This is a somewhat sentimental post for me: years ago, I had dinner with Jason at a restaurant in Manhattan (I forget which one) and ordered a brandy alexander. It turned out that the bartender didn’t know how to make one, so I tried my best to explain — in the end, I wound up with a white Russian instead.
But! A brandy alexander is a dang nice drink, and everyone should know how to make one. Even the internet turns up some pretty bizarre recipes that morph into that white Russian I had back in 2016. My favorite (of the ones that I remember) was probably twenty-one years ago, when I was a college student on vacation in Paris, ordered at a piano bar where tourists and locals alike belted out American showtunes. I’ll never be that young again.
But! It’s Thursday and it’s 5:30 on the east coast, so there’s no reason (except, like me, not having creme de cacao on hand) you can’t make yourself one of these so you can feel that young yourself.
This recipe largely follows the one at liquor.com, which offers a solid history for the cocktail (it used to be made with gin? okay, weird; most cocktails used to be made with brandy, not the other way around) and also feels the least objectionable:
Ingredients:
1 1/2 ounces cognac
1 ounce dark creme de cacao
1 ounce cream
Garnish: grated nutmeg
Steps:
Add cognac, dark creme de cacao and cream into a shaker with ice and shake until well-chilled.
Strain into a chilled cocktail glass or a coupe glass.
Garnish with freshly grated nutmeg.
Notes:
Cognac is brandy, but cognac is fancy brandy; other brandies can be good but cognac is pretty much always good. So why not use cognac?
I like a coupe glass; cocktail glasses look pretty but are a good way to spill your drink.
You could go equal parts cognac, creme de cacao, and cream, but why? It’s better with more liquor in it.
Don’t add more ice, even if you serve it in a rocks glass. Up is the way to go here.
You can get very dessert-y with brandy alexanders (whipped cream, ice cream, shaved chocolate, etc.), but at heart the thing is a cocktail, so treat it like a cocktail.
For his Letters & Liquors site, Matthew Wyne is profiling more than 50 classic cocktails accompanied by a type-driven design specific to each drink’s era.
As a graphic designer, my specialty is lettering, and the spirits world is replete with lettering styles. This blog is an attempt to merge my knowledge of cocktail history with the developments in lettering that accompanied it. There will be 52 cocktails in all, one for each week of 2017, and each one will be represented by a piece of lettering inspired by the design of that era. I have selected these drinks specifically because they tell the story of why people drank what they did when they did.
I really don’t like Wyne’s use of “she” as a cocktail’s pronoun, but everything else about this is great. (via df)
In 1937, Ernest Hemingway devised a cocktail called Death in the Gulf Stream for dealing with hard times.
Take a tall thin water tumbler and fill it with finely cracked ice.
Lace this broken debris with 4 good purple splashes of Angostura, add the juice and crushed peel of 1 green lime, and fill glass almost full with Holland gin…
No sugar, no fancying. It’s strong, it’s bitter — but so is English ale strong and bitter, in many cases.
We don’t add sugar to ale, and we don’t need sugar in a “Death in the Gulf Stream” — or at least not more than 1 tsp. Its tartness and its bitterness are its chief charm.
More drinks should involve lacing broken debris with alcohol. So the next time you feel like Hemingway kicking this can…
I’m happy and proud to announce that my pal Brian Bartels’ book The Bloody Mary will be out in a couple months.
The Bloody Mary is one of the most universally-loved drinks. Perfect for breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner, and beyond, there simply isn’t a wrong time for a Bloody.
In The Bloody Mary, author Brian Bartels — beverage director for the beloved West Village restaurants Jeffrey’s Grocery, Joseph Leonard, Fedora, Perla, and Bar Sardine — delves into the fun history of this classic drink. (Did Hemingway create it, as legend suggests? Or was it an ornery Parisian bartender?)
More than 50 eclectic recipes, culled from top bartenders around the country, will have drinkers thinking outside the vodka box and taking garnishes to a whole new level.
