Wild Bill Turkey

She likes Bison Grass vodka (Zubrowka), so I decided to experiment with that. Tried modifying the grassiness of it with Green Chartreuse. What was the word? Oh yeah...

Katie, from your description of your experience at Green Goddess it sounds as though they had their own party celebrating sloth.

What's sad is that in Europe, many of the good absinthes are available in 500ml bottles, but even those brands only show up here in the 750s. Which is too bad, because there, they only drink it as a stand-alone drink, and here it's only used by the dash in cocktails.

Could it be a corruption of "à la Roi"? Roi is always anglicized as Roy, and if it was penned by someone who was trying to make it sound French-ish, they could have also missed that 'la' should be 'le' in the case of 'le Roi'.

Marteau was formulated with strong notes of key flavors specifically with cocktail-mixing in mind. But if you can't find it, don't let that stop you. There are other verte absinthes on the US market that would be fine for cocktails. Vieux Pontarlier, Vieux Carré and Leopold are all pretty easy to find. Even Marilyn Manson's "Mansinthe" is pretty decent, hard as that is to believe, and you can find it on a lot of shelves. Jade's Nouvelle Orleans is starting to show up around town, and online vendors like Drink Up New York are also offering craft-distillery products like Pacifique and the products of Delaware Phoenix. Sadly, Pernod's new absinthe is to be avoided, as is La Fée, Mata Hari, Le Tourment Verte and both products by Absente.

Yeah, as a general comment I would advise against using blanche absinthes as cocktail modifiers or bitters. They can be delicious as stand-alone drinks, but blanches lack the full range of flavors available in a verte absinthe, and when a drink recipe calls for a few concentrated drops of absinthe flavor, I think you have to use a verte.

!!

Hey Brooks! Sounds like an instant winner to me. Can you think of anything one might use to upgrade the Pernod?

Sorry to be so late with this comment, but I love that glass.

Just spent a 3-day weekend at a rented party house with French people. One night, the host made her mother's traditional "Champagne Soup", and many of the guests acted like this was a fondly-remembered family ritual as well. Found this recipe online, though our host used simple syrup rather than granulated sugar...

If they added a little aloe to it, I don't see why it couldn't serve a dual purpose!

The Lewis bag isn't as easy to fake as I thought it would be. The linen dish cloths would be better than a pillowcase, but either will be quickly shredded by hammering ice with a muddler or rolling pin. The material is more important than the bag-form. The heavy canvas of a Lewis bag is tough as nails, and absorbent, which helps wick water away and keep the ice dry. An art supply store will help solve the problem, if you plan to make a lot of mint juleps this way next month. You can buy good raw canvas at a big art supply store, and cheap rubber mallets used by sculptors and mosaic artists (having used a muddler at first, I now swear by the comfort and indestructability of a rubber mallet). Cut a foot-wide strip of canvas twice as long as you'd like your bag, fold it over double and sew the sides closed to form a bag (almost any neighborhood dry cleaner/alterations place can do it for you with machines that make easy work of sewing heavy canvas) and you're done.

That would also explain why it feels balanced with a generous pour of syrup and sweetened gin. The Pernod pastis is syrup-sweet in comparison to absinthe.

I have to try the Night cap. I know you said the Cointreau was an "accident", but since the word here seems to be that Grand Marnier upgrades curaçao as Cointreau upgrades triple sec, do you think you would have used Grand Marnier had your hands not taken over? Brandy based liqueur in a brandy drink?

I guess the real acid test is whether you're willing to subject your guests to an Electric Kool-Aid

Ha! There's also a Kamikaze with a Chambord float called a "Purple Haze".

Well, from the song (We are stardust, we are golden...) there is a cocktail called the Stardust, but it sounds kind of vile, involving peach schnapps, blue curacao, lemon vodka and grenadine.

Somehow, the name Newton makes me think the brandy should be calvados.

Wow, so it's like that? Damn. Some of the big US chains are also carrying Don César, whose acholado was very highly recommended to me by two different Peruvian bartender friends, and I have to admit it's my favorite so far, as well. The version I've seen on shelves here though is the Don César pisco puro, made from a single grape variety, and I haven't tried it yet.

That's what I call Antica Formula .

Most of the Jades are temporarily out of production at the moment, and LdF isn't the only distributor that's running out of them. The good news, and the answer to second part of your question, is that I'm pretty sure production on most of the Jade line has slacked off because he's ramping up prodcution of the Jade Nouvelle Orleans, which is now being distributed in the US by Drink Up New York (hope it's okay to put up that link). The Nouvelle has long been a favorite from the line, and I guess it was the first one the distiller chose to get brought into the US. Like the rest of the Jades, Ted Breaux makes this absinthe with his own hands. This is not the case with the Lucid. Also on the linked page is the Vieux Pontarlier, and also the Leopold, which was the first US-made product to win unanimous approval from classic-absinthe geeks. Both of these would be great choices either to drink for themselves or to add the proper flavor to cocktails. The Leopold can also be found on store shelves in many parts of the country. In the next month or so, several great options, seen available now for presale on that site (in fact I think the Marteau is available already) will be seeing distribution throughout the US. The Pacifique, for example, threatens to take over the world and hold us all hostage. Good times...

Is this a pun?

I like your "Libation Library" off to the left.

Answering this question in the category of "New Orleans Sours" from the Gary Regan book is the Missing Link: Dark rum w/Cointreau and lemon in the 3;2;1 formula.

Both versions of that drink sound great ( I've been exploring, at some expense, the different styles of pisco and learning to love them) but, as a newbie, I have to ask if Julie Reiner's version isn't so substantially changed that it should have a different name. The addition of an egg white and half an ounce of rum seems like it would so alter the body and character of the drink that it falls into a whole new family. And does the dash of Apry get lost in all that? The original's apricot rinse sounds like a real flavor partner in the drink.