mbanu

Bloody Mary, vodka & tonic (try it with a few dashes of Angostura bitters), rye & ginger ale (if they have rye), scotch & soda, bourbon & water... Campari & soda is nice if you like Campari, Pernod & water is nice if you like Pernod. Irish coffee is nice when it's cold outside. Maybe vodka Gimlets or Black Russians for cocktails? Both are fairly straightforward. Worst case scenario, it's hard to look like an idiot ordering draft beer.

Make sure the bottles are cleaned and sanitized. The syrups need to be boiled but not caramelized. Christian Schultz (the guy who did the section on bitters, liqueurs, infusions, and syrups in How to Mix Drinks by Jerry Thomas) suggested "small thread" to "large pearl" levels of candying. I've found 2:1 sugar to water to be a good ratio for me. Honey should be cut to a similar concentration.

I've found this to be an enjoyable nightcap. 1 ounce bourbon 1/2 ounce apple cider vinegar 3-4 ounces boiling water honey to taste

I've always heard highball used to refer to spirit-and-a-mixer long drinks, excluding hot drinks and frozen drinks.

Perhaps kola tonic was a drink concentrate syrup? That would help explain the dual nature. As to sirop de citron, I always figured it was a precursor to sour mix, maybe something like a lemon-based version of Rose's lime cordial. It's sweet, sure, but you can tell that its role in drinks is as a souring agent. Take the CocktailDB recipes for a White Baby and a White Lady, for instance. One is quite obviously a variant of the other.

The regulars enforce the bar's rules for it, so it doesn't need to spell them out very often. New bars don't have regulars, and some bars never cultivate them, so they have to be more explicit. This should be on a plaque somewhere. I guess the bigger question is, if you don't want the drinks or atmosphere that are a bar's specialty, what is your reason for going there? It's like going to a Chinese restaurant and being frustrated by the lack of French fries.

Fresh-made Italian sodas (flavored syrups & soda water) are always enjoyable. Your local coffee shop or gourmet store should have a decent selection of syrups available. Throw in some lemons and limes, and you can make a variety of sparkling lemonades. Orgeat lemonade is pretty good, as are non-alcoholic Mojitos. Something helpful here might be keeping a bottle of plain water to use as a "nonalcoholic vodka" to thin out your drinks.

When I hear "sweetened lemon juice" I see a lemon counterpart to Rose's lime. Could swing either way, though, depending on how concentrated a person likes their drinks.

A bar culture that cultivates regulars instead of weekenders and tourists. High stable incomes. Nonrestrictive liquor laws, especially import laws. Wages high enough compared to the cost of living to attract career-track bartenders.

Interlibrary loan access from the local library combined with a good starting bibliography is how I do it. The bibliography provided at CocktailDB (thanks, Doc) is a good place to start, as well as the library catalog of the Bartender's School of Santa Rosa. AW Noling's Beverage Literature is also fairly helpful. Access to newspaper archive databases can also sometimes be helpful, as can be sites such as this, which allow multiple people to work on the same problems. It's important not to take anything for granted. If you recreate a vintage drink that was once highly regarded, yet it ends up tasting horrible, you have to find out the cause. Where did your source get its source? Could there have been a typo in the recipe somewhere along the chain? Do all the ingredients named mean today what they meant back then? Is powdered sugar powdered sugar? How large were the lemons? Is Jamaican rum made the same way today it was made when the recipe was recorded? It's also important to understand context, global and local. Drinking attitudes of the time in question, and an understanding of the drink inventor's quirks can often give you the clues you need to clear up ambiguity. Add the global context to the Golden Fizz (a Tom Collins/Gin Fizz with... egg yolk???) and you discover that a lot of hangover cure drinks had egg in them, because egg was considered easy to digest and a good source of vitamins. You also discover that it was a common belief at the time that you needed to drink the same thing you'd gotten drunk on ("hair of the dog that bit you") if you wanted a complete recovery, and that Gin Fizzes were quite popular at the time. Viewed through that lens, the Golden Fizz doesn't seem quite so odd. Local context is also important, since sometimes it can clear up confusion caused by global context. Global context would tell you that Trader Vic's Fogcutter (a drink made with rum, gin, and brandy, among other things) was a surefire way of getting too drunk and having a terrible hangover, as it was believed at the time that mixing spirits like that was a big no-no. So why would Vic have done it? Local context in the form of reading his books and studying his mixing style would have told you that he had a habit of selecting a unique spirit, designing a drink around it, then blending things together to form a substitute when the unique spirit ran out. It would also show that he used a similar rum/gin/brandy combo in his Scorpion Bowl, which he claimed to be inspired by a punch made with okolehao, a defunct Hawaiian spirit. Put local contexts one and two together, and things begin to clear up.

