Episode 1: Room on Fire

Some music has a way of just sticking to memories in my brain. This isn’t always good music, or even music I love, but I think we all have music that will always make us think vividly of a very specific time and place. Room on Fire by the Strokes is one such brain barnacle for me, and every time a song from this album played out in the wild my eyes glazed over and I started mumbling things like “well now, there’s a tune I haven’t heard in some time! I can still smell the machinery…” Meanwhile the table I was inevitably failing to wait on was just like “are we getting our drinks or what?”

“Tell us a story, I know you’re not boring”

You know those stories where someone makes a contract with the devil, and at first it seems like a sweet deal but the poor fool underestimates the catch? At Cedar Point in 2005 the sweet deal was a bonus at the end of the season: $1 for every hour you worked all summer in one fat juicy bonus check. For context, you only get one day off a week and you work very long hours in most cases, so it’s not unusual to rack up 50-60 hours a week during the busy months, sometimes more. That’s a lot of dollars over the whole season. The catch was you only got your bonus check if you fulfilled your contract and worked every last day you were scheduled. Since I lived within four hours of the park, I was required to work Halloweekends, the time of year after the regular season starting in September when the park is only open on weekends until they finally close for the year after Halloween.

I didn’t want to miss out on that thicc bonus. To my young underachiever brain that bonus alone was an obscene fortune. But I had to go to class because the new semester was starting up again, and most professors don’t consider screwing around on rollercoasters in Ohio an excused absence. So I commuted. Every Friday after class I would book it three and a half hours to cedar point, work my weekend, then after closing on Sunday I would drive all the way back home, arriving around midnight or so, pass out and wake up in the morning for my 8:00am class on Monday.

“You sound so sleepy, just take this, now leave me. I said please don’t slow me down if I’m going too fast”

Those drives on Sunday night were fucking brutal. I was exhausted from this insane routine I had agreed to, and I did my best to stay awake by blasting music loud enough to rattle all the mysterious loose bits hiding in the dash of the car. Around this time one of my albums of choice was Room on Fire. Sometimes it would just play on repeat in my car CD player because I was too focused on not falling asleep at the wheel to worry about changing the disc.

I slammed several red bulls every trip, and I would drive with the windows down to keep from getting too warm and cozy. I would stop frequently to walk around and keep my blood flowing, pacing the parking lot or welcome center like a drugged up maniac before jumping back in my car and speeding off into the night. I remember the cold air exploding through the window into my face, the smell of dill and hay in the air, making the back of my throat itch. The sticky, battery acid sour of energy drinks coated my mouth and throat, the flavor and sensation just stimulating enough to hold my attention and therefore keep my mind from wandering, like some twisted version of a Zen ritual. The toll road was deserted and dark save for the occasional delirious fluorescent radiance of a rest stop or uninhabited travel plaza.

The Strokes kept me company. Through sheer repetition and the unique insanity that comes with lack of sleep, I came to love that album. Most of the songs sounded similar in a way that seemed almost audacious. The music lacked any real nuance beyond sounding aloof and cool. The lyrics were mostly emo garbage dressed up in slick garage rock sounds. But I still loved it. The final two tracks are the ones that stuck in my head the most, the words “The end has no end” and “I can’t win” echoing through my skull and taking on new deeply ironic meaning given the situation I found myself in.

I always sang along to the final track in one last desperate attempt to not lose consciousness going 85 miles per hour in the middle of the night on a cold stretch of Indiana asphalt. “That was you up on the Mountain, all alone and all surrounded, walking on the ground you’re breaking, laughing at the life you’re wasting,” I shouted along as if it were a holy chant to summon divine protection, “Things in bars that people do and no one wants to talk to you, failing can be quite a breeze, you told me that those girls were easy,” as if I deeply connected with the message, as if it were speaking to a deep and painful experience I could relate to. And it did feel profound, like this song resonated with my soul, but I could never explain why; I didn’t actually relate to those words in any meaningful capacity. I was 20 years old, I didn’t have any experience with striking out in a bar (yet).

Like the blood stained Volleyball, Wilson, in Castaway, this album became my companion for these exhausted drives, the car my isolated island and me as dirty and desperate to be home as the stranded Tom Hanks. It was like a good luck charm or a riding buddy or something. And, like, The Strokes are kind of cheesy, if you couldn’t tell by the lyrics I was shamelessly screaming over the roar of the wind and my partially blown out speakers, but I loved this album so fucking much. I bonded with it in a time of desperation. I would get home, ears ringing, shaking from cold and the red bull sugar crash, peel off my work uniform saturated with the oily machine fumes of the park, sweat, and Axe body spray, collapse onto my bed and just shut down, only to wake up at 7:30 to my alarm, confused and startled.

