Source: DC Beer

The first place we visited in Washington was Bourbon. We went to the Adams Morgan location (there are two). Adams Morgan is a youthful upscale neighborhood in the northern part of the District. It is rife with interesting restaurants, shops, apartments, and people. Bourbon is right in the heart of the neighborhood, so you could comfortably make it a part of a larger evening’s perambulations.

Bourbon does not have the feel of a “Craft Cocktail Bar”. With exposed, rough brick walls, battered dark wooden tables and bar, and fairly dark lighting, you’d think it was just a nice neighborhood tavern. You could, and I bet a lot of patrons do, enjoy a nice meal without ever realizing quite what is going on here. I found that to be very pleasant, both in concept and execution. This is a place where the cocktailian can bring his buddies who think the whole “drinky thing” is silly, and everybody will still be happy. The food (which to our sorrow the next morning, we did not eat enough of, early enough) is very well executed tavern fare, tweaked to the upscale. What little we did eat was excellent, in particular the sweet potato chips. It is damn hard to make sweet potato chips with the same consistency and texture as those from regular potatoes, and they succeeded about as well as I’ve ever seen. The sliders were also delicious and symbolized the same balance as Bourbon’s decor: They were superficially ordinary enough to make the conventional diner happy, with just enough subtle twist to give the more adventurous something to hang his hat on.

Once you start delving into the drinks menu, the place becomes really interesting for folks like me. While the cocktail list is all interesting-looking originals, the real strength here is the spirits selection, especially the bourbons (duh). There are four pages of bourbons, ryes, scotches, and other whisk(e)ys. All are offered as two ounce pours, and most can also be tried in half ounce tots as well. If you want to expand your whiskey experience, you could not choose a better, more practical environment to try what the world has to offer. (Actually, you can, but that’s the next post.) If you want a little help with you whiskey adventures, they offer a variety of pre-selected flights as well. There are flights to explore different schools of bourbon and rye, as well as between entire different spirits. There’s also a fight of reserves for $40 bucks that I wish I’d felt flush enough to try.

Bourbon was a great environment to meet up with friends, with its manageable light and noise levels, and that is what we did. We had planned to meet Chris Hwalek and Matt Hamlin here, and SeanMike Whipkey also managed to make it moments after we arrived. As an added bonus, through the magic of a Twitter mention of our destination, Jake Parrott joined us as well. Both the booths and the bar are conducive to amorphous groups, so it was a good choice for our launching point upon a nation’s worth of bar hopping.

SeanMike, the PeguWife, Chris, and Matt

In conclusion, Bourbon is a great place for a light meal, and certain kinds of serious drinking. The whiskey selection is slightly over the top, and the rest of the inventory is extensive as well. There is a good selection of beer and wine too, for the amateurs. It is not a destination for an evening of mixology, however. Their cocktails are interesting and very well-made, but they are not the focus of the operation. For a Washington-area resident, Bourbon should definitely be part of your bag of tricks when planning your night life. For visitors, I’d recommend it highly if you are a whiskey aficionado, but there are places I’d send you to first for more adventurous food and especially cocktails.

This review is part of my larger Great Cross-Country Bar Crawl series. Here is the main post for our Washington stop, with links to all reviews for DC.

To kickoff Maggi’s and my Great Cross-Country Barcrawl, we took a guided tour of the Four Roses distillery in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky. Four Roses is a small major bourbon maker of whom I’d never heard until about a year ago, when I spied a bottle of their Small Batch product on a shelf and brought it home. I’ve already written whimsically of the story of the brand, and how a product this good, which for about a decade sported a Coca Cola-sized neon billboard in the heart of Time Square, could be so obscure. This post is about the product as it is today.

Four Roses markets seven different products. Two are available only in Japan, and for an explanation of that, see my previous post referenced above. The rather unique thing about Four Roses’ production is that while they make seven products, they actually produce ten different bourbons. They then combine these bourbons in differing degrees to produce the products.
Each of the bourbons produced has a flavor profile distinct from the others. To get ten different bases, Four Roses uses two distinct mash bills, one which contains 20% rye, and the other which has an exceptionally high 35% rye content. In combination with each of these mash bills, they maintain 5 completely separate yeast strains which originated in five different distilleries with historical connections to the brand. Each strain confers a unique character to the resulting product.

