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!

234 years ago today saw the troubled, uncertain birth of a nation. Fifty-six frightened men in Philadelphia rather presumptuously committed their two million fellow colonists to casting off the control of the mightiest nation on the planet. They knew they were doing something important, something big, but they had no idea just how big it would become.

The Fourth of July is a day to celebrate, and let me just say that one of the most appropriate possible ways to celebrate the greatness of our nation is with our national cuisine.
What’s that you say? America has no cuisine of its own? We steal the best of other cultures’ schools and enjoy them for ourselves? Hamburgers are not cuisine?
America does indeed have its own cuisine, its own culinary school of art and skill in which delicious dishes are expressed with creativity and style. Like other nations, we’ve exported our cuisine, and you can find it made all over the world, often at the highest levels. But it remains ours, and America remains the source of the best of the craft.

America’s cuisine is the cocktail.

A cuisine is a specific school of preparing food (I contend that drink is integral to food) that reflects the culture of the people who originate it, and the land where they live.
Cocktails reflect the endless inventive nature of Americans. They use the both the bewildering variety of ingredients available in our land, as well as ingredients from all around the world where we have gone as traders. Like so many American institutions, their success is predicated on industrial advances, most especially for cocktails, the mechanical production of ice.
Cocktails are America’s singular contribution to the bedrock element of humanity, the convivial table. The gestalt of liquors, liqueurs, juices, spices, herbs, and sugars is indeed our cuisine.

So on this Fourth of July, even if you aren’t American yourself (or perhaps even more so in that case) celebrate with a cocktail or three. Celebrate our fractious, dangerous, magnificent nation with a balanced, delicious example of our national craft. Make whatever you like, whatever appeals. Create your own, if you like. The genius of the cocktail, that makes it even more American, is that you can do that. It doesn’t take advanced schooling or apprenticeship to be able to make or create a good drink (though it can help). All it takes is patience and perspiration.

But I’ll leave you with a recipe suggestion, nonetheless. I’ve posted on it before, but it is a perfect Fourth of July drink. Born in the fetid swamps of our nation’s capital itself, the Gin Rickey is an overwhelming weapon in the fight against thirst. Moreover, emblematic of the nature of our cuisine as I’ve touched on here, it is easily tinkered with. Simply replace the gin with virtually any spirit that suits your fancy, or you find at hand, and it will likely still be delicious. Try one, or any other cocktail, and raise a toast to those fifty-six men in a hot, sticky hall in Philadelphia, preparing to hang together… lest they all hang separately.

The first round of the Chopped Mixology Competition is in the books, and a good time was had by all. The contestants all put together a series of great offerings, leaving a lot of difficulty for the judges. The winner of the first preliminary round, who will move on to the final on July 12th, was Cris from M at Miranova, but not without some drama along the way.

Cris Dehlavi, the first round winner, from M at Mirnova

I had not previously been to Mozaik, and I’ve got a second post about it coming next. For right now, I’ll just say that it is a swank joint, and is laid out pretty well for a contest like this one. With the walls wide open to the street, the atmosphere is wonderful. The sound system took a little while to get dialed in, but ended up working pretty well, which is both damned hard and damned important for an event like this.

Jason Davis of Mynt Ultralounge

Each night works as follows: There are three rounds of drinks created. For each round, the bartenders are presented with a sealed basket of ingredients. They must use all these ingredients to create four identical cocktails in twenty minutes, using the rest of the bar’s resources as they wish. They present their cocktails to the judges, who ask questions. After the judges have tried all the drinks, they score them according to a rubric that I’ll detail later on. The lowest scoring bartender is chopped. The remaining contestants return for the next round.

Lindsay Konkel of Haiku Poetic Food and Art

The first round was scored only to keep the format even, because the fourth contestant was a last-minute substitution. He was actually the guy who chose most of the secret ingredients earlier in the day. Under the circumstances it would have been unfair for him to keep going, a fact that was borne out by his actually being the highest scorer in the first round. The result was that Cris, who would other wise have been chopped first, stayed in the contest.