What size egg were you using?

Think I'm coming down with something, so... Recupérate Cocktail 2 oz. tequila 1/2 oz. Broncolin honey syrup 1/2 oz. lemon juice Shake and strain.

The Revised Bartender's Guide is a good one. The one downside is that it relies on commercial mixes for some drinks that would do better without them. As for suggestions, the Mai Tai for certain. Arawak Cocktail if you like Manhattan-style drinks. Lichee Nut Daiquiri if you like frozen drinks. One of his coffee drinks if you like hot stuff. The Tortuga if you like over-the-top drinks. Trader Vic also did a lot of fun stuff with tequila, surprisingly. Acapulco Gold, Durango, El Diablo, Jayco, and the Sonora Daiquiri are all worth a look at least. Happy mixing!

Figured I'd try to do something fun with some of the more obscure stuff that's been gathering dust in the cabinet. A name escapes me for the moment. 2 oz. tequila 1/2 oz. starfruit syrup 1/2 oz. lemon juice 5 oz. soda water A few dashes Swedish bitters Build in a glass over ice.

El Tesoro does that. It has an all-pervasive flavor like Pernod, probably a byproduct of being distilled to proof. You might try cutting it with some light rum, or adding more vermouth, since it has the most neutral flavor.

Some fun with horchata concentrate syrup. Picked it up at the local Mexican grocer while going on a lime run. Kinda like orgeat, only with rice and cinnamon instead of almond and orange flower. Names later, maybe, when feeling more creative. Fun #1 1 oz. blanco tequila 1 oz. Cointreau 1/2 oz. horchata syrup 1/2 oz. lime juice Shake & strain. Fun #2 1 oz. heavy rum (Jamaican/Demerara/etc) 1 oz. Grand Marnier (or knockoff orange brandy) 1/2 oz. horchata syrup 1/2 oz. lime juice Shake & strain

Grand Marnier does well in drinks that call for orange curacao. Makes a great Mai Tai.

One of Trader Vic's books introduced a bartender named Jasper LeFranc, who used nutmeg-infused Angostura as part of his sour mix, and I've heard that Angostura used to advocate infusing orange peel in a bottle of its bitters as a substitute for proper orange bitters. So has anyone fooled around with infusing bitters?

The Route 66 liqueur that fellow uses in some of his drinks sounds interesting. The creme de popcorn also sounds fun.

Sounds like something that might work as a bitters to me. Maybe try a twist on the Sazerac?

Fair enough. It is true that I was a bit lazy and didn't bother to crack the (regular home ice maker) cubes. Next time I will follow Dave's advice to the letter and report back. BTW, I know somewhere on these forums, at one point, I espoused the use of frozen gin in Martinis. I have since seen the error of those ways and leave my gin and mixing vodka at room temperature. Though, really the end result of the frozen gin was very similar to my experiments last Saturday with the frozen mixing glass. A very cold cocktail with almost no dilution. ← I guess this is part of what I meant when I said the Martini can be a bit of a headache for a beginner. Some of the confusion over which way to chill a Martini comes from the fact that an Extra Dry Martini and a wetter standard Martini aren't really in the same category of drinks, although they have the same name. Both drinks are best served ice cold, but the optimal strength and the role the vermouth plays are very different in the two. In an extra dry Martini, the vermouth is for aroma, and the optimal strength is around standard liquor strength (ie 40% abv). With that as a background, putting a bottle of 40-45% abv gin in the freezer and pouring it straight into a pre-chilled Martini glass with a misting of vermouth and the appropriate garnishes seems like a reasonable way of doing things. It's certainly less hit or miss than doing it the other way of using room temperature 45+% abv gin and trying to finesse the stuff into just the right amount of chill and dilution using cracked ice and a slow stir. On the other hand, in a wet Martini, the vermouth is for flavor, and the optimal strength is roughly half that of the extra dry. Here using ice to chill the ingredients is a better idea, because the drink needs that dilution. And of course because the mythos of the Martini partially rests on its drinkers being anally particular, there are an infinite number of degrees of dryness in the spectrum between the two types, where the vermouth slowly changes roles, the optimal strength increases, and the little details like cracked or crushed, small cubes or large, freezer gin or room temperature, shake or stir, etc. etc. etc. fluctuate about.

