Category: cocktails
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Drinking Poetic: The Banana Dance
I’m prouder of the Banana Dance than almost any other drink that I’ve created. More so than I probably have any right to be. It’s an esoteric, nerdy, centrifuge requiring, relatively prep heavy drink that is ultimately delicious, complicated, and easy to batch and execute in a way that belies its complexity. Its evolution is also a damn good microcosm of my personal journey behind the…
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Drinking Poetic (On A Christmas Wednesday): The Nutcracker
I’ve always felt disconnected from the Holiday season. While I grew up Catholic it has had been many a solstice since I identified as such. I’ve also spent the past 10+ years living 2,500+ miles from the family and friends I grew up with. As such when the holidays roll around I often find myself latching on…
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Drinking Poetic: Cascading Lines
This is the story of a drink that got away from me. As I’ve said before I tend to turn every drink into a brown, bitter, and stirred variation on a theme. It should therefore come as no surprise that I’ve been trying to play around with some version of a hopped Old Fashioned style drink for…
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Drinking Poetic: The Panic Order
I’m terrible at Vodka drinks. It sounds elitist, snobbish, and very hipster bartender of me but it’s a fact of life. I think the problem is twofold. 1) Stylistically, I gravitate towards stirred, booze forward drinks that include some sort of odd characteristic. I go through phases: stirred citrus, clarified everything, fruit infused sherries, etc. I essentially want to turn…
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Drinking Poetic (on a Wednesday): The Los Angeles Sour
The Los Angeles Cocktail is terrible and is a perfect example of a bad drink that survives because it’s old. Buried within the pages of the Savoy Cocktail book, one of the quintessential drink tomes of the Golden and Modern cocktail age, is a drink that reads like a New Yorker describing their “totally real” visit to…
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Whiskey Wednesday: Repeal Day
With all the excitement, food, and celebrations that are crammed into the space between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day you can be excused for not noticing that noted scoundrel and always bartender Jeffrey Morgenthaler managed to squeeze a completely new holiday in there: December 5th, Repeal Day. Repeal Day is the Hallmark Card Holiday of…
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Drinking Poetic: The Old Fashioned
“I prefer things the Old Fashioned Way!” said every generation ever as things changed around them. The Old Fashioned is my favorite cocktail. It appeals to me on such a deeply intellectual level that it rivals the psychic imprint that Lord of the Rings had on me in the third grade. And the imprint this…
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Drinking Poetic: The Hemingway Daquiri
I feel a certain kinship with Hemingway. I’d like to think it’ because we both have an affinity with words but there’s no denying that the legend of Hemingway has been at least as influential as the man himself. And just like the man himself the truth is always more complicated. Hemingway was, like most…
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Drinking Poetic: West of Brooklyn
I’m sentimental in my head. I say head because I’m less emotionally sentimental and more intellectually sentimental, meaning that I hold on to things because I feel like I’m supposed to. This often means I find myself with collections of stuff that sometimes seem to stick around simply because it’s already stuck around. Enter The…
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Drinking Poetic (on a Wednesday): Highballs
I’m a whiskey purist. Bourbon, Scotch, Japanese, Barrel Strength, it doesn’t matter, I drink it neat. For years I was determined that not even a drop of water would come between myself and my sweet, sweet barrel aged nectar. What’s changed me? The highball. The highball is nothing new. It’s a simple class of…
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