Brent Elliot, Four Roses quality control manager, took us through an incredible tasting experience. We had a chance to taste several of the individual bourbons to compare the differences the distinct yeast strains make in the same mash bill and the difference the mash bills make with the same yeast. Also, we had the rare chance to taste side by side the same recipe as both a white whiskey and aged. And throughout the tasting, we had a long discussion of the laboratory techniques used to control the quality and consistency of a product that is essentially alive for a good portion of its manufacture. It was interesting and somewhat comforting to see that, while laborious work with pipette and test tube has been replaced with pushing buttons on machines made by the Perkin Elmers of the world, the real decisions still rest with a group of well trained noses and mouths.

The resulting ten bourbons make for a tremendous pallet of flavors which Four Roses uses to blend some delicious products.

At one end of the spectrum, the main commercial product, Yellow Label, uses all ten whiskeys in varying percentages. At around $17-$18 and 80 proof, this is a very good everyday bourbon for a host of simpler drinks. If you do happen to have any residual memory of the Four Roses brand before its American resurrection, it is important to note that today’s Yellow Label is not your father’s Four Roses… it’s your grandfather’s. During the decades that Four Roses offered no straight bourbon in the US, Yellow Label was a perennial best-selling premium in Japan.
Four Roses’ Brand Ambassador, Al Young (more on him below) says that the distillery’s aim is to produce “Bourbons that don’t bite”, and they succeed. But it is not so smooth or sweet as to sacrifice character. It’s worthy call-brand competitor with the similarly priced Beams, Makers’, and Wild Turkeys.

The Small Batch was the first of their products that I personally had tried, and was the reason that I really wanted to tour their distillery. This big, delicious bourbon is a blend of four whiskeys from their pallet. Two use the high-rye mash bill, and two the low. They also use only two yeasts, the one that produces a berry-like overtone and the one that is the most spicy. Two mashes, two yeasts, means four components. Small Batch is a great craft cocktail bourbon, the Four Roses product that I’d most recommend the mixilogically inclined give a whirl.
The flavors are big and rich enough to stand out with and up to pretty much whatever you want to mix with it. I found it very nice for the fairly few whiskey-based Tiki drinks I like to make, such as the Port Light. The high rye content makes it worthwhile to experiment with for drinks that usually call for straight ryes. But don’t worry, this is still clearly a bourbon and not a rye. The round, cork-stoppered bottle with raised glass roses is lovely both to hold and behold.
This $30 bourbon has earned a permanent place in my inventory.

The top end Four Roses is their Single Barrel. This is, frankly, a monster bourbon. It is not a blend, but a bottling of one of their high-rye recipes. The whiskey has a powerful, rich, sweet, and deep flavor and aroma. Taking a good slug of it compels me to use a word I ordinarily hate, “mouthfeel”. Single Barrel has it in spades. It flows over your mouth and coats it. This means a very long and extremely comfortable finish. Nothing nasty shows up at the end here, unlike many other big and bold spirits.
Of course, at 100 proof, this Bourbon may not bite, but it will gum you pretty strongly. I think the Single Barrel is a bit too big for most mixing tasks, and I suspect the ghost of Paul Jones, Jr. would hunt you down if you wasted this in a glass with Coke…. It makes a fine Old-Fashioned, of course, and also works awesomely in a well-made Mint Julep, even without my usual addition of dark rum. Of course, at nearly $40, most people will reserve the Single Barrel for a sipping bourbon, in which field it is a formidable competitor.

Four Roses also offers private casks for sale, as well as Limited Editions of both the Small Batch and the Single Barrel, aged much longer and sold at barrel proof. I haven’t tried either of these. If you have, let me know what kind of an improvement they are over the regular equivalents.

Our tour was a private one, and bit more extensive than the usual excellent one they offer. But even if you can’t con them into thinking you deserve press treatment like I did, I recommend making a tour at Four Roses a priority if you make a visit to Kentucky and/or the Bourbon Trail. The distillery and the grounds are gorgeous. The somewhat anachrogeographic (is that a word?) Spanish Mission-style distillery building is on the National Register of Historic Places.
I’d like to end with a brief comment on our guide, Four Roses’ Brand Ambassador, Al Young. As brand ambassadors go, Al may not quite be Champagne Charlie, but he’s on a different planet from the more, um, common variety. Al has been in the distilling business for more than 40 years, working his way up through the ranks. He was the Four Roses distillery manager for about 17 years before becoming the brand manager. In short, he’s likely forgotten more about making whiskey than a lot of pros now know. He’s the first distiller who (with the aid of this cutaway segment of de-commissioned “beer still”) managed to make me really understand how a column still actually works. We learned a lot more about how bourbon in general and Four Roses in particular are made, but this post is long enough. I’ll simply wrap up by saying that he also has been a very active historian of the Four Roses brand, as you can see for yourself in his interesting and lavishly illustrated coffee-table book: Four Roses: The Return of a Whiskey Legend.

