Entries tagged with 'Serious Cocktails'
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[Flickr: edwardkimuk] Quince Brandy View the complete recipe here » A little over a year ago, inspired by the unexpected acquisition of a bowl full of beautiful fresh quinces—and imagining what their ethereal perfume and flavor would be like in a drink—I started a small project. After removing the core and finely chopping the quinces, I placed the fragrant fruit in jars and covered it with cognac. Adding a piece of cinnamon to one jar and a few cloves to another, I sealed the jars and stuck them in the back of my liquor cabinet. And though I blogged about it at the time, I soon moved on to other projects and quickly forgot about my jars of boozy...
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"Secret passwords and exclusive policies be damned." [Photograph: Robyn Lee] In yesterday's Diner's Journal, Pete Wells writes that Pegu Club co-owner and bartender extraordinaire Audrey Saunders is opening a new place, the Tar Pit, with chef Mark Peel in Los Angeles next month. With this move, Saunders—one of the most talented and influential bartenders in the ongoing cocktail renaissance—becomes the latest New York bartender to spread the craft west of Weehawken. Sasha Petraske, whose New York bars Milk & Honey and Little Branch (among others) helped spur the trend of the now ubiquitous speakeasy-style cocktail bars, played a hand in opening The Varnish in Los Angeles earlier this year, as well as taking his skills to the nation's capitol, working...
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Bartenders are getting into the game, not only producing high-quality bar ingredients for themselves but for wider audiences. [Photograph: Robyn Lee] As Jonathan Miles wrote in Sunday's New York Times, the vintage-cocktail renaissance has a few drawbacks. While this interest in the drinks of yesteryear has led to the revival of once-lost favorites such as the Aviation and the Corpse Reviver #2, assembling some of these cocktails can still be frustrating. He writes: It's the ingredients that can get really arcane: ground gentian, capillaire, raspberry syrup, tansy, ambergris, gum syrup. Throw in some eye of newt and toe of frog and you've got the cauldron from 'Macbeth.' Fortunately for those who love vintage drinks, it's easier to find the once...
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©iStockphoto.com/ManuWe Autumn is whiskey season in Kentucky, and at the recent Whiskyfest in San Francisco, I was able to try out some of the recent releases now appearing in bars and liquor stores (typically in very small amounts). One of the most appealing American whiskies I tasted was Wild Turkey "Tradition," a 14-year-old, 101-proof bourbon that entered the U.S. market last week in a limited run of 14,000 bottles. With the characteristic spicy tang of Wild Turkey bourbons, the Tradition bottling has a deeper, richer character that comes from its older age, as well as its aging position in the "center cut" of the distillery's warehouse. Also memorable is the latest bottling of Old Forester Birthday Bourbon, a 12-year-old,...
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"Sometimes people see chocolate and think alcoholic milkshakes." [Flickr: loremipsum] For the most part, those seeking to indulge both chocolate and cocktails have been restricted to the realm of heavy, sugary after-dinner drinks. But as chefs take chocolate more seriously—working with the savory, bitter flavors that cacao can bring to a dish—so have mixologists. As I wrote for last weekend's San Francisco Chronicle, a number of bartenders are getting into the chocolate game, making their own bitters, tinctures, and liqueurs that capture the rich character of chocolate without weighing down the drink's flavor with a palate-thumping load of sugar. Some classic cocktails and 18th century punches utilize the power of chocolate to good effect, playing the flavor against that of...
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[Flickr: shiokuma] Since the autumn transition is now official, I’m taking a seasonal approach to my liquor cabinet. The white booze, like the white shoes, has been packed away until the warm months roll around again. OK, that’s not entirely true. Good gin is a year-round pleasure, and sometimes you need a daiquiri or two during the winter to remind you that summer does indeed exist. But now that the nights are cooler and the leaves are starting to change, I’m looking at aged spirits with renewed enthusiasm, and one style of spirit in particular: Calvados. In today’s Washington Post, drink columnist Jason Wilson touches on a theme he started last fall: the often-overlooked apple brandy from Normandy. He...
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[Flickr: cbcastro] For a spirit that seems to inspire such a diverse set of reactions in drinkers, including no shortage of outspoken loathing, gin has certainly been faring well in recent years. As I write in the September/October issue of Imbibe, while gin sales have been modestly progressing since the 1990s, the explosive growth in the number of brands on the market demonstrates a great enthusiasm for the spirit among distillers, especially those just getting into the game. That's not surprising. Unlike spirits such as brandy or whiskey, gin requires no aging, so the time between still and store shelf can be as short as a matter of days—an important factor for start-up distilleries needing a quick source of...
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Bartending School in Arlington, Virginia. [Flickr: Larry Miller] Across the country, students ranging from pre-K to post-grad are putting the summer behind them and settling into the school routine, which makes it a good time to talk about bartending education. There's no shortage of bartending schools out there. Unfortunately, as my blogging bartender friends Darcy O’Neil and Jeffrey Morgenthaler have noted, enrolling in a bartending school is typically a waste of time and money. Morgenthaler, who has built a small empire of web traffic by posting unintentionally hilarious how-to videos from the American Bartending School on his site, wrote to an aspiring bartender: “You don't become a doctor, lawyer, or architect straight out of school, and the same goes...
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How many drinks have you tried on Anvil’s list? [Photographs: Paul Clarke and Robyn Lee] The 100 Classic Cocktails To Try Before You Die list began making the rounds last week but it's different from your average internet meme. While it's popping up all over on blogs and Twitter, the list originated as a menu recently introduced at Anvil, a craft-cocktail bar in Houston. Created by co-owner Robert Heugel and his Anvil partners, the selection of drinks (simply known as “the list") doesn’t lay pretense to being the best 100 drinks in creation or even a balanced representation of the best drinks in mixological history. Rather, the owners owe up to the list's subjectivity and arbitrary nature. “We at Anvil...
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"New York has played a role in my own bibulous education." [Flickr: ilmungo] New York City has always been a drinking town. From the first taverns of New Amsterdam to the palatial 19th century hotel ballrooms to the Prohibition-era speakeasies and today’s cutting-edge cocktail lounges, New York has always been well prepared to slake the thirsts that come with being one of the world’s greatest cities. Fittingly, after all this time, the city will celebrate its spirituous history at the Manhattan Cocktail Classic on October 3 and 4, the city's first-ever "part festival, part fête, part conference, part cocktail party." The series of seminars, tastings and out-and-out parties (check) will take place at the Astor Center and assorted bars around...
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