It’s not an exaggeration to say that if it weren’t for Murray Stenson, my career, and my life, would be disappointingly different.

A longtime Seattle bartender — most recently at Canon, and for much of the decade before that, at Zig Zag Cafe — Murray first got in touch with me in the summer of 2005, when this blog was only a couple of months old and my readership numbered, maybe, five cocktail-centric individuals with questionable taste in Internet browsing. Murray had stumbled across my blog via a comment I’d left on Chuck Taggart’s site, and invited me to come down to Zig Zag to geek out a bit about cocktails.

I did, and we did, and really, nothing’s been the same for me since.

Type “Murray” in the search window to your right and several pages of results will come up, with good reason: in the more than seven years that have passed since our first encounter, I’ve sat across the bar from Murray Stenson more than I have any other individual bartender on earth. During that time, he taught me about cocktails and spirits and all the assorted mechanics of mixology, but more importantly, he taught me how all this stuff isn’t what really matters.

Over the years, as I sat on a barstool across from Murray, he might occasionally mention a drink I wrote about on this blog or, more frequently, would introduce me to an obscure oldie that I’d then run home and blog about. But the blog post Murray remarked about more than any other was one from 2006 that had absolutely nothing to do with cocktails and absolutely everything to do with those sparkling, magic moments that happen when friends, acquaintances and strangers are all together in the unique social environment of the bar.

Without Murray, this blog would be depressingly flat. Without Murray, my skill — and my career — as a drinks writer would be weaker. Without Murray, my Wednesday evenings — which for years were (and to a certain extent, still are) my regular nights at Zig Zag — wouldn’t have been one of the highlights of my weekly calendar; they would have been, well, Wednesdays — the blandest night of the week.

Over the years, Murray demonstrated his endless patience with me, not just by tolerating my incessant cocktail-geek questions, but by putting up with me as I started bugging him with questions for articles I was writing. I used Murray as a source many times — for Imbibe, for the San Francisco Chronicle, and probably for stories I’ve forgotten ever writing. Over time, I shoved him more into my journalistic spotlight, as I did in profiles of Murray for Imbibe and for Shake/Stir, and in an essay I wrote in 2009 for the New York Times.

This is all to say that Murray’s given me a lot. And if you’re at all interested in cocktails and bars — and really, why are reading this blog if you’re not? — then he’s given you a lot, too, because this story I’m sharing about how Murray’s influenced me can be echoed by dozens of bartenders, bloggers, cocktail enthusiasts and others who enjoy relaxing in a bar, not only in Seattle but around the world, as well.

Now, it’s time to give something back to Murray.

Here’s the scoop: Murray has a heart condition, and may require intensive surgery. As with bartenders everywhere, Murray doesn’t have medical insurance, and he’s unable to work while incapacitated with this condition. Evan Wallace, a longtime friend of Murray’s, set up a MurrayAid page on Facebook, where people like me and you (hint, hint) can make a donation via PayPal to help defray Murray’s medical expenses. UPDATE: There’s now a website for the coordinated efforts to help Murray: murrayaid.org. Also, donating directly through PayPal, as described on the website, ensures your full donation will go to help Murray, without Facebook taking a cut.

Here’s what you can do:

• Make a donation to MurrayAid. (duh)
• Help spread the word — Murray doesn’t use Twitter or Facebook, but you probably do, so inform everyone in your networks of this issue and point them toward the donation page.
• Cocktail bloggers: roll up your sleeves and write. Mix yourself a Last Word and post something on your blog about Murray — even if you haven’t dusted off your blog in months, break it out now and get your readers to donate.
• Bartenders & bar owners: consider hosting a benefit or having a special that will raise funds to help Murray. “Like” the MurrayAid page on Facebook and post details of your event there. There are already benefits planned at Zig Zag Cafe on November 4 and at Paratii Craft Bar in Ballard on October 27 & 28, and those are only the events I know of right now — get on board, and make sure the word gets out. UPDATE: If you’d like to host an event, please coordinate with Jamie Boudreau from Canon in Seattle — an organized effort is a more effective effort. Jamie can be reached at drink[at]canonseattle{dot}com.

Murray’s done so much for the cocktail community over the years, and as I blathered above, he’s done a lot for me. Let’s help him out in this time of need.