“He want it easy, he want it relaxed, I said I can do a lot of things but I can’t do that”

I got my fucking bonus check, though. It was around $800. I felt triumphant. My parents made me spend almost all of it on school fees. This was my earliest practical lesson on the evils of capitalism: just because you earn the money doesn’t mean it’s yours. My frustration didn’t last long though, because shortly thereafter I had oral surgery to remove unsurfaced wisdom teeth and I got to be hopped up on Vicodin and Darvocet for two weeks. I went back to Cedar Point again the next summer and got fired. But that had nothing to do with Room on Fire.

The point is, you are alive when they start to eat you.

I made a drink that looks awful and tastes great

Kindred Cocktails did an interesting series several years ago on the role each type of flavor plays in making drinks, and I think it does a good job of demonstrating why I’m so fascinated with mixology. It’s like alchemy, with all these odd substances in bottles in varying shapes and sizes and colors, careful measurements, mixing and testing. Only unlike alchemy I’m unlikely to blow myself up trying to make gold out of lead.

My point is, while the buzz from the alcohol is always a welcome side effect, my primary motivation behind this hobby is more or less scientific. This being the case, I’m always on the lookout for obscure and unusual items for my experiments, even if (or sometimes especially if) that item isn’t commonly used beyond one or two official cocktails. Creme de Violette is one such item, so when I happened across a lone bottle one day after work at my favorite liquor store while looking for beer and vermouth, I experienced little to no hesitation in picking it up.

Ignore the nasty sticker smudge at the top, I haven’t found the goo gone yet

Creme de Violette is an intensely dark purple liqueur made from steeping violets in brandy  and sometimes adding sweeteners or supporting flavors. It’s sweet and floral with a fresh flower-like scent. It’s also not the easiest to find. For decades it was basically impossible to find in the States, until Rothman & Winter came to the rescue from Austria less than ten years ago. Since then it’s slowly been finding it’s way back onto store shelves, but it’s by no means easy to find even now, unless you live near an unusually awesome liquor store like I do.

So what do you use it for? Not much, honestly, but that suits my sense of experimentation just fine. The gorgeous color and delicate flavor make it a useful tool in creating unique and memorable concoctions, as in the case of the Aviation. A combination of Gin, lemon juice, maraschino liqueur, and creme de violette, the end result is a refreshing, delicious, and beautiful beverage the color of a cloudless sky.

Remember how nice this looks, it’ll be funnier later if you do.

Outside of that drink and some similar variations, there’s not a lot of well known or documented uses for this odd purple liquid. Usually you’ll find it mixed into drinks containing gin or lemon because those flavors compliment its delicate floral nature well. Solid advice, but I wanted to do something slightly weirder with it. So I did.

I decided, somewhat at random, that since the Last Word is one of my favorite drinks of all time, I should use that as starting inspiration. I subbed out the lime juice for lemon juice, and booted the maraschino liqueur despite my unending affection for it and replaced it with creme de violette. The Last Word is a rare example of equal parts of everything achieving good balance, and I wasn’t sure this was going to be the case here. It seemed unlikely, but I decided to try it at first and tweak it from there. I also decided to add a dash of orange bitters because in general I can’t resist using bitters whenever possible. I garnished with a dark cocktail cherry.

What resulted was a surprisingly balanced and delightfully tasty beverage that I absolutely did not need to tweak further. It was also intensely ugly.

I was immediately in love with the opaque grey color, of course. Seldom have I seen a more unappealing color for a drink, and I found this profoundly amusing. The cherry wasn’t even visible through the murky haze. It was amazing. The fact that it tasted very pleasant only made it even funnier to me. This one was clearly a keeper, which means I needed to name it. A quick google search led me to believe that no one else officially laid claim to this creation, so I got to work brainstorming.

I wanted to reference Detroit, the birthplace of the Last Word and the city I first tasted that drink. The fact that most people consider Detroit dark and dirty and sketchy is a bonus, too, I figured, considering the startling color of my creation. I also wanted it to be some nerdy reference to one of my personal interests, because that’s half the fun of naming things. With these criteria in mind, the only real choice was a Superchunk song title.