Ok, here's 6 and a non-7. Daiquiri. Why? It's a white rum drink, so it's inexpensive to make (and mess up on), even with fresh juice. It also follows the Sours style. Once you know how to make a good Daiquiri, you can pretty much make every other classic drink of that type. Margarita. Why? It's one of the few classic cocktails that is universally known (even if the number of people who have had one made correctly are far fewer). It extends off Sours into one of the next most common styles used in classic cocktails. If you can make a good Margarita, you can make a good Sidecar, a good Mai Tai, even a good Cosmopolitan if you're looking for something more modern. It's also good for demonstrating what a difference in upgrading the quality of your liquor can do. The difference between poor-quality tequila and high-quality tequila is one of the biggest I can think of in the spirit world, and the difference between generic triple sec and Cointreau is usually noticable if you live in the US. B-52. Not really a classic per se, but it's a fairly popular layered drink, and because of the Irish cream in the middle, less forgiving than some. If you can make a clean B-52, you can probably layer most any other drink required. Some kind of highball. Really, whatever you enjoy drinking. Gin & Tonic, Rum & Coke, Scotch & Soda, Bourbon & Water, even Irish Coffee. Highballs are really common, so it's a good idea to understand how to make a good one. Straight liquor served in its various styles. Kinda like the highball, they're so common it's a good idea to understand the details. Tom Collins. Not too terribly different from a cross between a Highball and a Sour, but a common example of a style that shows up a lot in the classic drink arena. I may be in the minority, but I'd suggest ignoring Martinis. A good Martini is indeed a drink like very few others, but they're really a headache that ought to be confronted after some practice. Getting good vermouth and garnishes can be sketchy business at times, the lingo surrounding the drink is particularly vague, and the globs and globs of mythology on top of the drink don't help out, as they encourage people to approach the drink as more than what it is. Good luck!

Juice garnishes (lemon/lime/orange wedges) exist because bartenders are no mind readers, so sometimes the sweetness/sourness of a drink needs tweaking after it's been made to suit one's personal taste. Since at home the bartender and the drinker are the same, these aren't needed. Twists and dashes (outside of bitters and heavy liqueurs used for flavoring like Pernod or maraschino) are for aroma. With familiar drinks this can sometimes be dispensed with, but a pleasant aroma almost always adds to the drink. I'd leave those in. In the right environment, purely visual garnishes can connect the drink to the place, which enhances the experience. But outside of those circumstances, they're really not so important. "Pleasant surprise" style garnishes like the cherry at the bottom of a Manhattan are of course unneccesary if one isn't a fan of pleasant surprises. I'd say however that the olive in a well-made wet Martini is a special case. To me, the salty pungent flavor of the olive is the slap in the face that snaps me out of the meditative state I often slip into contemplating the flavor/not flavor born of gin and vermouth. If there's a quality commercial version of a syrup and the price is right, there's nothing wrong with using it. People turn to homemade when the commercial versions leave something to be desired, are difficult to find, or are prohibitively expensive. On the other hand, though, having knowledge of syrup-making can be very helpful when you're feeling creative. As for ginger beer, the one issue with Reeds is that it is sweetened with things like pineapple juice and honey instead of a cleaner sweetener like sugar. This isn't really a problem in most drinks, but it's still good to have a cleaner alternative for those rare exceptions where the pineapple-honey backflavors clash with the drink. This doesn't necessarily need to be home-made ginger beer, but the commercial ginger beer selection can be rather limited/nonexistent in some areas.

Freepour is legal, but you need to purchase a license to do it. Many bars don't bother. Most people drink shots and highballs, which lend themselves to minibottles.

It's an aesthetics thing. I see it as falling into the same category as people who like Old-Fashioneds made with cube sugar and a muddler even though simple syrup would be faster and more consistent.