I had a chance to visit Seattle this Summer with my family. Since we had the kids with us, I didn’t get a chance to do a real detailed exploration of this, one of America’s premier cocktail towns, but I made sure to have enough time to hit a few highlights, and to get a feel for the general cocktail environment in town.

For a variety of reasons, I will lead with a review of Liberty, at 517 15th Ave. E. (@LibertyLovesYou on Twitter) Liberty is the love child of cocktail warriors Andrew Friedman and Keith Waldbauer. Andrew started Liberty in 2006, with Keith joining him later, so that makes this a very well-established and long-lived high-end bar. I’ve known, or at least “internet known”, Keith since I started blogging, as his now fallow Moving at the Speed of Life was one of the first cocktail blogs I read and among the first such blogs written by a working pro.

Liberty and its owners take great care to characterize it as “just a neighborhood bar”, rather than some Fancy Dan Craft Bar.
This is a load of bull fritters.
I insist that this is a fabulous, high-end bar. From the back wall (pictured above) full of a head-spinning array of ingredients headlined by a magnificent but not over the top selection of whisk(e)ys, to the menu filled with a great selection of classics and modern creations, to each and every drink that I saw placed before me or any other customer, Liberty is a cocktail lover’s dream. This is place with drinks like the Point of No Return, which simply lists fire among its ingredients. (If you visit Liberty, be sure to try one. It’s both delicious and a lot of fun to watch being made.)
There is also an excellent balance between the types of drinks on the menu. Andrew and Keith offer not just a wide variety of spirit bases and flavor profiles, but also what I’ll call “levels” of drinks. Many craft palaces I enter have menus of naught but ridiculously baroque concoctions that will be awesome to talk about with one’s fellow geeks at Tales of the Cocktail, but are too bitter, complex, or simply weird for anyone else. There are drinks here for the snob who isn’t “on duty” that evening, and the “training wheels” offerings still have something of interest to be learned from.

That said, Liberty also really is a neighborhood joint. Liberty’s location is one of the things that really strikes me about it. It is is located on a fairly modest stretch of retail shopping in a quiet residential neighborhood, rather than in the restaurant, tourist, or entertainment districts where most “serious” craft bars dwell.
Tourists like me are an anomaly in Liberty, and businessmen drinking here are likely doing so on their own dime, rather than an expense account. As a result, the prices are almost shockingly modest for such offerings.
To satisfy the Licensing Gods’ demand for food service, not to mention that of any reasonable drinker’s stomach, Liberty has the elegant and tasty solution of devoting about five feet of its bar to a sushi counter, with one or two cutters as demand warrants.

The place has that well-used feel of many older bars, the kind that have been open forever, have seen weddings and wakes, sometimes for the same customer, yet never ever feel run-down, through the sheer force of the love and responsibility of its proprietors. The seating is comfortable, both at the bar and around the room. The bar itself is moderately sized and fits in visually, rather than dominating the space like some altar to the Gods of Fernet and Angostura. There is even a large back room for meetings and private parties, but which is essentially invisible to the regular clientele.

Your average oblivious Jack and Coke drinker could make of Liberty his Third Place happily for years and never care or even realize that he was spending his time in a temple of high-end concoctions.

And this last point, the seamless melding of tavern and cocktail palace is what makes Liberty so interesting to me and, so important to the craft movement.

Craft cocktails as an industry have had a fascinating decade-plus of growth now, and are in a different stage of development in nearly every city in America. When you travel like I do all over the country killing people, you can move forward and backward through the whole history of the craft, using airline or auto as your time machine.
Many locales still have yet to see the first blush of our passion; the only “lime” in bars still has with the word “Rose’s” writ upon the bottle. Other cities have merely discovered the joys, and the commercial possibilities, of fresh or more exotic ingredients. Many, like my own Columbus, have a few restaurants and bars that are making a try at true high-end drinks. And cities like Seattle or New York have reached the point where the craft bars are a well-understood phenomenon, and most high-end restaurants have reached the point of having to offer competitive programs of their own.

But like any movement that is reaching maturity, at least in some markets, there is now a lot of angst about where to go from here. Because the simple facts are, craft cocktails made with exotic syrups, or oddball bitters, or cinnamon smoke, are not for everyone. And even among those who do enjoy them, they are unprepared to drink them all the time. There are very real limits to speed of growth and profitability in the craft movement.