Detroit Has a Skyline
3/4 ounce American Dry Gin
3/4 ounce Green Chartreuse
3/4 ounce fresh Lemon Juice
3/4 ounce creme de violette

Throw everything into a shaker with ice, shake to chill, strain into a perfectly clear glass to appreciate the beauty. Garnish with a dark cocktail cherry.

So yeah, my invention was heavily inspired by a classic, a little random, and partially luck, but luck is part of the spirit of exploration. And I still feel at least a little clever, just because it’s a sort of variation on an existing drink doesn’t make it creatively bankrupt. Either way, if you ever run across a bottle of creme de violette, I highly recommend giving this a try.

I went ahead and invented my own tiki style drink.

I promise after this I’ll move on from the whole Tiki experiment thing, but since I spent all that time and effort making falernum and orgeat I felt like it would do to follow it up with my own drink recipe that utilizes them. Well, one of them anyway. (Spoilers: it was orgeat. Sorry falernum!)

Basically, I just looked at the Tiki style drinks I’ve tried and gathered a few of my favorite flavors together. But I wanted to do something a little less conventional, so I decided on meyer lemons for the fruit juice component. You basically never see these used in classic cocktails, largely because as a weird cross breed between lemon and mandarin orange native to China, they didn’t really gain any sort of mainstream popularity here in the states until the late 1990’s. You don’t usually think of China when looking for tropical fruit, but I think meyer lemons have a unique and extremely interesting flavor that I really wanted to experiment with.

Next I needed rum. Obviously. But what kind? This is the kind of decision that, if taken lightly, could destroy me. Probably. I’ll never know because I got right on my first try.

I have more visual aids this time!

Really you can use any navy strength or overproof rum, but I feel like standard proof just doesn’t pack enough punch to stand out in this drink. Save the weak sauce for… weak… things. Man, I don’t know, just use strong rum, I promise it’s better here.

I also decided I fucking love orgeat. Falernum was a delicious creation, too, but it’s extremely potent and I wanted to keep the rum and the meyer lemon flavor in the spotlight. Orgeat, on the other hand, is much more rich and subtle, and I strongly suspected its flavors would balance well with the rest of the ingredients I had in mind.

The drink still needed balance, though, and being in the Tiki tradition this is accomplished best by adding more unusual ingredients and complications. I decided I didn’t really want to use sugar or simple syrups and that I would instead get my sweet balancers from more alcohol, namely maraschino liqueur. There are a few excellent brands out there, but Luxardo is not only the most common but my absolute preference in this drink because it has a sort of funky-sweet-bitter complexity unique to their recipe.

It looks like this by the way.

Needing just a touch more sweetness, I threw in a hint of grenadine. Real grenadine, of course, home made from actual juice from actual pomegranate, of course. Why would you ever use anything else? Anyway, you don’t need much, just a few dashes. Like, less than a quarter ounce, maybe a teaspoon tops but you don’t even really need that much. You could probably even skip this ingredient altogether if you like your drinks with sharper flavors, but I like the color and the general mellowing effect it adds in small amounts.

Finally, I needed to add bitters because of course I did. Bitters are fucking great in basically everything, and I wanted to add some nice trade spice flavors without turning to the brute force of falernum, so I used this stuff:

you can even put some on your cereal or something I don’t know!

You can use angostura bitters, too, but this stuff is a little more potent and complex. Plus, Fee Brothers are popular enough you don’t have to hunt too hard for it and inexpensive enough that even a broke-ass like me can afford it.

I was tempted to add fresh grated nutmeg to the top of this drink because I love what it does for the Painkiller, but I resisted the urge. You’re welcome, everyone, for my rare moment of self control.

All ingredients assembled, I tossed them together into a shaker to create my very own invention in the Tiki drink tradition:

Bomb The Cocktail Industry!
1.5 oz Overproof Rum
3/4 oz Meyer Lemon juice (fresh squeezed always)
1/4 oz Orgeat
1/4 oz Maraschino Liqueur
1-3 dashes of Real Grenadine (optional)
1-2 dashes of bitters (Fee Brother’s Barrel Aged or Angostura)
Shake with ice for ten seconds and pour unstrained into a double rocks glass.
Garnish with a dark cocktail cherry, a slice or wheel of meyer lemon, and a leaf or two of fresh mint.

Why yes, this drink IS named after my favorite band, thanks for noticing!

I was extremely pleased with my creation. Not bad for a first attempt! I originally used a full 2 ounces of rum, but I think for balance it would work better with slightly less so I reduced it for the final recipe. All flavors used are present here and if you focus you can pick them all out individually, but nothing tasted overwhelming when considered as a whole, which theoretically means I actually balanced everything properly.

