I quit.

Okay, so I said it a lot nicer than that, and I gave plenty of notice so as not to burn my bridges and all that kind of thing, but while my presentation lacked the cathartic release I’d long hoped for, the fact remains: I’m leaving the safety and security of the day job to claw out a career as a full-time freelance writer. On Thursday.

Hot damn!

(Oh, shit.)

While I’m enthusiastic as all hell, I’m also slightly terrified of ruin and starvation, which means I’ve been enjoying my share of celebratory good drinks, but ones that don’t break the bank. This, of course, means rum.

I tend to go through drink-related phases, related not only to the seasons and particular moods, but also to the different projects I happen to be working on at the time. Last fall, I had a thing for sherry and, as we edged toward winter, absinthe. More recently, while working on a rum story, I’ve been all about premium rum, and rare has been the cocktail hour in the past few months that hasn’t seen me reaching for some fruit of the cane.

You’d think it’d be a lot easier, though. With rum cocktails, it readily becomes apparent that there are very few that really let the spirit shake it all in front of you. Not that I’m complaining — I have a biding love for tiki and exotics, and daiquiris and El Presidentes will always be on my list of favorites. But when you consider the other spirits, there’s always at least a few drinks that basically serve up the best the spirit has to offer, with just a few touches of other ingredients that serve more as garland than as modifier. Sure, you can substitute rum for gin or whiskey in a variation on Martinis and Manhattans, and if you use something decent, you’ll have a nice drink, but it’s not quite the same — that’s rum in a walk-on role; for really nice rums, they need the opportunity to shine.

And that’s where I kept coming up short. Fortunately, I wasn’t alone, and Murray has been willing to help me through the process. First there was the unnamed drink that Keith featured not long ago, with Mount Gay Extra Old touched with Grand Marnier and Cointreau (or, if you’ve got it, Creole Shrubb does a nice two-in-one job), and a few dashes of Bittermen’s Xocolatl Mole bitters. This has morphed into other, simply prepared but absolutely wonderful drinks: the MGEO or Pampero Aniversario with a little Giffard Ginger of the Indies Liqueur and some Bitter Truth Jerry Thomas Decanter Bitters and a lime twist has been a recent favorite. And, to get a little more complex, there’s the Coin Toss, from Phil Ward at Death & Co: Scarlet Ibis (or something Venezuelan, if you haven’t got it) with Chartreuse and Benedictine, with a good dose of Carpano Antica and some Peychaud’s to hold the center.

Ah, but I’m rambling, and drooling as I do so. I’ve freely stolen from all of these ideas, and compounded something of my own: the Short Timer.

Short Timer

• 2 ounces Barbancourt 8-year-old rum
• 3/4 ounce Carpano Antica Formula vermouth
• 1/4 ounce Giffard Ginger of the Indies (substitute Domaine de Canton)
  
• 1/4 ounce Rhum Clement Creole Shrubb
• 2 good dashes Bitter Truth Jerry Thomas Decanter Bitters

Stir well with ice and strain into chilled cocktail glass.

I initially made this without the vermouth, and considered sinking the drink; then, remembering the Coin Toss, I added the vermouth in 1/4 oz increments, enjoying the weird alchemy it sometimes plays with other ingredients. The finished result is mildly sweet, with an almost cola-like aspect to it from the interplay. I used the Barbancourt, thinking that its dry, floral aspect would be good here, but the next time I take a crack at this, I may use something richer, like the Pampero Aniversario. If I had more than about a 1/4 ounce of Scarlet Ibis in the house, I’d trot that out, but whaddaya gonna do.

(And super-premium thanks to my Savoy-stompin’ friend Erik for sending the bitters my way.)

Anyway, the Short Timer works — which is something you won’t be able to say about me for much longer.

This Mixology Monday is hosted by Blair over at Trader Tiki; head on over and look for his roundup.

Tags: Drinks, Mixology Monday, Rum by Paul
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Okay, the polls on the Mixology Monday logo contest have closed (I had to disable the poll to make it stop counting, but that also means the results won’t display to everyone — you’re gonna have to trust me on this one), and here’s where things stand: 300 people cast votes on their choice of logo, and the winner, with 107 votes, is this design created by Courtney Patubo. Congratulations to Courtney; she’ll receive a signed copy of Wayne Curtis’ And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails; thanks, Courtney! (And shoot me your address in an e-mail so I can get the book headed your way.)

And thanks as well to all the designers who submitted logo ideas, and to everyone who took the time to vote.

