This Summer, at Tales of the Cocktail, I encountered the 151 Swizzle as the featured player at the most epically entertaining train-wreck of a seminar I have ever had the pleasure to attend. The session was titled “Swizzling Around the World” and led by Stanislav Vadrna. I had signed up for this session on a lark. I don’t swizzle a lot of drinks, but I had a gap in my schedule and this looked entertaining. The culmination of this event was to have all 151 people in the room make this thing called a 151 Swizzle at the same time, a “world record”.

Once I got to New Orleans, my expectations started to rise. Apparently, at the 2010 Tales, Stanislav’s session was viewed as the mixological equivalent of Woodstock. It was awesome. Women wanted to have his children. Husbands wanted their wives to have his children. That sort of thing. I kept my expectations reasonable, however. I wasn’t expecting the Sermon on the Mount, but I was now expecting this to be interesting and memorable.

Oh, it was memorable alright….

Stanislav started with a bit that he apparently has done successfully in the past, many times. He passes around a roll of toilet paper to the audience, asking each to take a single sheet and pass it on. During the time it takes to do this, he goes for a little shock value to get the group’s attention by demanding that we subsume our bartending skills in general, and our swizzling in particular, so deep into our subconscious that performing them becomes as natural as taking your normal, healthy dump first thing in the morning.

Yeah.

His point, of course, is more than a little valid. If you are spending your attention on making a drink, you cannot be spending it on your guest. And the secret to being a great bartender is being a great host. I can see how this little shock bit has worked for him in the past. But it did not work for him that day. and unlike when he mixes drinks, Stanilav must have to concentrate so hard on his speaking, that he was not grasping what was happening in the audience.

Obviously, he’s never done this with a crowd this large, spread out in a huge ballroom with bad sight lines, and no rational way to pass around that roll. And he only had one roll! It took forever, people kept calling for the roll to come back since it had missed them, etc. And he would not finish with the whole morning crap metaphor until we all had our (metaphorically, thank God) shitty little piece of TP. He just kept recycling his bit as he, and we, waited, getting all the more scatological with each iteration….

It was a perfect storm for the poor guy. Once a crowd is heckling you, though mostly quietly enough he could not hear (mostly), everything you do will be seen in the worst light. His interesting illustration that while the word swizzle, and the authentic swizzle sticks we were provided, may come from the Caribbean, the concept, and the tool, are fairly universal throughout the world should have been fascinating. Instead, when he started showing pictures he had taken to illustrate his ideas, I guarantee that every one of us in the room (except Tiare, bless her generous heart) were thinking, “Christ, he’s showing us a slide show of his vacation!” I know this to be true because I heard us all saying it.

It kept getting worse, but I don’t want to pile on the poor guy. If you make some or all of your living speaking to people, you will die from time to time. God knows, I sure have. It was just his day. Should I have another opportunity to attend something Stanislav does, I will. He’s charming, charismatic, attractive, and I especially like his philosophy on life and bartending.

Oh, and he taught me this fine drink. It is fun to make, especially if you have an authentic swizzle stick like the one I received, tastes good, and is an excellent use for Lemon Hart 151.

Last year, innovative bartender and consultant Eben Freeman led a seminar at Tales of the Cocktail on Intellectual Property. I ripped Eben a new one about it, based mostly on coverage of the session in The Atlantic. Eben was gracious enough to visit this venue himself and respond at length in the comments. The gist was that while the Atlantic article did a reasonable job of outlining the issues that concerned him, it did him a disservice as to his suggested remedies. He also suggested that had I actually attended, I’d have had a different view. That’s the problem with blogging, we usually don’t have the resources to do enough shoe-leather reporting.

Well, this year, I did manage to attend Tales of the Cocktail. And there was one session that I was looking very much forward to attending in person: Intellectual Property II, with Eben Freeman….

Eben was joined on the panel by intellectual property attorneys Sheila Fox Morrison and Riley Lageson of Davis Wright Tremaine, LLC. All three began the session with the explicit declaration that their mommas hadn’t raised no dummies, and that they had learned much from the general reaction to last year’s event. This presentation was a refinement and clarification of what they presented last year, with a focus this year on proactive business practices to protect your intellectual property, rather than legal action.
Since this approach was essentially what I’d ranted in favor of last year, I naturally am of the opinion that this year’s version was a giant, riotous success….