Four Roses has a good story and a better product. You should look into both. You’ll be glad you did.

A much better picture of the distillery than any I took. Click for a larger size and bonus, hilariously inaccurate, historical information!

The Liquor Fairy Was Here!
The following products, a bottle of Four Roses Single Barrel Straight Kentucky Bourbon and a copy of Four Roses: The Return of a Whiskey Legend, were recently provided to me as promotional consideration to encourage me to discuss them.
For a complete disclosure of my policies regarding promotional items and all other financial interests, please click this link, or follow the Liquor Fairy link in the header of this page.

In marketing, some brands seem to have a life their own. If so, then the life of the Four Roses brand is a sprawling epic of betrayal and fall followed by redemption after time in the wilderness.

The name Four Roses was born of a love story. Lawrence Jones, the successful scion of a Kentucky whiskey family, fell in love with a young belle who lived in Columbus, Georgia. He wooed her ardently for years, repeatedly asking her to marry him, always to be rebuffed… but never dissuaded. At last, he wrote her a letter that he was returning to her with the intent to ask her to marry him yet again. But this would be his last time, and he could hardly bear the thought of a final rejection.
Therefore, he implored her that if she would finally consent, she should arrive at the ball wearing a corsage of four red roses. If she did, he would be happy, and if she did not, he could retire from the event with his dignity intact and never trouble her again.
Of course, as with all good family stories of hazy authenticity, she swept into the ball adorned with four beautiful roses.

Needless to say, such a story became important to the family, so important that they named their flagship brand Four Roses. The Jones family were gifted rectifiers (blenders) of whiskey, and the brand enjoyed success in the days before Prohibition. While Prohibition brought the stories of most brands to a tragic end, the makers of Four Roses were quick to act, and purchased one of the few allowed licenses to sell whiskey as “medicine”. Thus the brand endured through the Noble Experiment.
When legal sales at last resumed, Four Roses found itself with tremendous advantages. It had a current, known brand. It had some financial resources. Most importantly, it had aged product available to bottle and sell.
The company used those advantages to the fullest, and by the end of World War II, was one of the nation’s most popular brands. If you look carefully in the background of the famous Alfred Eisenstaedt picture of the sailor kissing a nurse in Time Square on V-E day, the topmost sign in the world’s most famous outdoor ad space was for Four Roses.

My mother remembers that her father, a wealthy New England manufacturer, drank Four Roses as his favorite whiskey. My grandfather, J. Howard, was a man of moderate appetites, but exquisite taste.

Our tale takes its dark turn when the brand was sold to Seagrams in the late 40s, and this new guardian of Four Roses began slowly to betray its legacy. Tinkering began on the product, changing it to a blended whiskey of progressively lighter and blander character. Our noble, romantic hero began to fade as the brand slipped first into mediocrity and then decrepitude. Like a fallen bum on the Bowery, it found itself relegated to the cheap end of the bottom shelf, while its name faded from the living memory of the market.

And there it languished and would likely have died, forgotten and unmourned, except for a secret love it kept hidden away like a golden locket, secreted in a safe place under its tattered clothes. That secret was Japan.

You see, the real Four Roses, the high-quality straight bourbon whiskey, never stopped being made, and in large amounts. But it was all being sold in Japan. (OK, Europe got some, but Four Roses was a huge, perennial top-seller in Japan)

As the new millennium dawned, Seagrams completed it’s own rags to riches to rags arc and began to spin away it’s spirits brands and operations. Japan’s Kirin Brewing stepped in and purchased the Four Roses brand, the distillery where it was made, and about half its inventory of aged whiskey. I suspect Kirin’s management looked into the abyss of no more Four Roses, and moved accordingly.
The blended, artificial, whiskey-drink product was discontinued, and a comeback in America of the good stuff was planned. Any remaining stock of the old crap was bought up and destroyed. If you find any out there on a dusty shelf somewhere that they didn’t track down, put it down and back away. Such sad ghosts need not be disturbed.