This is why bars like Liberty, and Anvil in Houston, and to some extent Passenger or Bourbon in Washington, DC, are so significant, and why I admire them so much. These are places that serve all drinkers well, not just our specific clientele. The aforementioned Mr. Jack and Coke can happily hang out there with his buddy Mr. Vieux Carre. And Mr. Sazerac can find the opportunity to hit on Miss Greyhound here. (Mr. Grey Goose Martini, don’t waste your time hitting on Miss Knob Creek Old-Fashioned. It’s not going to end well for you.)

Bar like Liberty are where previously undiscovered reserves of cocktail lovers (as opposed to cocktail drinkers) will be uncovered. The easy atmosphere provides no barrier to entry for the uninitiated (quite the contrary), but the magnificent offerings are the sort that can open doors and minds. If you visit Seattle, take the time one evening to cab your way to Liberty and settle in for a great evening. If you live there, this is the kind of place you take your uninitiated friends when they are resisting being initiated….

It’s pronounced “ka-roon“. Caorunn is a new gin from that hot bed of white liquor production… Scotland? Produced at the Balmenach whisky distillery in the Speyside region, Caorunn is a small-batch gin with a uniquely Scottish character, a gorgeous bottle, and fascinating flavors. Given the nature of this blog and my own significantly Scot heritage, I am compelled at this point to ask Mike Myers for his opinion on Scottish gin:

Caorunn does not distill its base grain neutral spirit at Balmenach, since pot-distilled barley is not exactly a great base for gin. The Scot element comes from the water (of course) and the unique blend of botanicals, including five unusual ones which they identify as “Celtic botanicals“. Heather, Dandelion, and Bog Myrtle all are sharply evocative of Highland landscapes. Coul Blush Apples are an early 19th century hybrid, recently rediscovered. The final element is Rowan Berry, which the maker describes as “the very soul of Caorunn.” Rowan berries are traditionally used in a variety of Celtic herbal medicines, and seen as a powerful source of mystical good fortune. Also, they are popular eating and commonly used to make or flavor brandies, though I’ve never seen such here in the US.
The traditional botanicals are juniper, coriander, angelica, cassia, and lemon and orange peels.

The infusion of the alcohol into gin is what is performed at Balmenach and is performed in the above pictured 1920′s made copper berry chamber. The botanicals are spread out on the wide trays you see, then the chamber is filled with the alcohol vapor over a long period to infuse them into the gin. This contraption was originally designed for extracting essential oils used in the manufacture of perfume. It is a pretty uncommon device for distilling gin.

The spirit resulting from these unique as the processes and ingredients is pretty special in its own right. Caorunn is bright and very clean in flavor, and has for me the rather odd effect of smelling lightly sweet while tasting fairly dry. The apple in particular seems evident in the nose and less so in the mouth. It is certainly no Tanqueray, but I think it is closer in character to a London Dry than it is to the hard to define “New American” gins.

I like this gin. A lot. But it is not a gin you can deploy indiscriminately in all cocktails. Its real strength is in combination with other herbal flavors. To that end it is a simply magnificent Martini gin. It is difficult to describe why this gin goes so very, very well with vermouth, but it does. I don’t go with the whole olive thing, so I cannot attest to how things will go if you like to dirty up the waters. On their extensive and beautifully illustrated recipe page, they recommend garnishing a martini with a slice of apple, which I have not tried, but will next time I get my hands on some really good ones.

I’m into my second bottle of Caorunn, largely because it’s about the only thing I’m making Martinis with any more. When I find a particular brand that seems perfect in a particular drink I make regularly, I tend to just dedicate it to that particular purpose. But of course, as with all gins I had to try Caorunn in the Greatest Cocktail Ever Mixed™. I actually tried this first, and it almost made me give up on Caorunn from the start. I think the product has a Kryptonite, and it is indeed green: The Lime. There is some chemical interaction happening between the two that triggers a very slight but notable acridity in the mix. If you peruse the brand’s recipe page, you won’t see lime listed at all in the excellent Search by Ingredient feature.

So, no Pegus, no Rickeys, no lime with your Caorunn. It seems to go quite nicely with other citruses, however, and some whose taste I trust say it works particularly well with grapefruit. Rather than get frustrated with this weirdness, I just chalk it up to the marvelous opportunity for experimentation cocktails offer.

Caorunn is not yet available all over the US, so I am happy indeed that Ohio is among the first states where it is distributed. I’m guessing that it will be appearing in lots more markets before too long, so if it isn’t in your local store right now, keep looking. In the meantime, it is available from several online retailers such as DrinkupNY.