The seminar was broken up into several segments, the first ones dealing each with a specific kind of intellectual property protection. Sheila would define the segment and outline its legal implications. Riley would amplify business consequences, and Eben would add anecdotes or other context for the bar world. They would then conclude with a discussion of the best means of conflict resolution and, more importantly, prevention.

Source: Tactical IP

They began with patents. This is the most complicated, most laborious, most expensive, most lucrative area of intellectual property protection. It also has the least application in the cocktail world, so I will summarize the while thing thus: If you really do invent some new bar tool, machine, or culinary process, consult with a qualified IP lawyer. (And either get ready to dip into the vast reserves of accumulated capital most culinary types have built over their careers… or start sizing up your better-heeled customers as investors.)

The first legally registered trademark was for a booze product.

Next for discussion was trademark protection. Given much of the controversy on this subject of late, there was a real buzz in the room when we got to this point. I thought Eben did a good job heading off the crowd’s urge to make this topical by briefly addressing, then spiking any discussion of navy rums, bar syrups, or tiki bars. This was good, because there was a lot to go over here on a subject that has been pretty hot lately, is important, and is not well understood. For my part, I was glad to have some of my beliefs confirmed, and to discover that some other things that I “knew”, turned out not to be true. (Turn of phrase copied from Ronald Reagan, lest anyone think I’m being a plagiarist.)

Here’s my definition of trademark, as gleaned from this discussion and other reading: A trademark is a word or phrase, in some circumstances a logo or graphic, to which the holder is granted exclusive right of use in commercial speech in a specific arena of commerce to identify the holder’s goods or services. In some circumstances relating to well-known and long-standing trademarks, this protection can extend beyond the holder’s own commercial field to broader commercial speech. Trademarks are more of a living property than other IP protections in that they remain in force indefinitely, so long as the holder maintains and nurtures that property in certain specific ways. Finally, the societal good which justifies trademark protection is not property protection for the holder’s investment, but consumer protection. Trademarks exist to prevent consumer confusion in the marketplace.

There were several key takeaways from this part of the session for me. First was that as a matter of practice, trademark is less an intellectual property protection as it is a marketing device. I felt confirmed in my main takeaway from my last post on this, that the negative marketing consequences of employing trademark protection in the cocktail industry may often outweigh any positive ones. Companies and individuals should think long and hard before they go around trademarking cocktail products, recipes, etc. The discussion never got around to the process of how or whether a particular trademark should be granted (e.g. Disney’s near-debacle with SEAL TEAM 6), and I apologize for not thinking to ask the question myself.

The second thing is that the “evergreen” protection of trademark protection is only maintained with a lot of fertilizer. It is not just a part of the requirements, but it is the responsibility of the trademark holder to actively monitor and guard the use of the trademark. Remember that trademarks are at their heart a consumer protection. The holder of a trademark only maintains it by ensuring what Sheila termed “quality control”. The point here is not that a holder has to make sure that everything sold under its trademark is “good” (we all buy crappy stuff with ® on it all the time), but that it is what the consumer expects when they see the trademark. Fulfilling this requirement requires active vigilance, and sometimes active measures, for as long as you wish to maintain the trademark. So, if you are Gus Tatory, private bartender in Peoria, you have every right and power to trademark your new Calcutta Cooler® cocktail if you like. Just expect to lose money every day you maintain that trademark yourself.

The last big thing to come out of this part of the session was a big clarification for me, regarding the aforementioned requirements of protecting trademark rights. In actual practice, the bright-line enforcement requirements of preserving a trademark we keep hearing about, and which holders keep brandishing in defense of bullying charges are not in practice so bright-line. The use of private contracts or licenses can provide protections for all sides in many disputes. Marginally infringing behavior does not have to be forbidden outright, every time, just to preserve the copyright. Minor considerations or even just a mutually-agreed upon disclaimer may be enough to settle many disputes in a manner that won’t result in a PR nightmare and damage to the very brand being protected. The only real requirement that I think overrides is ensuring that efforts are made to maintain that “quality control” in consumer expectations.

The last main segment of IP protection discussed was copyright law, with a healthy does of work for hire. Much of this segment was new ground, added this year in response to requests. Most of that, I’ll be covering in a separate post, as it pertained to journalists and writers, rather than the industry professionals targeted in the material I’m discussing here.

