This drink comes as part of a virtual cocktail party from the book Spice & Ice. I first met Kara Newman as part of Tales of the Cocktail 2009, when I interviewed her for the Tales Blog. She had recently published a book of spicy cocktails—titled Spice & Ice—and was moderating a panel of the same name during Tales. Kara writes a regular column for Chile Pepper Magazine called “High Spirits,” which “focuses on spirits and cocktails with bold flavors, as well as drinks appropriate for pairing with the fiery foods”. Her interest in cocktails grew out of an event featuring Dave Wondrich and Audrey Saunders, and her work for Chile Pepper was a natural growth of that spark and her obsession with food.

Kara reached out to me to write about one of the cocktails from the book, with the direction that re-working the recipe was encouraged. I am a born tinkerer and can’t resist playing with even the most standard cocktail recipe, so the challenge appealed to me.

After reviewing the list of drinks, I settled on the Sparkling Ginger Daisy, a mix of gin, ginger liqueur and sparkling wine. The original was good, but I was sure I could take it apart and pull together an all-new remix, so I set about doing just that. Continue →

Everything I am comes from the desert. I spent a sizeable amount of time as a child wandering through the unmarked, cracked expanse of the mighty Mojave behind my dinky double-wide from the time I could walk; collecting wild dog bones, rattlesnake eggs, sweaty jars of rusted nuts and bolts. I caught scorpions and snakes, got nailed by both, and had my first kiss near the boiling runoff the local toads called home. I can name every bush that grew within two miles of the place I lived (jimson, juniper, and sage) and I still occasionally long for the inimitable smell of burning creosote. So while my ethnicity would seemingly dictate otherwise, tequila is in my blood—as a watermark of the place I never left, the home that I carry with me.

Tequila is my first love, and though I have since given a goodly part of my dirty black heart to whiskey, nothing will ever equal the emotional connection I have to the blessed blue agave and her sweet nectar. That sentence is ridiculous, but it’s completely true, and then some. Tequila is fully responsible for my love of fine (and not-so-fine) spirits, and nearly every amazing memory I have of liquor and liquor-related shenanigans is somehow related to tequila. My father, a man of fairly reliable temperament and often dubious taste, introduced me to his three great loves—Bob Dylan, fishing, and tequila—in chronologically ascending order, and like all dumbassed kids, I hated all three with varying degrees of vitriol at certain points in my life, simply because he loved them. And now, perhaps better late than never, I realize he was right (maybe more than he knows) about all three. Continue →

What you see here is the beginning of my newest obsession: the books of Charles H. Baker, Jr. His Gentleman’s Companion books are well-known and well-trod in cocktail circles, so I’m not jumping into some unknown source material. Rather, I was fairly unprepared at the beginning of my cocktailing journey to enjoy the drinks in his books. Now, after five years of mixing and tasting, it seems obvious to me that Charles H. Baker and I, were the time-space continuum not an obstacle, would be drinking buddies. Our tastes converge along many lines, and frankly the man seems like he was a self-contained party. He spent time in the company of Hemingway and William Faulkner as well as movie stars, musicians, socialites and royalty. He married (many times), he traveled the world, and most importantly he wrote about all of it. And because he did all those things, I probably should have listened to the man years ago, since we have both come to the same conclusion:

…all really interesting people—sportsman, explorers, musicians, scientists, vagabonds and writers—were vitally interested in good things to eat and drink; cared for exotic and intriguing ways of composing them. We soon discovered further that this keen interest was not solely through gluttony, the spur of hunger or merely to sustain life, but in a spirit of high adventure.

It isn’t summiting Everest or piloting a hot air balloon around the world, but there is a certain amount of adventurousness requisite to the cocktailian. For Baker, it was traveling the world in search of those recipes. For us, now, it’s more archaeology than adventure, but we still reap the spoils in our dusty exploring of tomes like his. Continue →

It’s been a while since I have posted a cocktail here, which has primarily to do with the fact that I’ve now been sick twice in three weeks. Unusual, I know, especially for someone who generally doesn’t get sick more than once a year, but sadly true. This cold has kept me in or near bed for most of January—a fact which neither pleases nor excites me. I’m feeling much better today, though, and as such I’ve followed my doctor’s standing orders and am taking a dram to cure what ails me.

Amusingly, this is the cocktail Ted was drinking the last time we were able to visit a bar together when he was the one being assailed by a cold. As such, the aptly named Prescription Julep is an accepted cure-all for these pesky viruses, the word “julep” being very old and, for a good portion of its history, associated with medicinal potions for ensuring health and vitality. The ingredients and applications have varied over the centuries, but julep has been interpreted in Middle English, Persian and many other languages as a flavored syrup, which is obviously still true to a large extent. Referenced in many sources, including Milton and Pepys, juleps medicinal, alcoholic or non, are an old favorite of the Old South—though we can’t be exactly sure when mint came in to the equation—and an American icon.

This julep, made with brandy and rye whiskey, was published (humorously) in Harper’s Monthly during the nineteeth century and republished by Dave Wondrich in Imbibe!. Spicy, sweet, complex and delicious, it really does help you cope with a sickness… mostly by inducing naps. Look no further for the ultimate julep for a cold night by the fire—or even a summer day by the pool. Continue →

Happy New Year, friends, and welcome to the fifth anniversary year of SLOSHED! It hardly seems possible that I’ve been sitting behind this keyboard banging out posts for five years, but the calendar does not lie.

My planned week off after the New Year has spun out into nearly three, thanks to a nasty cold and various other distractions. And, with what’s gone on and is continuing to happen in Haiti, blogging about cocktails hardly seemed like the thing that should be taking up my time. Speaking of which, I’d like to give a small plug for charity. I know everyone is texting their donations to the Red Cross, but I’m more than a little suspicious of non-profit organizations with CEOs paid over $400,000 a year. There are many other, less bureaucratic, aid groups out there who could also use your ever-more-precious dollars—groups like Oxfam International and Doctors Without Borders.

And now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Since this is the beginning of our fifth year, I thought I’d do a little photographic flashback through the gradual development of the bar, and of the blog. After years of work, we finally have all of our bottles and tools housed safely and accessibly, a fact which I can only disclose after a lot of trial and error and messy, overcrowded solutions—namely, the single, large cabinet that has attempted to house our unwieldy collection of bottles since 2005. All the cocktail geeks will tell you that bottle, book and tool storage is a real problem, especially when you live in a tiny little apartment with no space for a wet (or even a dry) bar. Eventually we found the best solution for us, which you can see as part of the morphology below: Continue →