In the process of putting together this friendly competition, it became apparent that some folks were still fond of the original MxMo logo. To these readers, I offer an apology for not taking that logo into account in the voting, but also an explanation:

As I mentioned when I first proposed the logo competition, Mixology Monday has lasted much longer than I think any of the original participants thought it would, and has attracted many more participants than we initially imagined. Over the course of two years of moderating Mixology Monday, it became clear to me that a couple of the event’s aspects were becoming confusing for participants, and difficult and time-consuming to manage. One of these aspects was the archiving of past events — right now it’s stuck deep in the archives of this site, and it even takes me too damn many mouse clicks to get to the page that has all the relevant info. This is being remedied in the next month or so, when I get the time to give Mixology Monday its own site. Setting up a new site is time consuming and doesn’t come free, but I think it’ll make it much easier to follow upcoming events, and to find out about past ones.

The other aspect that had become difficult was the logo. Darcy was very kind to create the original design which so many people came to know and love, and pretty much every month for the past two years, he’s updated it and forwarded the new versions along to me to distribute to each month’s hosts. The downside was that the logo had to be changed every month — Darcy has professed he’s not a designer, and I’m pretty damn lucky if I remember how to log into WordPress every day, so setting up an automatic system like the Dood has been discussing wasn’t part of the equation. Compound that with the fact that both Darcy and I have outside lives, replete with spouses and kids, and a little matter of updating a logo every month and passing it back-and-forth via e-mail to the hosts can turn into a time-consuming annoyance — not a huge amount of time, true, but a pain in the ass nonetheless. And for something that’s supposed to be fun and casual like Mixology Monday, having drudgework involved kind of runs counter to the whole idea.

So how much easier, I thought, if we kicked off a new year of Mixology Monday with a new logo, one that can be used every month without any kind of administrative or technological hassle, and that’s been created by an event reader or participant, and that is voted on by everyone who’s followed Mixology Monday for months or years. And we’ll even have a modest prize, just to make it more exciting. What’s not to like?

What I hadn’t counted on was that outpouring of support for the old logo that’s cropped up in the comments of the election post. So, the loser in the header of this post is me: my apologies for not considering support for the old logo. It wasn’t my intent to strongarm the community into using another graphic, but rather my desire to make participation and hosting easier for everyone, and to make moderating the event a less cumbersome experience for myself.

I think Dood and others have a great idea to make updating the logo with event particulars an automated process, but at the same time, as others have mentioned, it’s good to have a logo that doesn’t require such updating, that can stand alone for the event. That’s my two cents, anyway.

Now, on to rum….

Tags: Mixology Monday by Paul
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Fresh off cleaning up my own site for the first time in years, I was thinking it might be time to take a fresh look at Mixology Monday, especially considering that we’re now entering the third year of this monthly cocktail event.

Way back in April 2006, eight of us got together online to swap recipes and share experiences on cocktails with pastis. Now, we’re regularly drawing around 30 bloggers each month (including most of the original crew), and we’ve covered everything from aperitifs to winter warmers to cocktails that require careful supervision.

Not imagining this event would be so popular or go on so long, we started out on a fairly simple basis; I’ve moderated the sessions and kept the archives, and Darcy created a logo that we’ve updated each month as we’ve progressed. Recently, though, some of this has started to feel unwieldy, and I think it’d be a good idea to start our third year with a light facelift.

Here’s what I’m proposing:

A MxMo logo design contest - the folks who run The Session beer-blogging event and Wine Blogging Wednesdays have spiffy logos that stand up to the tests of time (their graphics are to the right for examples). It’d be great to have something that doesn’t need to be updated for each event, so we don’t have to bug Darcy every month to come up with a new graphic. The new logo can be inspired by the old one, or totally new — let’s see what you’ve got.

Entries should be PNG, GIF or JPG files, smaller than 20KB and with no dimension larger than 175px. Send entries to me by May 1, by either e-mail to paul [at] cocktailchronicles [dt] com, or by pasting a link for an image in the comments below. Once the entries are in, a winner will be selected by online voting, with polls open from May 2 through May 9; the winning logo will be announced here on May 10, and will make its debut for the May Mixology Monday on May 12.

Hosting that event is Trader Tiki, and his chosen theme is Rum. In recognition of this theme, and to help sweeten the contest pot, the winning designer will receive a hardcover copy of And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails, signed by Wayne Curtis. Wayne has kindly agreed to play along with this event, and if you haven’t read his fascinating work on the original American spirit, you’re really missing out. So fire up the Photoshop (or Adobe Illustrator or whatever the hell it is you design people use) and show us what you’ve got.

Second, since digging through my archives to find the Mixology Monday links and calendar has become a real pain in the ass, I’m taking a page from the wine bloggers and setting up an independent site that will be focused exclusively on Mixology Mondays; it’ll have links to past events, a calendar to upcoming events, and whatever other relevant stuff I can think of to put on there. This won’t be up until June, but by announcing it here it’ll give me the motivation to actually do it. Tentative URL is mixologymonday.net, which right now just bounces over to my site; if I can get the squatter (*cough* Jimmy *cough*) who snagged mixologymonday.com to give it up, I’ll host it there instead.

