/December issue is still available on the shelf, or if you need to read the Seattle piece RIGHT NOW, here’s a link to a PDF copy – but really, get the magazine).

One of the drawbacks of these kinds of stories is that I never have enough space to fully recognize some of the more noteworthy bars and the talented bartenders that I come across. In the print version of the story, I included recipes from Erik Hakkinen at Zig Zag Café, Eric Carlson at Moshi Moshi, and Jay Kuehner at Sambar, but these are only a few of the bartenders who have made Seattle into the city it is today: a soggy, Ramazzotti-soaked destination for the cocktail enthusiast and/or the discerning inebriate.

But whaddaya know — I have a blog, a little rusty from recent disuse but as far as I can tell, still functional (knock wood). So over the next week or so — emphasis on the “or so” — I’m going to run a few notes and recipes from bars and bartenders I may have mentioned in the article, but didn’t have a chance to fully recognize.

First on this mini-tour of Seattle bars is a place that I first visited not long after I moved to Seattle in 1998: Vito’s, on First Hill. Vito’s has been around since the 1950s, and the décor seems to hardly have changed since its debut (don’t believe me? Check out the Cougar Room in the back). In the late ‘90s, Vito’s was a fun if slightly down-at-heel kind of place to spend a Saturday night; more recently, the bar had a run of bad luck, and the memories it inspired started trending to the “I almost got shot there” variety.

But last year, new owners started cleaning the place up, keeping the non-ironic retro furniture and the edge-of-downtown aura to the place, but spiffing up the menu and the music and just generally getting Vito’s vibe and clientele back into more-or-less respectable territory. Even better — at least from a cocktail-geek’s perspective — the bar’s booze selection was seriously rethought. Sure, you can still get a can of Oly and a shot of well whiskey at the bar, but Vito’s is reflecting its Italian influence with more than just the eggplant parm; bottles of Italian aperitifs, spirits and liqueurs such as Zucca Rubarbaro, Strega and Barolo Chinato now populate the back bar, and the bar menu has a serious drink-geek’s touch, with cocktails such as the Waldorf & Statler, made with gin, falernum and Fernet Branca; the Akimbo, a rye, Campari and Barolo Chinato drink not on the current menu but worthy of a return engagement; and the Tom Handy, a Sazerac interpretation made with Rittenhouse rye and Remy VSOP, spiced with The Bitter Truth Creole Bitters. The drinks take an East Coast, spirit-forward approach, and this winter Vito’s is even serving Smith & Cross-fuelled Tom & Jerrys, the first regular appearance of these I’ve seen in a Seattle bar.

Still, Vito’s is not immune from misfortune, as is demonstrated by my Imbibe story:  while I recognized bartenders Jared Scarr and Nabil Sherief for their work behind the bar, somewhere in my fuzzy joy at finding that Vito’s had cleaned up and had taken the craft-cocktail pledge, I accidentally gave Jared a promotion to bar manager, overlooking the man who’s done the most to turn Vito’s beverage program around: Justin Gerardy.­­ So here, in front of the Internet and everybody, I offer my apologies to Justin, and as testament to the skill of Vito’s bar staff, I offer you one of the establishment’s original drinks (developed by barman Connor O’Brien and named by Gerardy), To Hell With Spain.

To Hell With Spain

• 2 oz. blended scotch (Gerardy uses the smoke-laden Johnny Walker Double Black, which you should as well — failing that, the peat-enhanced Black Grouse should work)
• 1/2 oz. Carpano Antica vermouth
• 1/4 oz. Laphroaig 10-year-old
• 1/4 oz. Cherry Heering
• 3 dashes absinthe (Pacifique – yesss…)

Combine ingredients in a mixing glass and fill with ice. Stir well until chilled, about 30 seconds. Strain into chilled cocktail glass; garnish with a cherry.

“Remember the Maine, To Hell with Spain” — get the connection? This is the Remember the Maine’s smoky Scottish cousin, with the peaty complexity supplied both by the new-ish Johnny Walker Double Black, which carries an extra payload of Islay malt in its blend; and by a touch of Laphroaig, just to keep the fire burning. Cherry Heering, Carpano and absinthe are burly enough characters to take a little smoke in stride, and the result is a powerfully flavored, richly alluring cocktail.

