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Now it's my turn to ask... By "Roast Paprika Syrup", do you mean what we in the US would call roasted "red bell pepper"? Or do you mean actual dried paprika? If so, how to prepare either?

Wow, fantastic! A theme song! I was using Flor de Cana's Extra Dry to preserve the red color. I actually think it might be a bit better with more of a character rum.

Some friends asked me to come up with a cocktail for a collaborative zine project they are working on. The zine is based around a group of wood cuts and illustrations by one of the artists. Criteria: A bittersweet and whimsical love triangle. This one stumped me for quite a while. For obvious reasons I thought it should be bitter, but wasn't sure what to use for a base spirit. The deadline for the project actually passed. But a note of salvation! The deadline had been extended! Then yesterday, uh duh, Campari occurred to me. Sheesh! Red like a crab! Crab Malice Cocktail 1 1/2 oz Campari 3/4 oz White Cuban Style Rum 3/4 oz Lime Juice 1/4 oz Cointreau Shake with ice and strain into an ice filled glass. Top with soda water or selzer. Whew! We've got bitterness and a nice red crab-like color. A nautical theme from the rum and the bubbles from the selzer. Actually, now thinking, a nice long lime peel twist made with a vegetable peeler around the side of the glass would up the aromatic quotient, and be kind of sea weedy. As a special bonus, it's pretty darn tasty and refreshing, as long as you don't mind bitterness (no super tasters need apply!) edit - The only cocktail that I sort of had in mind when making this was the Jasmine. Similar ingredients, but inverted proportions to make up for using selzer and rocks. Aside from the Americano, is there anything else it is similar to?

Almost 3 years later, I finally noticed this behind the counter at a local Italian Deli... Not only that, but scored a lovely large bottle of Amarena Fabbri Wild Cherries in Syrup. Persistence pays!

Roger, you might want to get in communication with these folks: Roboexotica

Hawaiian Cocktail 4 Parts Gin. (1 1/2 oz Plymouth Gin) 2 Parts Orange Juice. (3/4 oz fresj Orange Juice) 1 Part Curacao (or any other of the Orange Liqueurs) (Barspoon Brizard Orange Curacao) Shake well and strain into cocktail glass. Went a bit light on the Curacao, for the recipe. The orange I was using was pretty sweet. A pleasant, non-demanding cocktail.

Havana Cocktail 1 Dash Lemon Juice. 1/4 Dry Gin. (1/2 oz Northshore Distillers #6) 1/4 Swedish Punch. (1/2 oz Swedish Punch, homemade) 1/2 Apricot Brandy. (1 oz R&W Orchard Apricot) Shake (stir, please) well and strain into cocktail glass. (Lemon Peel.) Not undrinkably sweet, but pretty darn close. And what are those Cubans doing with Gin, Swedish Punch, and Apricot Brandy? Havana Cocktail 1 Dash Lemon Juice. 1/4 Dry Gin. (1/2 oz Northshore Distillers #6) 1/4 Swedish Punch. (1/2 oz Swedish Punch, homemade) 1/2 Apricot Brandy. (1 oz Haus Alpenz Marillen Apricot Eau-de-Vie) Shake (stir, please) well and strain into cocktail glass. With a dash of bitters, this would be absolutely delicious. The amazing thing is how the Swedish Punch dominates the first cocktail, and the second tastes of nothing but Apricot. I think it is unlikely that Apricot Eau-de-Vie was intended here, especially since the upcoming Hesitation is a nearly identical recipe with 3/4 Swedish Punch instead of the Apricot and Swedish punch. However, making it with Eau-de-Vie is worth a shot, if you've got it in the house. Very tasty.

I've never seen that liqueur. Kind of confused by the Del Maguey website. Is it a cream liqueur? Or just Mezcal sweetened with Agave Syrup. If you've got Gum Syrup, that's what I'd use. Or if you've got Agave Syrup, also probably fine. The Mesquite Gum Syrup is what I've got right now for Syrup. Reminds me I need to track down some of the Gum Syrup Jennifer Colliau is making these days for bars. I tried her Pineapple Gum and found it quite amazing. They're currently using it in an awesome Pisco Punch at Beretta.

Hasty Cocktail 1 Dash Absinthe. (1/3 tsp. Lucid) 4 Dashes Grenadine. (1 tsp. Fee's American Beauty) 1/3 French Vermouth. (3/4 oz Dolin Dry Vermouth) 2/3 Nicholson's Gin. (1 1/2 oz Junipero, dash Mesquite Gum Syrup) Shake (stir, please) well and strain into cocktail glass. (Lemon Peel.) As near as I can tell, Nicholson's was an Old-Tom, so Junipero with a dash of Gum is standing in. OK, the garnish was a dumb idea. I was looking around the kitchen for my peeler or channel knife (Sigh. People who have never worked in a kitchen just don't understand the importance of putting things away in the same place after washing.) and ran across the microplane. I thought to myself, "Hey, a delicate sprinkling of lemon peel snow. That will be cool." Actually, it did taste kind of cool, just not the most appealing to choke down, what with the little hair-like lemon peel pieces and all. Nice cocktail.