In 2004, Four Roses returned to American shelves as a high-end whiskey again, with the introduction of a single-barrel bourbon. In 2006, they added the excellent Small Batch premium blend. Now they have reintroduced the Yellow Label as a mainstream straight bourbon. Finally, there are a number of single-barrel special bottlings, as well as private cask sales.
But Four Roses has not forgotten the country which kept the brand alive. There are at lease two major bottlings which still are available only in Japan. It’s not that they would not do well in the US market, but they simply sell there for so much more.
It remains to be seem how this tale will end. The name really was poisoned in the US, and few who remember the name are old enough to have fond memories. Will Four Roses be able to return as a major player with its Yellow Label? Will it settle in as a comfortable premium small brand?
But any good tale should leave you wanting to know just what “happily ever after” means…

I haven’t touched on an awful lot yet, there’ll be another post coming up shortly with some discussion of the excellent whiskeys that make all this bodice-ripping interesting in the first place, and how they are made.

(IITTALA Ultima Thule Old-Fashioned Glass: available from Amazon.com )

OK, most important thing: It’s pronounced Oh-WHY-Oh LAH-nee. Got it? Good.

My last post reviewed the new bottle of honey and vanilla infused vodka I received from local Columbus micro-distillery, Middle West Spirits. It’s a boldly flavored, and tasty, spirit, but it is a bit direct to leave on its own in a good cocktail. After some experimentation, I found it pairs rather nicely with a good premium bourbon, like Blanton’s, which adds some harmonious depth.

On inspection, the drink I’ve come up with to enjoy this bottle may seem a bt, um, straightforward to be called a Tiki drink. But the OYO provides a very exotic flavor on its own. Combine it with a healthy sprig of mint, and the resulting vibe is remarkably Tiki. I give you the OYO Lani:

The mint garnish is important here. I’m hardly comparing this little ditty to Trader Vic’s Mai Tai, but the effect of the mint is the same. The drink is delicious without it, but the aroma of the bruised mint oils as you sip livens things up considerably.

Of course, this drink doesn’t need to be thought of as a Tiki drink if you don’t want to. It’s just a complex Sour after all. Simply adjust the presentation to fit your mood, or the tastes of your recipient. But keep the mint.

I have been a bit hard on Eben Freeman in the past, and I just ran across a story on him, about which you’d pretty much expect me to tee up and take a rip at.
See, the reason I’ve taken shots at Eben in the past isn’t that he so richly deserves it. He doesn’t. He’s one of the Boss mixologists out there, with great feel for ingredients, a wealth of knowledge of food, cocktails, and chemistry, and an adventurous, avante garde mind. And a bit of ego. Combine all that in one man, and from time to time he’s going to take an idea, puff it up and stretch it from intelligent to ridiculous. Get ridiculous, and snarky critics like me will be there to ridicule you.

But not this time.

See, this time, Eben’s got a idea that’s both ridiculous on its face, and guaranteed to piss off a bunch of purists I could link. But I’m here to praise, not bury, because the drink sounds cool, Eben’s not puffing it or himself up, and the method is both ingenious and appropriate.

[Source]

He’s shooting a finished cocktail out of a soda gun. It’s called the Waylon, and while I’ve never heard of it, he’s been making it for a while.
The Waylon is a highball, with Buffalo Trace bourbon and smoke infused Coca Cola. To produce it, Eben smoke-infuses the pure Coke syrup, then mixes in the whiskey. Add the right amount of water, and you have a mix that will likely last months. Or hours, if it’s a busy night and the drinks geeks know it’s there to be tried.
Plug in the CO2 tank and hook up the gun. Eben runs the output tube through a chilled aluminum block to produce a cocktail that is already drinking temp. I have no idea if this is something that most soda fountains do, but I doubt it. I can see the value, even though this is a rocks drink, of the chilling. There will be less, and more reliable melting, leaving a drink that is reliably strong, no matter what ice you end up using.

Yes, it uses a soda gun, but the blasted mechanism is put to good use here. The drink’s also fun, different, and not at all pretentious. OK, it’s a little pretentious, but with a wink. And if you’re on a mission to shut down all winking pretension, you’re going to have to shut down the whole craft bar industry. So piss off.

[Source]

I imagine that this is a method most anyone could use themselves at home for all sorts of jiggery pokery. I’m thinking it’ll be fun with Cuba Libré variants. All you’d need is a soda siphon, which you hopefully have, and if not, shame on you. The drink won’t be pre-chilled, but some things just can’t be helped. And depending on what ingredients you play with in your own efforts, the batch should last quite a while.

The serious ingredient you’ll need is the Coke syrup itself. You could go all Darcy and make it yourself. Or you could pick up any of the scores of knockoff syrups out there for use in home soda machines, like the bottle that came with my SodaStream.
But back in the day, you could just go to your pharmacy’s antacid aisle and buy a bottle of pure, genuine Coca Cola syrup. It’s a lot harder to find today, which is a shame since it does the job on nausea. Still, here’s at least one source where you can buy small bottles of the stuff. And you can even buy five gallon bags of Essence of the Real Thing™ right from Amazon. That’s a bit much for the home mixer, I suppose.