Source: Nick Chill Photography

Well folks, the long, tropical, volcano-lit dusk of Tiki Month is at last over. The sun peeks up over the eastern horizon, and the spirits of the Tiki Gods flee their hand-carved wooden totems.

Reality intrudes….

I think this has been my best Tiki Month to date. Although the Tiki Month 2012 page link will disappear sometime tomorrow from the header, it will still be available, and you can look back over everything I wrote this time through there. But I thought I’d do a little roundup of everything I posted, so you can see what you might have missed and want to look for.

I did eleven drink posts, from the sublime to the ridiculous. I had a great time talking with Ed Hamilton, the hero of American Tiki fans who brought us back Lemon Hart 151. I really started to get into the whole Tiki mug thing this year, alas for my wallet.

I also managed to gin up some almost controversy over Beachbum Berry’s comment about Tiki and “guilt-free sex“.

I had a full-on, dress-up Tiki party in my temporarily Tiki Basement Bar. My kids loved the makeover at first, but they now want it restored to normal conditions. They like to hang out down there and it is hard to read by “volcano light”.

I spent a good bit of time navel gazing here at the end on why I did the first Tiki Month, and more importantly, why I keep doing it.

And of course, the blog highlight of the month was Mixology Monday LXIV: Tiki! Thanks once more to all the bloggers and other writers who contributed the more than 40 pieces to February’s carnival. And yes, I hijacked MxMo for my own purposes. I think it worked out well for all.

The most important thing to me about this year’s Tiki Month was all the buy-in and participation I got from so many of you. There were vast opportunities to employ Rule 2 as blogger after blogger hopped on the Tiki Month bus and made their own contributions on their own blogs. I linked every post I saw, if I missed yours, please let me know. Beyond that, I got lots of comments this month. Comments are like nectar for bloggers, folks. When we get them, pro or con, we know you are paying attention. We all need to comment more. This month I got tons of feedback and it really kept me going. It wasn’t easy, but I managed to average just over a post a day, not counting sideblogs. It wasn’t easy, but the attention people were paying made it so.

Aloha everybody. I hope you come party with me again next February, but I also hope you stick around and keep reading here the rest of the year!

Exit Question: What do I drink tomorrow night, Old-Fashioneds or Manhattans?

At this point in Tiki Month, I think it appropriate to discuss one of the many legacies of the late Steve Jobs: The podcast. Sure, he didn’t invent it, but he didn’t invent the MP3 player, the personal computer, or digital music downloads either. He just made them workable and/or legally reasonable for white-bread Americans like me. I am not a huge podcast guy, but there is one activity I do a lot of that is conducive to listening to podcasts.

You see, if I don’t mow my grass every couple of days in the Summer, full-grown deer can hide it in with no trouble. Having a lawn in Ohio is a constant fight to keep your house visible from the street.

Thus, every few days, I mount my mighty steed and do battle with the bluegrass besieging my home on all sides.

I thus have plenty of time to listen to things over my noise-cancelling headphones whilst Blade-Biter and I do battle with the green horde, and I fill that time with podcasts. Two of my usual favorites are the Ricochet Podcast (Warning: Includes conservative screenwriters, columnists, and others who often use the term “RINO”, as well as the occasional Pat Sajak. This makes it obviously a broadcast of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy™) and How to do Everything (WARNING: A production of National Public Radio, and thus obviously a broadcast of the International Communist Conspiracy®). Both make me laugh, but they aren’t enough to get me through all the grass.

I’ve put together a few podcast suggestions for you that are appropriate to Tiki Month, some of which I’ve known for a long time, others that are new to me, but are ready on my computer for when the Spring comes. Listen to them when you like.

I’ll start with a few Tiki music-oriented audio podcasts:

I’ll start with Brian Cooper’s Exotic Tiki Island Podcast. This is a brand-new one that features music from Brian’s own collection of vintage exotica on LP. The sound quality of the music is exceptional for vintage vinyl, and the music is great. He doesn’t talk a lot, but he does throw in some other stuff between songs, including some vintage, Tiki-themed advertisements. As I write this, there are only four episodes, but the latest one is less than a week old, so I expect more content to come.

The Zen Tiki Lounge Podcast is another fairly new effort. It is more of a chat show with lots of music. In between the music there is a lot of banter and some good discussion about Tiki drinks in addition to Tiki Music. It also has been a very regular producer of new podcasts over its still short history. The companion website has episode summaries and any food or drink recipes discussed during each.