Thinning the rhubarb on Saturday, I pulled a bunch of leaves. Needed some dessert for dinner, and we already had a couple pounds of kiwi fruit. Rhubarb and Kiwi pudding! Dumped a bunch of sugar on the cleaned and sliced rhubarb. Let it sit for an hour and start to release juices. Added a cinnamon stick and the zest of half an orange. Cooked until it started to soften, then added a bunch of kiwis and 2 TBSP tapioca. OK, it was pretty ugly when it was done cooking. Served it still warm with some whipped cream. The crispy kiwi seeds provided a nice texture counterpoint to the soft pudding. Yummy!

Well, the first thing to check before eating any flower is to make sure it isn't poisonous. I found this handy page on edible flowers: Edible Flowers Looks like you're in luck with Lilac, though flavor is said to be quite variable. You probably won't capture much scent without distillation. It does appear that some honeysuckle varieties may be poisonous, so best to be sure you know which you are harvesting... Same with Jasmine. Here's another good page: Edible Flower Guide

One of the best brain dumps I've found regarding the use of fresh juice in a bar setting, was this post from kingcocktail, (aka Dale DeGroff,) on the DrinkBoy forums: Running Bar Programs with Fresh Juice edit - To me that suggests, even refrigerated, you've only got 24 hours maximum life on lemon or lime in contact with air. I was thinking you might be able to mitigate by backfilling the bottles with a neutral gas instead of air. I think wine dispensing devices often do this.

To go along with cdh's concerns, the fresh juice is something that I am wondering about. Unless you are providing some shelf stable, filtered, pasteurized and preservative laden juice, someone on staff is going to have to be juicing the lemons and limes, and filtering the juice. The shelf life of freshly squeezed lemon and lime juice is pretty short, even filtered, so it will also be necessary to monitor the quality. Seems like that would be a big challenge for citrus based drinks.

You can toss fruit syrups in the freezer. At least the more robustly flavored syrups, like grenadine, seem to do fine. Due to their sugar content, they should stay in a semi-frozen slushy state, which can then be easily defrosted in a couple seconds under cold running water.

Hey, at least you've got a river. All I've got is the sound of the US-101/I-280 interchange. If you close your eyes, it sounds like the sea...

Harvard Cocktail 2 Dashes Angostura Bitters. 1 Dash Syrup. (1/3 tsp Mesquite Gum Syrup) 1/2 Brandy. (1 1/2 oz Cerbois VSOP Armangac) 1/2 Italian Vermouth. (1 1/2 oz Vya Sweet Vermouth) Shake well and strain into cocktail glass. (Rose Geranium Flowers.) Sorry to go all "Farmers' Market" and flowery on you. I've been experimenting with taking pictures outside and this picture just wasn't working without anything else for garnish. The clusters of Geranium flowers caught my eye. They look cool, but don't really smell or taste like anything. It seems to me that the Brandy Manhattan has been covered at least a few times before in the Savoy Cocktail Book. I guess they are fond of them at Harvard. For what it is worth, I found the Vya Sweet Vermouth, Bitters, and Brandy in the Harvard a much better combination than the Vya, Absinthe, Mint, and Gin in the Harry's Cocktail. It is quite an enjoyable cocktail.

I guess I just don't understand what you're trying to address. At least here in San Francisco, it's my impression that the most common reason restaurants don't serve cocktails has to do with the costs associated with and/or difficulty of obtaining the proper license(s) to serve hard liquor. It's not that they can't find staff qualified enough to make 5 simple drinks. Generally, in restaurants which have full liquor licenses, but don't serve a lot of booze, it seems like it is most common for the drink making responsibility to fall on the host. If I'm in a bar or restaurant not known for its cocktails, the presence of a drink making robot really isn't going to sway me, (well more than once probably,) towards ordering a drink. Unless, indeed, it is a very cool robot.

If any of you read (or write) blogs which cover cocktails, you might know that Paul over at Cocktail Chronicles has been organizing a monthly online cocktail event he calls Mixology Mondays. This month's event is being hosted by Blair over on his blog Trader Tiki's Booze Blog. The theme is simply Rum!. To quote Blair from his explanation of the topic: If you would like to participate, please write up a cocktail in this topic before Monday, May 12th at midnight. I will compile a list of cocktails posted and email them to the organizer. Yaaar!

