It’s been a long, busy summer of mostly ignoring this blog, and if left to my own devices I’d likely let the radio silence continue until well after Labor Day. But in response to several inquiries and gentle nudges following the last round of Mixology Monday — a theoretically monthly event that last took place in May — I once again donned my blogging beanie and found a host (or nine) for upcoming events, the first of which is today (at least it’s still today for another half hour or so).

When I put out the call for hosts via Twitter (I’m @cocktailchron, in case you’re wondering), I wasn’t surprised that the first offer came from Lindsey Johnson, who in her day job — if that’s the right term for it — works with the spirits industry as the maven behind Lush Life Productions, and who keeps her social media street cred by not only being a tireless Tweeter (sorry — usually I avoid such new-media lingo, but my amour for alliteration won out) and by participating in social-media focused panel discussions such as the one she joined me on last month at Tales of the Cocktail, but by also publishing the blog, Brown, Bitter and Stirred — which, as luck would have it, is the theme for this month’s MxMo.

While it’s still August, autumn seems to be creeping in early here in the Pacific Northwest, and dark, boozy drinks laced with a little elaborate Italian liqueur are perfectly suited to the next 10 months of mostly unbroken gray. Here’s a drink I was introduced to last fall that I wrote up for the San Francisco Chronicle earlier this year: the Bitter Maestro.

The Bitter Maestro is from Brooke Arthur, who was then at Range and now helms the bar at Prospect in San Francisco. I swung by Range last October on the night before Whiskyfest, to say hi to Brooke and to spend a little time at Range’s small, comfortable bar. With practically no direction from me, Brooke brought over the three things I needed most at 9 o’clock on a Thursday evening: salad, ice cream and a cocktail built on a base of cask-strength whiskey.

Brooke said that the Bitter Maestro was related to a drink from John Deragon at PDT, and while the stump-blaster she poured me had a base of 140-plus-proof Thomas Handy Rye, it also works well with something of a more modest (though still mighty) octane, such as Rittenhouse bonded or Russell’s Reserve Rye. Playing off this spicy base is a small pour of applejack (though Laird’s bonded apple brandy works well, especially if you have a higher-proof rye in the mix), with a little mellowing from Dubonnet rouge and the bitter angle provided by a half-ounce of Amaro Nonino.

In the realm of bitter liqueurs, Nonino is a bit of a pussycat along the lines of Averna, as compared to the rough-trade bitterness found in stuff like Unicum or Fernet Branca, and Nonino’s gentle nip of bitter is a nice counterpoint to the roar of the rye. For a change of pace and to bump up the bitterness a tad, I’ve tried the Maestro with Bonal Gentiane-Quina substituted for the Dubonnet; it dries out the drink a little more (though it doesn’t need it), and gives it a little more back-palate action for those times when the mood takes you there.

Anyway, thanks to Brooke for introducing me to this drink and for sharing the recipe.

Bitter Maestro

• 1 1/2 ounces rye whiskey (go for higher proof)
• 1/2 ounce applejack or apple brandy
• 1/2 ounce Dubonnet rouge
• 1/2 ounce Amaro Nonino
• 1 dash pomegranate concentrate or grenadine

Combine in a mixing glass and fill with ice; stir well and strain into chilled cocktail glass. Twist a bit o’ lemon peel over the drink and discard, and garnish with a few pomegranate seeds.

Want to see what everyone else has been up to for Mixology Monday? Head over to Lindsey’s place and check out the submissions.

Tags: Applejack, Drinks, Mixology Monday, Rye by Paul
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In the early 1990s, when I was young and indestructible, on Thursday nights — and occasionally Wednesdays, and Tuesdays, sometimes on Fridays if we had a big enough group to take over the tables in the back but never, ever on Saturdays, when the weekend assholes were given rights to the place — it was my habit to visit, with a friend or ten, a bar called Milano’s, on East Houston Street in New York City.