So there you have it! If you make the drink yourself, let me know what you think. I’ve invented a couple other, non-tiki drinks that I might share at a later time, but in these cold winter days this taste of warmer climates was a comforting distraction for me.

The point is, you are alive when they start to eat you.

 

Tropical Drink Syrup Experiments

A few days ago I proclaimed that I was sick of being constantly bummed out. Politics in this country are a mess, and vitriolic feelings are impossible to avoid not just on social media but from working with the general public. On top of that, some shithead in Payroll fell for a really obvious scam and put every single employee’s personal info in jeopardy, so the atmosphere at work had been tense and frustrating, too. Top that all off with garbage midwest weather and it’s pretty easy to fall into the clutches of seasonal depression.

I’ve managed, with some degree of success, to self medicate with video games and weekend road trips to more interesting places. But then I remembered this theme party my friends and I used to have every winter, where we would crank up the heat and wear Hawaiian shirts and other beach gear. We’d drink Mojitos and Mexican beer and pretend for an evening that there wasn’t a snow-rain-mix slopping from the colorless sky like half frozen drool in sub-freezing windchill.

That was always a good party, but it was also just single event. So I decided to apply a small portion of that to my weeknights by delving into the bizarre world of tiki cocktails. Tiki gets a bad rap for being sickly sweet slushy messes with unnatural colors and enormous fruit basket garnishes, but that’s largely due to mainstream bastardization of the original concept, which is all too common with pretty much any good thing that becomes popular (action movies, punk music, “Doctor Who”, etc.). The original Tiki cocktails brought to the public by the likes of Trader Vic and Don the Beachcomber utilized fresh squeezed juices from tropical fruits, quality rums, generally good stuff. And the results are surprisingly balanced and very boozy drinks. They aren’t as dry and clean and simple as most western cocktails, but they deserve a place in your beverage rotation.

The problem is a lot of the older recipes call for obscure ingredients like falernum (a heavily infused syrup made with limes and spices) and orgeat (a sort of almond syrup sweetened with cane sugar and orange blossom or rose water). The good stuff is hard to find and tends to be expensive, but with some quick internet searches I discovered I could just make them my own damn self for a fraction of the price and only moderate effort on my part.

So off I went, into the freezing cold and snow to purchase tropical fruit and trade spices. My original plan was to take a bunch of pictures of the steps involved so I could show you all what goes into this stuff and how simple it is, but I took exactly three pictures and forgot the rest. So you only get three visual aids. I told you this blog was mediocre.

First, I made falernum. You can get crazy with spices in this stuff if you want, but since this was my first attempt I kept it basic with cloves, allspice berries, and whole nutmeg. Toast those fuckers in a skillet.

like this I guess.

It’s going to make your whole kitchen smell awesome so brace yourself. Next I julienned some fresh ginger and zested eight whole limes. I don’t know what the muscles are called that are used while zesting, but mine are super toned and sore now.

like french fries and astroturf. Yum!

Combine it all in a bowl and soak it in some good quality high-proof rum. I used this stuff because it’s delicious.

City Wide is basically my promised land.

And I promptly forgot to take pictures of the subsequent combination. But I assure you they were combined. Then they soaked, covered, for 24 hours, and combined with a rich simple syrup solution and some almond extract. The result is fucking delicious but very, very powerful. You’ll probably only want to use small amounts of this stuff at a time, but it was very much worth making it myself.

But what, dear readers, of the orgeat? Well, I forgot to take any pictures of that process. But basically I toasted two cups of sliced almonds, pulverized them in a blender, and soaked it in a hot simple syrup solution for a few hours before straining it through cheesecloth into another bowl, where it was introduced to rose water and a shot of vodka to prevent spoilage. As an afterthought I hit it with a few dashes of orange bitters, too, for good measure. I funneled it into a cleaned out old brandy bottle. According to the internet it should last about a month before starting to lose freshness if I keep it cold.

This, too, turned out delicious. Very strong fresh almost flavor, slightly sweet and just a hint of mellow fruitiness in the background. I have yet to try it in a drink, but when I do I will probably forget to take pictures of it.

And that, friends, is phase one of my tropical winter plan complete. Now I have to make some actual drinks, and maybe provide actual recipes when Ido instead of frustrating and vague adjectives. But seriously, I’m happy to share the various recipes I checked out online that I based my recipes on. These were surprisingly easy to make, and the process was interesting and fun and helped me forget the ugliness outside my kitchen for a bit. If you’re int he same boat as me, I recommend you give it a try yourself. Happy syruping.