Tags: General by Paul
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Drinks aren’t something you should get too sentimental about. Tastes change, products come and go, and that bright-pink thing you couldn’t get enough of last summer is now considered a punch line in every bar in town. Change happens, and over the past century change has happened in the drinks world more rapidly than ever. But as our cocktail books and iPhone apps have grown bloated with thousands of recipes, patterns have emerged, families have been formed, and it’s become clear that on some level we’re still drinking the same things as before.

I posted about this earlier this week over at Serious Eats, but to follow up here (since I’m rediscovering this blogging thing again): my cover story in the May/June issue of Imbibe is, “The 25 Most Influential Cocktails of the Past Century,” covering drinks created (mostly) since 1910 that, in some way, have left a notable mark on the way we drink, whether that’s in the form of descendents and variations, or in the way bartenders and drinkers think about drink composition and ingredients, or in the lingering (or now defunct) trends a particular drink may have influenced. The list was initially chosen by myself, was vetted through the good folks at Imbibe to argue out the details, and was given further review by Greg Boehm, one of the most knowledgeable and history-oriented cocktail geeks on the planet.

The 100-year cutoff was admittedly arbitrary, but it posed its own set of challenges: by requiring the drinks on the list to have been created (or, in the many cases when it’s nigh impossible to settle on a particular cocktail’s date of genesis, to have entered broad circulation) after 1910, this eliminated some of the biggest and most obvious influences in the mixological canon: the Manhattan, the Daiquiri, the Martinez, the Old Fashioned and the Sazerac, and that whole world of punch. The Martini got a pass because it was still developing in the first decade of the 20^th century and the mix of gin and dry vermouth didn’t obtain the “Martini” sobriquet until sometime around that first decade, but also because the Martini evolved so significantly over the course of the century that the drink ordered by the Don Drapers of the 1960s was markedly different from the Hoffman House variations that were in early circulation. Likewise, who the hell knows when the first Cuba Libre or Caipirinha was mixed? Without a precise birthdate, I tried to track down some of the earliest mentions of such drinks to see when they started appearing in (primarily American and/or European) bars, and each of these fell after the 1910 mark; there may be further proof about the earlier origins of these drinks, but if it’s out there, I didn’t find it.

The folks over at Serious Eats have gone to town in commenting on this list, suggesting their own most influential drinks of the past century, with some straying widely from the mark (an 1860 Martini? I don’t think so) and others making a good case for why one drink and not another should be on the list. Surprisingly, however, I’ve only received one e-mail regarding my selection of drinks, from which I’ll quote directly:

The 25 cocktails article is BAD, no worst than bad, it sucks and a kiss up to the small based fans of Paul Clarke (who ever the hell he is, another wanabee who has done nothing but have a lousy web site) How long has he been in this business? Has he heard of the Rusty Nail […] The Manhattan? Fuzzy Navel? and many more. Never heard of the Red Hook, Last Word or Saunders’ Gin-Gin Mule. I checked with other Bars and Bartenders who have been in the business for over 15 years, neither have they ! PLEASE I know everyone has his opinion. His sucks.

What do you think? (Really, even if you hated the story your comment can’t be more harsh than that, so don’t even try.) What drinks do you think deserve a place on this list, and which ones do you disagree with altogether? There’s an argument for the inclusion of each drink on the list, which I’m happy to share if asked (nicely — seriously, I’m done with the ill behavior the Internet seems to invite, and if you’re an asshole about something, your comment will be politely jettisoned and your existence on this earth denied).

And since the whole article isn’t posted online, and linking back to the magazine’s site earned me accusations of “whoring the magazine” over at Serious Eats, I’ll post the list here, arranged, as it is in the magazine, roughly by decade — but if you want a freebie on all the text and recipes, you’re just gonna have to wait for the PDF, cheapskate.

1. Dry Martini
2. Cuba Libre
3. Mojito
4. Alexander
5. Singapore Sling
6. Aviation
7. Sidecar
8. Margarita
9. Bloody Mary
10. Negroni
11. Last Word
12. Zombie
13. Bellini
14. Mai Tai
15. Moscow Mule
16. Irish Coffee
17. Kangaroo
18. Caipirinha
19. Harvey Wallbanger
20. Pina Colada
21. Long Island Iced Tea
22. B-52
23. Cosmopolitan
24. Gin-Gin Mule
25. Red Hook

Tags: General by Paul
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Five years ago, more or less – not surprisingly, I’m running a few days behind on getting this post together – in a moment sparked almost equally by inspiration and boredom, I created a Blogspot account, typed up my musings on David Wondrich’s then-latest book (Killer Cocktails, at the time), and posted it online to be read by … well, mainly just me.

