From the instructions he sends out to you just in case he decides to attend your party: Gin, chilled glass, small pour size. Check, check, check. That last item is especially well put (read the New York Post’s article).
So far so good. He sounds like a reasonable man here. Why am I getting so hot under the collar?

Shake for 45 seconds…!
Muddled cucumber…?
“No vermouth necessary.”?!?!

Tangential. At. Best.

Yes, I’m talkin’ to you, Bob. It might be a fine drink, whatever it is, but show some respect in the future. I don’t want to hear you taking the name of the Gospel of Gin in vain again.
(Thanks to @Teekeemon for his alertly twigging me to this cultural travesty.)

The timeline of cocktail history. Starts with the Fish House Punch in 1732. But why end with the Coctel Algeria in 1960? (From WorldClass)

The Feathers Hotel in Oxfordshire has just set the Guinness World Record for largest gin selection in a bar. Make your travel arrangements accordingly… via @AngusWinchester

Pictured:
Me, apparently

Disclaimer: I hugely respect every luminary mentioned in this post. It does not moot the necessity or fun of some swift Internet justice over this.
Angus Winchester seems to feel that I’m about to unleash some sort of fatwa against the panel, and they will have to live out their days in Salmon Rushdie-esque hiding, moving from one undisclosed speakeasy to another, always in fear of being recognized and immediately served violently shaken Manhattans. Since we both have beards, I can understand his fear that you may mistake me for the Ayatollah Khomeini, but please, dear reader, keep stirring Angus’s Manhattans, and muddle no bright, chemically red cherries in Phil Duff’s Old Fashioneds. (OK, you can use bottled lemon juice in their Corpse Revivers if they aren’t looking….)

Ok, smack time.

Renaissances have distinct, necessary phases. Just as the early phase of The Renaissance was marked by a significant rediscovery of classical Greek sources, the early stage of our modern Cocktail Renaissance has been in no small part an archaeological one. For all the creativity exhibited so far, the most important events have been largely the rediscovery of legacy ingredients and forgotten recipes. Some of the work in this field, and much of the dissemination thereof, has been the work of cocktail blogs. While this work will continue, I think it is no longer the driving force in the Craft Cocktail movement. This evolution is, I suppose, a main driver behind the existential angst I see in my neighborhood of the Internet.

The problem with archaeology, as any student of Hollywood knows, is that you will from time to time unearth something powerful, something terrible, something that would best have been left… earthed?

Beachbum Berry (pictured) discovers he that has released the Best Year from its tomb….

In the spirit of this truth, there was a session at this year’s Manhattan Cocktail Classic entitled “Do Not Resuscitate“, which discussed both a number of legacy cocktails and some classical sources that they felt were less Rembrandt and more Thomas Kinkade. The panelists were Dale DeGroff, Audrey Saunders, David Wondrich, St. John Frizell, Steve Olson, Robert Hess, Philip Duff and Angus Winchester. An All-Star panel, to be sure.

And they certainly had some valid points among them. Frizell’s comment, “Drinking a Brooklyn makes you think, ‘Why am I not drinking a Manhattan?’…” is particularly on point, whether or not you have some mythical stash of Amer Picon.
And Olson’s dismissal of the El Diablo is a sort of Emperor’s New Robes moment for me. I’ve always thought it is a mediocre at best drink, even when well made, and I thank him for giving me the social cover to publicly say, “yuck.”

Discussions like this are great fun. But what makes them fun is the buzz created by Rule 4: Controversy leads to conversation. Had they named only self-evident, universally acclaimed losers, the seminar would have been forgotten instantly at best, or viewed as a crashing waste of money for those attending at worst. And this group of very talented, knowledgeable folks appear to have gone the extra mile to ensure it was not boring. They employed Rule 4 to effect, with some reasonable entries setting up some less so, right on to some silly contentions, and at least one outright turd in the punch bowl idiocy that, had it been uttered by any lesser of a light, would have left me growing out my beard and hollering, “Jihad!”

I’ll save said turd for the end. Paul Schrodt at Esquire was kind about it. I intend to have more fun.

Oh no, Doug!
One of them didn’t dare to diss the Pegu, did they?

Of course not. Had he made such a pronouncement, no amount of power, accomplishment, or reputation would stop me from declaring him unfit for employment by so much as a Fat Tuesday’s.

Also, Audrey was sitting right there! The blood spatter would have been visible from space….

Anyway, I’ll start with the relatively harmless contention by my man, Angus Winchester, that the Vesper be on this list.
Yes, you cannot get the original Kina Lillet anymore. Who cares?
I contend that with Lillet Blanc you still have a quite decent drink. Further, I have always contended that a decent drink with a really kicking story beats a really kicking drink possesing no raconteuring opportunity all hollow as an experience.

No story beats the Vesper’s

Finally, from an industry standpoint, Angus’s idea is just counterproductive. The Cocktail Renaissance may be moving out of the archaeological phase, but it is by no means particularly mainstream yet. The Vesper can be a great, perhaps the great, drink for busting the vodka “Martini” drinking male out of that rut and on into the world of better drinks. (By this I mean gin drinks. You’ll get your turn, brown liquorati.)

