Fred Yarm recounts a seminar on the science of cocktails at Harvard. Fascinating.
ADDED: Video here.

I recently got a heads-up about a new utility from a website called FindTheBest.com. It is a gin comparison tool. They have approximately 190 gins in the database, with some extensive information about each, including a picture, typical retail price, category (London Dry, “Modern”, Genevre, etc.), and major botanicals. FindTheBest also has similar databases for Whiskey, Brandy, and Vodka, as well as Dude Ranches, Fractional Jet Ownership, Pedigree Dogs, and STD Clinics.

While some of these databases may have higher utility than the one for gin, I can see a few uses for this one too. Say you tried a new gin at some bar in Tacoma last week, and cannot now remember the name. I know, the concept of memory loss during a bar visit is kind of improbable, but stick with me. If you can remember being told, or tasting for yourself that the gin had a bit of caraway in it, the FindTheBest site will help you narrow it down to four possibilities. Of if you remember it was from Ohio, then Bob’s your uncle: It was Watershed. (Here’s my review of Watershed, by the way.)
Similarly, if you are looking for just the right gin for this new cocktail you are creating, and it needs just a hint of cinnamon…. I want to start playing with Sloe Gin, and the website has given me a few to look into more before I buy.
It is also a good resource for bloggers, as it has nice bottle images, website links, and various other information provided by the distillers.

Of course, as with any database, the information is only as good as the data entry. Some entries are oddly lacking basic info. All have ABV and price, but several don’t have botanicals, or have left many out. On the plus side, entries are moderated before being added to the database, which gives me more faith that the data that is present is at least in the neighborhood of accurate. I found only one egregious error, which is pretty damn good for an on-line database.

I did learn two big things from perusing the site.

One: Ohio needs a better selection if gin, dammit! Out of 190 gins in the database, we have about 20. Maybe. For a gin aficionado like me, this is simply intolerable, and frankly, FindTheBest, you’ve made me sad….

Two: There is some severe grade inflation out there in professional spirits rankings. One of the basic categories in the gin database is “Expert Rating”. This is a weighted average of scores from such sources as the International Wine and Spirits Competition and The Beverage Tasting Institute. The first two pages of the listings are all 5 or 4.5 out of 5 stars.
In my opinion, the “professional” graders are not giving us useful information here. That means a quarter of all gins were given a best available grade from a half or more of the “experts”. Sorry, today’s straight-A college grad, if a quarter of the class got them too, then I’m dropping grades from my consideration when hiring, because they are meaningless, or at least uninformative. (I earned my Cum Laude designations, dammit! And get off my lawn!) Five stars should only be tacked on to a very small number of products. Four should still be a damned impressive spirit, but if you look at this list, you might get the impression that 4 stars is really a C.
For what it’s worth, I wandered through the list. And of those products with ratings, I thought most were at least hierarchically in line. I won’t mention the 5 star gins (or whiskeys, vodkas, tequilas, etc.) that don’t deserve such a rarified ranking. (Please feel free to vent your spleen down in the comments, though! Please.) I will only say that to have an aggregate score of only three (on this inflated scale no less) for freaking Aviation Gin makes me want to moon the judges collectively.

Anyway, it is a fun little way to look at the products out there. Give it a shot.

The Perfect Bloody Mary—It’s SCIENCE!1!!1 This is a great Rule 4 (hilarious smackdowns drive traffic) example. (via @GinMonkeyUK)

There are a host of things I love about cocktails, but there are two that pertain to this post. First, you can sometimes make the tiniest change to a recipe and have a whole new drink with a different character. And second, after the fun of creating something new, you can have a lot more fun coming up with a name for said creation.

Last night, I was perusing my copy of Paul Harrington’s Cocktail, looking for any likely looking drinks therein that I had not yet tried. The Nikki Finn caught my eye: a mix of cognac, Cointreau, and lemon juice, with a splash of Absinthe to give the right element of danger to a drink with a name reminiscent of a far more dangerous tipple. I liked the name, and the drink seemed promising. But I was not in the mood for absinthe, and my wife never is.