Now, having just reached the fifth anniversary of what became The Cocktail Chronicles, I have a mixed bag of results: hundreds of posts, scores of drink recipes, a daily readership that’s ranged from one to several thousand, more media attention than I deserve, about $4.50 in advertising revenue and a full-time writing career that owes quite a bit to this blog.

Five years in, I also have a dwindling enthusiasm for spending my free time doing much the same thing I do in my work life, almost no patience for the pubic lice of the Internet who seem to visit blogs looking only for items that will incense them into posting hateful comments, a fatigue with the incessant barrage of press releases pushing new types of booze that would be grossly out of place on this blog, and a lingering sense of guilt that I haven’t blogged about the countless ideas, suggestions, samples, people and experiences that I’ve come across during the half-decade I’ve been running The Cocktail Chronicles.

Five is a milestone year; if it were a child, my blog would be losing its baby teeth and asserting greater independence about now, and indeed there are times when The Cocktail Chronicles feels like a creature distinct from me, something that for a long time has been an outgrowth of my interests and my personality, but which now – due primarily to the time and effort required to keep up such an operation, coupled with my fatigue at doing the same – feels out of sync with what I’m really thinking and doing.

I’ll spare you the full extent of my bloggy navel-gazing, but suffice it to say that as this blog’s fifth anniversary approached, among the options I considered for its observation was the decision to whack it entirely. One day, it would be there, with the recipes for cutting-edge drinks I blogged about back in 2006 or 2007 that are now ubiquitous and even dated; and the next, like Paul Harrington’s belated cocktail section on Wired, The Cocktail Chronicles would be dissembled, its components scuttled into the dark depths of Internet oblivion. The idea of blogicide had a morbid allure, but ultimately – whether it’s because I still see value in the idea of maintaining the blog, or because I simply don’t know when to shut up – it’s an option I cast aside.

Anyway – enough with the Tim Burton-style necrodynamics. The Cocktail Chronicles is still here, it’s five years old (which in blog years is somewhere around 112) – whoopee! I haven’t forgotten my login password and I still drink more kickass drinks than I can reasonably expect to type up during my free time, so I’ll keep the old girl running for a while longer yet just to see where it may take us all.

Thanks for coming along these past five years, or however long you’ve been visiting the site. I’m not sure I can promise five more, but I have at least a few more good rounds left in me. Cheers.

Tags: General by Paul
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For the third time this year, Mixology Monday is being hosted by a Seattle bartender with a blog — and for May’s event (which takes place May 24), it’s Andrew Bohrer at Caskstrength who’s up to bat, and Andrew has selected Tom Waits as the theme.

I know, it stumped me too, at first.

But hey, we’re four years into Mixology Monday, and we’ve already hit most of the obvious drink inspirations, so a MxMo devoted to the bard of booze isn’t too far-fetched. As Andrew writes in his announcement post,

Let the bawdy, lovely, peculiar and obvious late night life inspire you to tell a favorite drinking tale while listening to, or being inspired by Tom Waits. Waits 40 years of drinking tunes to choose from.

In other words, while this MxMo is about drink, as always, it’s about much more — it’s about your favorite drinking stories, and the places and people that define your late, hazy nights, past or present. Even if you’re not a Waits fan and have no interest in his music — yes, I’ve heard such people exist — if you’re reading this blog then you likely have spent your fair share of nights on a bar stool. Let’s hear about one of your favorites.

To participate, have your post up on your blog by Monday, May 24; be sure to let Andrew know you participated by leaving a comment on his announcement post, and don’t forget to link back to the Mixology Monday site and Andrew’s site while you’re at it. Cheers–

Tags: General by Paul
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In the yellowing, broken-spine bible of classic cocktails, there are drinks I’ve come back to repeatedly over the years, both to savor for their enduring deliciousness and to appreciate as totems, mixing them from time to time if for no other reason than to remind myself of the fine use of mixological engineering that led to their creation.

The Singapore Sling is not one of those drinks.