Eminent Mixologist

Next, I take issue with needless over-bashing of Baker, and equally unfounded worship of the Savoy. In bashing the eminently bashable Holland Razor Blade, Phillip Duff utters an hilarious line which I will make you follow the link to Diner’s Journal to read. But it is really a disservice to talk about Baker this way. To bash the very questionable quality of most of the recipes therein has the same value as bashing Embury for the same reason.
You aren’t going to dismiss Embury are you, Phil? I didn’t think so. The overwhelming majority of recipes in both volumes are stinkers. We know. It’s not why you have to read them.

Likewise, in regard to the lamentable Snowball cocktail, Robert Hess is alleged to have uttered the simply laughable line, “This may be the only bad cocktail in the Savoy Cocktail Book.” My early edition of the Savoy is one of my most prize possessions, and my visit to said bar is among the formative nights for me as a cocktailian, but please! That said, this line will come back to haunt the panel as a whole, since he was not set upon for it by the rest….

Ooooh! Foreshadowing!
Is there no rhetorical bag of trick you won’t hesitate to use, oh mighty pundit boy?

Well, I are an English Major….

But the mighty matinee idol Dale DeGroff is the real target of this post, alas. As a minor point, I first take issue with his dissing of the Papa Doble. No one as much the physical doppelgänger of my father are was Hemingway can be truly wrong in my book. More to the point, even hard-core alcoholics deserve their own craft cocktails.

“Shake my Manhattan, and you get to play Russian Roulette with a full pistol….”

But I shan’t go too hard on Dale over this one because the PeguWife also despises the Papa Doble, and I know what is good for me.

But, Dude! “King Cocktail” had to go and crap on the Aviation? That just makes me sad.

Hapless Victim of Royal Persecution

Actually, no. It makes me mad. Angus assured me via Twitter, whilst I was threatening him with the paragraph a bit above this, that Dale’s comments were restricted to the Savoy’s recipe, but that is not what I seem to get from the Diner’s Journal article.

Wait! Are you telling me that you are taking the New York Times as an iron clad source?
Who are you and what have you done with Doug?

Good point. And I’ve certainly already had my share of chastisement over my experience with trusting reporting by The Atlantic over a session at Tales. So I suppose some critical element might have been left out of the piece….

I’ll finish with my thoughts on the Savoy recipe, but regardless of the exact recipe DeGroff was dumping on, I think he’s wrong on many levels.

First off, the Aviation is a helluva cocktail. It is attractive, balanced, and delicious. If you don’t like maraschino liqueur, fine. I can’t abide Campari, but I don’t claim the friggin’ Negroni is some kind of over-hyped nothing.

But more importantly, I contend that Dale should look at his freaking bank balance and realize that a good chunk of the cash therein is owed to this cocktail. And yes, I’m serious. The Aviation may be a bit passé these days, to the point that the kind of people who use phrases like, “I’m so over____” and “____is so yesterday” on occasion today use those phrases in regards to the Aviation. (For the record, I’m so over both those constructions; they are so yesterday.) But both phrases support my point, since they are only used for things that once were in fact the cat’s pajamas. And the Aviation was said PJs. And said PJs at a critical moment in the craft cocktail renaissance. Back when hordes of people like me were just getting started into this movement, when quality, craft cocktails were just seeing a glimmer of commercial acceptance, the Aviation was the Secret Handshake™ of the movement.
(I also take a bit of personal exception to Dale’s dismissive comment, “It was a darling of the Internet.” Sorry Dale, but you can’t just note the fact that for a good long time this drink was a huge favorite of the largest community driver of the Cocktail Renaissance, then dismiss that same community of your best customers as connoisseurs of “hand soap” without expecting some stormy waters….)

The well-made Aviation simply embodies some of the most critical elements in our art, elements that apparently even some of our best have come to take for granted; things like fresh juice, especially citrus; legacy ingredients like Maraschino or even resurrected ones like Creme de Violette; drier and/or more delicate flavors; freaking gin. This drink is important, damn it… In addition to being delicious.

I still love you, Dale, but don’t let this happen again.

Now, since Angus has already been engaging in damage control over this with me via Twitter, I suppose I should address the word from the Spin Room.

“It’s important to get your stories straight and keep them consistent!”
Pictured: White House Spokesman Jay Carney

“Dale was only talking about the Savoy Cocktail Book version on the Aviation!”
Pictured: Angus Ferguson

I may have fudged with those attributions just a bit….

Anyway, I find it odd that Dale would really have been only singling out the Savoy version of the Aviation because I for one have never seen nor heard anyone actually advocate making an Aviation as printed in the Savoy. If you are going to single out a drink no one makes as one people should stop making….
And again, neither Esquire nor the Times seemed to pick up on this fairly major qualification.

That said, the Savoy recipe is indeed pretty lame. It simply is too sour and doesn’t include the Creme de Violette in the first place. But even though this version is mostly lemon and evergreens, it still doesn’t taste like hand soap, unless Dale uses some nasty kind of lemon in his drinks, which I’m pretty sure he does not.

And besides, the session had also been told that the Snowball was the only bad recipe in the Savoy….

You can even get Creme de Violette in places like Ohio these days, so if you don’t understand what this drink is I’m making a such a fuss over, you owe it to yourself to give it a whirl. Here’s the recipe I most often use:

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….