The Quiet Village Podcast, from Digitiki is inexplicably not directly available through the iTunes store, but iTunes users can still subscribe manually, as I have. I think that this one is the best of the batch. Digitiki himself is a member of one of the very best exotica bands out there today, the Tikiyaki Orchestra.
As of last week, there have been forty five episodes of The Quiet Village, an extraordinray number. The podcasts have become less frequent of late, but Digitiki is to be forgiven since he recently spawned a child or something. Each episode features lots of cool music and very detailed, interesting discussion about most every song played. There is usually a guest for him to talk with about the subject matter as well. While most of the one hour podcasts center on Tiki-style music, he does go slightly away for some thematically close stuff. His two-part podcast retrospective on James Bond music is simply awesome for even the casual Bond fan.
The production values and Digitiki’s voice on this podcast are utterly professional, better frankly than most such programs I’ve heard on places like NPR or Pacifica. If you like Tiki music at all, you need to check out this podcast for a sea of music you simply will not be able to hear anywhere, much less buy.

Podcasts also come in video as well. The very first one I ever subscribed to, video or otherwise, was the late, much lamented TikiBarTV. Come back to us, Lala! OK, you can bring back Dr. Tiki and Johnny Johnny if you must…. Tiki Bar TV is a must watch, even if you don’t give a damn about Tiki.

The Velveteen Lounge Kitschen video podcast is genius. A dead-pan retro housewife (Kelly Camille Patterson) first mixes up a decent-sounding cocktail, Tiki or otherwise, then produces a somehow appetizing-sounding dish straight from what ought to be the darkest culinary days of 1959…. I may actually go buy some SPAM. The podcast is not 100% Tiki, but it is definitely of a piece with the era. If you don’t want to subscribe to the podcast, the whole series (34 episodes so far) is available on YouTube as well. I’ll wrap up this survey by embedding the episode A Lovely Luau With SPAM.

Over the Martin Luther King Holiday, I took my family to Chicago for the long weekend.

Wait… What?
You voluntarily went to Chicago… in January…
Why?

Because I have a nine year-old daughter, who absolutely had to have one of these:

She had saved up her money (a lot of money), so we took her to Chicago to the American Girl Doll store to buy the doll, and do the Experience, including brunch in the store’s restaurant.

We’d have done dinner instead, but I hear the cocktail program there is terrible….

This, however, left me with a powerful thirst each evening. Fortune smiled upon me in this in the shape of Sable Kitchen & Bar. I’ve written before of my fondness for the Kimpton chain of boutiquey hotels. We chose one of their Chicago offerings, the Palomar, because it has a pool, only to find from my “legion” of cocktail geek twitter correspondents that adjoining its lobby was one of the most highly recommended bars in the city!

I was surprised to such a nice hotel bar, Bambara, in the Hotel Marlowe in Boston. I was amazed to find not just an above and beyond hotel bar, but an absolute top-shelf craft bar in the Palomar. Really. It rocks.

Sable is a restaurant as well. And a delicious one. Chef Heather Terhune (@HeatherTerhune) runs a smooth and elegant operation. The menu is an eclectic mix of range of dishes from sides such as duck fat french fries and all sorts of game entrees, to things like sweet corn creme brulee and bacon jam with toasted baguette points. They offer fried chicken on waffles for both dinner and weekend breakfast. Most of the larger dishes are offered in half-portions to facilitate a Tapas-like sharing experience.

And it is all really very good, though I’ll admit that while the bacon jam was as tasty as I expected, it had more of a novelty appeal for me. Still, you know if you go, you’ll order it, because, well, bacon jam.

Terhune is a contestant in the current season of Top Chef. I don’t watch the show myself, but I was told by some fellow guests that she is being given the “villain’s cut” by the show’s editors… poor girl. But that probably means she’ll be around til the end. Regardless, I don’t care. I’d eat at Sable often if I lived anywhere near.

But the bar….