As Gerardy says, “I tend to be most interested in a drink that references its ingredients, rather than tries to redefine those flavors. When you do that, some of the reverence for that is lost.” No worries of anything getting lost in this mix – it’s one I’ll come back to, especially as the season gets darker and colder.

Tags: Drinks, Establishments, Scotch by Paul
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I love the Appletini.

Mind you, I’ve never actually had one — not a “real” one, anyway, assuming you can call a drink that’s become an icon of all that’s saccharine and false about cocktails “real.” Even when I was younger and (more) stupid, when I was less picky about what went into my glass, a drink that both looked and tasted like Jolly Ranchers just seemed to be wrong, not only a fraudulent fake of a proper cocktail, but yet one more molestation of a natural flavor.

But as someone who makes his living writing about drinks, the Appletini has been a godsend, a useful tool for mocking all that’s wrong with bars, and an instrument of warning to those who are tempted to take the quick, easy way out. Plus, with the drink’s pioneering appropriation of the ‘tini suffix, the Appletini became a punchline in itself, a gaudy green scapegoat in a cocktail glass for craptinis everywhere. Long may it wave.

There’s a problem here, though. Y’see, for all its faults, an Appletini has one thing going for it: it tastes decent to a lot of people (so I assume — again, I’ve never had one, but it’s easy to come to that conclusion) — and why not? It tastes like apples (kinda, or at least what apples taste like as interpreted by food scientists), and apples are awesome. Even spirits actually made from apples don’t really, truly taste like apples (except on a certain ethereal, completely engaging level), thanks mostly to the effects of barrel aging — not that I’m complaining, of course. But, apples — why not? If you can take a drink that’s emblematic of all that’s fake in mixology, and render it in a natural way, isn’t that a worthwhile cause (or at least a potentially interesting way of spending a Monday evening)?

Fortunately, today is Mixology Monday, and as this month’s host Jacob Grier chose to frame it, this month’s event is themed “Retro Redemption.” Jacob’s challenge is to take a misbegotten concoction, preferably from recent decades, and tweak it into something appealing to the growing craft-cocktail crowd. And if ever a drink needed tweaking, it’s the Appletini.

So, here’s how I’m going to proceed: I’m going to take the Appletini at its most literal, and break it down by the constituent parts of its name — first, it has to have an apple influence; and second, it has to earn that ‘tini suffix.

My starting ground rule is that the drink’s base elements must be gin (vodka? really? are you in the right place?) and dry vermouth; bonus points if the orange bitters stay in the equation. And for the apple? It must be a natural component, something from an actual apple, not a mock-up of apple flavor or a processed apple product. Simply adding an ounce of apple juice or the like to the drink would be cheating on a certain level — my self-imposed rule stipulates that the drink must still be identifiable as a martini — but what if I process the drink through an apple?

We know from experience that apples and dry vermouth work fantastic together, as demonstrated in Audrey Saunders’ Eve — a simple five-day infusion of Macintosh apples in vermouth. Had I given this project much thought prior to the last couple of days, I might’ve smacked a bottle together, but by the time I started thinking about the apple + martini project earlier today, the infusion ship had sailed.

Or had it? No, I didn’t have five days for an infusion, but I had a few minutes — not to mention a couple of Granny Smith apples and an iSi cream whipper, which, by following the nitrogen infusion process first explored by Dave Arnold, was all I needed to do a flash-infusion of apples into my drink, and which hopefully would only bring the delicate, fruity notes of the fruit, without the darker, bitter flavors that come from oxidizing apples.

Okay, this post is way too chatty by this point — let’s get down to the recipe:

The Appletini is Dead! Long live the Appletini!
makes 3 drinks

• 6 ounces gin (I used Plymouth)
• 3 ounces dry vermouth (I used Noilly Prat)
• 1 large (or 1 1/2 small) Granny Smith apple
• 1 dash orange bitters
• lemon zest, for garnish

1. Core the apple and chop it, peel and all, into small chunks. Place the apple chunks in the canister of an iSi cream whipper, and add the gin and vermouth.
2. Seal the whipper, and get your stopwatch ready. Use a N2O charger to pressurize the whipper, and swirl the contents around for 30 seconds; at the end of 30 seconds, place the whipper on the counter and let it rest an additional 30 seconds.
3. Rapidly depressurize the whipper by placing a plastic container over the spout (to catch the spraying liquid) and squeeze the lever. Once the whipper is completely depressurized, strain the liquid into a large glass. Let it rest a few minutes before using — the flavor develops better with a little time.
4. Proceed as with a standard cocktail: place three ounces of liquid in a mixing glass, add a dash of bitters along with a bunch of ice, and stir until chilled. Strain into chilled cocktail glass; hit it with the lemon zest.

