It’s National Aquavit Week, and I just noticed that I have never published an aquavit cocktail here. There’s a reason for that: for the last ten years, I’ve mainly been focused on good cocktails with long histories, and there just aren’t any aquavit cocktails that fit that description.
Aquavit has always been a bit of a prickly customer, with big flavors foreign to the mainstream American drinking palate. But the American palate seems to be changing a bit — again.
The Savoy Cocktail Book has been pretty well mined for century-old examples of classic cocktailing, and yet there are still a few attractive wallflowers that don’t get any attention. One of my favorites among these little charmers is the Ray Long Cocktail.
My mother had two remedies for colds. One was chicken soup; the other was a mix of lemon and honey.
I never thought to ask her if she really believed these nostrums cured anything, but they certainly had psychological benefits — at least they made us all feel like we were doing something.
Continue reading “Home Remedies and the Penicillin Cocktail”
While I was working through the Brooklyn Cocktail’s evolution and formula for the previous post, my Bride brought home a couple of bottles of Dad’s Hat Pennsylvania Rye whiskey.
One sip of Pennsylvania rye reminded me that in pre-Prohibition New York, the whiskey in your cocktail was likely very different from the Kentucky-style rye we’re most familiar with these days, Continue reading “Repairing the Brooklyn Cocktail, part 2”
Many bartenders have invented drinks called the Brooklyn Cocktail. The only version with any staying power, the Brooklyn we most often encounter today, is derived from a formula first published by Jacob Grohusko in his 1908 JACK’S MANUAL.
But we don’t encounter it very often, and therein lies a tale.
Given its name, you’d expect the Creole Cocktail to be from New Orleans. You’d be right—sort of.
The Bamboo Cocktail reminds me of the legend of blind men describing an elephant—every bartender’s guide seems to describe this cocktail differently.
There is one thing we do know about it, and it’s the thing that makes the Bamboo important to cocktail history: the Bamboo cocktail is the classic model for combining vermouth and sherry. Continue reading “Searching for the Bamboo Cocktail”
There is a tongue-in-cheek reference to something called a Brainstorm Cocktail in a 1906 issue of a trade magazine called “The Northwest Druggist”:
The “brainstorm” cocktail is the latest. It consists mainly of cracked ice set aside to thaw.
Druggist humor, I guess.
The real Brainstorm Cocktail came along about ten years later; it’s one of Hugo Ensslin’s pre-Prohibition classics, first published in his Recipes for Mixed Drinks (1916).
Continue reading “Whiskey and Bar Spoons: the Brainstorm Cocktail”
At first glance, the Swizzle seems like a very close cousin of Tiki—both are refreshing blends of (typically) rum, lime, sweetener, and ice, served in tall glasses with pleasant, tropical garnishes.
But the two styles followed very different trajectories.