So I cast around a bit, and my eyes fell upon the bottle of Tobasco that I keep on the bar for my ongoing Bloody Mary experimentations. After a bit of tweaking, here’s what I came up with:

It’s really good. While spicy, the heat is nice, not overwhelming. It cleanses the palate but doesn’t hang around to burn. There is just enough sweet to make it appetizing, and while you can make out the cognac fairly well, the spiciness just about eliminates any alcoholic burn entirely.
Overall, I’m very pleased with it.

Now, if it’s a good enough drink to make again (and again), it needs a good name. I believe that an enduring drink name should be fun, lyrical, and evocative of its flavor profile. And some of the most famous are named after famous people or characters. The absinthe gives the Nikki Finn the appropriately poisonous vibe, but this drink, while still possessing the dangerous vibe, is much more friendly and spicy….

For me the name came easy: The Nikki Heat. Who’s she? Here:

Spicy enough for you, but not dangerous? How about this?

That is Stana Katic, who plays police detective Nikki Heat on the TV show Castle. Well, actually she plays police detective Kate Beckett on Castle. Character Detective Beckett is the inspiration for character Rick Castle (a novelist)’s new lead character in his mystery novels, named Nikki Heat. The show is the most Meta thing ever produced for network TV. It is so meta that the novels mentioned in the show actually exist. You can buy Heat Wave and Naked Heat on Amazon. They are actually damn good books, by the way.
You can even see both “Nikki Heat” and Kate Beckett in the same promo for the show here:

See? Meta.
And also, as you see, a good name for this little drink.

It think it’d be a great drink for Castle to feature at the bar he just bought, the Old Haunt in Manhattan. In fact I think he was soliciting cocktail ideas on Twitter a while back. Yes, Rick Castle has a real Twitter feed. Not Jameson Rook, the fake character in the real books who is based on Rick Castle himself, but the real Rick Castle who is a fake character on the real TV show. My guess is that they drink a lot in the writers’ room on this show.

If they did make mention of the Nikki Heat, they ought to serve it using this cognac:

How’s that for a bottle?
It is Landy Désir. I just bought a bottle in Texas because I buy every bottle of liquor that comes with a little hat. And even if it didn’t have the hat, I’d have bought it for my wife since she’s a seamstress and a bottle that is an actual dress form (the dress can come off, and the are even others so you can change the clothes apparently) is an obvious gift.
I haven’t opened it yet, and judging from the fact that there are no actual reviews of it anywhere on the web, I’m guessing most people just think it is too darn gorgeous to open. Rumor it is is quite good, so I’ll open mine soon and perhaps be the first to report.

[Update: Welcome, Wombat's Rule 5 wanderers! There's plenty more to see 'round here, Rule 5, Rule 5 o'clock, and occasionally even the politics of Rule 5 o'clock alike!]

Kara Newman, author of Spice & Ice, posts a her list of 11 Cocktail & Spirit Trends for 2001.

I doubt #2 (At least in 2011). I fully expect #5. I hope for #9. And I’m afraid she may be right with #8.

Go read.

TikiGeeki Writes THAT Post. You know the one. The one that every cocktail blogger, pro or amateur, writes eventually….

source

It seems to be Punch Month. You have your Christmas parties, of course, this year the Imbibe November/December issue is dedicated to it, and David Wondrich’s new book Punch: The Delights (and Dangers) of the Flowing Bowl is new on the scene as well. I haven’t posted a real punch recipe since my rundown on Chatham Artillery Punch. (Be sure to check out page 22 of the Imbibe issue, where Ted Haigh makes a kind mention of us.) I’d toyed with getting in on the punch action but was at a loss for anything special.

