The name of the drink may be a pun, but it is an apt description of life lately. When I’m away from the computer and the cocktail shaker, I spend most of my time gardening or cooking. My little empire of dirt takes up most of my time, as I start all my vegetables from seed, and have recently begun trying my hand at other forms of propagation. Any gardener can tell you that seedlings require time and attention, so most of my day is spent in various planting, pruning and fertilizing efforts—efforts which unfortunately are best done in daylight, leaving me little time for photographing cocktails.

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 →

Now that spring has started to pop up, it seems that everyone has their mind on gin. Just last week I attended a gin symposium, was invited to a gin lunch, and was reminded of a major gin figure’s birthday. Ginny gin gin—I do love gin, and apparently other people have it on their minds as well. So, to bring it all together, I have for you a gin anecdote, a wee bit of history and a recipe for my juniper-loving friends out there.

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 →

I hate me some St. Patrick’s Day. Besides the green beer, the stupid costumes, and the bullshit posturing of culturally bankrupt American Euromutts, there is the small matter of my upbringing. Yes, I too am Irish (in part—a small irony that Oliver Cromwell is my great uncle roughly 6 generations back), and on that side of the family, St. Patrick’s Day was up there on my granddad’s ever-growing list of “Things I Would Gladly Light On Fire Before Shooting With My Illegal Firearm,” right behind Jimmy Carter, and only above John Kennedy because the CIA got there first. It’s not that he was ashamed of being Irish—far from it—but rather that he was disgusted with the pseudo-Irishness that appeared annually.

To him, raised in a predominantly Irish shantytown in the Bay Area during the Depression, Ireland was a barely civilized Third-World country full of drunks and degenerates that his people fled to embrace their new identities as drunk and degenerate Americans. “It was a grey, dirty shithole full of factories where no one worked, land that no one farmed, and rivers where no one bathed,” he would proclaim, despite having never been to Ireland, “If all these dumb Micks want to go back to Ireland so badly, I’ll get a wheelbarrow and load ‘em on the ship myself.” It was my granddad’s view, not uncommon among immigrant children of his generation, that one must renounce one’s ethnic heritage upon arriving here, and despite retaining a good deal of the traditions and customs that he was raised with, he considered himself an American first. It was also my granddad’s view that the local hot dog stand was harboring Communist sympathizers in their kitchen, which caused a particularly alarming armed standoff one afternoon after one too many Screwdrivers when I was a kid, but that’s a different story. Continue →

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 →