This worked out better than expected. The liquid went into the canister a light straw color (from the vermouth), and came out a delicate, chlorophyll green. At first sip, the apple was barely noticable — it was all martini, with a softer, rounder edge.

But after the liquid rested a bit more, the apple flavor developed; the drink was still no fucking doubt a martini, but it had a lightly floral aroma, and a lingering finish that was had the bright, acidic crispness and the very gentle sweetness of a fresh Granny Smith apple. You wouldn’t sip this drink and have “apple” immediately leap to mind, but the fruit gradually manifested itself as a welcome addition to the martini’s familiar flavor — as though the bright freshness of the fruit was one of the botanicals in the gin or the vermouth, pronounced enough to be identifiable as a flavor, and definitely lending a soft, fruity caress to the drink, but not attempting to seize control of the drink’s character from its spirituous base elements.

Does it taste like a “real” Appletini? Hell, no. That’s why I’m still drinking it…

Anyway, that’s my MxMo contribution for this month. Head over to Jacob’s place and see what others have got up to for this round.

Tags: Drinks, Gin, Mixology Monday by Paul
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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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Mornings? You can keep ‘em.

Even though I have all the daytime demands that come with being a middle-aged family man unburdened by independent wealth, I still prefer coming at the morning from the other side — seeing the sunrise as a tip that it’s time to go to bed rather than as the cue that it’s time to start making the goddamn donuts.

But, what can you do? Well, when the opportunity presents itself, you can start the day with a drink.

A disclaimer: I almost never start the day with a drink. When I stagger into the kitchen most days, it’s the coffee cup I’m reaching for to pull me out of my bleary haze; a drink at that hour? Might as well go back to bed, which isn’t a bad idea at all, but one that brings us back to those daytime demands I mentioned earlier. But sometime the day just swings that way; either it’s a special weekend or a holiday when you have the luxury of squandering an hour or so at the breakfast table or of slouching back to bed after tucking in to the bacon and brioche, or you’ve got guests, in which case you could use a damn drink to get everyone through the ordeal of beginning a new day together.

(Or, you could also be thinking of a breakfast drink because today is Mixology Monday, hosted by Kevin at Cocktail Enthusiast, and Kevin has chosen “Morning Drinks” for this month’s theme.)

Anyway, there are some grand morning drinks out there — think the Ramos Fizz, the French 75 or the Milk Punch – as well as the old standbys (the Bloody Mary, of course, and its frequent companion, the Mimosa) — and once you start thinking about it, almost anything can make a case for itself for winding up in your cocktail glass just as the toast is being buttered.

But, think carefully here: for all their beauty, the Ramos Fizz and the French 75 are perfect morning drink s only when prepared by someone else. Really, if you’re still waking up and possibly shaking off the effects of the night before, do you really want to commit yourself to compounding elaborate mixtures of ingredients and rat-a-tatting them in the cocktail shaker anywhere near your tender head? And as for the Bloody Mary and the Mimosa – well, they’re not bad, necessarily, especially if you’re using decent booze and good ingredients and take a little care in the preparation. But every time I drink a Bloody Mary or one of its kin — this is usually in the once a year department, typically on New Year’s Day — I find myself asking, “Is that all there is?” Ditto for the Mimosa, and the answer, of course, is “Yes — sorry.”

So — what’s tasty and fortifying, gentle on the head, palate and stomach and easy enough to prepare so you can mix yourself a drink with little fuss, or knock out a bunch for a crowd? Consider the Black Velvet. True, there’s no hard booze in there, but at this hour that can’t be considered a crime, especially when one of the ingredients is champagne, which makes everything in life just a little bit better. The other ingredient? Beer — stout, to be precise, and as any hangover survivor can attest, the bubbles and the barley are among the most useful curatives known to man (also on that list: champagne, which makes all of this absolutely golden). No shaking or cautious jiggering is required, and the only advance prep the Black Velvet requires is that you stick the beer and the wine in the fridge the night before.

