Setting up a home bar can be daunting, given the huge array of liquors to choose from. The 12 Bottle Bar will have you up...
We’re closing out the 9-Bottle Bar’s month-long look at rum with the recipe for a drink aptly named for the occasion. The alphabet-ending XYZ Cocktail appeared in the famous Savoy Cocktail Book, by bartender Harry Craddock, first published in 1930.
Even if all we did was admire it from afar, the Clover Club — with its colorful palette of pale pink, crisp Naval white, and ruby red — would be a winning drink. To its credit, it tastes mighty fine, too. This classic cocktail is an upgrade to the basic build of a sour cocktail (the Pisco Sour and the Whiskey Sour are two examples) thanks to a hit of sweet, tangy raspberry syrup.
This drink, which supposedly originated at the bar of a British private club in the Burmese capital of Rangoon sometime in the 1920s, is squarely in the wheelhouse of the 9-Bottle Bar. It calls for four of the nine bottles, with lime juice as a fifth, acidity-adding ingredient. Being a British invention by way of a steamy ex-colony, the Pegu Club starts with London dry gin and then goes long on both citrus and bitters. In fact, the build is pretty darn close to that of the Margarita.
This combination of gin, sweet vermouth, bitters, and maraschino liqueur makes for a complex, brooding libation that scratches the itch for a Manhattan. But instead of foregrounding woody, vanilla notes from whiskey, the use of gin in the Martinez turns up the volume on the herbal aromatics. Far more astute and knowledgeable writers than this one have done a superb job delving into the history of the Martinez.
The Ward Eight, as drinks historian David Wondrich has written, is one of the City of Boston’s few contributions to the classic-cocktail pantheon. It came into being sometime around the turn of the 20th century and riffs on a Whiskey Sour with the inclusion of a special, somewhat mysterious ingredient: grenadine.
For fans of sweet vermouth, the Fig Leaf cocktail is the kind of drink that ought to be in your regular rotation. Unlike the majority of cocktail recipes, in which the spirit is the most plentiful ingredient, the build of the Fig Leaf is heavy on the aperitif wine rather than the booze (in this case, light rum). This drink falls into the category bartenders often call “reverse cocktails.
Creating drinks named the “Turf Cocktail” was evidently a popular pastime during the decades hugging the turn of the 20th century. There are no fewer than three distinct drink recipes bearing this name or a slight variation that come to us from old bar books. In today’s cocktail, we focus on a version that starts off like a Dry Martini before galloping in its own direction.
The devilishly named Satan’s Whiskers cocktail is a longstanding classic, catalogued in the Savoy Cocktail Book (1930) and likely of even older vintage. It’s a “perfect” drink, meaning that it contains equals parts of sweet and dry vermouth. The base spirit is gin, and many versions of the recipe call for orange liqueur, orange juice, and orange bitters, resulting in a rounded, layered exploration of the citrus fruit in all its bitter-juicy-sweet complexity.
It’s July, outdoor drinking is in full swing, and orange liqueur is our muse of the month here at The 9-Bottle Bar. Based on those three facts, we seem practically duty-bound to mine our cocktail-recipe resources for a drink that suits these summery climes. So let’s get busy mixing up the Beachcomber. This cocktail, which appears in the famous 1947 Bartender’s Guide by tiki legend Trader Vic (Victor Bergeron, Jr.
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There’s a cocktail named for each of New York City’s five boroughs, so why not its neighborhoods, too? The Red Hook cocktail shares its moniker with a waterside enclave in south Brooklyn. Recipe-wise, this bold and booze-driven drink is a cross between the Manhattan (rye whiskey, sweet vermouth, bitters) and the Martinez (Old Tom gin, sweet vermouth, maraschino liqueur, bitters), pulling ingredients from both.
If you’ve been keeping up with The 9-Bottle Bar this month, by now you’ve learned that sweet vermouth consists of wine that’s been fortified with additional alcohol; infused (or “aromatized”) with a variety of botanical ingredients, one of which should be artemisia absinthium, vermouth’s namesake, better known as grand wormwood; and sweetened with burnt sugar. The process sounds simple enough — and thus begs the question, Can one make vermouth at home?
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Tutorial for making fused recycled bottle glass bar beads that can be used to make jewelry. Includes instructions and firing schedule
You can craft a dizzying array of cocktails from a surprisingly small number of spirits and mixers.
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