I haven’t set foot in the place since I moved to Seattle in 1998, but a quick Google informs me that Milano’s is still in existence, and a brief glimpse at Yelp turns up two recent reviews with the lines, “Cheap Beer, Good Juke box, you don’t have to put the toilet seat down when you’re done,” and “I love seeing the old, old man in the corner getting his rocks glass refilled with Jack over and over in a period of 30 minutes, and still not stumbling out the door,” which in the absence of additional information makes me believe the place hasn’t changed much since my last round at the narrow, then-smoky bar.

As I’ve written before, both here and over at the NY Times’ Proof blog, Milano’s played a major role in my formative drinking years. It was never the kind of place you wanted to start out the evening — unless you were willing to let that evening take a very weird turn — but I finished up countless nights there, many of them bleeding into morning, with the dim light coming up over the East River as we staggered out trailing cigarette smoke and beer fumes and cursing whoever first suggested hitting the bar on a weeknight.

It also wasn’t (and presumably still isn’t) a place where you ordered a cocktail — at least, nothing more ambitious than a Jack and Coke. This was fine by me at the time — aside from the occasional glass of bourbon or scotch, I was primarily a beer drinker back then, and when ordering my first pint at the bar I basically had two choices for where to take the evening: Bass or Guinness. Usually, Bass won out, if for no other reason than that it’s possible to drink a lot it without feeling like you just swallowed an iron stove, but on some nights only the bracing rigor of stout would do, sometimes — but not often — with a backup of Jim Beam in case it was someone’s birthday or they’d just quit their job (whether voluntarily or not) or there was some other reason for celebration and/or just extra drinking. It wasn’t fancy, but it was beer and whiskey; throw in the Holy Ghost and you’ve got yourself a trinity, and a full-blown religion can’t be far behind.

Today isn’t my birthday, and it’s been more than two years since I quit my job, but we do have something to celebrate, kind of: it’s Mixology Monday, this time hosted by Andrew Bohrer over at Caskstrength. Andrew came up with possibly the most challenging MxMo theme we’ve had in the four years of running the event: instead of picking a type of spirit, or a particular flavor, or some kind of conceptual edge for the event, Andrew picked a person – and not just any person; no, Andrew is basing this month’s event on the patron bard of booze and smokes (who, ironically or actually not so much when you really think about it, swore off the stuff almost 20 years ago): Tom Waits.

You can read Andrew’s reasoning behind the concept over at his site, but I was first turned onto Tom Waits’ music about a month after my 21st birthday, so I’ve been an ardent fan of his raspy weirdness for pretty much all of my legal drinking life. As far as I can recall from my time there in the ‘90s, Milano’s never had any of Waits’ music on the jukebox — it was much more a Sinatra and Pogues kind of place, and given the fly-in-amber quality of the best dive bars, those same songs are presumably blasting over the bar’s speakers right now. But at the bar, while sitting next to the 70-year-old guy who was there every fucking night from 5pm until the 4am close, grinning at every pretty woman who walked by and occasionally knocking over his barstool while getting into a shuffling pretense of a fistfight with the 80-year-old guy sitting on the other side of him, you were pretty much sitting inside a Waits song from his boozy era in the ‘70s.

Tom Waits doesn’t drink anymore, and I’m not sure how he’d feel about this little online cocktail event that’s taking place in his honor, but part of the event is to come up with a drink suitable for the theme, so here’s mine: Grapefruit Moon. Named for a maudlin bawler on Waits’ first album (titled, appropriately, Closing Time), the drink was kind of a bitch to come up with, and here’s why: the concept of anything as fussy as a cocktail seems grossly out of place with so much of the sentiment found in Waits’ music, especially the early, boozy stuff. But, this is the gig, so I set a few ground rules for myself: first, my drink had to have some bearing on my own dive-bar experiences as noted above, for it to have some personal connection; and second, the drink can’t be too complex or have anything you wouldn’t reasonably find in a basic bar (or, as backup, something you’d be able to buy in a neighboring 24-hour deli).