The big thing about copyright is that you can’t copyright recipes. As creativity in the bar industry becomes more and more valuable, this central fact continues to escape many professionals, and to rankle those who do understand it. So Gus Tatory from our example above can require Bob’s Bar on Central Park to make his Calcutta Cooler exactly the way Gus says it is to be made (through the use of trademark protection), but he has no way to stop them from using his exact recipe, and calling it something else. Nor can he get one red cent from them for this either. It’s not gonna happen, and whining about it is both bad business and bad for your stomach lining. And, since most of us are one good bitch session away from a peptic ulcer anyway, it’s a good idea to turn our eyes to what you can do to protect and profit from your ideas.

Not Shown: Actual amount of money to be earned creating cocktails….

Having outlined the traditional forms of raw Intellectual Property protections, Eben took a few moments to tell a parable. It starred… Eben Freeman.

Eben took a one year job with an establishment to design and implement a new bar program. Only a few months in, he had done his job well and the bar program was humming along smoothly. The menu worked. The bartenders were trained and capable of training replacements. In short, all the work had been done.

And the business terminated Eben long before his year was up….

Um, not to put too fine a point on it, but of course they did! Frankly, any business person who would not do this (given these raw circumstances) is unlikely to be a successful one. If a consultant or other contract professional has completed the work to be done, then they are dead weight going forward.

Back to the parable. Not only is Eben out several months of promised compensation, but all the work he did, all the ideas and creations he produced for the bar, is now the property of the bar, with no residual value owned by him. Most of what he produced, most of what anyone produces in the bar consulting (or any other consulting field for that matter) isn’t really protectable property through any of the above rights we discussed. First and foremost, you can’t protect recipes. And if there is anything of his work that might be considered ownable intellectual property, it doesn’t belong to him, it belongs to the bar. This is due to a concept called Work For Hire. Any idea, invention, or piece of passionate, purple prose you produce while on the job for someone else is by default the property of the employer.
[UPDATE: Sheila Fox Morrison has written me with a correction/amplification to the previous paragraph:

It would be important to note the if a person is a traditional employee (paid by the hour or on salary, with benefits, etc), the above underlined statement is true. However, it is the opposite if one is a contractor (project based, contractor is responsible for its owns taxes, no benefits etc). If one is a contractor all protectable IP is owned by the contractor unless there is an agreement to the contrary, but the hiring party likely will have a non-exclusive license to use all work product.

Thanks, Sheila. I'll note that her response provides a useful example of what I'm saying below.]

In the end, Eben was left with a third of his expected pay and no residual value for all the work he did.
It’s a sad outcome… and it’s exactly the way things should have worked out… given Eben’s actions.

Yes, it’s cold.
It’s business.
We may love to think that the cocktail business is a congenial, collegial, friendly environment where gentlemen rule. But the facts are that it is an intensely competitive, low-profitability business segment where nice guys are likely to finish sitting on someone else’s barstool.

Please note, I am not suggesting that good business people should or do screw everyone available, as hard as they can, at every opportunity. Hollywood villains aside, in the real world acting this way often makes it hard to hire the next good person, and impossible to get a good night’s sleep.

But in Eben’s own story about himself, he wasn’t getting screwed. It was just sensible business. So why was he unhappy? Because, as Eben himself and his panel emphasized this year, Eben had been a bad businessperson.

A formerly bad businessperson speaks….

Eben has learned how to prevent, painlessly but painstakingly, virtually all of the ways this job failed to work out. He learned the hard, bloody way, and has been banging away at these IP sessions at Tales for two years now to help others get the same knowledge without the whole professional road-kill part of the learning curve.

The answers to the problems in Eben’s parable, and to most of the others that arise from the limitations discussed above in traditional IP rights are: Contracts and Licenses. A reasonably, intelligently crafted contract will put employer and consultant (or bartender or manager) on the same side, with the same expectations.

Eben took on a contract with project-based responsibilities, but time-based compensation. He did a bang up job on the job, so there was no need to pay him for more time than it took to do it. Had the contract specified that payment for the project was X, then Eben would have gotten X. It might have come in 12 monthly payments to accommodate a new business’s cash flow, but it would have been for the project, not 12 months of work.

