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Phew.

It has been one of those weeks—work snuck up and gave me the stress-and-deadlines equivalent of a sound beating with a blunt object, so needless to say I have been a little lax about typing up a post. I really need to replenish my selection of drafts, but I always think about these things when I’m too busy to do them and then promptly forget when I become un-busy. It’s a vicious cycle, I tell you.

Anyway, I’m here now, and I bring you a classic first introduced to me by the one and only Ted Haigh, aka Doctor Cocktail. I had seen this in the pages of Vintage Spirits & Forgotten Cocktails but only tried it after Ted explained its construction to a (very patient and cooperative) bartender while we were terrorizing the bars downtown. Said bartender was already wearing one of our party’s Negronis from a tragic shaker malfunction earlier in the evening, so I imagine the Jack Rose was a welcome respite from our wardrobe-destroying Campari fixation.

One of David Embury’s six essential cocktails from The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, the Jack Rose was popular during the Prohibition years and was mentioned by name in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, which also contains the first printed reference to “The Lost Generation,” Gertrude Stein’s phrase for writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald who so embodied the pathos of the generation coping between the wars. Which is neither here nor there, as the Jack Rose has its own eclectic history:

The simplest explanation of the name is the fact that it is made with applejack and is rose colored from the grenadine. Also, it is possibly named after, or even invented by, the infamous hitman Jack Rose. Albert Stevens Crockett (Old Waldorf Bar Days, 1931) states that it is named after the pink Jacquemot (also known as Jacqueminot or Jacque) rose. It has also been posited that the Jack Rose was invented by Joseph P. Rose, a Newark, NJ restaurateur, and named by him “in honor” of a defendant in a trial then being held at the courthouse in that city. (Joseph P. Rose once held the title of “World’s Champion Mixologist.”) – from Wikipedia

I’m inclined to think that the name is derived from applejack and the rose hue of the drink, but it entertains me to think it refers to a hitman, the drink’s creator issuing a sly warning about his concoction’s potency. You say tomato, I say psycho killer, qu’est-ce que c’est… Continue →

This comes with the territory, but I buy a lot of cocktail books. I buy a lot of books in general, but books about food and drink are especially hard on my willpower. This is especially true of new books, like the eminently enjoyable recent releases Imbibe! and Sippin’ Safari. I haven’t written about them much because I didn’t want to tread on the experience of other readers, and because the “new” in “new release” would wear thin if I were running around publishing recipes out of them.

That being said, I think we’re far enough from the drop date for Beachbum Berry’s last tome to share one of the recipes. We’ve been eyeing this drink for months, but something always gets in the way—no oranges, no pimento liqueur, we’re out of Martinique rum, don’t have enough Demerara…oh, the trials of the tiki cocktail enthusiast! A recent shopping spree replenishment mission provided all of the necessary ingredients and we were finally able to enjoy the cocktail that had been taunting us.

This drink comes from the chapter on mixologist Hank Riddle who, like many others, spent time slinging booze for Donn Beach, aka Don the Beachcomber. As my fellow nerds will know, the name is in morse code; as it happens, three dots and a dash is the code for “victory,” a word that was particularly popular during WWII when Don came up with this concoction. This recipe details the drink as made at the Las Vegas Don the Beachcomber’s circa 1965. Continue →

So. Heatwave. It’s amazing how four 90º+ days can sap both your will to live and your will to drink. I’ve been subsisting on very cold water and the occasional very cold beer, so there (sadly) hasn’t been much to blog about. That will change this week, but in the mean time I’m here to remind everyone that we are mere weeks away from Tales of the Cocktail 2008!

If you haven’t been keeping up with the Tales Blog, there are a whole passel of bloggers converging on Tales this year and we’ve been working hard to provide sneak previews of the great panels and events that are scheduled. I’ve managed to work out a pretty open schedule for my time, so I thought I’d post the places I’m most likely to be; I’m really looking forward to meeting everyone, so please say hi if you see me (I have a long list of people who I am hoping to run into, though I’ll probably wind up stuttering and looking like an idiot once I do).

We’ll be arriving on Wednesday after a brief visit with a friend in Texas, but I’ve worked out a rough itinerary—meaning these are the places I want to be when I’m not touring cemeteries or listening to jazz (or staggering around town drinking). Continue →

Another month, another Mixology Monday is upon us! I’m limping in at the last minute because, despite our hefty preparations for today’s feature, we managed to muck up the timing and run out of bourbon mere days before the roundup. Oh, the horror! MxMo days are pretty much the only happy Mondays around here—especially when the featured ingredient is one as beloved as bourbon—so we figured it’s better late than no Kentucky.

Bourbon is The Boyfriend’s liquor of choice, so we decided to do something special for the MxMo crowd. We worked and worked (and drank and drank) to present the alchemical wonder of a Sloshed! original for this month’s roundup over at the Scofflaw’s Den.

Aside from being both tasty and refreshing (in our humble estimation), this cocktail has a story behind it. You see, there is this man—we’ll call him John—who has been a friend of The Boyfriend for many years. John is an All-American kind of guy; he’s a football fan, has more Cannibal Corpse records than is probably healthy and he owns the entire (and I mean entire) Pet Shop Boys discography. He dresses up as Tommy Trojan for Halloween. He is the luckiest card player I’ve ever been at a poker table with: I’ve seen him draw two royal flushes with my own eyes. I’m lucky if I can pull a straight flush once in a decade.

All of this gives you an idea of how much fun John is, but there is one long, enduring tradition that withstands the rigors of time—the Penny. Please try not to grimace but the Penny, as envisioned during John’s college years, was a party-starting combination of Early Times and Squirt over ice. (A Dirty Penny being our poor man’s variation without ice: pop the top of a can of Squirt, drink some and pour in the Early Times. Voila! Party in a can.) As you can imagine, we demolished our fair share of cheap whiskey and soda via the Penny.

But times, they are a changin’, and our tastes don’t run to Early Times as they used to (in our younger years, when our livers were strong and our tastebuds were weak). Despite that, we treasured the Penny in our hearts and have resurrected its spirit to suit our more rarified cocktail tastes.

John, this one is for you. Here’s to life! Continue →