“McLovin”, Chopped’s good-natured and talented, (and unauthorized) final contestant

The final round came down to Lindsay and Cris, and ingredients included caramel macchiato ice cream and Russell’s Reserve Rye Whiskey. Both contestants put together very good offerings, and the judges required a lot of time and discussion to render their decision.

Judges (L to R): Ben Zenitsky of Columbus Monthly, Madlogic of Local Night Scene, and Amber Fox of Black Olive restaurant

Brandon revealed the judge’s decision after each round by lifting a champagne bucket to reveal the drink of the bartender who was to be chopped. The only hiccup of the night came at the final reveal, when I was not sure whether it was the winner or loser who was being exposed! Regardless, as I said at the beginning, Cris was the narrow winner, and I’m glad I didn’t have to choose this week, as Lindsay’s drink was equally good.
The next round will be Monday, June 21st, at Mozaik at 8:00PM. Come on down, have some inexpensive drinks, some great food, and cheer on next week’s batch of bartenders vying not to be… chopped!

Just a reminder about tonight’s first round at Mosaik of the Chopped Mixology Competition.
Tonight’s contestants come from four well-known local establishments: Cris from M at Miranova, Lindsay from Haiku, Matty from Fado Irish Pub, and Jason of Mynt Ultralounge.
They are expecting a large crowd this evening, so if you are planning on attending, you might want to get there early. I hope I see you all there!

This is first and foremost for the local readers, but I hope it will be of interest to others as well.
Starting next Monday, June the 14th, sixteen of the most committed bartenders in Columbus will begin a month-long mixology competition at Mozaik in the Arena District. It will begin with four weekly preliminary competitions, and the four winners of those rounds will compete on July 12th for the grand championship. The Facebook page is here, and the Local Night Scene page is here.
This competition grew out of the earlier Columbus Iron Bartender event I wrote on before. The organizer is former Iron Bartender Brandon Bowsher. Brandon looks to have learned a lot from the earlier event, and he’s using that experience to make this competition much bigger and more comprehensive. Brandon has also shown some real drive and agility, keeping the whole thing on track after the initial home for the event succumbed to the hard economic times less than a fortnight before the scheduled start. That he kept all but one competitor through the rescheduling shows how eager the contestants are to compete.
Um, modesty compels me to refrain from mentioning the most obvious example of Brandon’s organizing taste and genius.

Ha!
You mean the fact that you’ll be one of the judges, Doug?
Well, I’ll say it for you.

That’s what sockpuppets
are for, dear.

Exactly.
Anyway, I hope I see a bunch of you down there at Mozaik on Mondays for the next month or so! I’ll be covering the event here, with likely obsessive detail. Of course, I’ve also got a trip to New York City to throw in as well this month, so expect this to be bar review central in June and July!
Not all the contestants are from traditional cocktail-centric bars. There are some pubs and watering holes too. I’ll tuck the participating bars and restaurants below the fold. It is an impressive list.
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I’ve written before of the four bedrock drinks of cocktailia. Each based on one of the four foundation spirits of classic cocktailia, gin, bourbon, rum, and brandy, I refer to these cocktails as The Four Gospels. There are other great and/or popular spirits that people mix with, of course. And there is for most of them an emblematic cocktail as well. I’ll refer to these drinks as the Gnostic Gospels, since the spirits they use aren’t quite canonical for one reason or another.

We shall discuss today the (Gnostic) Gospel of Vodka: The Cosmopolitan.

The Cosmo is the new kid on the block among the power cocktails, which among other reasons means it gets less respect than it should. I’ll get to those reasons in a bit, but I’ll lead with why the Cosmopolitan deserves to be considered one of the Gospels.

Firstly, the drink is very popular. I challenge you to find a bartender in America (biker bars probably excluded) who isn’t called on to make them often. While it is no longer so omnipresent as it was a few years ago, that is actually a testament to its importance and influence. So many people who were attracted to the Cosmo learned that there was a world of cocktails to explore beyond it.