And all the work Eben did became the property of the bar. The concept of Work for Hire bit him on the ass. But WFH is not absolute. A reasonably well-drafted contract can dictate any assignation of these rights. Do any new ideas, drinks, etc. belong to Eben? The Bar? Both?
Through a license, perhaps Eben owns them, but the business has an indefinite license to use them. Maybe the restaurant’s license requires Eben to not sell his ideas to any other joint in town, or for 18 months. Sheila made the point very clear that, “the great thing about a contract is that it can say pretty much whatever you want it to.”

And as I alluded to above, this doesn’t just apply to contract workers. Employment contracts can be crafted in the same way, preserving rights for the employee (or the business owner).
Of course, it is possible that one side in a contract won’t want to be a reasonable negotiator. This is absolutely fabulous, if you ask me. If a guy wants to be a greedy, unreasonable sonofabitch over your contract, what on Earth makes you think he’d be anything other than poison to work with? Go find a better job (if you are worth a damn yourself) and watch for whoever buys his assets when he goes bankrupt… a bankruptcy that won’t be spilling onto your reputation.

There was a tremendous amount more in this session than I can go over in this already over-long post. A last concept I’ll touch on in closing was advocated by both Riley and Sheila. One somewhat sure way to prevent your ideas from being copied is to go all Don Beach and Vic Bergeron. They can’t steal your stuff if they don’t know what it is. And if you must let employees mix your secret Fabulous Fandango, make them sign a non-disclosure contract as a condition of employment.
Of course, while keeping lots of secrets in the drinks world may make you seem an exotic force of nature, it also might leave you viewed as a colossal douchebag…. There are no truly free lunches.

The whole discussion was an incredibly useful and interesting hour and a half. If you missed it, I bet Eben will be doing some variation on it next year at Tales. The lost year you save may be your own.

I originally posted this session writeup on Tales of the Cocktail’s own TalesBlog. I’m re-posting it here because I like it, it needed some links and improvements, and as a lead in to all the other material I’m going to have here in coming days about the kind of learned mayhem that was Tales of the Cocktail 2011.

It is odd to kick off a discussion of a critical business tool with the hope that your customers will steal it. But that was precisely the tack taken by Angus Winchester and Sean Finter in their Pro-Session, The Menu, at this year’s Tales. Their contention is that the menu is the most important piece of paper, perhaps the most important implement in a craft cocktail establishment. It is integral to customer satisfaction, to a smooth operation, to marketing, and most importantly to profitability. And it is often the result of great sweat, toil, and inspiration. Finally, many craft cocktail bar menus not only don’t accomplish what they were made for, they actually achieve the opposite.
I’ll get back the “stealing” issue in a bit. Before you worry about your menu growing legs, you need to be sure that it grows profits.

Menu writers all too often create a menu, then tailor operations to suit that menu. This can have negative consequences in many ways, and is a backwards approach to the issue. Angus asserted that “90% of cocktail menus are designed to fail”, because they are not a serious representation of the product the bar actually needs to sell to be successful.

First, many cocktail menus are simply too large. This can be a problem in several ways. It can require a bar to have to stock too many ingredients, many of them perishable. It can take up too much of a customer’s time, time they could be generating revenue. “Are you a bar or a library?” asked Sean. It can be so long that customers will give up and order most drinks from the first page, or they might just order something else entirely, throwing off your expected sales mix. It can also overtax your POS system and prevent you from properly analyzing sales to see not only what is actually selling, but whether you are maintaining good operational efficiency.

But the biggest problem with an overlarge menu is this: While the top 20% of your staff will happily and easily execute a long list to perfection, the bottom 20% will not. There is no worse thing to happen with a menu than for one of your staff to make anything on it wrong. Wait, yes there is, they could tell the customer that they don’t know how to make it. When I mentioned this on Twitter during the session, I got heavy, immediate feedback from all over the country. Agreement was very strong. If this has ever happened to you as a customer, you should already know how important it is to ensure this never happens on your watch as an owner or manager.
Simply put, you must ensure that you don’t get carried away and make your menu for elites, be they elite customers, or elite staff. Only when you craft your offerings to suit the desires of your customers, and the abilities of your staff, can the menu drive profits for you.