Why I’ve been cheating on beer with liquor

Some of those following me on Facebook or Instagram or even this very mediocre blog lately may have become concerned for my well being. “Alex,” they begin cautiously, as one might address a man with a gun to his own head, “what’s with all the cocktails, man? I thought you were a beer guy. Don’t you still like beer, Alex? Don’t you remember all the good talks you had at people about beer? Alex, put down the Gran Gala and let’s talk about this. About beer.”

Well, I’d like to set the record straight and state that I still love beer the most. Beer has the longest ties to recorded human history compared to any other culinary substance. It ubiquitously pairs with food better than wine (look, I love wine, but it’s time to give up the dream that it can keep up with beer in this field). Collecting and enjoying craft beer is a lesson in culture and history and, often if not always, brings us together for shared human experiences.

Basically, beer is my favorite thing to drink besides water. But I still have a relentless curiosity for the world of wines and spirits, and sometimes the mood of the evening steers me into their realms instead. And lately my insatiable hunger for learning combined with my healthy love for history and science has had me studying historical cocktails.

Here’s the thing, I’m not mixing up the sugary dredge you find in family restaurants or anything that involves soda or artificially colored liqueurs that taste like melted Runts candy. What I’ve been so enamored by are almost entirely pre-prohibition drinks created by people who knew what the fuck they were doing. Seriously, these people took an academic approach to the craft, in which scientific theorycrafting and experimentation led to concoctions of superb balance and flavor.

After the Volstead act effectively killed the American golden age of cocktails, we were still seeing some excellent new drinks being invented in other parts of the world like Italy and Cuba. But by the 70’s, post-prohibition American bars were ruining goddamn everything, and continued to ruin it for a few decades, bastardizing old recipes at every turn.

I’m not one to ever say “the old days were better, the modern world sucks now” because that’s objectively untrue, unless you’re male, rich, and white (I’m only two of those things, so I have to rely on logic and empathy to navigate the world). But I will say that most people I know think of something sweet or slushy or garnished with half a fruit basket or possibly all three when confronted with the word “cocktail.”

So then how did I even stumble into this world of classic cocktails? First, a local distillery in southwestern Michigan called Journeyman. Not only do they distill excellent spirits but they have a bar with a respectable collection of unique cocktails of their own invention. Their concoctions are decidedly modern but crafted with a care and balance I wasn’t used to seeing. This is just a local and anecdotal piece of evidence for the current revival of the “craft” cocktail scene, in much the same way we’re all seeing the explosion of the craft beer scene.

The second event occurred in Detroit a couple months ago. I had never been to the city, but was summoned there by the irresistible call of a live show headlined by Jeff Rosenstock and supported by Hard Girls and Katie Ellen. The venue was a place in Mexicantown called El Club, and we got there way too early. We took advantage of the extra time by ordering beer and pizza, but shifted to cocktails after studying the elaborate array of bottles behind the bar.

Our bartender looked a lot like the Portlandia version of Fred Armison, so we felt safe in asking him obnoxious questions that he clearly wasn’t used to getting. “How long has this bar been here? That’s a huge Tequila selection, what’s your favorite? Who makes that cool looking bottle of Bourbon behind you?”

I apologized for asking so many questions, but he said he didn’t mind. “It’s kind of cool, actually. Most people just get canned beer or whatever, we don’t get a lot of cocktail orders or questions about liquor,” he replied, mildly amused. This response wasn’t surprising to me, but I was still intrigued by the huge variety of obscure elixirs behind the bar.

So, we asked him what his favorite mixed drink to make was. He thought about it for a second, and then went to work delivering a plastic cup (this was a standing-room-only music club, after all) containing equal parts gin, green chartreuse, maraschino liqueur, and lime juice. It was called, he informed me, The Last Word, and it had been invented right there in Detroit just before prohibition.

Our bartender was totally unaware of this, but he had just presented me with a combination of factors that amounted to crack for my brain: something I’ve never had before, historical context, local tradition, and to top it all off it was fucking delicious.

Afterwards I crammed myself into the pit of sweaty music fans for a damn good show, but once I got back home I went to work researching the strange and intriguing world of oldschool cocktails. And, because the only thing I love more than obtaining obscure knowledge is sharing obscure knowledge with the hope that somebody else cares, I’m here on this severely mediocre blog doing just that. At least occasionally. Amongst other posts about random bullshit. It’s kind of a mixed bag when your blog is this mediocre.