It’s safe to say I’ve mixed up fewer than ten of the slings in my lifetime, and that’s with some wiggle room built in. The Singapore Sling always seemed a dismal failure of a drink to me, an unruly mixture of – well, who knows? It’s not like one baseline recipe has been settled on in the almost century of the drink’s existence. But before I get into my rant any further, a little background—

It’s generally acknowledged that the Singapore Sling originated at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore in 1915, and that the drink included gin, cherry brandy and Benedictine. After those scant details, things start to fall apart; the original recipe is believed lost, and the “official” recipe now in use at Raffles Hotel reportedly leaves a great deal to be desired. In the vacuum left by the absence of the original recipe, all sorts of combinations arose; some call for dry cherry brandy in place of the more frequent use of Cherry Heering, and other variations call for the inclusion of pineapple juice and grenadine, while still others are more sparely pared down to assorted ratios of the three base ingredients, with the addition of club soda as a final shrug in the matter.

Anyway, I won’t go into the full details regarding the drink’s history and preparation, and here’s why: it’s a pain in the ass to figure out the “right” way to make a Singapore Sling. And by “right” I don’t necessarily mean the “most authentic” way – because sometimes with these age-old cocktails, authenticity sucks. By “right” I mean finding the most flavorful and pleasing way to make the drink, while still hewing to some generally recognized construction of the drink’s composition (my reasoning being, if you stray too far from the “original” or “generally recognized” recipe – let’s not get too caught up in semantics here, that’s more of where the “pain in the ass” factor comes into play – then at some point you’re drinking a different drink; perhaps an utterly delicious drink, but different nonetheless).

In order to get to this “right” recipe, I invariably wind up wandering the halls of the Internet (by the way, George Sinclair has an excellent writeup on the Singapore Sling that goes into all the detail I’m avoiding with this post; I’d suggest everyone read it, along with Ted Haigh’s thorough and entirely entertaining review of the Singapore Sling literature from 2005) and flipping once more through the pages of a dozen cocktail guides, each with different variations of what a Singapore Sling should be. Eventually – a point that’s coming sooner and sooner nowadays – I say “the hell with it” and just mix a Manhattan, or something that takes a little less time and energy when I feel like just having a drink.

So, my Singapore Sling explorations have been few, and most of them have been scuttled after the first try because – well, the drink variation I tried just wasn’t very good, to be honest, and I was getting fed up with poking through the variations of a drink that I’d come to believe just wasn’t suited to my taste.

That’s where Beachbum Berry Remixed comes in. I was paging through Jeff Berry’s new book a couple of weeks ago, and noticed that he had three recipes for the Singapore Sling, along with another valuable historical brief of the drink. The recipes represent a couple of different schools of Singapore Sling-ology, but best of all, for one of the recipes (that appeared in a letter to Gourmet magazine sometime in the mid-20^th century), the Bum gives the kind of guidance I so desperately needed: “While there’s no proof that this ‘corrected’ recipe is definitive either, it tastes better to us than any other version we’ve tried – and we’ve tried ‘em all.”

Well, holy hell – questionable authenticity be damned, the Bum says this drink tastes good and it has the gin/cherry/Benedictine hallmarks of a Singapore Sling (plus a couple of other things that may or may not be authentic, but they taste good so what the hell), so let’s give it a shot and see if there’s any gas left in the old girl’s engine.

Singapore Sling (~1950s)
From Beachbum Berry Remixed

• 2 ounces gin
• 1/2 ounce brandy
• 1 ounce Cherry Heering
• 1/2 ounce Benedictine
• 1 ounce fresh lime juice
• 1 1/2 ounces (or more) club soda

Add everything except soda to a cocktail shaker and fill with ice. Shake well and strain into a tall glass. Stir in soda, add fresh ice to fill; garnish with an orange wedge and a mint sprig.

First things first: no, I didn’t photograph it. Surprised? Don’t be – take a look around this bare-bones blog, for chrissakes. And secondly: allow me to reintroduce myself to you as a Singapore Sling convert – this thing’s freakin’ delicious, much better than the other variations I’ve tried over the years.

A pain in the ass to settle on a recipe worth mixing? You don’t know the half of it – I’ve been feeling insulted by this drink for the better part of a decade. Satisfied that this version works out? Hell yes – and proof that sometimes waiting around for a solution to present itself is the best approach of all.

Anyway, that’s my take on “Pain in the Ass Drinks”, coincidentally the theme of this month’s Mixology Monday, hosted by Mike McSorley at McSology. Head on over to Mike’s place to see what other totally frustrating, annoying drinks came up over the course of this month’s event.

Tags: General by Paul
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