The other point stressed most by Angus (and while some might find it debatable. I don’t), is that too many bars are too in love with their own creations, to the point that that is all their menu consists of.
Too many of your rank and file customers will reject a menu filled only with choices they have never seen or heard of, and will go off menu to order. The more guests order from your menu, the faster your operation, the happier the customers, and the more accomplished your staff will become. Both Angus and Sean contended that you could conceivably have a menu that encompasses the only drinks you offer at all, just as with restaurant food menu. I understand the idea here, but as a customer type, I’d likely be fairly hacked off by this approach.

The old classics are still around for a reason. They are really good. Use them as a touch point for
customers to give cred to any originals you do decide to employ.

“There are maybe fifteen drinks created in the last twenty years in the entire world that will still be around in another twenty,” contended Angus. It is damn near impossible to create a menu filled entirely with originals that will hold up for any length of time. Most bars which want to feature only “signature drinks” don’t understand the real meaning of that phrase. You may view it as your favorite creation, something that identifies you to you. But if you sell only three a night, while you move a sea of your take on an old classic, your customers will see that as your signature. If the world beats a path to your Manhattan, it doesn’t matter that is was invented 140 years ago.

The session was packed with far too much good advice to relay it all here, so I’ll finish with several critical elements that they highlighted.

Language is important. You can allow no typos, no grammatical errors. (You menu is not a blog post.) Hire a professional editor at the very least. Sean and Angus likened the quality of writing on your menu to the cleanliness of your bathrooms. If either is, um, untidy it will turn off many of your customers outright, and leave the rest at least subconsciously doubting you and your product.
Still on the language, Use evocative descriptions. Talk about the flavors in a cocktail, rather than name-dropping a bunch of ingredients that many customers will not be equipped to evaluate. Just because you know the difference between Angostura and Peychaud’s Bitters, doesn’t mean that all (or most) of your customers do.
Finally, you need to choose a balance in how much you write on a menu. Many menus include meaningless factoids, even at the expense of useful information, while others are so terse that they convey no real information at all. Try to create a conversation in some instances, but never a rambling one.

Take lessons from restaurant menus. Every customer need their own, and needs it virtually as they sit down. Your menu does you no good being presented only on request. And if it is made a part of their greeting, the customer will be far more likely to respect what’s on it as being what they should choose from.

Consider offering an array of drinks with a wider range of prices. Many customers who experience sticker shock on first entering a craft bar may feel a lot more adventurous about that eleven dollar cocktail after they’ve first had one of the $6.50 highballs next to it on the menu.
Also, you need to go deeper in your analysis as you set your prices. A simple focus on gross profit of X percent over your cost of ingredients will not properly price a drink. Consider a drink that you serve in a relatively fragile stem cocktail glass. It is going to cost ruinously more over the long haul than another you put in something more sturdy like a thick double-old-fashioned. And a “cheap to make” Moscow Mule will end up losing you a ton if you forget to factor in the theft rate of all those copper mugs you employ in your revivalist frenzy.

And that brings us back to wanting your menus to be stolen. A great menu is a great business card for a bar. If your customers walk off with it, they will have a reason to talk about you, to remember you, and to come back to try something else on that document. Not all menus are cheap enough for you to employ this strategy, of course. Go ahead and keep good tabs on the leather-bound, brass-accented tome you put out there. Conversely, others are produced too simply or cheaply to really become worth stealing, much less become a keepsake.
As a bar owner, all these decisions are yours, but the real takeaway from this seminar is that your menu will drive the profitability of your craft bar… in one direction or the other.

{Originally posted on July 21, 2011, here.}

They call their movement Legalize Cachaça! You can visit their website here. The idea is to mobilize justice-minded citizens of America to take to the streets in peaceful protests to pressure the government to free Cachaça from rum’s iron-handed moniker. From New York to New Orleans, grassroots supporters of Brazil’s Noble Spirit have taken to the streets in large, loud protests.

Sure they have.