The Black Velvet reportedly originated in 1861, at Brook’s Club in London, following the death of Prince Albert (at least, that’s what the Guinness website states — I’ve done exactly no digging to verify the claim). There’s another version of the drink in circulation, made with cider in place of champagne; I haven’t tried it so I can’t speak to its character, but if you’re looking for an excellent breakfast companion (especially if you’re mixing for friends), shell out the extra cash and go for the bubbly. There are also recipes that insist this drink be layered, a la a Pousse Caffe. Should your breakfast require a floor show or other dramatic effects, feel free to go that route; for me, I’m happier with the stout and the champagne joining each other on equal terms, the ferric tang of the Guinness finding its mate in the fruity snap of the wine, and the distinctive bubbles of each beverage brightening the outlook for the day ahead.

Black Velvet

• Guinness or other stout, chilled (but, really, Guinness)
• Brut champagne or other dry sparkling wine, chilled

Fill a champagne flute (fancy!) or a Collins glass (for more generous-size drinks) halfway with chilled champagne. Gently add the stout (careful, this can be a foamy production) to fill the glass. Give the whole thing a cautious stir, then proceed with the morning’s business.

That’s my suggestion for a decent drink to start the day — for more suggestions, head over to Cocktail Enthusiast to see what other folks recommend for morning drinks.

Tags: Drinks, Mixology Monday by Paul
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I’ve been sitting on this recipe for a while.

This drink initially caught my attention last winter, while working on the (aborted) 60/30 thingy in which I tried to revive my own interest in this blog by writing about a whole hell of a lot of stuff. Writing about 60 drinks in 30 days over the busy holiday season proved to be, well, a stupid idea — but this drink, that I was holding in reserve but never got around to posting? Pretty much the opposite of a stupid idea.

The Weissen Sour comes from Kevin Diedrich, late of the Burritt Room in San Francisco; the drink appeared on an early menu for the bar, and during the course of talking to Kevin about other stuff I was writing last fall, I asked if it’d be okay to run the recipe for this drink. Kevin’s moved on from Burritt Room now (heading to Jasper’s Corner Tap & Kitchen, according to Paolo Lucchesi), and considering the beer-forward nature of the new place, this drink that combines bourbon with brew seems particularly fitting.

(Fitting for what? Well, today is Mixology Monday, an online cocktail thingy that’s been going on for more than five years now — anyway, this month’s event is hosted by Fred at Cocktail Virgin Slut, and for July’s theme, Fred chose Beer Cocktails — so, now the whole thing hopefully makes sense.)

When you come right down to it, the Weissen Sour is an amazingly simple drink: just a basic whiskey sour with the tweak of adding orange marmalade (if you’re playing along with the name game, I suppose that’s a tour through the Omar Bradley with a tip of the hat to the Marmalade Cocktail, though now it’s getting complicated) and orange bitters, then tossing the thing in a highball glass (with ice? I neglected to ask Kevin, so I went for it, though in hindsight it might have worked better with crushed ice rather than big cubes), and finishing it with a punch of chilled weisse beer.

As anyone with an occasional (or frequent) boilermaker habit can tell you, bourbon loves the hell out of a cold, crisp beer, and as we head into mid-July, few beers are crisper or more appealing than a decent weisse. For this drink, I used Maker’s Mark (wheated bourbon, wheat beer…) and Ayinger Brau-Weisse for the beer. I’m not sure if I wound up trampling all over Kevin’s original recipe for the drink, but I’m pretty pleased with the result: the gently sweet fruitiness of the marmalade is a great bridge between the richness of the bourbon and the flowery aromatics of the beer, and the mixture is simple enough that you don’t feel anything is going over the top.

Weissen Sour
from Kevin Diedrich

• 2 ounces bourbon
• 3/4 ounce lemon juice
• 1 barspoon orange marmalade
• 2 dashes orange bitters
• chilled weisse beer
• small piece of lemon, for garnish

Combine everything except beer and garnish in a cocktail shaker; smush the marmalade around to help it dissolve in the liquid, then fill shaker with ice and do what comes natural. Strain into highball glass (I filled mine with ice, but give it a try without if the idea of pouring beer over ice skeeves you out), and top with chilled beer.

And that’ll get you through a warm July evening.

That’s what I’ve got for this round of Mixology Monday. Be sure to head over to Fred’s place and see what other drinks folks have come up with this month.

Tags: Bourbon, Drinks, Mixology Monday by Paul
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