Well, enter my mother and sister, who are going through the old family documents. Today, they sent me a copy of my late father’s transcription of my great-grandfather’s notes on Regent’s Punch. He states that the gentleman from whom he got the recipe, one William H Felton of Macon, Georgia, had been making it for twenty five years, so this version dates back to at least 1888, or 132 years ago. (Or it could be older than that. See below.) As Wondrich notes on the Esquire site, there are a zillion versions out there. Darcy O’Neil offers Jerry Thomas’s version over at Art of Drink.

I offer the old ancestral version because, in part, it is markedly different from any version out there that I’ve seen, and because my great grandfather’s words are interesting in and of themselves. Read them and the recipe, then I’ll have a few thoughts on the language and content, as well as a quite possibly apocryphal tale of the sordid origins of Regent’s Punch.

3 January, 1913
Mr. Felton says that he has used this recipe for twenty five years without either change or need for same. He says the ingredient quantities my be increased for larger parties. He further adds that one quart of the finished stock should be mixed with three quarts of Champagne — the drier the wine, the better the punch. He cautions that, though he knows that such a caution is not necessary, only the finest ingredients should be used. He feels that there are imitation cordials sold in the U.S. (which) are a disaster.

REGENTS’ PUNCH STOCK

• 1 quart strong black tea — while hot add
• 3/4 lb. sugar — dissolve thoroughly
• 1 pint high grade Rye or Blended Whisky or imported brandy
• 1 pint Maraschino
• 3 gills* Benedictine
• 1 1/2 gills* St. Croix Rum (he does not mention light or dark, so I say aged)
• add the juice of 1 dozen oranges and
• 1 dozen lemons — strained
• 1 dash good bitters, orange preferred

*ed. note: 1 gill = 1/2 cup

This stock will keep indefinitely and is better to be made several days before its intended use as this allows it to blend and mellow. Keep it in a cool place else the sugar and fruit juices may ferment. Fermentation does not spoil it, however, as it can be strained and added to other stock freshly made.

As stated previously, use one quart of stock to three quarts of Champagne, and pour this amount over one large block of ice — so as to cool it quickly. He finds that it is better for the Champagne to be used be thoroughly chilled before mixing — the reason is so as not to melt the ice more than necessary thereby diluting the punch.

My father added (circa 1980s1990):

This is similar to, but less complicated than, the Charleston Artillery Punch that my father H Dillon Winship, my brother Dillon and I spent several weeks of mixing and testing to be sure it was properly mellowing.
The distaff side was not impressed with our efforts, but it was one hell of a 25th Anniversary!

OK, first off, One Dash of bitters? Unless they had some nuclear bitters back in the day, that measure is obviously wrong. Anyone got a better suggestion? A teaspoon? Tablespoon?

I am struck by how much these notes read like a blog post, especially one here. Apparently being a wordy bastard is deeply coded in my genetic sequence, along with plenty of other bloggers’. I find it comforting to know that we did not really invent the “bloggy” style of writing that we, love it or leave it, claim as a modern creation. My great grandfather could have been seamlessly blogging in the fifteen minutes it would have taken to teach him WordPress. His punctuation and copy-editing would have fit right in, too….

Similarly, there is little new in the world of booze appreciation either. Let’s see:

• Ice geekery? Check.
• Crabby commentary on the sad state of modern ingredients? Check.
• Overly elaborate, time consuming processes? Check.
• Oh, by the way, Franken-food chemistry? Check.

Yup. This document is a cocktailblog post from 1913.

Source

Finally, whence the name, Regent’s Punch? It is named for Prince George the Not-Yet-Fourth, of England. George III, having lost some prime real estate in his lucid youth, descended into syphilitic madness in his later years, and his heir was made regent for the good of the Empire and everyone’s peace of mind. I’m not sure how well this worked out, because George spent most of his regency eating and drinking, as well as schtuping every available and unavailable woman in sight. It’s good to be the king. And even better to be the regent, since if anything had gone wrong, the mob would have cut off the head of batty old dad.
Needless to say, were you a member of the nobility, you endeavored to curry as much favor as possible with the Prince Regent whenever he came to call. He was likely to build up quite a thirst whilst banging your lady wife, so a nice punch named in his honor was just the ticket. If the punch was really kicking, he might drink enough to omit the wife-borrowing part of the program, so there was that as well, I suppose.