Regardless, Eben is serving up his Waylons tonight (I believe) at a bar called Fatty Johnson’s in New York. I’ll miss out because I am here, but if you can chip your way through the ice encasing your door in New York, tell Eben I said hello, and come back and tell me how the Waylon tastes. (Via The Feast, H/T: Gizmodo)

OK, I’m going to advance a new cocktail of my own creation. Ordinarily, this is akin to a red-neck driver handing you his beer and saying, Y’all watch this! However, in this case I think I’ve got a winner, or at least an entry which makes the podium.
In a recent post, I reviewed Bols Genever. I detailed how I banged my head against the wall trying to figure this spirit out, and how I finally found some delicious ways to serve it up. As I was editing the post, there was some material I discarded about how many mixologists tout qualities in genever that liken it more to whiskey than gin. That got me thinking.
And for those of you wondering when he is going to pop up and make a snarky comment about that, I locked him in the sock drawer before starting this post.
One of my favorite cocktails is the Vesper, a drink that marries two spirits to tone down the more radical elements and create a lovely fusion. I decided to try the same with the genever and its supposed cousin, whiskey. If a Vesper is a Martini variant, I’d make this cocktail a Manhattan one.
After a lot of experimenting with tiny cocktail glasses and my dwindling bottle of Bols Genever, I found a recipe that I hope some of you out there try and tell me what you think. It’s not an every day drinker, since it is pretty strikingly flavored, but I think it’ll be a fine option when I’m looking for a bracer and have time to ponder what I’m sipping.
Finally, I had to have a name. My first thought was the Gen Ee Sais Quoi, since I really didn’t know what to make of this! But, meh. I wanted some romance. Now, Vesper was a beautiful double-agent, and British, like gin. As it happens, the most famous (if apocryphally) double-agent, Mata Hari, was Dutch, just like genever! Now, there are already a number of cocktails, and an absinthe, called the Mata Hari, so I looked Mata Hari up. Her real name was Margaretha….

I’ve really been in a rut lately, drinking basically nothing but Aviations of late.

Gee,
Pretty nice rut….

True, but a rut is a rut. I’ve been kicking around something new to try to work on and through a combination of circumstances which I’ll detail in future posts on this subject, I’ve found myself experimenting with perhaps the most appropriately named cocktail on (or off) the planet, the Old Fashioned.
Like all great cocktails, you can get into an argument about where it comes from. The traditional, fun tale is that the cocktail was created at the Pendennis Club in Louisville, Kentucky in the late 19th century. This is demonstrably untrue.
In 1806, a New York newspaper answered a reader question about how to make this new thing called, a Cocktail. They replied with a concoction that is for all intents and purposes what we now call the Old Fashioned. The Old Fashioned could just as easily be called The Original. But it wouldn’t sound as cool.

But I don’t want to diss the Pendennis Club. It does have an important place in the history of the Old Fashioned. By the late 1900s 1800s, the original Cocktail had likely fallen from favor, superseded by the winds and whims of fashion. One a fateful day, a member strode into the bar at the Pendennis. This man was likely a cranky, persnickity, but knowledgeable drinker, the kind who scoff at the pitiful ideas of lesser men about what makes a drink. In short, he was likely an ancestor of Gabriel Szaszko…. This guy sneers at all the drinks his fellow members are consuming (the Cosmos and Vodka Martinis of the time), leans upon the mahogany and demands of the bartender, serve me a damned Cocktail!
Of course, Mr. __________. What kind shall I get you?
I said I wanted a Cocktail. You know, whiskey, sugar, and bitters. An old fashioned Cocktail, like real men drank before we got all sissyfied in our drinks with shakers and fancy glasses! He likely went on to decry such trendy mixers as vermouth. And don’t get him started on crappy euro spirits like gin!
Another member, likely one who owed him money, decided to suck up and also ordered, one of Mr. _________’s Old Fashioned Cocktails, please. The name, as well as the drink, stuck. Over time, armed with a new, catchy label, the original Cocktail once again spread across the land as the Old Fashioned Cocktail.

So, if the Old Fashioned is the original Cocktail, Mr. History Buff, why isn’t it the Gospel of Whiskey, instead of the Manhattan?

Well, firstly because the Old Fashioned is actually a class of drinks. You can make it with a wide array of spirits, not just whiskey. We’ll examine that further in future posts. Also, while there may be an original recipe for the Old Fashioned, there really is no canonical best way to make one.

