And now I am back…with a gift! Next week the CSOWG will be hosting its usual Thursday Drink Night in the chatroom, hosted by Zaya Rum and featuring special guest Jeff “Beachbum” Berry. In honor of that event, I am hosting a giveaway.

One lucky reader will win a brand-spankin’-new copy of Jeff’s latest book Beachbum Berry Remixed, a revised, expanded, absolutely glorious reworking of his first two incomparable tiki classics, Grog Log and Intoxica!, signed by the Bum himself.

I’m sure I have mentioned this before, but Jeff is one of my favorite cocktail authors. His books are full of life and color and rich history, compounded by the awesome drink recipes that he works tirelessly to find. He only publishes the most authentic, most historically accurate and most delicious tiki concoctions, which has made him one of the big Kahunas of Polynesian Pop. And on top of that, he’s one of the nicest people you’re ever likely to meet. He has revised and updated recipes from the first two books based on new research culled since the books were published and added 107 new drinks he found in his travels, including new creations by such modern bar masters as Martin Cate, Lu Brow, Chris Hannah, Jamie Boudreau, Joaquin Simo, Philip Duff, Jim Meehan, Audrey Saunders and Stanislav Vadrna. Are you thirsty yet?

To be entered to win this astounding compendium of exotic tipples, you simply have to leave an answer to the question below in the comments section. The competition closes Wednesday, August 11 at 12pm. All correct answers will be placed in a random drawing to select the lucky winner. Pomaika’i, a hui hou kakou!

What is the verbiage of the announcement made every Wednesday night at the Tiki-Ti by Mike Sr. in honor of his father, bar founder and tiki legend Ray Buhen?

Like this? We also suggest:

• Dr. Cocktail Book News — books, dr cocktail

Content © 2010 Marleigh Riggins Miller / Daniel Miller / SLOSHED!. | Permalink | 8 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: books, giveaway

There is an exception to my obsessive (and probably annoying) pedantic enthusiasm for classic cocktails, and that is the Margarita. Make no mistake—I have very specific requirements for what I call a Margarita, and they entail fresh lime juice, tequila and Cointreau, shaken, on the rocks, with salt. The Margarita is such a simple, straightforward and frankly awesome drink all on its own, though, that it’s hard not to want to toss in some other flavors just to gild the lily a little bit. Such was my reaction when I found a recipe for watermelon margaritas that was just itching to be batched up for a party. Watermelon and tequila are two great tastes that go great together, so why not dare a little in front of company? (...) Continue reading Watermelon Margarita

Content © 2010 Marleigh Riggins Miller / Daniel Miller / SLOSHED!. | Permalink | 8 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: cocktail, lime, party, tequila, triple sec, watermelon

This recipe comes from Imbibe online, whenceforth it magically appeared on my Facebook feed and piqued my interest with mezcal and amaro right off the top. This recipe comes from Mike Ryan of Sable Kitchen & Bar in Chicago and features one of my favorite combinations: mezcal and strawberries. Tequila and mezcal both work very well with fruit flavors, but strawberry is an especially great foil for their spice, smoke and earthiness. I’ve already put up our first batch of Tequila por mi amante for the year, which I highly recommend to anyone who finds this cocktail to their liking. Strawberry-infused tequila is pretty much the most perfect summer spirit I can think of, but since it takes at least three weeks to make these should tide you over until it’s done. (...) Continue reading Speaking in Tongues

Content © 2010 Marleigh Riggins Miller / Daniel Miller / SLOSHED!. | Permalink | No comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: amaro, bitters, cocktail, lemon, mezcal, strawberry

This recipe comes from Food & Wine Cocktails ’09. Created by Joaquin Simo of the venerable NYC cocktail bar Death & Co., it has the same light, crisp qualities as a margarita with a brighter, slightly more brash flavor. The little twist here comes from using marmalade and agave nectar in place of triple sec, which also imparts a stronger bitter orange flavor and a bit more texture. (...) Continue reading Flor de Jalisco

Content © 2010 Marleigh Riggins Miller / Daniel Miller / SLOSHED!. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: cocktail, lemon, marmalade, orange, tequila