The room is on a corner of the hotel, with solid glass walls on two sides of the very large space. The decor is modern, all dark leather and wood with metal accents. The bar itself is huge, about 40 feet long, with a massive liquor wall behind, boasting an impressive selection of all manner of spirits, rather than the 73 identical bottles of Grey Goose you find behind too many bars.
The bar has a design element that I’ve not really seen before and which works very well. Most of the bar is dark wood, and fronted by large, comfortable bar stools. But two segments of the bar, about 6-7 feet long each, are glowing blocks of white marble. There is no seating here and these spaces are for patron standing, rather than server access. For all its high-end nature, Sable is not an intimate environment. It is a hotel property after all, and well situated in downtown Chicago, so I’m imaging it is packed to the gills with power ties after regular workdays. It was plenty full every night we were there on a holiday weekend. (Yes, I had at least one drink there every night. Shut up.)
Crowds suck especially hard for a cocktail geek, as once the seats at the bar fill up, it is ordinarily impossible to interact with the bartenders without looming over or squeezing between other patrons. If they will put up with you trying. These blocks of standing room only at Sable’s bar go a long way to fixing this. Yes, they can fill up too, but people who are standing are more likely to make room happily, and the crowd in these segments naturally turns over much faster. The bottom line is, even on a busy night, you can still get to the bar staff.

And at Sable, getting to the bar staff is well worth the effort. Lead Dog Mike Ryan (@gastronautmike), who is currently sporting a lot more hair than in his picture on Sable’s website, is a star. A former chef, I’m guessing he just liked people too much to stay in the kitchen. Mike has a terrific resume, including Violet Hour; can carry on a cocktail geek conversation with the best of them; mixes drinks with care, craft, and style, while somehow also being swift; and has allegedly read this blog before. So what more can I say? Oh yeah, he also has what I consider the most important quality in any manager, bar or otherwise: He attracts good people.

Mike Ryan, now with 250% more hair.

I drank there every night, but Friday night Sable was the only place I drank. I spent a couple of hours bellied up to one of those glowing marble sections of the bar, trying to find the limits of former Pittsburgh bartending fixture, Fred Sarkis (@FredSarkis), and failing. This is how the Official Illustrator of the Cocktailosphere™ told me on Twitter to recognize Fred: “Reddish mustache, powerful build, probably wearing a vest. Moving swiftly & smoothly, making shakers beg for mercy.” Accurate but incomplete, as Fred has added a gigantic bartender’s beard since Pittsburgh.
I felt like being a pain in the ass, as usual, so I just kept describing elements I wanted in my drink and letting Fred decide what to make me. Everything he returned to me was not only essentially what I asked for, it was good too. He made me an Old-Fashioned with yellow chartreuse and cinnamon syrup that was particularly good.

I blush to say that I can’t remember the name of the bartender who served me Sunday before an early bedtime, but he too knew his drinks and his drink talk.

The cocktail menu is lovely, as you can see in the picture above, with a thick cover and page after page of about half original cocktails and a listing of spirits. The word “vodka” appears but twice. And while they put a certain cocktail on the menu, they have the puckish balls to refer to it by its proper name, the Kangaroo. The menu is also liberally sprinkled with a variety of excellent quotes of cocktail jokes and aphorisms. Many of these I had not read before, which is saying something. I was able to resist stealing one only because it is available online.

Sable is a wonderful cocktail bar, earning a spot in the overall top echelon of bars I’ve been to around the country. It bests a number I can think of with far wider reputations. It isn’t intimate, but the noise level is reasonable, and the crowd surprisingly manageable due to the innovative bar layout. There are no crazy high-end Ice Programs or Soda Programs, but I could perceive nary a corner cut either. Most importantly, should your fancy extend beyond the menu, the staff has the inventory and tools, and moreover the knowledge and inclination, to take you there. If you live in Chicago, you really need to explore Sable for yourself. And if you travel to the city, Sable alone is enough to put the Palomar on your short list of places to stay.

This is going to be the shortest of my Washington reviews, in large part because it was nearly 11:30 before I finally bellied up here, after great times at PS7 and the speakeasy inside The Passenger: Columbia Room. Maggi and I had wandered by the entrance to The Passenger earlier in the day, to make sure of our bearings, and we had raised an eyebrow upon seeing it. Despite being about two blocks from what I just described as the glittering power neighborhood surrounding PS7, the block the Passenger is on seems a bit… disreputable. This is due in no small part to the entrance to The Passenger itself. You see, when I finally got back there after walking my flagging wife back to our hotel, it dawned on me that, “Hey! This is a dive bar!”

I am not a fan of dive bars.
But that is because most dive bars aren’t anything like The Passenger. Sure, the place is raucous, ratty, and a bit run down (artfully so). But the drinks were awesome.