Cachaça is a liquor that is gaining in popularity in the United States, due in part to the cocktail renaissance we are enjoying, and in part to edgy (Not Entirely SFW) and creative marketing by various brands. I’ve written about it several times in the past, and I like a good Caipirinha quite a bit when it’s hot out.
While Cachaça is sometimes referred to as Brazilian Rum, Cachaça is most definitely not rum. It doesn’t taste like rum, you can’t use it in place of rum, and while both come from the sugarcane plant, instead of rye, corn, or potatoes, the Cachaça process is fundamentally different from rum’s. Hell, even this guy knows Ka-Cha-Ka is it’s own distinct booze.
Ooops! Did I say Cachaça is sometimes referred to as Brazilian Rum? Actually, if you want to sell a bottle of Cachaça in the United States, you have to label it Brazilian Rum. It’s a federal trade regulation that all Cachaça makers must mislabel their product, folks.
The Cachaça industry, and the Brazillian government have finally woken up to this issue and have begun lobbying the Treasury Department’s Tax and Trade Bureau to correct this old rule. This will allow them to quit calling their product something it isn’t, and also prevent somebody from setting up a still in, say, Costa Rica, making Brazillian Rum, calling it Cachaça, and selling it here. Their efforts are being aided greatly by the desire of many American distillers to prevent, say, Eastern Europeans from selling whiskey in Brazil and calling it Bourbon or Tennessee Sour Mash.
In fact, correcting this silliness is largely a done deal. It is uncontroversial. The revision to the regulation has been written and agreed to by all parties. The only hang up now is that our august Administration has not found someone who has paid enough of his or her taxes to be confirmed as the appropriate Deputy Treasury Secretary who can sign the paperwork.
So, I might suggest you pick up a bottle of Cachaça and put it away in storage. One day, your grandkid can put it on a display shelf in his basement bar and bore his guests to death with the same moldy old story about how the ancestors used to be such idiots as to call Cachaça… you get the picture.

Now, while they wait, the various Cachaça makers would like to sell you as much Brazilian Rum as they can. And one maker, Leblon Cachaça has decided that if they must deploy diplomats and hire lobbyists to demand change (Change!) from Washington, they might as well deploy street protesters, sign declarations, shout slogans, and generally make a big ruckus in the streets of America. The fact that any attention they garner might lead those so attracted to say, try come Cachaça, is strictly incidental….

What you see pictured above is a very clever, effective, and a bit silly example of a practice called Astroturfing. Astroturfing is where a lot of money wants to advocate some political action but wants to hide thier involvement and instead make it look like a grass-roots movement, i.e. a group of private, ordinary citizens who are so moved by a cause that they rise up almost spontaneously and speak out.
If you don’t know what Astroturfing is, you should. And if you do know what Astroturfing is, please don’t think I’m accusing Leblon of any of the underhandedness usually associated with the term! (Fair disclosure, Leblon sent me a bottle of their Cachaça to review last Fall. Thanks guys, it’s good.)
Leblon has run two of these events that I know of, one in New York (pictured above), and the other in New Orleans, at Tales of the Cocktail. The Tales protest, which accompanied the signing of the Cachaça Declaration of Independence, was more performance art than Astroturfing. Of course, given that it was in New Orleans, this may be what serious political protests actually look like down there….

Here’s a cool video Leblon produced about the New York City protests. Look at how effectively they have done this. It looks big. We are treated to the artful shot of a police car, and some of the protestors are wearing masks. The signs are all legible to the video camera. The people have several clearly understandable and organized chants. The interview with Steve Luttman (the man behind this promotion) is nicely done, as is the clip of the slightly bemused Brazilian tourists.

These little marketing events look like that they are supposed to look like, real, live, big protests.
In fact, the big lesson you should take from this is this: If this protest looks so real to you, how many of the protests you’ve seen over the last decade only looked real too?
There are ways, of course, that you can tell Leblon’s stunt is Astroturfing. And they are worth studying so that you can use these same techniques to tell if any real political protest isn’t so real either. Beyond the subject matter (Americans do not take to the street in the rain to protest obscure governmental bottle labeling stupidity), these protesters’ signs are too good. They are professionally made, and scaled for the cameras, by someone who knows good production values. You see the same sign duplicated many times. The camera is always positioned to make the crowd seem bigger than it really is. The protesters go off frame in one place and return in another, increasing the apparent size of the protest. You see some of the same faces of rank and file protesters in cities hundreds of miles or more apart. There are no Belgian Beer Purity activists or whatever hanging around in the back of every shot, trying to gravy train on the main protest….
Oh, and there can be no really well-run Astroturfing campaign without protest babes.

