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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This could be the summer for pisco.

I’ve been hearing for years about how the revival of this South American spirit was right around the corner — about how pisco and cachaca (which is also made in South America, but beyond the matter of geography and color has pretty much nothing in common with pisco) are ascendant and just waiting for their breakthrough moment. And I look, and I wait, and…well, I can’t say “nothing” because that’s not the case, but for an alleged revival, it’s certainly been slow to come about.

But really, this time it could happen, and it might be happening now.

Consider: six or so years ago, when I purchased my first-ever bottle of pisco, there were maybe three brands in the Seattle liquor store I visited (two, if you discount the one in the goofy novelty bottle), and those were all Chilean. Nothing against Chilean pisco, mind you, but the bottle I bought (and the others I subsequently tried) were, well, lackluster. So unimpressive, in fact, that I still have that damn bottle of pisco, somewhere at the back of the liquor cabinet, about three-quarters full and gathering dust.

But now, pisco’s popping up everywhere, and this time it’s not just mediocre brands that are coming into the store. Campo de Encanto, which is coming this way from Peru via San Francisco, is easily one of the very best piscos I’ve tried (and during a visit to Lima in February, I tried way more than my fair share), and other very good Peruvian piscos are popping up in bars and liquor stores right now, and — by not being crap, and not costing $40 a bottle — they’re convincing bartenders and cocktail geeks to actually try playing around with the stuff, breaking out some old classics as well as experimenting with new pisco cocktails.

So, as I said, maybe this summer is it.

Since tomorrow is the first day of summer (and today is Mixology Monday, hosted by Filip at Adventures in Cocktails, with the theme of “Niche Spirits,” which is a realm pisco falls into here in the U.S.), here’s a pisco cocktail that’s especially alluring: the Pisco Bell-Ringer.

I’ve tried this drink before, with the aforementioned crappy pisco, so I’m especially relieved now to mix it again with a decent representative of the pisco class. As Dave Wondrich notes in Esquire Drinks (and on the website), this little ditty goes back to 1903, when it appeared in Jim Maloney’s How to Mix Drinks. While there are Bell-Ringer drinks (defined, apparently, as drinks served in a glass rinsed with apricot brandy) in Maloney’s 1900 book, The 20^th Century Guide for Mixing Fancy Drinks, pisco didn’t make the cut in that round. That’s unfortunate; pisco and apricot are absolutely bonkers for each other, with the round, flowery richness of pisco providing a perfect platform for the lush fruitiness of apricot liqueur; really, everything else in the drink just keeps it in balance so these two flavors-in-love can go at it like rutting weasels.

A version of this drink made its way onto the cocktail menu at Clover Club a while back, and that came out in Dale DeGroff’s The Essential Cocktail; in this version, Julie Reiner tinkered with the formula slightly, adding an egg white and tweaking the bitters approach while adding an extra half-ounce of aged rum, which gives a little vanilla-ey woodiness to the mix; it’s nice, certainly, but for tonight I’ll stick with the earlier formulation (with one caveat: I’m bumping up the lemon and simple syrup, for a little better sour/sweet balance) rather than distract the pisco and apricot from their flavorful amore.

Pisco Bell-Ringer
(adapted from Wondrich’s Esquire Drinks)

• 2 ounces pisco (I used Campo de Encanto acholado – stick with Peruvian for this mix)
• 1/2 ounce lemon juice
• 1/2 ounce simple syrup
• 2 dashes orange bitters
• 2 dashes Peychaud’s bitters
• Rinse of apricot liqueur

Combine everything except apricot liqueur in a cocktail shaker and fill with ice. Shake well until chilled, about 10 seconds. Strain into chilled cocktail glass that’s been rinsed with apricot liqueur. Garnish with lemon wheel.

Mmmm, pisco. C’mon, summer of 2011, let’s see what we can do with this stuff.

That’s my drink for this Mixology Monday; be sure to head over to Filip’s place to see what everyone else has been up to.

Tags: Brandy, Drinks, Mixology Monday by Paul
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The world needs more Chartreuse-based drinks.

True, the French herbal liqueur is splashed about a bit too liberally nowadays; so many ambitious bartenders and home mixologists handle Chartreuse much the way they once did St. Germain, pouring it into more cocktails than they should while seeking to give their bespoke drinks what they hope is the Last Word kind of treatment.

But you can’t blame Chartreuse for its current overexposure, and the cocktail world would be a lesser place without drinks like the Diamondback or the Pago Pago Cocktail, to say nothing of the extraordinarily tasty Chartreuse Swizzle, in which Marco Dionysos built a drink around the liqueur’s robust herbaceousness, matching it with the tropical brightness of pineapple and the sweetness and spice of falernum.

I first read about the Beuser & Angus Special a couple of years ago, on Jay Hepburn’s Oh Gosh blog (and if you want to see a lovely photo of this drink in action, click on that link — my lackluster skills as a photographer have doomed this drink tonight, and besides, Jay’s photos always look so delicious). Developed by German bartender Goncalo de Sousa Monteiro, and named for Traveling Mixologists Bastian Heuser and Angus Winchester, the drink is, like the Chartreuse Swizzle, built on a powerful foundation of green Chartreuse. While a liqueur, green Chartreuse is remarkably dry (owing in part to its whopping 120-proof potency, as well as to its botanical blend); combined with fresh lime juice, the mix needs a counterbalance of sweetness, which comes from maraschino liqueur (right now you’ve got three-quarters of a Last Word, though in different proportions) and a touch of simple syrup. Fresh egg white lightens what could otherwise be an assertively heavy mixture, and when topped with orange flower water, the finished drink has aromatics that wave their wispy fingers at you from across the room.

Between the herbal green Chartreuse and the orange flower water, the drink has a distinctly floral element – making it appropriate for this month’s floral-themed Mixology Monday, hosted by Dave at The Barman Cometh. Here’s my contribution to the online cocktail party; head on over to Dave’s place to see what others have come up with.

Beuser & Angus Special

• 1 3/4 ounce green Chartreuse
• 3/4 ounce lime juice
• 1/2 ounce maraschino liqueur
• 1/2 tsp. sugar
• 1 egg white
• 5 dashes orange flower water

Combine everything except OFW in a cocktail shaker and shake well, without ice, until drink is well mixed and foamy. Add ice and shake again until chilled, about 10 seconds. Strain into double old-fashioned glass filled with crushed ice. Dash OFW atop drink.

Tags: Drinks, Mixology Monday by Paul
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