Drink historians grouse that there is no way to determine the “real” Regent’s Punch from among the thousands of versions out there. I’d say it is likely, given the origin story, that most any agreeable punch would have born the name in the attempt to slake the man’s appetites. (Or, given enough tea in the recipe, to stoke said appetites—depending on the amount of favor the host needed to curry!) The one curated by Mr. Felton might be one of those from the day. Maraschino was becoming trendy among the nobility in Britain during the Regency. And it would have been a royal drink indeed, as the Abbey of Fécamp had recently been destroyed in the French Revolution and Benedictine would have been a precious ingredient to offer. If this was indeed concocted to suck up to George, the liquorati baron who did so must have wanted something bad!

My daughters’ school just had a three-day weekend and we took the opportunity to head up to Detroit. Maggi had some things to do, but our main aim was to spend a few days at The Henry Ford museum.
I had about given up on finding any interesting watering holes in Detroit to write about here. A few years of blegs, tweets, and FaceBook requests for a top notch craft bar in that city have been met with bewildered silence, so I’m forced to conclude it is a cocktail wasteland. (I look forward to your letters. No, really I do. Prove me wrong… please!) So I was certainly not expecting to get any blog material on this trip.
Instead, I find an unique and extraordinary working cocktail bar than should fascinate any drink geek who enters.
And I found it in a museum.

I’ve got to take a paragraph or two to explain what The Henry Ford is first, because it helps explain the Eagle Tavern, and because the place is just so awesome in general. If you don’t want to read about it, just skip down to the next break where I’ll pick up again with the drinkie thingie.
The Henry Ford bills itself as “America’s greatest history attraction”. I’m sure a number of folks who work in the legacy of James Smithson would beg to differ, but having spent a good deal of time in both Washington, DC and Detroit in the last few years, I think the Ford folks have at least a good case. Sure, the Smithsonian has the Star Spangled Banner and the Spirit of St. Louis, but do they have an exhibit that makes 60 real trucks every hour while you watch? OK, that “exhibit” is really the Dearborn Truck Assembly Plant in the Rouge Factory Complex. But the tour and exhibits there are a major feature of The Henry Ford and are more than worth your time and dime.
The primary element of The Henry Ford is its main museum, which contains in its massive, multi-day-sized confines at least one each of pretty much everything from the entire Industrial Revolution. There are hundreds of planes, trains, and of course automobiles. There are pre-Victorian steam engines, farm machinery, one of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Houses, and the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile. The section called With Liberty and Justice for All reminds us that the entire American experience has been the story of realizing and protecting civil rights. Among the exhibits that will give you goosebumps here are the very chair from Ford’s Theater (no relation) in which Lincoln was shot, and the bus on which Rosa Parks (refused to) make her stand.
The third major element to the Henry Ford is Greenfield Village. This outdoor “village” consists of Henry Ford’s personal collection of, well, history. Ford bought and moved here many of the actual building in which the modern world was created by him and his friends. You’ll see his home as well as the first Ford factory, just a few paces away from Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory, which is around the corner from the Wright Brothers’ bicycle shop. If your feet get tired of walking around to see all this history, you can take a ride in one of many Model Ts that cruise the streets.
The element that most pleases me about The Henry Ford as a whole is the underlying message. What is demonstrated here unequivocally is the unmatched power of private industry to advance and better the world for mankind. And yes, the irony that this message has its home in the city that most clearly exemplifies what happens when management, labor, and government all decide to start treating industry like an ATM instead of a mighty enterprise is not lost on me.