The Passenger taught me something about myself: Why I don’t like dive bars. I always thought I was just too effete for that scene. When your nose is as big as mine, you notice it when you find it shoved up in the air. But no. The reason I don’t like dive bars is because I can’t get a decent cocktail in one. In the Passenger you can’t get a decent cocktail either. You get a fabulous one. With that fixed, I loved the atmosphere.

So whether you are a real dive bar lover, or a total cocktail geek, you need to drop in for at least one drink at The Passenger if you visit Washington. And for those of you who live close enough, why isn’t this your hangout already?

Apparently, I’m not quite the snob I thought I was!

Nah.
You’re pretty much a snob.

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.

This review is going to be tricky. Our visit to Columbia Room in Washington, DC was my most anticipated stop for the first half of our whole Cross-Country Barcrawl journey. It was the first full-on craft bar we visited. And it was the truest speakeasy of all. So, I let my expectations get awfully high. I also was having a great time getting to meet the other half of Scofflaw’s Den, Marshall Fawley, and spent so much time talking to him and SeanMike that I didn’t give myself the time to engage our bartender or really bask in the experience. And I want to make all those disclaimers clear up front, because this is a hell of a bar, and a wonderful experience. If this review seems full of quibbles and complaints, it’s because if you point to the outfield a la Babe Ruth, I want your home run to shatter the light standard, not just drop into the tenth row….

It is important to explain upfront just what Columbia Room is. It is a small speakeasy bar inside the larger, totally different bar called Passenger (next post). You must make reservations in advance. They take reservations in groups of (AFAICT) 4 or 6 only. The basic experience is a prix fixe tasting menu, with an opening drink, a seasonal cocktail and a light dish, followed by a cocktail creation just for you. Your visit is designed to last just under two hours.

They tell you at the time you make your reservations that they will call you in advance to discuss your visit, and they do. First quibble: If you are going to do this, you ought to do more than just check for food allergies and reconfirm the number. I expected some discussion of our tastes, and didn’t get it. Note that they don’t promise any such thing, I just projected it. I still think they miss an opportunity with this.

When you arrive, you identify yourself and are escorted back through Passenger and through a dark, unmarked door into the Columbia Room. The noise drops to near zero and you find yourself in a beautiful, intimate space. The lush soapstone(?) bar runs the whole length of the left side of the room, and boasts only ten, very comfortable, bar chairs. Behind these, along the right wall, are eight upholstered and elevated seats which overlook the bar. The group before us was understandably lingering over their drinks, and I don’t blame them, so we were seated on the high seats to wait our turn. We were brought cool towels to refresh ourselves as we waited, and were served our opening round, a delicious punch. This is a highly intelligent setup which keeps a slow moving first group of the night from making everyone late for the rest of the evening, as happens all too often in less thoughtfully run places. I do wish they had the room to turn these seats sideways, because I felt a bit guilty that I was looming over these nice people’s shoulders like a vulture, waiting for them to vacate our seats.

“You know,
Harry Craddock says you need to drink your cocktails swiftly….”

The air-conditioning was over-taxed a bit due to the heat wave, but the funky 1930s table fans kept the air pleasantly moving. The lighting is elegant but dim (which I will seize on as an excuse for my crummy photographs). I took lots of fascinated notes, then accidentally deleted half of them from my iPhone before I could sync it, so I am missing a few important details, such as the name of our bartender. She was not the owner, Derek Brown, but was as a smooth, attentive, and elegant a drink maker as you could ask for in a craft bar.
Our main seasonal cocktail she brought us (also lost with the notes) was this smooth little concoction:

We were also brought our “amuse bouche”, this delicious bowl of soup. I put “amuse bouche” in quotes because this was a pretty big bowl to hang with that term. It was also delicious. I had eaten well to ensure I didn’t suffer another epic hangover, so I wasn’t really hungry. But delicious packs its own trunk full of hungry….

Now, here is my one (legitimate) beef with our Columbia House experience: For the most part, I didn’t see my drinks being made. This bar is only ten seats long, and more than half the time, our bartender was down a ways from us, far enough where I couldn’t follow what she was doing. Now, it is possible that she didn’t get quite so in our face as usual since we were so busy at times with that phenomenon of the Internet Age: Meeting Old Friends for the First Time. But it didn’t feel like that, and we couldn’t have more clearly been serious cocktail geeks if we’d stood up every fifteen minutes to offer a loud toast to Dale DeGroff…. Again—expectations: In this bar above all others, I wanted sole title to that bartender when our drinks were being made, and I didn’t get that.