Anyway, onward with the third year of Mixology Monday. Thanks to everyone who’s helped and participated in the past — special thanks to Darcy for keeping up with the logo for so long — and let’s look ahead to mixing with rum in May.

Tags: Mixology Monday by Paul
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Two years.

I hadn’t pointed it out earlier — thanks to all the other things I’ve been wrangling with lately, I kind of forgot — but this month marks the second anniversary of the launch of Mixology Monday (this month hosted by the wonderful Anna at Morsels & Musings). I’ll save the misty sentimentality for another post, but for now, let’s just mark the occasion by noting that bloggers keep coming to these things — more than ever, at last glance — and we’ve somehow managed to keep this little drink-blogging celebration in the air for two years without it plummeting to the ground.

If only the same could have been said for the de Havilland Comet.

With a rush of hoopla and hubris that, in hindsight, harks back to that surrounding the Titanic, the Comet — the world’s first commercial passenger jetliner — entered service in 1952, making its maiden BOAC commercial flight from London to Johannesburg in May of that year. It sharply cut flight times, was a model of passenger comfort that can only be dreamed of in today’s era of nonexistent legroom and cattle-car conditions, and was so popular that the Queen Mother was an early passenger, becoming the first member of the British royal family to fly in a jet aircraft.

Celebrating this launch — according to David Wondrich’s Killer Cocktails — was this sidecar relation, put together by Eddie “King Cocktail” Clarke at the Albany Club in London, and featuring the South African tangerine-and-herb liqueur, Van der Hum. Tart and fruity, these Comets go down fast.

Just like the winged ones did. Less than a year after commencing service, Comets started dropping out of the sky — metal fatigue, it turned out, a problem remedied in later models (and avoided by competing aircraft manufacturers), but by then the damage was done: the Comet’s reputation had taken a hit, and sales never completely recovered.

Fortunately, this Comet is still around:

Comet (adapted from Killer Cocktails, by David Wondrich)

• 2 ounces cognac
• 1 ounce yellow grapefruit juice (good luck finding yellow — I had to settle for pink)
• 1/2 ounce Van der Hum
• 1 dash Angostura bitters

Shake well with ice and strain into chilled cocktail glass.

Thanks for two years of Mixology Mondays, everyone; now head on over to Anna’s place to see what everyone else has been up to.

Tags: Brandy, Drinks, Mixology Monday by Paul
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Tonight’s drink comes with a tip of the hat to Rick at Kaiser Penguin, who is hosting this month’s Mixology Monday with the theme, Limit: One. Thanks to this theme, Rick has created an event that is guaranteed to be followed by “Hangover Tuesday.”

When in the need of a cocktail that comes in heavy, you have two options that are pretty safe, if such a word can be used in this situation: go with the rum-soaked goodness of tiki; or, reach for the green stuff*. Me, I’m fond of both, but considering our host and the eager participation of Blair and Craig, I was sure tiki would be well represented for this round. Just to be a contrarian, I’m reaching for the absinthe tonight.

Before you take a glimpse at the recipe and gag in disbelief, hear me out: this drink actually kind of works. Sweet? Oh, yeah — part of the reason you’d only want one — but the redeeming factors in the Weeper’s Joy far outweigh, in my mind, this detraction.

Consider this: between the absinthe, the vermouth and the kummel, you’ve got, what, a few dozen botanicals in the drink. So is it really that different from something like a Widow’s Kiss (which it resembles somewhat in terms of flavor intensity and its presentation of the taste of antiquity) or — okay, I’ll write the name one more time — the Flower Power Martini? And as for the horsepower: I’m not doing the math to see if this fits under the “3 oz. of 80-proof or higher booze” requirement Rick laid out, but anything with an ounce of absinthe in it comes on like a bucket full of knuckles.

This drink — originated by “The Only William” Schmidt and recently dusted off in IMBIBE! — is yet one more reason why David Wondrich is expected to take the top prize at the upcoming National Soused Book Award. Okay, I just made that up, but wouldn’t it be great if there was such a thing?

Weeper’s Joy, using Wondrich’s updated measurements from IMBIBE!

• 1 ounce absinthe
• 1 ounce vino vermouth [I used Carpano Antica, to toss a little extra bitterness in the mix]
• 1 ounce Kummel
• 1/2 teaspoon simple syrup
• 2 dashes curacao

Stir well with lots of ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

As Wondrich notes, you can leave out the simple syrup to cut back on the sweetness, but it does bring a fuller mouthfeel to the drink.

This Mixology Monday is brought to you by Gilka Kummel, the official spirit of Kaiser Penguin. Be sure to head over to Rick’s place to see how everyone else weighed in this round.

* OK, so I used a blanche absinthe instead of a verte. Poetic license and all; deal with it.

Tags: Absinthe, Drinks, Mixology Monday, Vermouth by Paul
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