That said, let’s throw out a good version of that original formulation.

There you have a base, historical Old Fashioned. And, like most cocktails I love, there you also have a host of arguments.
No real controversy on the whiskey. Use what you like, just use decent stuff. You may find, if you start really experimenting with different formulations of Old Fashioneds, that different whiskeys will work better with different versions. If you find yourself constructing elaborate charts and matrixes of your results with different brands, seek professional help immediately.
That sugar cube is a problem, though. Yes, it is the traditional way of doing the drink. Yes, it is a cool preparation. Yes, yes, yes. But no. It doesn’t dissolve easily, and seldom does it dissolve completely. You may end up with the dreaded sludge on the bottom of your drink, and that is not classic. I go with the modern idea of using simple syrup to taste. Somewhere between a teaspoon and a tablespoon should do the trick.

Next, there is the question of oranges. I’ll discuss a lot of things you can put in an Old Fashioned in later posts of this series, but orange deserves a spot in the first go. For many, if not most, modern Old Fashioned drinkers, it is as much a part of the drink as the whiskey. I agree. Without something to expand it, the cocktail I outline above is just too sharp for my tastes. Please note, the orange the drink needs is orange peel, not juice. After you have mixed the sugar, bitters, and the first batch of ice in your glass, cut a good sized slice of orange zest with a channel knife or vegetable peeler. Do this over the glass so you catch most of the oils that will spray out as you make the cut; these oils are what you are after. Give the peel a twist and drop it in the glass. Then stir in the remaining whiskey.
If you don’t have fresh oranges, you can replace the peel and its oils with a good orange bitters like Regan’s Orange Bitters No. 6.This has the virtue of speed and convenience. You might also try Angostura Orange Bitters as well. I’d avoid trying to use the Fee Brothers orange bitters, at least in Old Fashioneds. The Fee’s is much milder and doesn’t really do the job here, at least for me. None of these bitters are as good as the fresh orange oils from a peel, however.
Finally, let’s talk garnish. You can make a perfectly good Old Fashioned with no garnish at all (should you employ the bitters option or the no orange option), and some traditionalists insist this is the way to do it.
The orange peel I suggest is an attractive garnish in and of itself, as well as a functional ingredient. You can even toss in a cherry with the stem on if you like.
The most common garnish for Old Fashioneds these days is a wedge of orange and cherry on a cocktail sword. While this little assembly is pretty by itself, I find it a bit fruity frou-frou for a classic, two century old drink. Sticking this massive garnish on your Old Fashioned is a bit like buying clothes for your grandmother at Forever XXI….

Hey!
You forgot an ingredient!

No, I didn’t.

Yes, you did! What about….

No. I. Did. Not.

…!

Don’t put club soda, seltzer, or any other unfrozen H2O in your Old Fashioneds, save perhaps for enough to dissolve your sugar cube, if that’s the way you roll.
True, lots of Old Fashioned recipes call for you to top up the glass with soda water. But you can tell that this is a B.S. ingredient from that telling phrase, top up. The simple fact is that a basic Old Fashioned recipe will likely not quite fill many Old Fashioned glasses. Bar patrons don’t like a glass that isn’t full, and bartenders don’t like to hear, Hey bartender, I’ll have another. And this time put some liquor in it. The simple solution is to hit it with the soda gun and everyone is happy, except someone who wants the best Old Fashioned.
Bartenders, add more ice and stir a bit if you must have the level approach the lip. Bubbles add nothing to the magnificent tranquility of this venerable drink. And if you are mixing your Old Fashioned at home, don’t worry about the level. You know how much booze you put in. Just stir and taste until enough ice has melted to give you the strength you want.
So there you have it, the basic Old Fashioned. Drink, enjoy, and come back to see what’s up as I examine some fun modifications, extensions, and variations in future posts!

It is the first weekend in May, and that means it is time for the Running for the Roses, the Kentucky Derby. I have absolutely no interest in horse racing, to be honest. But this race always seems to capture my imagination anyway. Horses are magnificent creatures in the middle of a race. I just have no interest in the personalities of the owners or trainers, nor do I have any desire to bet on races. All this means I just don’t watch horse racing. But on Derby Day, for a brief moment, I buy into the idea that we are watching the most exciting two minutes in sports.
And besides, the personalities and activity surrounding the Derby are classic. The whole experience is filled with outrageous, time-honored, customs and accessories. The day is usually hot and stifling. The derby-goers are in need of cooling down and relief from the baking sun in the stands and on the infield. So let’s talk about the classic centerpiece of that relief:

Very funny.
Talk about the drink.