The point is, You are alive when they start to eat you.

Let’s Drink Absinthe!

You know what’s great? Absinthe. Absinthe is great.

Now, before you all start clamoring to burst my bubble, yes, I know full well that it doesn’t actually make you hallucinate. And no, that’s not because we don’t use the “original” recipe from Europe, it never made people hallucinate. The instances of absinthe causing people to engage in violence and debauchery were almost certainly due to the high alcohol content.

“Well, okay,” you might say with heavy suspicion dripping from your sadly absinthe-less mouth, “but doesn’t it taste like shit? I hate liquorice and herbs or whatever the fuck it’s made out of.” Fair enough, dear reader, but consider this: absinthe, like most liquor, comes in many different shapes and sizes. Jim Beam doesn’t taste like Blanton’s which doesn’t taste like Evan Williams, after all, even though as bourbons they all follow relatively uniform recipes. In that same way, some absinthes are dry and bracing with strong anise flavors, and others are much softer and sweeter. Do some research and experiment around to see what sits best with you.

But what can you even do with the stuff? Well I have good news, friends, for I have spent my recent evening hours diligently mixing some cocktails with the green fairy and will now happily share my two favorite results with you.

And in fact even the name “cocktail” brings us to our first drink. Back in the day, a cocktail was merely any liquor mixed with sugar, water, and bitters, such as the Old Fashioned (so named, in fact, because as more modern cocktails entered the scene that broke from that formula, its own simple recipe seemed, well, old fashioned). But I’m not here to talk about the Od Fashioned; I’m here to share the Sazerac.

Don’t let snobs and old people scare you away from this drink. It was invented in New Orleans and considered by many to be the oldest American cocktail and possibly the first “branded” cocktail (it was named after the Sazerac French brandy it was originaly made with), but that doesn’t mean you have to be pretentious about it. You can use Brandy or Cognac, or Rye, or even Bourbon or fine Rum despite how many gasps and dropped monocles that suggestion evokes. I feel like the base spirit is actually less important than the aromatics in this drink. Here’s a basic starting point:

A Perfectly Fucking Reasonable Sazerac
2 oz base spirit (Brandy, Rye, whatever)
¼ oz demerara simple syrup (or a sugar cube, or normal simple syrup)
4 dashes of Peychaud’s Bitters
1 dash of Angostura Bitters
¼ oz Absinthe
Lemon zest for garnish

Chill a rocks glass with ice and water, set aside. In another glass, mix the base spirit, sugar, and bitters. Add ice and stir to chill (do not fucking shake, it will become too cold to appreciate all the nuances). Dump the ice from the first glass and add the absinthe. Swirl it around to coat the glass as best you can and then discard (or drink) the absinthe. Strain the spirit solution into your now chilled, absinthe coated glass. Twist some lemon zest over the glass and discard, or just drop the bastard in and watch traditionalists faint at your apparently unforgiveable transgression.

This is in no way a traditional Sazerac. The original didn’t even use absinthe, but I think this bizarre green booze really adds amazing depth and complexity to the drink and sets it apart from being “just an Old Fashioned only with different bitters.” Be sure to swirls this one around as you drink it and breathe deep all the crazy powerful botanicals and aromatics. It’s a pretty stimulating experience.

But maybe you don’t always want to live on the edge, flying by the seat of your pants with absinthe goading you to throw away your inhibitions and surrender your soul to herbal madness. Totally fair, sometimes you have to take it down a notch. That’s when you make a Quill.

I don’t have any fancy origin story for this drink, I found it by accident while googling “how do with absinthe work?!” It’s basically a Negroni only with absinthe in it, but it’s still a classic in its own right due to being a decades-old recipe if nothing else.

The Quill
1 oz Gin
1 oz Campari
1 oz sweet vermouth
¼ oz Absinthe
Orange Twist

Mix together the Gin, Campari, Vermouth, and Absinthe. Stir with ice to chill, strain into a chilled rocks glass or, if you prefer stemware, a coupe. Garnish with the orange twist.

Right off the bat this drink is much sweeter and softer than the Sazerac, but not cloying or overly sugary. There’s actually a lot of depth of flavor here, and the similar aromatics used in all the ingredients play together very nicely but delicately.

Unfortunately, because this drink relies heavily on specialty liquors, the quality is basically directly affected by how much you’re willing to spend. Decent Gin isn’t too bad, but using real Campari or, if you’re really feeling like a high roller, Gran Classico isn’t cheap. Vermouth, too, varies wildly in quality and can make or break a beverage with depressing ease. That said, you’re using small amounts of everything so your bottles should carry you awhile as long as you don’t abuse them.