And influential the Cosmo is, like all the Gospels. The Manhattan was the first gospel, the Martini defines cocktails as elegance, the Daiquiri and its progeny kept hope alive down in Cuba during Prohibition, and the Sidecar is the iconic Europeans contribution.
The Cosmo was the light that brought classic cocktails back out of the wilderness.

Aaaah!

Zut alors!

Aack!

Kaaahn!

Yes, it did, oh snooty drink purists. Please remember the state of cocktails when the Cosmo was born. The drinking world was a vast wasteland of shots, and slushies, and sour mix. (Oh My!) Even the mighty Martini had devolved into a glass of cold vodka, drunk only by old men and paleo-hipsters.

Then the Cosmopolitan burst onto the bar scene. The cocktail glass became cool again, as did drinks in it. Because most bars had become places that had neither the inventory nor staff to produce drinks like a decent Cosmo, fashionable patrons sought out Martini Bars, where they could get one without a fuss. Over time, you could once again find measurable numbers of bartenders who stood out because of their mixing skills, instead of just their sympathetic ear or appearance (or cleavage). I’m not saying that the Cosmo sparked the craft bar renascence of today, but I’m sure it provided several critical items of support.

• It provided cash flow for a (still to this day) niche market.
• It spiked demand in the mainstream for Martini-style mixology.
• It convinced a hell of a lot of young women to put down the wine bottle and pick up the cocktail glass.

To be a Gospel, a cocktail must also be the perfect vessel for its base spirit. I contend that the Cosmo is the perfect embodiment of what you can do well with vodka. Vodka provides no distinctive character of its own to a drink, nor
color, or aroma. Instead it provides a simple, smooth kick. When you mix with vodka, your drink has cocktail potency, but you can decide on whatever flavors you need, without having to subjugate them to a dominant spirit. The delicious, well-balanced mixture of flavors from the the other ingredients in a Cosmo won’t work without the vodka. I’ve tried. Interestingly, it is the addition of a large amount of 80 proof liquor that actually makes the drink smooth and drinkable.

Of course, the mere use of vodka is why many in the Church of the Cocktail would relegate this gospel to gnostic or “also ran” status. Vodka has a very short history in cocktails, and not a particularly distinguished one. Most of its oeuvre consists of either simply dull concoctions, or dumbed down versions of superior gin drinks.
The Cosmo is different in that when made well with good ingredients, it is an interesting, balanced cocktail. Further, the ground is littered with the bodies of cocktailians who tried to turn the Cosmopolitan into a decent gin cocktail. The fabled Metropolitan heresy has wasted more good gin on bad results than you can imagine. (For the record, my attempt can be found here. I cheated and it is still only OK.)

There is more to be said about the history and culture of the Cosmo, but I’ve gone too far into the post already without giving a recipe. Here is Dale DeGroff’s Rainbow Room recipe:

For the record, I actually think Dale’s recipe is too sweet. (Ducks head to check for lightning) My preferred recipe is this, the Dry Cosmopolitan, if you will.

I use a lime wheel because I seldom have oranges around, and I’m tired of burning my fingers learning how to flame the peels anyway.
When you are learning to mix your own Cosmopolitans, the cranberry you use will dramatically affect the final product. The omnipresent brand in America is Ocean Spray Cranberry Juice Cocktail. That is what my ratios are designed for. Other brands vary in sweetness. You can also find pure cranberry juice, but please be aware that it is seriously tart. You’ll need to add simple, more Cointreau, or less cranberry to make the drink work. Frankly I see no benefit.
Ocean Spray isn’t really a juice in cocktail mixer terms, but a cordial, like Rose’s Lime. Use accordingly.

Another issue worth discussing with Cosmos is the Cointreau. Use it. Any decent vodka will do fine in a Cosmopolitan, but if you skimp and use cheap triple sec, the quality will suffer. And using most other orange liqueurs is a heresy, as the darker color will throw off the pristine pink shade of the cocktail.