Now hold on!
I love that hat!
That said, I’m thirsty, too.

Ok guys, I’ll get to the main event. This is a cocktail blog, not a millinery site.
The traditional refreshment of the Kentucky Derby is the Mint Julep. I’ve blogged about it before, but I think it is worth examining each year at this time. It is a good cocktail that deserves a far better fate than it has been consigned to in the modern age.
I suggested a much more complex recipe before. This time, I’m going with a more mainstream and much easier to construct drink, while still maintaining enough elaborate preparation to impress your non-cocktailian friends.
Here are the simple ingredients:

I actually like to go with Rye in most circumstances when I make a Julep, but on Derby Day, you really do have to go with a good Kentucky Bourbon, like Bulleit. Strip the leaves (about 10 to 12) from one of the mint sprigs and place in a large old fashioned glass. put the chunks of pineapple and the sugar cubes atop like so:

Simple syrup would dissolve easier than the sugar cubes, but the cubes look cooler as you prepare the drink, and the abrasiveness of the sugar helps release the minty oils and break down the leaves. Muddle until you have a mottled yellow and green paste in the bottom after a minute or so. It needs to be more smashed than this:

Plop in several nice big ice cubes and the bourbon. Stir gently to combine and garnish with the pineapple spear and the second sprig of mint. Reserve the better looking sprig for the garnish.

The resulting drink needs a hot day to really work. The aromatics come out to play in the heat. And more to the point, this drink is designed to treat what ails a hot and thirsty mouth. It isn’t really suitable for an indoor cocktail party in the Fall.
Riders, to the Post!

Among many things that I set to the side during Tiki Month here at the Pegu Blog was bottle of Bulleit Bourbon that the distiller kindly sent me for review. For a variety of reasons, I wanted to make a review of this outstanding liquor my first post-Tiki post.
Bulleit is a premium small-batch bourbon. The original Bulleit, Augustus, worked up his unique style of bourbon in the 1830s, and his secret disappeared, along with Augustus himself, on an ill-fated trip to New Orleans to sell his brew. While his actual fate is unknown, I’m guessing he was a bit ahead of his time and suggested to the locals that his stuff would make a better Sazerac, leading to violent defenestration. At any rate, descendant Tom Bulleit researched the methods and ideas of Augustus and has come up with the modern Bulleit process, proving once again boys and girls that lawyers can make a positive contribution to society, if only they just stop lawyerin’!
Now, I don’t drink bourbon neat. But I do taste new ones that way to figure out what to do with them. Whiskeys are very complex liquors, and if you leap right into a Manhattan with a new one, you’ll learn nothing beyond “good”, or “um”, or even “eww”. So I poured a few fingers into a glass, dropped in a couple of tiny ice cubes, and took a sip. At that moment, I found myself with something different on my hands. This stuff is good. Every bit as good as most of the single malts I keep around for sipping.
And Bulleit drinks more like a single malt than any bourbon I’ve tried before. First off, the various flavors are more in balance than is usually the case with a bourbon. In particular, the sweetness elements are toned down here, with a smokier undertone coming out in response. Bulleit uses a of of rye in its mix, and you can certainly tell. Perhaps if anyone still cared about the once white-hot debate over rye versus bourbon in Mint Juleps, Bulleit would be the product to bring peace in our time.
It is important to note that this is still definitely a bourbon, not a scotch. There are no peaty flavors here, and while the sweetness has been put in a more respectful place, it is still quite evident.
I may have mentioned before that I have a terrible sense of smell. If I saw like I smell, I’d be legally blind, so I don’t usually pay much attention to the aroma of liquors. But there must be some powerfully good aromas associated with Bulleit. I say this because I have a raging cold right now, and last night I tried the Bulleit one more time to make a few additional notes, and it was not nearly so good to me. It was flatter. If you have a nose that works like a normal person’s, I can only imagine how much you’d like this whiskey.
Several nights ago, I was down at Details, my new favorite cocktail bar in Columbus, and upon looking at the menu saw Bulleit as one of the options head barman Chris Dillman offers for his Old Fashioneds. Interestingly, it was the cheapest of the bunch. This surprised me greatly, so l later went and checked the Ohio liquor price list and was shocked at how reasonably priced Bulleit is! As I said, my first bottle of Bulleit (it won’t be my last) was a review sample, so I didn’t know. Blanton’s is about 44 bucks here. Booker’s is about 53. Bulleit is 25. Twenty-five.
My mind immediately leapt to Sobieski vodka. As I’ve written about that liquor, it is cause for excitement when you come across a genuinely top-notch product that is priced well below its peers. Especially in these times, where unless you have or a planning of getting a guvmint job, you need to count your pennies.
I only hope this doesn’t become a problem for the brand. I continue to think that the low price is a drag on Sobieski’s growth in the market. But it is a vodka. While the difference between it and its top-priced peers is negligible, the difference between it and its same-priced competitors is only slightly greater. Bulleit is a bourbon. Whisk(e)ys are unique critters, with huge ranges in style and quality between each brand. Pricing itself right next to Makers or Jim Beam is a bad idea. In fact, I asked Chris about this (right after he gave me the tragic but unsurprising news that he was out of Bulleit), and he said he had heard that they are considering moving the price up to a better neighborhood.
Not that I’m requesting a price increase! The world needs more great booze at good prices. I’m just saying I don’t expect this one to stay this cheap forever. So if you like bourbon, or even if you are a single malt guy, go out and give Bulleit a try while it’s still so unreasonably reasonable.