Anyway, that’s your basic introduction to absinthe. There’s a lot more you can do with the stuff, but I don’t want to take the joy of discovery away from you (read: I don’t feel like writing more today). Happy drinking.

Regarding the Confusion Over the Cheeseburger Sequel

Here at Popular Restaurant, we pride ourselves in offering a large variety of meal options for our guests, which is why we have just released our new fifty-page menu. As always, the highlight of our selections are the unique and high-quality burgers, all of which you can tweak and alter however you like so that you get served exactly what you want.

Not all of our burgers are complicated, however. Sure, you can get the Bald Eagle patty topped with pulled pork and all eleven of our buffalo sauces, fried garlic bulbs, sautéed pumpkin and served on a gluten-free bamboo bun, but for those of us less adventurous the classic Cheeseburger is still an excellent way to satiate your pub-grub needs.

It has come to our attention that some guests are confused by the new inclusion of a menu item dubbed “Cheeseburger 2”. This newsletter is designed to clear things up and help you better enjoy your visit.

Let’s start with the classic Cheeseburger, which is just a standard chuck patty topped with american cheese, lettuce, tomato, onion, and pickles. The Cheeseburger 2, however, is the same thing but with shredded lettuce, diced onion, and a little bit of mayo. It may seem unclear at first why we decided to make an entirely new menu item for something that is almost exactly the same as an existing item, especially when all of our dishes are fully customizable. But what we haven’t told you yet is that we have planned several sequels to our classic Cheeseburger, each with a new twist that is sure to tantalize even the most discerning of tastebuds. Here’s what we have planned so far:

Cheeseburger 3: Same as the Cheeseburger 2, but here we have also diced the tomato and pickles, and added mustard.

Cheeseburger 4: Same as the 3rd in the series, but now we have also diced the burger and shredded the cheese, and added ketchup.

Cheeseburger 5: Same as the 4th, only now we have also diced the bun and added ranch.

Cheeseburger 6: Same as the 5th, only we have also diced the plate using an industrial grade ceramic cutter and added an extra ranch on the side.

Hopefully this has cleared things up for you, our loyal guests. We look forward to seeing you soon, and we’ll be sure to keep you posted on any additional exciting changes to our menu.

Your Drink Sucks

It’s fairly well known at this point that I know a lot about beer. Whenever anyone has a question about beer, they make a small pilgrimage to find me. Upon passing a series of physical and mental challenges designed to fend off wastrels, they push past two large heavy doors to find me sitting cross legged on a slab of limestone, bathed in warm candlelight and the soft clattering of chimes. I then offer them a brew and answer any and all questions they may have about said holy concoction before returning to my sacred duty of playing video games and watching YouTube.

But my alcohol knowledge doesn’t stop at fermented barley. I even wrote a wine class once for work. But today I’m here to tell you why you’ve been doing cocktails wrong. Well, probably. Based on statistics. I don’t want to make any assumptions about you personally as an individual.

And when I say “wrong,” I don’t mean to sound accusatory. It’s not entirely your fault. The post-prohibition cocktail scene is fucking stupid. Huge, quarter-gallon drinks saturated with sugar and half a fruit basket are the standard now, and while a few very dedicated snobs are working hard to bring the “craft cocktails” back into popularity, chances are your favorite mixed drink still contains Malibu Rum or that Vodka that tastes like Froot Loops.

“But Alex!” You protest, licking your sugared and chocolate marbled glass rim clean, “I like those drinks, and I refuse to apologize for that!” Well, feel free to calm down, my soon to be diabetic friend. I firmly believe you’re allowed to like whatever you want without being judged. If you knew half the stuff I liked you’d either be horrified or turned on or both. My point is you may find you really like some simple, classy drinks with the help of Science and a little bit of thoughtfulness.