Anyway, among the buildings in Greenfield Village is the Eagle Tavern, an 1831 stagecoach roadhouse moved here from Clinton, MI. This working restaurant is set up in the communal style common to the era, and the food is straight out of that time as well. You can get your fill of Pork & Apple pie, Bubble & Squeak, or Salmagundi. In this writer’s humble opinion, those were dark days if indeed people had to eat as much cauliflower as is on offer here….
As we sat down for lunch, I was surprised to see a drinks menu. And shocked to see what was on it.

The world is filled with many old school cocktail bars. We currently enjoy a wealth of cocktail bars dedicated to classic cocktails. But I doubt that you’ll find another whose menu consists of nothing but Cobblers, Cock-tails, Punches, and Juleps. Nor will you find one where the only regular wine on offer is claret, but they serve hock by the bottle. In the time period represented by the Eagle Tavern, a venerable Manhattan would have seemed as futuristic an offering as something from Quark’s Bar on Deep Space Nine.
Beers are served in ceramic mugs, while all drinks come in the same plain, low, glass tumblers. The only garnish to be seen are long, straight tubes of uncooked ziti (I think) for swizzles and/or straws.

The bar itself has no seating, though there are a few tables in the room for patrons who choose to eat there, instead of the main tavern room. The decor is sparse, as you can see above, and gets only sparser out of the frame. It makes a clean, elegant joint like Pegu Club look like a TGI Fridays. (My girls had the camera, so this image stolen from Flickr) As with everything else in Greenfield Village, a great deal of effort has been put into making this place appear as authentic as possible. The only things present that shouldn’t be are women in the bar, and the only thing absent that shouldn’t be is a pervasive, choking cloud of tobacco smoke.
Before the railroad siphoned off much of the Eagle Tavern’s transient traffic in its original location, owner Calvin Wood must have prepared a vast number of Cobblers, Cock-tails, etc. of all types behind this bar. As the menu notes, the period reconstructed here was the peak of American alcohol consumption, which resulted in the birth of the Temperance movement.

So, just how are these vintage drinks? Eh, they’re decent actually. But there is a reason you just don’t see dudes kicking back after work with a good Cobbler these days… like most everything else, we’ve gotten better at making drinks than we used to be. One of the best ways that they illustrate progress at The Henry Ford is by so vividly depicting what things were like before said progress. It’s one thing to go into a museum display of an empty bar and look at a period menu on the wall. It is altogether something more to lean over that bar and ask a living bartender to mix you a liquid time machine. For the casual observer, it is a lasting lesson that there haven’t always been vodka tonics. For the cocktail geek, it’s your imagination come to life, making you both appreciate the history of hooch, and how good we drinkers have it today.

Now, I should say that there is considerable “stage magic” at play here. The preparation of these vintage drinks is anything but historically accurate. They make and use a vast amount of simple syrup to shortcut the preparation, which I doubt was much employed in 1847. What they call on the menu “Holland Gin” is actually London Dry. (Attention Jacob Grier, next time you are in Michigan, head down to Greenfield Village and do your Brand Ambassador thing!) They carefully hide a soda gun in a side closet for making sparkling “Temperance Drinks”. There’s lots of ice.
Even the “applejack” they use, isn’t. It’s Laird’s good 7 1/2 year old apple brandy, not that I complained. And not that Laird’s Applejack is really true applejack either. True applejack is made by “jacking”, or freeze-distilling. With an apple orchard in Greenfield Village, I think they ought to set up a demonstration of real applejacking during the annual Christmas Festival. I can attest that it is certainly cold enough then. I think people would be fascinated, but perhaps it would be illegal.

They do have one problem that I’ll call them out for, that both undermines the accuracy and quality of the drinks in the Eagle Tavern. Sometime not too recently, they ran out of bitters. (Perhaps the Bitterlypse struck?) Regardless, the drinks they are producing right now are missing this historically and mixologically essential ingredient. I snuck a peek at the recipes they use, and they call for bitters in all the right places. They just don’t have the bottle behind the bar. Remember guys, the right amount of bitters don’t make a drink bitter, they make it better, more flavorful. They need to get the bitters back.