Regardless, when I did see her working, she displayed that easy grace and skill you only see from a real pro. And what she made us was great. The mint julep with which I finished off the visit was completely different form the one I had the night before at Jack Rose, just as good, and even prettier.
And yes, I was drinking a lot of mint juleps… have I mentioned it was stupid hot in Washington while we were there?

As I said at the start, this has been a tricky review. Half of what I said has been beefs, fair and not. Yet I’m still going to heartily recommend that you visit Columbia Room should you get the chance. In fact, don’t miss it if you do get the chance. It is a wonderful atmosphere and a unique take on the speakeasy experience. Everything placed before you is great. If you have a client or two (cocktailian, or especially if not) that you want to impress, Columbia Room will deliver. And when you are done, you can experience cocktailian whiplash when you go back out and sample the utterly different, yet just as good experience that is Passenger….

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 kick off our second night of the Great Cross-Country Barcrawl (still in Washington, DC) Maggi and I met up with SeanMike Whipkey for dinner and drinks at what might be my favorite of all the places we visited in our nation’s capitol, PS7. It’s just a couple of blocks north of Pennsylvania Avenue, between Capitol Hill and the White House. The neighborhood practically throbs with the dark majesty of the Federal Government. With the Convention Center to the North, this is a heavy-hitter business, government, and tourist area.

Source: StarChefs

The Head Bartender at PS7 is Gina Chersevani. SeanMike, who apparently knows every bartender who works near the Potomac River, told me she is the best “original modern drink” mixologist in town. Who am I to argue? The drinks were very good, though we didn’t have that many rounds, for two reasons. One was that we had a long night ahead of us. In addition to being skilled, Gina is also immensely charming… an attribute that I’m led to believe doesn’t hurt in the bar game. We sat at a table, so I didn’t get to see her work, but the sunlight was still flowing into the beautiful modern lounge and I could see all her products being delivered to tables around us. The drinks were gorgeous and the faces of the customers appreciative.

SeanMike had apparently told her in advance of our coming. When he introduced us, she told me she had something in mind for me. A few minutes after we sat down, she came over to our table with that monster you see below. (The drink, not SeanMike!) If you had told me that I was going to really enjoy a Strawberry Sage Frozen Pegu, in a snifter the size of a basketball, I might have scoffed…. But nay, nay! That was delicious. It wasn’t terribly Pegu-like, but it was good. The other reason we each only had one other round was the size of this thing!

PS7 is a fine dining restaurant first, with a fine drinking lounge attached. But that lounge is not what you’d expect from a restaurant bar. The prices are not inflated over bar prices as is the inexcusable case with most fine dining restaurant bars. The cocktails on the menu are all originals, but aren’t the typical homogenous group of offerings that limit so many such menus. A few are riffs on classics, updated with a new or oddball ingredient. Others are completely novel creations. Gina employs some combination of fresh fruits, herbs, spices and/or peppers in most drinks. She even uses beets in two on the current menu. I have a policy against beets, but that’s just me. The names are also clever, which I really appreciate. Some are evocative of classic cocktail predecessors, while others are meant to appeal to the clientele of Washington, DC, like the press and military.

I’d like to eat in the main dining room at PS7 next time we visit DC. The food in the lounge, where the offerings are mainly small plates, was simply delicious. Again, the offerings start as bar food, with burgers, sandwiches and flatbread pizzas. And like lots of great places, they tweak it for more modern tastes. But Chef Peter Smith takes that transformation further than most, with great results. The most outstanding and unique dish we had was a plate of thick slices of pork belly, rolled up in small hot dog buns and covered in a gently spicy relish. I think they are called Banh Mini, and I could eat them about every day. The rest of the world needs pork belly hot dogs, stat.

As I noted before, the decor in the PS7 lounge is very modern and airy. It isn’t much like what you see in most “craft” cocktail bars, with their dark woods and cozy environs. There is nothing of the speakeasy here. The walls are white, the windows, huge, and the light, bright. The bar itself is smaller than in most watering holes of this quality, but there is a plethora of low, plush seating spread throughout the rest of the large room. The music was there, but ambient. This is a bar for conversation, where they assume you are interesting enough to hold the attention of your fellows when you can actually hear each other….

The reason I said that PS7 may well be my favorite from our Washington stop is that it does so many things well. The service and hospitality are wonderful. The food is top notch, especially those pork belly things. The location is convenient and safe-feeling. And the drinks are top-notch and not over-priced. As an overall package, the lounge at PS7 would be great for a lot more occasions than just a night of cocktailan adventure. It wold be a great pre-show stop, happy hour haunt, or business entertainment venue as well. Here’s hoping I can get back and review the restaurant itself soon.