The Cosmo, at its Miami nativity, used citrus-infused vodka. You can experiment with this if you like, but employing such vodka so you can omit the lime is a heresy. And using Rose’s in your Gospel of Vodka will surely as the Sun shall rise bring a visit from these guys…

I’ll wind things up with some discussion of the history and cultural impact of the Cosmopolitan. While DeGroff is widely and persistently credited with inventing the Cosmo, to his credit he has just as persistently refused to take credit. Cheryl Cook, a South Beach bartender, first made a “Cranberry Kamikaze” with this famous moniker. DeGroff adopted and improved the recipe as a signature drink for the rebooted Rainbow Room in New York.
The Cosmo’s first big splash with the general public came when Madonna visited the Rainbow Room after the Grammys in the early 1990′s. A NewYorker photographer snapped a picture of her enjoying a Cosmopolitan and it created a sensation around New York’s bar scene.

Then Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda made the Cosmo their cup of communion on HBO’s Sex and the City, and the cranberries really hit the fan.

The show never suited my taste, so I watched only a few episodes. But it’s clear to anyone why it sparked such a sensation in the cocktail world. The four fabulous women of SatC led thrilling lives, attend fabulous Manhattan events, wear incredible (and incredibly over the top) outfits, have wild, varied sex, and drink exotic Cosmopolitans. The largely female audience which made the show popular wanted that life. But they mostly didn’t live in Manhattan, didn’t have the money for designer clothes, and wanted that sex to be with men other than those available.
All that and six bucks would get you a Cosmopolitan. See the effects on the cocktail world, as postulated above.

With the arrival of the latest installment of the Sex and the City saga in theaters, expect another run on this drink, as well as other means of spicing up marriages. Carrie and Big are apparently getting bored with each other, and such dodges as wearing identical men’s tuxedos out for a night on the town don’t seem to work. The ladies therefore take the only logical step, which is to jet off to a Muslim nation to ogle men and drink heavily. (?!?!) To paraphrase the movie’s trailer, It’s like Aladdin? Yes, but with Cosmopolitans.


Thus endeth Cosmopolitan, The Book of Vodka.
Here are the posts detailing the Four True Gospels of the Cocktail:
The Daiquiri, The Book of Rum
The Sidecar, The Book of Brandy
The Manhattan, The Book of Whiskey
The Martini, The Book of Gin

Bring to me… a shrubbery!

Wait. What?

Ni!

Excuse me?

Ni!

Stop that!

Ni!

Alright, I’ll bite. Who the Hell are you supposed to be now?

We are the Knights Who Say… ‘Ni’!

Please. Get out of here.

No.
The Knights Who Say… ‘Ni’ demand a sacrifice!

Get back in the drawer, Guy….

Ni! Ni! Ni!

Oh for God’s sake.
Alright, Knight Who Says ‘Ni!’, what do you want?

We shall say ‘Ni!’ to you again, if you do not bring us…
a shrubbery!

A what?!?

Ni!

This is a cocktail blog, not a friggin’ nursery. Why are you asking me for a damn bush?

Ni!
Not a bush, I, er, WE want the drink. It is Spring and we are hot.

Don’t blame me Doug.
I just mentioned I was thirsty, and all this crap happens.

He does go to great lengths to make sure you are never thirsty for long…

Ni!

You don’t want a shrubbery, you idiot. You want some shrub.

Ni… er, what?

First off, pure Shrub is a 19th Century non-alcoholic mixer. It is a fruity syrup with a vinegar base. Baker notes that Shrub as mocktail made a comeback of sorts among the law-abiding set during Prohibition… at least when the Man was over for supper. Shrub is dead easy to make without waylaying innocent travelers in the dark woods and demanding sacrifices.

Ni!

I just whipped up a batch of my own, based on blackberries, and it is not only delicious, but a great vehicle for cocktail creativity.
I stole my Blackberry Shrub recipe from Paul Clarke (the Prince of Puget), specifically, his post for MxMo XXX, entitled And everything smelled of vinegar…..

A couple of notes: Paul is not kidding, the entire Tri-State Area will smell of vinegar after you make this. Add the berries slowly so as not to splash syrup on the sides of the pot, which would burn. Finally, when you pour out the syrup, it may spit. Wear aprons, and keep the area clear. Blackberry juice stains.
Once it cools, you can do a thousand things with it.