The daiquiri is a good place to start to illustrate my point. This poor bastard has been tortured and brutalized beyond recognition. You usually see these in family restaurants served in enormous margarita or hurricane glasses (wrong), often strawberry flavored (also wrong) and frozen like a slushee (make it stop). The real drink is a refreshing balancing act of sweet, sour, and alcohol. Its simplicity is so beautiful as to make entire armies lay down their arms and weep for their loss of innocence. Observe:

Daiquiri
2 oz rum
1 oz lime juice
½ oz simple syrup
Shake and strain into a normal fucking glass

The 4:2:1 ratio of alcohol, sour, and sweet makes this drink taste way more complex than it is and allows all the flavors to meld seamlessly. Traditionally you’d use a light rum, but you can use whatever rum you like as long as it’s not flavored or spiced. Leave that shit for highschoolers and your future midlife crisis. As far as the lime juice goes, fresh squeeze it. The pre-bottled stuff tastes like windex and really shouldn’t be used for anything except, like, sanitizing sponges or something. Finally, the simple syrup. It really is simple, it’s not an ironic turn of phrase for a complex recipe. It’s literally just sugar disolved in an equal volume of water, which goes faster if you simmer it while stirring. The resulting liquid is twice as sweet as normal sugar and doesn’t recrystallize thanks to Science, so it’s perfect for mixing into cold liquids like cocktails. You can even infuse the syrup with herbs or fruit, or even just use raw or demerara sugar to make a dark, rich syrup that you can use for this daiquiri variant I call a Shadow Daiquiri:

Shadow Daiquiri
2 oz dark or black rum
1 oz lime juice
½ oz  demerara simple syrup

This version is darker and richer, but it’s still way more balanced than that pink slush they serve by the bucket at Applebee’s. I usually just strain mine into a rocks glass, but if you like stemware use a coupe. Margarita glasses are usually gluttonously huge and martini glasses are garbage in every single way. Don’t even make martinis in a martini glass. Use a coupe and look sophisticated as fuck.

Speaking of martinis, here’s a segue into talking about them. Much like the poor daiquiri, the martini has been swarmed by an entire fleet of imposters. Here’s how to tell if your martini is a malicious fake:

• There are more than three ingredients, including the garnish.
• You are using vodka instead of gin.
• No, seriously, stop using vodka instead of gin.

For those of you who think you don’t like gin, first stop getting bottom shelf swill. Gin is made in almost the exact same way as vodka but has some botanicals added, and as a result different brands can have wildly different flavors and dryness, but all of them add an important level of complexity to a martini that vodka can’t accomplish, especially since real martinis look like this:

Martini
2.5 oz gin
½ oz vermouth
Stir (don’t shake) with ice, strain into a not-martini glass, garnish with an olive or citrus peel

That’s it. There’s not much to it, so you’re trusting the gin’s botanicals to round out the experience. The vermouth is there to soften the edges and add a bit of depth and texture, but you don’t need much. And don’t skip the garnish, it contains oils and aromatics that change the drink slightly but noticeably. Also, since gin is highly aromatic, you really don’t want to shake this drink because it will get way too cold for any of those flavors or scents to come through. Just stir gently but purposefully with ice in a shaker tin and strain. If you’re really feeling wacky, throw in a dash of  bitters, possibly while laughing maniacally and lightning flashing in the background. Despite my three ingredient jab earlier, this won’t make your drink garbage.

Actually, since you brought it up, bitters are pretty important in the cocktail world. It’s just a bunch of tree bark and roots or whatever infused in an alcohol solution that makes a liquid so bitter as to be non-potable by itself (in theory, though I can pote them just fine so to each their own), but can lend astronomical balance and complexity to your drinks. Bitterness is one of the five basic tastes we can perceive and can be detected by almost every part of the mouth, even the gums. And we all know bitterness is a flavor that transpires from the interaction of a G protein called gustducin and TAS2R taste receptors blah blah blah we’ve heard it a million times in casual conversation so why repeat it all here when we could just get to drinking an old fashioned:

Ye Olde Fashioned (you don’t have to spell it like that, I’m just obnoxious)
3 oz Bourbon or Rye
1 tsp simple syrup
3 dashes of bitters
Build over ice in a rocks glass, garnish with a twist of lemon zest

You’ll notice there’s no muddled maraschino cherries or orange wedges or bananas or whatever the fuck your local bar insists goes in an old fashioned. That’s because they belong in a fruit salad and not in your fucking drink. I mean, look at the ingredients: the sweetness of the sugar balances the bitters and the booze, and the water in the ice slightly mellows everything and ties it all together. Adding a bunch of fruit throws the sugar content way out of proportion, and even if your sweet tooth approves at first, by the end your palate will feel dulled and the flavor will seem cloying. Trust me, it’s Science.

Alright, I think I’ve fixed enough ruined drinks for today. I’ll probably be back again soon, though, based on the fact that my job is a daily reminder of the defilement of the beautiful drinkable chemistry of cocktails. Now, get out there and start drinking. Just not from a martini glass.