Harry’s Pick-Me-Up Cocktail 1 Teaspoonful Grenadine. (1 barspoon Fee's American Beauty Grenadine) 1 Glass Brandy. (2 oz Cerbois VSOP Armangac) The Juice of 1/2 Lemon. (About 3/4 oz Lemon Juice) Shake well and strain into medium sized wine glass, and fill balance with Champagne (Louis Bouillot Cremant de Bourgogne Brut). (Lemon Peel.) There are a few "Pick-Me-Up" cocktail in the Savoy Cocktail Book. Cecil, I.B.F., Nineteen-Twenty, and Roosevelt. I don't really see much commonality, but I would guess they're more or less synonymous with "Corpse Revivers". Drinks to get your pounding head restarted the morning after... Anyway, Harry's Pick-Me-Up is a dry and enjoyable refresher which I imagine, without much tweaking, could have some legs in today's world. You'd just have to convince folks, somehow, that they aren't drinking a pink French 75.

Along these lines, one of the more interesting recipes I've found for the Clover Club was Robert Vermeire's, from "Cocktails: How to Mix Them": In addition to the Vermouth, as noted by Mr. Wondrich from the original recipe, it's interesting that this is the only recipe I've seen for the "Clover Leaf" which calls for sprigs of mint to be shaken with the drink.

I haven't had the pleasure of sampling your cocktails, so I'm not sure exactly where you're coming from with this. I'll try to clarify my position To me the first common mistake I made was to make cocktails too sweet and too large with low quality booze. This is where I was in the 1980s. The next thing I did to combat the sweetness is to pump up the sourness to counteract the sweetness. This gives you intensity and volume, but the booze is often lost. Probably for the best. After that, the next thing I did was to start buying better booze and push the sourness and the liquor forward. The place I'm at now, is dialing back on both the sourness and the sweetness, and leaving relatively decent booze at the fore of the cocktail, but also make a smaller cocktail. The problem with the smaller cocktail, however, is you are really on a knife's edge with amounts of sweetener and sour. At the mercy of your ingredients, talent, and taste. Two people, making the same cocktail from the same recipe can have completely different results just due to minor tweaks. To get back to the restaurant metaphor, a lot of restaurant food is too rich for me. Over salted, over seasoned, and over constructed. I can eat it every once in a while, but don't really enjoy it unless I am in a splurgy mood. At home, I seldom mount sauces with butter. Usually a wine deglazing and reduction with the pan juices and fond is fine for me. Must be my proximity to Chez Panisse!

I had a hard time finding this on the Tales site, so I'll post a link. There's a full list of the menus of the various spirited dinners, including drinks on this page: 2008 Spirited Dinner Menus It also tells you the names of the chefs and bar chefs involved.

You know, a lot of people seem to have the impression that mint needs to abused to flavor a drink. This is absolutely not true. It is OK to abuse mint in a drink with strong citrus flavors, like a mojito. The citrus will cover up the sour and vegetal plant flavors from the goo inside the leaves. But in the case of a drink like this, you just want the flavor and scent of mint. When I made the Fascinator, (Gin, Dry Vermouth, Absinthe, Mint,) with Jennifer Colliau at Slanted Door I sort of surprised her when I told her I thought the mint was in the cocktail not a garnish, so I got her to add the leaves to the cocktail she was stirring. We were both amazed at how clearly the mint flavor and scent was expressed without having to mash the leaves or shake the cocktail. It was sort of an "Ah Ha!" moment for both of us. To be boring, generally scented substances like menthol are manufactured in glands near the surface of the plant leaf. Usually, the mechanism for their release is brushing against the small hairs on the leaf surface.

Harry’s Cocktail 1/3 Gancia Italian Vermouth. (3/4 oz Vya Sweet Vermouth) 1 Dash Absinthe. (1/3 tsp. Lucid Absinthe) 2/3 Gin. (1 1/2 oz Beefeater's Gin) 2 Sprigs of Fresh Mint. Shake (stir, please) well and strain into cocktail glass. Serve with a stuffed olive. Sorry, didn't think to add the olive until after I took the picture. For some reason, which doesn't quite make sense to me, this didn't do much for me. This completely puzzles me, as Sweet Vermouth, Absinthe, Gin, and Mint should pretty much be a gimme. I'm not sure if it is the Vya, the Lucid, the Beefeater's, or a combination of the above that didn't work. I mean it certainly seemed to have enough potential. I should probably just go back and re-make it with Tanqueray and Martini & Rossi Sweet Vermouth...

I got obsessed with making Cocoa bitters with Mexican spices for a while. Started from cocoa beans I got in a Mexican grocery and roasted them. Mole Bitters/Liqueur When researching roasting my own beans, I found this site quite helpful: All about Cocoa Beans and blue jeans. At least, for bitters or infusion, you don't have to sift and winnow the shells. This recipe may be what you are looking for: Homemade Creme de Cacao (Jagendorf) Recipe I haven't tried making it, but sort of incorporated into my Cocoa bitters process.