But New Orleans is still fighting its way back from that disaster, and the New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic has been a big part of that. One of the most well-known parts of New Orleans is the incredible musical history, and it’s one of the few places in this country where there is such a great love and support for live, local music. You hear it everywhere in NOLA—jazz, rock, R&B, blues, soul, Dixieland, ragtime—spilling out of doors and windows, from brass bands on street corners, buskers in Jackson Square and family bands singing on the riverfront. It flows through the place like its lifeblood, and since 1998 NOMC has been doing the hard work of helping the marginally paid working musicians of New Orleans to get affordable preventative healthcare, for themselves and their families. (...) Continue reading Save the Clinic

Content © 2010 Marleigh Riggins Miller / Daniel Miller / SLOSHED!. | Permalink | No comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Happily, my wee plants are all getting big and strong (at least the ones that can be at this time of the season), so we snipped some fresh thyme from the garden and made use of our delicious fresh batch of homemade limoncello (thanks, Maria!). We found the Precious Thyme in the pages of The Essential Bartender’s Guide, on the hunt for a limoncello cocktail. The drink is a variation on a Negroni put together by Francesco Lafranconi; the limoncello subs for gin and the drink is topped off with club soda for a light, refreshing highball. If you really want to gild the lily a few dashes of lemon or orange bitters would be tasty, and subbing Aperol for the Campari would be a nice variation here too. (...) Continue reading Precious Thyme

Content © 2010 Marleigh Riggins Miller / Daniel Miller / SLOSHED!. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Campari, cocktail, limoncello, negroni, thyme, vermouth

Gin appears in a mind-numbing number of cocktails, mostly because it has been around forever and is adored by our colony-founding forebears in England. Originally a Dutch distillate, the English developed the style that we most often associate with gin—that is to say London Dry. 99% of the gins you find on supermarket and liquor store shelves are in the London Dry style, or are a variation thereupon: a neutral grain spirit base which has been flavored or distilled with juniper and a mixture of other botanicals. Herbaceous, crisp, clear and decidedly not sweet, gin is the basis for the Martini, Corpse Reviver #2, Last Word, Alamagoozlum, Negroni and host of other delicious cocktails, including every gin drinker’s staple: the gin and tonic.

I first encountered gin as a child, when I saw the bottle of Tanqueray that lived in my parents liquor cabinet. (I’ve always enjoyed the bottle itself from an aesthetic point of view, so it is perhaps no wonder that I became a gin drinker.) My father is a very no-frills kind of guy and, aside from the occasional rum and Coke, Bloody Mary or vodka-tonic, he drinks his liquor on the rocks. I didn’t realize until I was much older that other people did not drink Tanqueray straight, with ice and two cocktail onions. It didn’t even occur to me that there were people who didn’t like gin, since I was surrounded by gin drinkers. Fast forward to the early 2000s and you can see how poorly I fared in the Los Angeles bar scene, attempting to order drinks at bars stocked with vodka and Heineken when my comfort zone was Gimlets, blended scotch and Coors Lite. As you may have guessed by now, I was (and remain) decidedly unhip.

These days I have embraced my love of gin and wallow in it, so I was excited to hear that my first love (in gin), Tanqueray, celebrated founder Charles Tanqueray’s 200th birthday over the weekend. It’s a rather scary gin for novices to try cold turkey, so I’ve prepped a tipple that will help smooth out its heavy juniper and citrus flavors. This recipe came my way via Eric Alperin of The Varnish, who discovered this version of the Orange Blossom in David Embury’s Fine Art of Mixing Drinks. This preparation was widely known during Prohibition as a way to disguise the taste of rotgut bathtub gin, but this particular recipe works hard to keep this from being just a gin Screwdriver. (...) Continue reading Orange Blossom

Content © 2010 Marleigh Riggins Miller / Daniel Miller / SLOSHED!. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: cocktail, gin, lime, orange, orange flower

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 reading Sparkling Ginger Daisy

Content © 2010 Marleigh Riggins Miller / Daniel Miller / SLOSHED!. | Permalink | 9 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: aperol, cava, cocktail, gin, ginger, lemon juice

…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 reading Bumble-bee Cocktail

Content © 2010 Marleigh Riggins Miller / Daniel Miller / SLOSHED!. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: baker, bitters, cocktail, honey, lime, orange, rum

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 reading Prescription Julep

Content © 2010 Marleigh Riggins Miller / Daniel Miller / SLOSHED!. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: brandy, cocktail, cognac, mint, rye, whisk(e)y

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 reading Build-a-Bar Workshop

Content © 2010 Marleigh Riggins Miller / Daniel Miller / SLOSHED!. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Well, here it is: the end of 2009. It’s been a great year for Dan and I, personally and professionally. Our wedding, the weddings of some very dear friends, lots of interest in the website, my ever-expanding garden and some excellent job fortunes have all added up to a pretty stellar year. We feel blessed and fortunate to be surrounded by our wonderful family and an incredible group of talented, supportive, loving friends. All in all, 2009 has turned out better than we could have hoped and we have even higher hopes for 2010. There are travel plans in the works and lots of fun adventures ahead so bring it on, new year!