I started off working with the two basic things I drank way back then: beer and bourbon. Bass was tempting, but ultimately stout won out as an accompaniment to the whiskey. Then there was the name: Grapefruit Moon has been a regular on my CD player and iPod for around 15 years; add to that its sense of barroom presence, plus it has a fucking drink ingredient in the name, and I needed no further rationale to justify grabbing that as a name, provided I could factor grapefruit into the combination somehow (and any bar that can put together a Salty Dog is gonna have a can of grapefruit juice around somewhere).

Interestingly (to me, at least), coming up with the final recipe was easier than I thought: bourbon and stout are natural friends, and grapefruit matches with bourbon in the Brown Derby (named after the former bar and restaurant in L.A., which also kind of makes sense for this whole Tom Waits theme, kind of). Sticking closely to the “ingredients you’d find in a basic bar” idea, I initially just dribbled in a little sugar to sweeten the mix; stepping away from that concept just a tiny bit, I found the drink works somewhat better if you use a barspoon or so of maple syrup — not a common ingredient, I grant you, but it gives the drink that Nighthawks at the Diner eggs-and-bacon connection that I’m going to stick with for now (plus, to hark back to my old Milano’s reference, there’s a 24-hour deli on the corner; if it comes down to it, just grab a bottle of Log Cabin off the shelf the next time you step out for a smoke and bring it back with you). Toss everything on top of some crushed ice (or, realistically, that mushy bar ice) in a beer glass and you’re golden.

Grapefruit Moon

• 1 1/2 ounces bourbon
• 1 1/2 ounces grapefruit juice
• 1 barspoon simple syrup or maple syrup (to taste, depending on the brand of stout you use)
• 2-3 ounces chilled stout

Mix bourbon, grapefruit and sweetener in a shaker. Shake well with ice and strain into a pilsner glass or tall beer glass filled with crushed ice. Top with chilled stout.

Surprisingly, this is a pretty damn good drink – I’ll even mix this after MxMo is over. Now head on over to Andrew’s site and see what other drinks and stories people came up with for this round of Mixology Monday.

Tags: Bourbon, Drinks, Mixology Monday by Paul
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Time is fickle in its tastes. Consider the dishes that were once common, but now seem old-timey or downright gross to many contemporary eaters: tongue sandwiches, liver and onions, pickled pig’s feet. Each has, at one time, enjoyed a certain degree of appeal in America’s culinary history, and in some circles today they still seem pretty tasty, but at some point each of these dishes devolved from commonplace food item to relative oddity, due to nothing more than the constant shift of popular taste (in particular the “ick” factor).

Punch has a role in here somewhere, but unlike things like head cheese or grilled kidneys, there’s little “ick” factor that comes into play. The precursor to the cocktail and the relic of a time when drinks were typically mixed for a crowd, punch – and by this of course I mean real, true, boozy punch – mostly fell off the cultural radar at some point in the mid- to late-1800s. This onetime champion of the sideboard became relegated to the status of a party clown, trotted out on holidays and special occasions to entertain the easily amused and to distract from the host’s meltdown over a dozen party-planning catastrophes.

But today is Mixology Monday, and our host at Hobson’s Choice has chosen “Punch” as the theme. This is fortunate, as punch is on something of an upswing, due in no small part to the efforts of David Wondrich, whose upcoming book drinks deep of the flowing bowl. Since Dr. Wondrich has played such a significant role in turning a new generation onto the wonders of punch, I thought I’d nab a recipe he wrote up recently for my entry for this month’s MxMo.

I really wish I had more details about the Gowanus Club Gin Punch, but sadly I cribbed the recipe from the now-defunct Gourmet magazine (the August 2009 issue, to be exact), and Conde Nast apparently hasn’t seen the value in putting Wondrich’s original article on one of their related websites. (Sad, also, is the fact that I’m heavily jet-lagged right now so there’s no way in hell I have the energy to start digging through every drink book on my shelf in pursuit of details on the Gowanus Club).