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.

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.

A little while ago, I wrote a post about a new aged rum, Ron de Jeremy.
Yes, named for that Ron Jeremy.

Oh dear, I have a bad feeling about this post….

Probably wise.

Anyway, the Liquor Fairy rolled up this week with a bottle of Ron de Jeremy for my review! There really is a lot to go over, fun and serious, with this rum, and it is hard to decide where to…

Heh. You said, “hard”!

Don’t you start in, too!
I’ve got no problem with any of the subject matter, just the way you two are going to wallow in….

Sigh. If you two keep interrupting me, this is going to be one long post.

You said, “long”!

…

Ron de Jeremy is the brainchild of two Finnish guys, Ollie Hietalahti and Jouko Laune. Sitting one evening in a bar in Amsterdam, they were congenially perusing the rum offerings. They were struck by the group of rums which use the Spanish word, “Ron”, in their names. Soon, they were boozily riffing on made up rums that sounded like people’s names, until one of them uttered the fateful words, “Ron de Jeremy!”
For the heroes of our tale, this was one of those cocktail napkin ideas that was too good to discard upon regaining sobriety, and they resolved to make the brainstorm a reality. Neither had ever met The Man before, but Olli was undaunted and picked up the phone to make his pitch. “Talk about a cold call!” he remembers.
With buy-in from Ron, who had been upset for years at all these booze manufacturers who were “using his name” to market their rum, One-Eyed Spirits was born. They even tell this story (slightly embellished) in one of their many videos:

The company has made a number of good choices in getting their rum to market.
First, being advertising men, they created a lush, gorgeous ad campaign. It has fantastic still imagery…

(You can enjoy a silent video of how they made that picture here.)

Second, they also created some awesome video and one of the more entertaining product websites you will find. (And yes, it is perfectly safe, if a bit suggestive.) I suggest, no I require, that you go in particular to the How to Mix Drinks Ron Style section. In it you can choose which of Ron’s three comely bartenders will make one of three drinks. Each has their own style of very unique “flair” for each drink that you won’t want to miss. Neither Gaz Regan nor Tom Cruise has anything on these ladies’ routines.

Third, they indulged themselves in just the right amount of juvenile humor. I won’t steal anymore of their jokes than I did in my first post. Just poke around the website and…

Heh. You said, “poke”!

…!

Fourth, and most importantly, they realized that as great spirits makers… they made great ad men. (Ad men are awesome at consuming great spirits, but it is important to know what you don’t know.) So they contracted with an established distillery in Panama (Alcoholes y Rones de Panama) to produce their molasses-based product, and hired an old pro, Francisco “Don Pancho” Fernandez to create it. The 72 year-old Don Pancho is a second-generation Cuban rum maker whose other rums include Zafra and Havana Club’s 7 Anos.

So, how’d he do with Ron de Jeremy?

It is hard to know what to expect with celebrity-connected products of any kind. Drinkhacker was a bit bemused by Ice-T’s brandy. Many of us were pleasantly surprised by Dan Aykroyd’s Crystal Head. In this case, I think they’ve got a winner. While they tout Ron de Jeremy as both a sipping and mixing rum, I think it leans more toward the former. It has a lovely vanilla and orange aromas and flavors. It’s quite smooth, even neat. It reminds me in many ways, stylistically and olfactorally, of a nice Cognac.

Few rums with any character are all purpose mixers, of course. Ron de Jeremy makes only a decent Mai Tai by itself. I got better results by blending it with other rums, but I never found a perfect match. Perhaps the Dood will come up with something. For me, I found it blends better with herbal or spice elements than fruits, so I’ll likely look elsewhere for my Tiki needs.

But where the Ron de Jeremy really shines is in a dead simple Old-Fashioned.

I am completely serious. This is about the best Rum Old-Fashioned I’ve made yet, and I make a lot of Rum Old-Fashioneds.

As Craig Ferguson would say, I look forward to your letters….

Hey!
I can think of some great entertainment to enjoy while having one of these!

Oh, you can think of that entertainment all you want….

You almost certainly won’t find Ron de Jeremy in your local liquor store yet, but you can find it in the US from DrinkUpNY. European readers should try Masters of Malt. Let me know if you try it, I’d love to hear your take.