The Seventh Heaven Cocktail
The Seventh Heaven Cocktail is a quick, simple, and summery gin sour. The formula—gin, citrus juice, and Maraschino—will be familiar as the basis of the Aviation in its late 20th-century incarnation—the one without crème de violette. Read more 
The Last Word with an Asterisk: variations on a classic cocktail
When I first encountered Phil Ward’s “Final Ward” cocktail, I wrote it off as a “why would I do that?” type of experiment. It was, after all, just a variant of the Chartreuse and Maraschino Last Word, which didn’t make sense to me, either, on paper. Read more
Detroit’s Finest: The Last Word Cocktail
The Last Word is another of those cocktails that just doesn’t look right on paper. Chartreuse and Maraschino? C’mon, man, that doesn’t make any sense at all. Read more
The Silver Cocktail
The Silver Cocktail is a Prohibition-era cross between the Martinez and the Martini. Truly old-style, at equal parts gin and vermouth, it seems to reside comfortably on its own branch of the Martini family tree. Read more
Building on the Old-Fashioned—The Improved Whiskey Cocktail
As I noted in my previous entry, my 1887 edition of Jerry Thomas’s Bartenders Guide lists the original ”Whiskey Cocktail”—that’s the one we now think of as the “Old-Fashioned.” That same publication provides evidence that the hard-line definition of the “cocktail” was fraying at the edges. Read more
The Red Hook Cocktail
So many flavors, so little time. I finally got around to trying the Red Hook Cocktail after Imbibe included it in its cover article on “The 25 Most Influential Cocktails of the Past Century” (Paul Clark, May/June 2010). Whether the Red Hook really has earned a place on that list in the six years since its invention* I really can’t say. I can say that it had an instant and favorable influence on me; at least for now, it has supplanted the Manhattan in my personal cocktail rotation. Read more