UPDATE: Welcome readers of Screwtop Winebottle! While you are here, why not take a look at a few of my other liquor reviews, or just some more generalized tomfoolery?

Among the great classic liqueurs that I have never really gotten around to playing with, the most famous and mainstream is Benedictine, along with its pre-blended cousin, B&B. Benedictine was created by Benedictine monks in France during the Renaissance, and its ingredients must have seemed like a liquid map of the world to the people of that age. The monks made Benedictine until the revolution, when the French, in their zeal to conflate democracy with killing anyone who disagreed with the mob, caused the monks to abandon their abbey at Fecamp. At that point, the recipe was lost for almost 70 years, before a copy was found in an attic. (Perhaps the guy was looking for stuff to sell on eBay) It has been a commercial success ever since.

The D.O.M. stands for Deo Optimo Maximo which roughly means, to God, the most good, the most great.
Over Christmas, I received a bottle of B&B to review, and that gave me the kick in the pants I needed to go out and buy a bottle of Benedictine, so I could try them both.
I started off with the Benedictine because, well, I’m a simple kind of guy and it made simple sense to me to try to understand the pure stuff first. This liqueur is a highly organized riot of flavors from citrus to spicy to a little savory. The flavorants include nutmeg and vanilla, cinnamon and cardamon, and even Myrrh, which I’ve been running into a lot lately. Benedictine says that there are 27 separate ingredients, and they probably store the secret recipe in the same vault guarded by a three-headed dog as Coke does. The website has a cool little trivia game for foodies, where you have to put some of the major spices onto their place of origin on a map of the world. (Go to the site and click on the discovery tab)
I went browsing through some recipes to see how I could deploy this drinkable perfume, and settled on the Frisco. There are two versions, and I started with the Rye variant:

The resulting cocktail is a bit cloudy and yellow. It tastes very tart and not bad at all, for those of us who like our cocktails that way. But the Benedictine is very much a background player in this drink, and I couldn’t tell much about what exactly it was bringing to the party. Its presence is apparent, but this is not a great drink for me to evaluate Benedictine. I next tried the Bourbon version:

This cocktail is clear and much prettier. You can easily identify what the Benedictine is bringing to the party here, and drinking this version is where I got the idea to call it a highly organized riot. There is a lot of different stuff to savor, going in a lot of different directions, but the cool thing is, they don’t get in each other’s way at all. Unfortunately, this version is too sweet for me.
It was clear by this point that there’s a good reason why Benedictine’s been made forever. I am relatively easily confused by too many competing flavors, and that wasn’t happening here. This is, I suspect, why this liqueur is so accessible to so many drinkers. But is was also clear that a sour guy like myself was going to need another route make it work for me. I turned to Gary Regan’s recipe using B&B that I read on Intoxicologist:

Now we were getting somewhere! This cocktail is a delicious blend of flavors, with the floral Sapphire and even more floral St. Germaine really bringing out the Benedictine in the B&B. And this is not a sweet drink, it’s smooth and dry.
But I still was not satisfied. The flavors I was finding best in the B&B were the spices, as opposed to the florals. I reasoned that since both the B&B and the Sapphire are a mix of floral and spice, the floral St. Germaine was tipping the balance against where I really wanted to go. So I backed it out and replaced it with some more spice:

Bingo. This one definitely works well for me. The Canton tilts the balance toward the spicy side, but doesn’t unbalance the Benedictine’s broad spectrum of flavors. This isn’t a casual sipping drink, though. Try one when you feel like paying attention.