This is a delicious soft drink for kids or hot, grubby gardeners.
Paul combines it with apple brandy and ginger ale for a nice Buck of sorts.
Rick goes with rum and ginger beer instead.
The Nerd goes the same way, and points us to a commercial source of Shrub, if that’s the way your lazy ass rolls.
Stevi goes with gin to show that you can really use whatever spirit you like with this stuff and it’ll work with the right tinkering.
You don’t have to stick with this simple Buck-type recipe with your Shrub either. Cocktail Klatsch relates three much more sophisticated recipes, by Boudreau, Morgenthaler, and themselves, which use a variety of shrubs. I’ll steal Jamie’s, only because it uses a blackberry base.

For my part, I offered this little concoction for last Thursday’s TDN: Bitters, named with the expectation that no one else would have any Shrub on hand to make it.

In the event you are one of my under-rock-dwelling readers who won’t know what Guy was going on about above, I’ve tucked some classic film-making under the fold.
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I recently had a chance to complete an on-line course in spirits, cocktails, and bartending called BarSmarts Wired. The four week course, replete with valuable information, videos, and tests, was a fascinating experience. You can get information about the course at the website. The next window for entrants will be July 1, 2010.
While I took the course from a cocktail enthusiast’s point of view, it is primarily designed as a tool to better educate bar owners and professionals in the art and science of the classic cocktail, the better for them to offer the fruits of that knowledge to their customers. I have taken to talking BarSmarts up to the various bartenders I know, those that haven’t done the course themselves already. There is also a much more rigorous certification, BarSmarts Advanced, that I hope to complete someday.

All this is by way of introduction to a new series of posts I plan. A core element of the curriculum is the 25 Classic Drinks Every Bartender Should Know. These aren’t necessarily the “Top 25″, though many are among the greatest drinks ever created. They are selected to ensure that if you are familiar with them all, you will know most of the types of drinks, and techniques of mixing, that you need to work the craft. The Gospels are all there, of course, as well as many others I know well. (The hardest test in the course was the recipe challenge at the end, because I definitely had alternate ideas when it came to a few drinks!) But there are a few drinks in the list that I have never tried to make or drink. This series will examine my experiments with them, as I try to flesh out the knowledge I earned in the course.
First up will be… The Bellini

I’ll start with the basic recipe.

To make peach pureé, you can use fresh, frozen, or bottled. Fresh is of course best, but they are out of season right now. I went with frozen. I took a one pound bag of sliced peaches and let them thaw partially. I put them in my Blendtec blender with an ounce and a half of simple syrup and an ounce of warm water. I mashed them down with my spiffy new BarSmarts muddler (included with the course) and pulsed the blender a few times until the mash started to churn. I then ran the smoothie cycle twice, and voila! The pureé was missing that sparkly brightness that fresh peaches would have brought to the table, but is darn tasty anyway. If you use canned or jarred peaches, omit the simple syrup, and consider using frozen next time. Just sayin’.

For the champagne, I was surprised how much the quality of the wine affects the cocktail. With lots of fruit pureé drinks, the produce renders all alcohol on a par with its most common version. But here you will tell the difference between good bubbly and bad, dry and sec. Buy splits of decent stuff, so you won’t waste half the bottle when drinking at home.

The real challenge I found with this drink is mixing it without losing all the fizz. It takes a some work to get the pureé to combine smoothly with the wine and every movement dumps effervescence you want to preserve. Don’t mix it in the glass, there isn’t enough room in a flute for smooth movements and you’ll either end up flat or with a puddle of goop at the bottom. Mix it first in a mixing glass. The proportions are important, so you want to measure. But if you use a measuring cup then put it in the glass, you’ll lose your fizz there too. Find out the level in your mixing glass that corresponds to four (or eight, it’s a drink for two) ounces, then carefully pour the champagne down the side to that level. Add the peach gently after any fizzing settles. Stir very gently with your bar spoon. Mostly your movements should be up and down, rather than swirling. Then pour it into your flute.
BarSmarts suggests you strain it as you pour, but that will just lose more bubbles. If you did a good pureé, I don’t see the need.
You can float a bit of liqueur on top if you like, but I think it’s gilding the lily.