I wrote to Steve Luttman for some more information and a few pictures. And I asked him about Astroturfing too. I was amazed that he had not even heard of the term! This is a practice that has been developed over decades. Millions are spent on Astroturfing all the time. And Steve and a few dudes in his graphics department duplicated the whole industry, near letter perfect, in a few days, probably while consuming at least a modicum of Brazilian Rum.
Astroturfing in politics is designed to do two things, neither of them very savory. They want to misrepresent the strength of the movement, to intimidate politicians. And they want to misrepresent their numbers to trigger the herd instinct in ordinary people.
The reasons Leblon’s promotion is clever and fun, rather than underhanded, are varied. First, the signs are all in Leblon’s corporate typeface and colors. Also, Leblon’s advertising slogan, Live. Love. Leblon. is on many signs. In short, it’s almost impossible, if you know even what Cachaça is, not to know this is a Leblon paid event. Finally, Leblon and the other Cachaça makers have embarked on a mundane, legitimate, already about to be successful lobbying effort, and this political action isn’t really aimed at that effort. They are out to make a buck and have some fun. What is more legitimate and American than that?

The Cachaça Declaration of Independence.
{click to pop full size image}
To gauge the gravity of this document, please note that in just the first column, such cocktail luminaries as Gabriel Szaszko, John Hancock, and I. P. Freely all are signatories….

If you read any number of cocktail blogs regularly, you will note that I am one of the few such bloggers who is not currently pickling him or herself in New Orleans right now. Fear not, intrepid reader, I’ll just have to put up enough content to take up the slack until they sober up (Check back in October). I’ve been in a new drink funk for a while, so I’m touring Talesbloggers’ houses while they are out, and stealing their drinks. In the interests of sending you to their blogs, I’ll leave out one critical item from recipes I repost here….

SeanMike, of Scofflaw’s Den, has been doing an interesting series of posts in advance of Tales. He created over twenty original cocktails named and modeled after various blogger and bartender types who are attending the debauchery serious work in Nawlins. Needless to say, he left his house with a target rich environment for me to break in and add to this series of posts. The one I’m posting here is his tribute(?) to Paul Clarke, and his Cocktail Chronicles.

Now, SeanMike has been irritating Paul lately, so he is on his best behavior in this post. His best behavior isn’t very good, as his post is liberally sprinkled with flaming absinthe, BLINK tag accusations, and dancing babies, but bless him, he tries. His main effort is in using a rather serious main ingredient, Rittenhouse 100. The resulting cocktail is a pretty darned nice Manhattan variant, even if I had to use my standby rye, Old Overholt.

The thing I like about this cocktail is how many layers it has. Each sip gives three or more distinct taste impressions. It’s well worth the occasional mixing, and some future experimentation.
And a final reminder, if you want the secret ingredient, as well as a demonstration that SeanMike can’t see what is in his own pictures, read his post.

If you read any number of cocktail blogs regularly, you will note that I am one of the few such bloggers who is not currently pickling him or herself in New Orleans right now. Fear not, intrepid reader, I’ll just have to put up enough content to take up the slack until they sober up (Check back in October). I’ve been in a new drink funk for a while, so I’m touring Talesbloggers’ houses while they are out, and stealing their drinks. In the interests of sending you to their blogs, I’ll leave out one critical item from recipes I repost here….

This post details the Jasper’s Rum Punch, which I am stealing from Rick of Kaiser Penguin‘s liquor cabinet while he is in NOLA.

Interestingly, Rick stole the Jasper’s from Ted Haigh’s new edition of Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails: From the Alamagoozlum to the Zombie 100 Rediscovered Recipes and the Stories Behind Them.
Whomever Jasper was, he made a mean Rum Punch. Most of my experience with rum punch comes from the mean streets of the Jolly Rodger Pirate Cruises in the Caribbean. Such potables were certainly potent, but lacked subtlety, finesse, and, um, good taste. Jasper’s is a delicious cocktail that you can make one at a time. You’ll enjoy yourself in far greater taste and sophistication, right up until you are flat on your back.
The Rum Punch Express has only one destination, folks, no matter who’s driving!
Anyway, here it is:

Obviously, what I left out is the recipe for Jasper’s Secret Mix. You can buy Ted’s book for it, or visit Rick’s for a version tailored for an individual drink.
Incidentally, the first time I whipped one of these up, my nutmeg was all gone. I used a dash of cinnamon instead. It works nicely, but isn’t as good as it is with the nutmeg!