Regardless, the Eagle Tavern is a drinking experience for anyone with a taste for cocktails and an inquiring mind, and is simply not to be missed for the serious student of drink.

Dan Dunn, of Playboy’s The Smoking Jacket (the articles sometimes really are worth reading) offers up his Top Ten Barchetypes. Writing a post on someone else’s meme-ish post for easy content should be in every blogger’s bag of tricks, and I haven’t pulled this one out in a while. Hopefully I won’t shank the drive….
Dan’s Barchetypes are the ten categories into which he claims all bars on Earth fit. It’s almost comprehensive, and very funny. You need to read the whole thing, of course, but I’ll steal excerpt a bit to whet your appetite, before revealing the category he missed.

3: The High Concept Bar
These are built upon a central idea that is sometimes clever, but more often tiresome once the novelty has worn off (this process usually takes about a week). These typically sprout up in major metropolitan areas like New York, LA and Paris where there’s an ample supply of either a) tourists looking for expensive thrills or b) arrogant twits who believe they’re more sophisticated than the average beer-swilling Philistine and feel the need to prove it by embracing the latest in nightlife novelties. For example, I was once dragged by a publicist to the Ice Kube Bar in Paris where, for somewhere in the neighborhood of 75 dollars (luckily I wasn’t paying), I got to dress up like an arctic explorer and spend 20 minutes doing Grey Goose shooters inside a bleak frozen chamber made entirely of ice… The publicist maintained that freezing my dick off just to catch a buzz was an “authentic experience like no other.” Funny, it seemed an awful lot like another highly authentic experience called “homeless in winter,” only a hell of a lot more expensive.

The most authentic part of that experience, like every other, is Dan’s interaction with a certain type of publicist….

6: The Full Of Itself
… these bars are specifically aimed at that vertical slice of humanity that enjoys liquor…. I’m talking, of course, about the bars that purport to bring a science and a purism and a sense of history to the creation of cocktails. In these places you’ll often hear bartending referred to as “mixology.” You are also very likely to be charged $15-$20 per drink. Which is great when they’re great. But their trendlet has attracted poseurs, and when these places are bad, they are deeply hideous. Because the last thing you want when you’re trying to enjoy a relaxing drink is either smug superiority from the bartender or a member of the waitstaff insisting on telling you about the fair-trade origin of the drink’s agave syrup. Shut the hell up and make with the alcohol fetching. … I should reiterate that many of these places are wonderful and employ some of my favorite people in the world. Some I’ve been known to enjoy are New York City’s Death and Co., LA’s The Doheney, San Francisco’s Bourbon and Branch, and Chicago’s Violet Hour. Oh, and London’s famed Milk and Honey….

I actually have a soft spot for poseurs, when they are posing for something I appreciate.

Wait, you mean you hate them, right?

No, actually. I mean they are an indication that people are interested in what I love. If I and others do our job to make sure people are educated enough to experience the good places, the poseurs won’t hurt, and will show how good the good ones are in comparison.

Anyway, Dan misses one major category of bar: The Restaurant Bar.
This is a dark hole off beside the entrance of a restaurant, a bar where no one ever goes just to drink, but is instead a place to anesthetize yourself to the mind-numbing wait for a table. You will be ignored by the bartender working right in front of you, because his real customers are the wait staff. The drinks will have no imagination, there will be no conversation, and the wait will be more than twenty minutes longer than promised….
The restaurant bar is like Purgatory, or dentist’s waiting room, minus the six month old Golf Digests, but at least with drinks. Which is better, I leave to the reader.

Why the Mai Tai you ordered tastes like KoolAid… or costs 20 bucks. There are happy mediums to be reached here, folks!