Category: Drinking Poetic
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Quarantine Bottle Kill #7: Drouin Pomme Prisonnière
I think the biggest thing people feel they have lost from this whole quarantine is time. Time lost on their career. Time lost to spend with loved ones. Even the time to simply plan. The future looks so uncertain that it filters back into the present spreading a malaise over each individual moment. And while…
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Quarantine Bottle Kill #6: Tanqueray #10 and the 5:00 Martini
It’s not all about whiskey over here. Just like this weekly bottle talk isn’t just about drinking. It’s a mental check in with myself and an attempt to connect with my community as we shelter and wonder what our industry will look like once we start hosting happy hours outside of digital boxes again. When…
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Whisky(ish) Wednesday: A Different Story
I’m not a healthy individual. I know I project an air of fitness, health, and confidence but the underlying structure has a flaw. This flaw directly relates to me being a bartender and no it’s not my propensity to drink barrels full of whiskey or my possibly addictive personality. I started bartending as a career when I was 25 and…
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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: Dry(ish) January
On January 16th, 1919 Nebraska became the 36th of the 48 states that composed these United States of America at the time to ratify the 18th Amendment thus beginning the “noble experiment” that was Prohibition. While Congress didn’t ratify the Amendment until January 29th, and the sale of alcohol wasn’t made fully illegal until January 20th, 1920,…
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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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