So, let’s skip the history and get right down to it: based on Plymouth gin and lent a delicate, ethereal character through the use of green tea, yellow Chartreuse, pineapple syrup and muddled lemon zest, the Gowanus Club Gin Punch is light and lively enough for an early Spring party (or a late Summer bash, for that matter), but has enough pizzoom to keep it from being mistaken for one of those 7-Up and orange sherbet concoctions that used to be considered punch back when my parents hosted faculty parties in the ‘70s. I mixed a bowl of this not too long ago for a party where I was tending bar, and the richness of flavor was enough to inspire tolerance, if not love, in the hearts of dedicated gin-haters.

The Gowanus Club Gin Punch is kind of a pain to make, but this should be true for anything you serve by the bowl. Take note of the recipe and break it out the next time you have a group coming by; there’s a little something in there for every drinker in your orbit.

Gowanus Club Gin Punch

Pineapple syrup:

Combine 2 pounds demerara sugar in one pint of water in a saucepan over medium heat. Whisk until completely dissolved and syrup just comes to a boil. Let cool, then pour into a bowl with the flesh from one cleaned, cored and chopped fresh pineapple. Let soak for around 24 hours, then strain through cheesecloth, squeezing gently to extract the bits of pineapple-ey goodness.

Punch base:

Prepare a weak green tea by covering three tea bags with one quart near-boiling water. Let steep for three minutes, then remove tea bags.

In a non-reactive mixing bowl, place the thin-cut peels of three lemons with two ounces superfine sugar. Muddle vigorously with a wooden muddler until the mixture forms a fragrant yellow paste; let sit for one hour.

Add one cup of fresh lemon juice to the bowl and whisk to dissolve the sugar. Add:

• 1/2 cup pineapple syrup (as above)
• One ounce yellow Chartreuse
• One liter Plymouth gin
• One quart weak green tea

Stir well and remove lemon peels; place in refrigerator and let cool for at least one hour.

To serve, fill a large punch bowl halfway with ice (or use decorative ice mold). Add punch base, along with one liter chilled club soda. Garnish with fresh mint.

Unfortunately I neglected to take a photo of this punch the last time I prepared a bowl; hopefully this month’s other Mixology Monday participants are less lame than I am. Head over to Hobson’s Choice to see all the entries for this month.

Tags: Drinks, Gin, Mixology Monday by Paul
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Hot on the heels of one of the most well-attended Mixology Mondays yet, the March round of MxMo could be even bigger. Hosting the March round (that’s Mixology Monday #47 if you’re counting) is Mike at Hobson’s Choice, and for this round Mike has chosen Punch as the theme. Here’s how Mike suggests participants approach the topic:

There aren’t really any specific limitations on this month’s subject. I emailed David Wondrich to ask if he had any pearls of wisdom for us as we take on the punch challenge. This was his response: “The thing I like to keep in mind while making Punch is that it is, as the London Physician Nicholas Falck defined it in 1779, ‘an extemporary kind of wine.’ It is not, in other words, simply a large cocktail. Like wine, it should be balanced, not too pungent, not too strong, and preferably not decked out in all sorts of gaudy frippery like something participating in the retail sex trade.”

Keep in mind that we are at that time of year when there are some wonderful citrus varieties available at the market. And in the warmer climates, we are already seeing the first of the Spring berries.

Those of you who are friendly with the bartender at your favorite punch-serving watering hole, it would be great if you could get him or her to share the house recipe. If there is something your family has been serving at parties for generations, go with that. Let’s have some fun with this and see how many different recipes we can find.

Once you have settled on a recipe, make the punch and then post the recipe, a photo, and your thoughts about the punch on your blog or on the eGullet Spirits and Cocktails forum.

Include in your post the MxMo logo and a link back to Mixology Monday and this [original announcement] post. (And once the round-up is published, it would be great if you could update your post with a link to that summary post.)

Good lord — “punch” as the theme. With all the ways this can be approached, and with all the crazy delicious fun that can be had with punch, this month’s MxMo could be one for the ages.

To participate, simply have your recipe (and photos, hopefully) posted on your blog or at eGullet by the close of March 22, as described by Mike, above. Be sure to let him know that you’re participating by dropping a note and link in the comment section to the announcement post, or by e-mailing Mike at hobsonschoiceinfo at gmail dot com.