If you read any number of cocktail blogs regularly, you will note that I am one of the few such bloggers who is not currently pickling him or herself in New Orleans right now. Fear not, intrepid reader, I’ll just have to put up enough content to take up the slack until they sober up (Check back in October). I’ve been in a new drink funk for a while, so I’m touring Talesbloggers’ houses while they are out, and stealing their drinks. In the interests of sending you to their blogs, I’ll leave out one critical item from recipes I repost here….

First up is Micheal Dietsch, of A Dash of Bitters, with the Fleabag Sidecar.

Now, I have written extensively in this blog upon the Gospel of Brandy, the Sidecar. I love this drink, and I tend to treat it with the utmost of respect and care, sometimes to a fault.
The point of Micheal’s post is that the Sidecar can take care of itself fairly well, thank you very much. Even with base level ingredients, rather than a VS or VSOP cognac and Cointreau, the drink still is well worth the sip. I’ve whipped up one myself, as part of my work for the Hiram Walker Triple Sec review that is still in my draft folder, and he is right. The Flea Bag is not as good as one with top shelf hooch, but the point is that a cocktailian who is just starting out need not shy away from the Sidecar. Not everyone wants to shell out 35 bucks each for two bottles just to try a drink!
Here’s Micheal’s recipe:

Well, there you go….

Hey! Look here.
You said you weren’t going to post the whole recipes in the series! Cheating already?

No. The recipe is so short and classic that leaving something out wouldn’t get people to click thru to Dash of Bitters. What I’m leaving out is Micheal’s math, in which he calculates the out of pocket for the Flea Bag. It’s cheap folks. Read his post to find out how cheap!

OK, so as I said, I’ve been paying a little more attention to Bourbon lately. Today I ran across a delicious new way to employ Bourbon, Maker’s Mark to be specific. Use it in Ice Cream! We were browsing for lunch down at Columbus’ North Market and came across…

Hey! Not to interrupt, but why aren’t we at Tales of the Cocktail?

Not to interrupt? I think you are. I’m trying to write about ice cream here.

My question stands.

Because I can’t afford the time or the money, OK? Especially the time.

But I really wanted to go!

Then you go. Tell me about it when you get back.

You’re joking right? I’m a sock puppet! One part of the job description is that I’m always mysteriously exactly wherever you are, even though we are, of course, completely independent people.

Well excuse me! I’d love to be down there, destroying my liver, watching demonstrations on making 80 proof marshmallows, and generally drunk-blogging up a storm. But as I said, I can’t afford the time! Even if I hadn’t just spent twelve days in Orlando, Summer is not a good time for travel for us, except for business.

It’s the schedule! That’s it. They probably chose that date just to make it hard for me, er, you to attend. The schemers!

Please, I’d never suggest such a thing. I’m offended you did.

Sorry, I appreciate your modesty on the subject. I just think it is so darn irritating!

Are you done bitching?

I don’t know. Am I?

Yes.

Oh wait! I forgot. I was talking about ice cream. We have a local ice cream maker here in Columbus called Jeni’s Ice Creams. They make a lovely selection of specialty flavors, most including some unusual ingredients, such as Queen City Cayenne, Wild Berry Lavender, and the flavor that started this train-wreck of a post, Maker’s Mark Buttered Pecan. I love Butter Pecan ice cream to begin with, and even have a good recipe for making it myself, but this really caught my eye. Jeni’s description says it has a big Bourbon punch, but this (fortunately) overstates things. You can taste the Bourbon, but it does not stand out. Instead, it melds perfectly with the toasty nuttiness of the buttered pecans. It is some delicious stuff.
The only problem with this is that now I have things to do. I need to try this with my own Butter Pecan recipe, and I hope I get the amount of Bourbon right the first time, or I’ll weigh 200 ponds before I get it right. Also, I think that a bigger lesson to be learned is that Bourbon makes a great backup singer to the kind of nutty, sugary flavors in this ice cream. There has to be a dessert cocktail or two in here.

Maybe it’ll keep you mind off all the fun you are missing in New Orleans!

Oh, shut up.