I had never had this drink before, but it’s delicious. It utterly destroys a Mimosa, a drink it resembles. It is a bit harder to put together, but not so much that it isn’t worth the massively better results. It is refreshing enough to sip before dinner, and sweet enough for after. And I imagine it would be a perfect beverage to go with your brunch-time Belgian waffles.

Over at Underhill Lounge, Eric notes/fans the flames of a simmering debate in the cocktail world surrounding the liquorati’s Secret Handshake™, a.k.a. the Aviation. The question revolves around which of the two main recipes for the Aviation is right, proper, meet, hunky-dory, legitimate, etc.
The original formulation, dubbed by Erik the Ensslin version is thus:

The more common formulation in use today is generally credited to Gary Regan, and goes like so:

At least that is the common formulation if by common formulation you mean what you will get after trekking three days through the Himalayan Mountains to find some bartender named Yogi who will respond to your request for an Aviation with something other than a blank stare. It is the Secret Handshake™, after all….
The debate was triggered by one of my favorite commenters, here and elsewhere in the Cocktailosphere, The Concierge. Erik calls it a Nomenclature Debate as the question as he sees it is whether Gaz’s modern formulation should be called an Aviation, Infra-Aviation, etc. or whether we ought to refer to Ensslin’s original version as a Violet Aviation, Ultra-Aviation, etc.
I don’t really think what’s important here is nomenclature, however. Drink recipes change and evolve. The Old Masters in particular do this. As ingredients change in character, or go in and out of production (e.g. creme de violette), recipes for drinks need to change.
Of course, this can sometimes be disastrous. The less said about common modern formulations of the Mai Tai, Daiquiri, or Hurricane, the better. But when living in a creme de violette-free world (most of you did until very recently) Gary Regan’s formulation is a damn fine drink and good way to keep a classic’s spirit alive. They both are Aviations.
That said, there is a good debate to be had here, just not over the name. Which is better, dammit?
Sorry Gary, but while your version may be a damn fine drink, Ensslin makes a better product in almost every way.
First, as Gwen says, Violets are blue, Aviations are too. Without the color brought to the party by the c d v, the Aviation is kinda blah looking. With it, the drink has that incredibly unique look of a deep sky in the gloaming that evokes images of Howard Hughes, or Charles Lindbergh, or Amelia Earhart, flying off into history.
Second, the whole point of a Secret Handshake™ is to show off your chops. Maraschino is hard enough to find, but bust out the purple bottle and any other cocktailian present will know you are a force to be reckoned with. Or something. Unique ingredients make for unique flavor combinations, and those are what make special cocktails special.
Lastly, sorry Gaz, the original Aviation formulation just flat tastes better. I love maraschino, but like absinthe, I have to keep a very tight reign on it. When doled out with a spoon or even a dropper, it adds an indefinable something to drinks. But by the time you get up to a pony’s worth, this little wimp punts. and the creme de violette adds more than just color, it definitely adds to the drink’s pleasant complexity that I mentioned above.
Having committed the ultimate sin of publicly preferring another recipe over one of Gary Regan’s, I’ll get out while the getting is good, leaving you with two very good points that came out in the debate at Underhill Lounge.
Erik makes the point in his own comments that the Ensslin ratios are subject to modification as you go. Gary makes the same point about his version in another thread. As I said, ingredients change with time and brand, varying in sweetness and strength. Tastes of course vary too. Make an Aviation, and you show off your knowledge. Make a good Aviation, and you show off your skill and artistry.
The last point is also one of Erik’s that bears repeating. And repeating. And repeating. And also applying to many other cocktails out there. Make the Aviation small. It’s very bracing, and you won’t drink it very fast. It is awesome when well-chilled, and flat out bad when it warms up.