Tags: Mixology Monday by Paul
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Way back in aught-six, when I first posed the notion of this regular little drinkfest we call Mixology Monday, the first theme picked for the event was pastis. Why pastis? Because that lovely anise flavor that so many have such a love/hate thing for is called for in countless classic cocktails – not that you frequently, or ever, see the word “pastis” in a vintage bar guide like George Kappeler’s Modern American Drinks or Harry Johnson’s Bartender’s Guide. No, in those books and others of their vintage, you’ll see the flavor called for as “absinthe”, the precursor to pastis and, some would argue, a vastly preferable ingredient.

But back to that first MxMo round: in 2006, absinthe wasn’t available in the U.S., or much of the world for that matter, unless you made your credit card weep by ordering a bottle from France – don’t get me started on the whole Czech thing – or if you cobbled together an alembic in your kitchen and set to work on your own. But here we are in 2010, and this month’s Mixology Monday theme is absinthe (hosted by Sonja at Thinking of Drinking, who ironically did put together a still and make her own), which can now be purchased at most well-stocked liquor stores all across the country.

Folks, please: a quick toast to the times we live in.

As I’ve mentioned at least a couple of times in the past, absinthe has a rich history as a cocktail ingredient. From the enrapturing flavors of absinthe-heavy drinks such as the absinthe cocktail or absinthe frappe, to the use of absinthe’s potent character as a punctuation mark in drinks such as the Morning Glory or the Cocktail a la Louisiane, absinthe can push a cocktail from mundane to superstar faster than just about any other ingredient in the liquor cabinet.

Here’s one example: the Modern Cocktail. I fetched this recipe out of Modern American Drinks, by Hugo Ensslin, published in 1917 (not saying that’s the first appearance of it, because I haven’t bothered to look – but while browsing through Ensslin this weekend I saw the recipe and started feeling thirsty). I’d come across this (or similar) recipes before; while the recipe listed in Ensslin takes the tack of older, spirit-forward drinks such as the Improved Gin Cocktail and the Police Gazette Cocktail, in which the base spirit (scotch whisky, in the case of the Modern – I used Famous Grouse) is lightly adorned with dashes of other ingredients, other recipes for the Modern have amped up the ancillary ingredients to teaspoons and quarter ounces. While I certainly see the reason for doing this in some cocktails, when such a powerfully flavored spirit as absinthe is among the list of ingredients, the effect is akin to playing piano with a sledgehammer – it’s just too much of a flavor bonanza for the cocktail to handle while remaining palatable.

When made with a light touch of absinthe, orange bitters, lemon juice and Jamaica rum (I used Smith & Cross, which you should, as well, due to its extra oomph of rangy flavor), these ingredients sooth the sometimes surly attitude scotch takes on when it enters a mixing glass. In a dash, the absinthe isn’t obvious to the drink – there are no fingers of anise aroma creeping out of the glass, and the dense flavor of absinthe doesn’t sock you in the gut when you sip the cocktail. Clearly I need to visit other versions of the Modern (as well as ol’ Doc Cocktail’s adaptation of the drink, the Modernista), but I didn’t find a damn thing wrong with the version in Ensslin’s book. It tastes old timey, that’s for sure, but sometimes that’s exactly what I’m looking for.

Modern Cocktail
Adapted from Recipes for Mixed Drinks, by Hugo R. Ensslin

• One drink scotch whisky (1 1/2 ounces, or 2 if you’re thirsty)
• 2 dashes lemon juice
• 1 dash absinthe (I used Vieux Carre, as it was what I had in the dasher bottle)
• 2 dashes Jamaica rum
• 1 dash orange bitters

Shake well with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Ensslin recommends serving with a cherry, which I ignored.

I know, the theme is absinthe and I use one damn dash. Sue me, or better yet, head over to Sonja’s place to see what other absinthe-fuelled drinks folks came up with for this Mixology Monday.

Tags: Absinthe, Drinks, Mixology Monday by Paul
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