Speaking of which, before we close out the archives on 2009 we have to recap the ten most popular cocktails on the site this year. I’ve excluded the Cocktail Archive—which was technically the third most popular page on the site this year—in favor of actual posts, but feel free to peruse it for inspiration in tonight’s festivities. And so, here are the ten most popular cocktails on SLOSHED! in the past twelve months:

1. Blood Orange Margarita
2. Home Bar 101
3. Brandied Cherries
4. Corpse Reviver #2
5. Satan’s Whiskers
6. Pumpkin Cider
7. Le Tourment Vert
8. Violet Fizz
9. Bourbon Renewal
10. Snowshoe

And to close the year out right, there is one final cocktail for the books. The Last Word is aptly named, as it is generally a last word in many respects, being both a fine and rather strong concoction. Simple and tasty, this is one of our favorite gin cocktails any time of the year and we hope you’ll like it too. Use it to bid adieu to this year or ring in the new, or just to savor one of the little pleasures whenever you need one. (...) Continue reading Last Word

Content © 2009 Marleigh Riggins Miller / Daniel Miller / SLOSHED!. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: chartreuse, cocktail, gin, lime, maraschino

It was supposed to rain today, but instead it is windy and icy cold—in short, unpleasant without even the beneficial aspects of precipitation. Thus I am inside tending the fire, enjoying a hot beverage and working on finishing up a few more Christmas treats. This particular hot beverage is a personal favorite, being as it is both soothing and warming with the added bonus of holiday spice.

It isn’t complicated to make and has a passing similarity to eggnog, though without the extra fat and extra work. And, though the recipe here calls for rum—taken as it is from Trader Vic’s Bartender’s Guide, Revised—you could easily make this with brandy, whiskey, or even applejack. I’m pretty sure it’d be okay with a little slug of amaretto, Kahlua or créme de noyaux too, but then again when it comes to cocktail variations I’m a rebel and I ain’t no good. (...) Continue reading Hot Rum Cow

Content © 2009 Marleigh Riggins Miller / Daniel Miller / SLOSHED!. | Permalink | No comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: cocktail, hot, milk, nutmeg, rum, vanilla

This recipe is so simple that it almost feels like cheating. Two ingredients, no shaking—really, how much easier does it get? Not much, and yet this is one of our favorite winter warmers. It is even Doctor Cocktail-approved, given that the good doctor himself gave us the formula and the impetus to try this delightful beverage over a year ago. Since then I don’t think I could count how many Snowshoes we’ve made, nor how many empty bottles of peppermint schnapps in the recycling bin have caused our neighbors’ eyebrows to arch. If you’re feeling a chill this yuletide, or if perhaps the holiday cheercheercheer has worn you down, read on. A quick Snowshoe is a warm, cozy balm for your cold, weary self. (...) Continue reading Snowshoe

Content © 2009 Marleigh Riggins Miller / Daniel Miller / SLOSHED!. | Permalink | 11 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: bourbon, cocktail, mint, peppermint, schnapps

We stumbled upon this little gem in a back issue of Imbibe, resurrected from the pages of the Savoy Cocktail Book by our friend Paul Clarke via Dave Wondrich. As he points out in his own write-up, the Cameron’s Kick is a particularly accomplished red-headed stepchild. Perversely mixing two spirits well known for being a royal pain with—of all things—orgeat syrup, this drink reads like a recipe for disaster. It seems doomed to failure which Paul, like us, finds an irresistible draw. Bring us the most profanely awful recipe you can find and we’ll all be driven to make it and, perhaps, find some way to tweak it into drinkability. Surprisingly, this bizarre marriage blends all the disparate bits into a harmonious and delicious whole that we have been imbibing with regularity. (...) Continue reading Cameron’s Kick

Content © 2009 Marleigh Riggins Miller / Daniel Miller / SLOSHED!. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: cocktail, irish, lemon juice, orgeat, scotch, whisk(e)y