This is one of those drinks that sounded so…well, potentially horrible that I just had to try it. I had an open bottle of sweet vermouth and was scanning various bartending guides looking for drinks that featured it (alas, I did not end up getting through the entire bottle in the 30 days or so…
The other night, I was getting ready to make myself my usual drink, an Old-Fashioned, when I had a whelming sensation to make it with rum instead. It wasn’t an overwhelming sensation, because I didn’t do it. But the thought stuck with me, and the next night I did. I followed the exact template I…
We’re back to that venerable tome, the Savoy Cocktail Book. Today’s drink was, presumably, named after the card game. It utilizes two different spirits, something modern bartenders often frown upon, but a practice that was fairly common back in the Golden Age of cocktails. In this case, they are rum and calvados, a French apple brandy.…
Since I’ve got that bottle of pisco open, I might as well continue down that road. Today’s drink was invented sometime in the 1850s or 1860s at the Bank Exchange (good name for a bar…) in San Francisco. If you know your history, you know a lot of Chileans traveled up the west coast of…
2015, as my year-in-review stats from WordPress reminded me, was a year in which I made 4 posts. Not very good. Partly this was because as my kid has gotten a bit older, he stays up a bit later, and I’ve found that by the time he’s in bed, I don’t much have the energy…
Apologies to all 8 or so of my readers, because I haven’t been posting much lately. This is mostly the result of just drinking old-fashioneds of late. There’s also probably an element of laziness involved. So be it. But here, at last, is another drink: The Paddy Cocktail, which comes to us once again from…
This drink seems to have a long and rather varied history. It first appears in Hugo Ensslin’s 1917 tome, Recipes for Mixed Drinks. Therein, it is a simple 2:1 gin/sweet vermouth drink, with 3 dashes of maraschino liqueur and the “juice of a small piece of grapefruit,” which is great if you’re into vagueness. Harry Craddock…
This is a simple, quick little cocktail, courtesy of Ted Haigh’s Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails. He cites it as appearing during the 1940s, and indeed I can find no trace of it earlier in my limited resources. I’ll assume Haigh, in his extensive resources, didn’t either. Given its fairly basic ingredients, it’s rather surprising no…
We’re starting the year off with a bang, because this drink is dy-no-mite! See what I did there? Anyhoo. This is a Beachbum Berry rejiggering of a drink that was offered at Blackbeard’s Galley in Newport Beach, and went by the name of Pirate Grog. Like so many fine Tiki establishments, Blackbeard’s Galley shut down…
This drink was invented by Otto Soglow, and named after his long-running comic strip The Little King. It appears in Ted Saucier’s 1951 book, Bottoms Up, and seemed, I thought, like a promising use for applejack, an ingredient with which I have had only marginal success. It is yet another in a whole series of drinks…
Here’s another cocktail that basically just goes to show that Chartreuse is a tough thing to include in a drink in any quantity without said drink tasting more or less like Chartreuse. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I always sort of hope, when confronted with Chartreuse-containing recipes, that finally, this one is going…
This has to be one of the laziest cocktails I’ve ever seen. It appears in Ted Saucier’s 1951 book Bottoms Up, and was created by one Eddie Buzzell, a film director. He was no slouch, though not exactly Howard Hawks, either. But he did do a couple of Marx Brothers films, and the final entry in…
Another from the Savoy Cocktail Book, the Moonshine Cocktail is about as simple as it gets, and also about as tasty. I can’t find any history on this drink, so perhaps it was a Harry Craddock original…but who knows? And who cares? Let’s just get to the recipe. The Recipe: 1.5 oz. gin 1 oz. dry…
We’re back to the classic Savoy Cocktail Book for this one. I haven’t been able to track down much of anything about the provenance of the Moll, but it presumably takes its name from the word for a gangster’s girl (who often, herself, packed a piece) that was being popularized in the nascent hard-boiled detective stories…
Both of these vintage cocktails come from The Old Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book. The Brown was purportedly named for a student from the university of the same name, while the Rosemary’s provenance is explained somewhere else in the book other than with its recipe. Unfortunately, a cursory examination failed to find said explanation, and frankly, a…
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