Brian is probably the one person most responsible/culpable for introducing me, somewhat later in life than many, to the wonderful world of spirits and cocktails. I am not a particular fan of the Bloody Mary, but I’m buying this book because Brian has yet to steer me wrong when it comes to beverages.
A Proper Drink is the first-ever book to tell the full, unflinching story of the contemporary craft cocktail revival. Award-winning writer Robert Simonson interviewed more than 200 key players from around the world, and the result is a rollicking (if slightly tipsy) story of the characters — bars, bartenders, patrons, and visionaries — who in the last 25 years have changed the course of modern drink-making. The book also features a curated list of about 40 cocktails — 25 modern classics, plus an additional 15 to 20 rediscovered classics and classic contenders — to emerge from the movement.
I know bits and pieces of the story, but it’d be cool to hear the whole thing. Simonson also wrote the book on The Old-Fashioned, which would probably be my desert island cocktail. Ok, maybe a daiquiri if there were limes on the island. (via @buzz)
The PBS Ideas Channel talks to Brooklyn bar owner Ivy Mix about all the different kinds of glassware that cocktails are served in. The most interesting bits are about how factors other than taste influence how people enjoy drinks, as with wine. Men in particular seem to have a difficult time enjoying themselves with certain types of glassware and drink colors.
One year in front of a large audience I ran a test intended to prove that big ice cubes were all show. I shook with different types of ice and dumped the drinks into graduated cylinders to measure the amount of foam the shaking had produced. To my surprise, and embarrassment, the large cube had a positive, repeatable effect on foam quantity. I don’t know why the big cube does a better job, it just does.
I’m not sure my homemade cocktail game is quite good enough to be worrying about texture at this point, but yours might be.
This is…weird. The National Archives contains a Cocktail Construction Chart made in an architectural style, for some reason, by the US Forest Service in 1974.
If it does, royalties might be due to the family of late Forest Service Region 8 Engineer Cleve “Red” Ketcham, who passed away in 2005 but has since been commemorated in the National Museum of Forest Service History. It’s Ketcham’s signature scribbled in the center of the chart, and according to Sharon Phillips, a longtime Program Management Analyst for Region 8 (which covers Virginia, Georgia, Florida, Oklahoma and Puerto Rico, though Ketcham worked out of its Atlanta office), who conferred with her engineering department, there’s little doubt Ketcham concocted the chart in question. “They’re assuming he’s the one, because the drawing has a date of 1974, and he was working our office from 1974-1980,” she said. And in case there’d be any curiosity as to whether someone else composed the chart and Ketcham merely signed off on it for disbursement, Phillips clarified that, “He’s the author of the chart. I wouldn’t say he passed it along to the staff, because at that time, he probably did that as maybe a joke, something he did for fun. It probably got mixed up with some legitimate stuff and ended up in the Archives.”
I contacted the librarian at the Forest History Society and found similar information. An archivist pulled a staff directory from the Atlanta office (aka “Region 8”) from 1975 and found three names that correlate with those on the document: David E. Ketcham & Cleve C. Ketcham (but not Ketchum, as on the document) and Robert B. Johns (presumably aka the Bob Johns in the lower right hand corner). Not sure if the two Ketchams were related or why the spellings of Cleve’s actual last name and the last name of the signature on the chart are different.
However, in the past few days, I’ve run across several similar charts, most notably The Engineer’s Guide to Drinks.1 Information on this chart is difficult to come by, but various commenters at Flowing Data and elsewhere remember the chart being used in the 1970s by a company called Calcomp to demonstrate their pen plotter.
As you can see, the Forest Service document and this one share a very similar visual language — for instance, the five drops for Angostura bitters, the three-leaf mint sprig, and the lemon peel. And I haven’t checked every single one, but the shading employed for the liquids appear to match exactly.
So which chart came first? The Forest Service chart has a date of 1974 and The Engineer’s Guide to Drinks is dated 1978. But in this post, Autodesk Technologist Shaan Hurley says the Engineer’s Guide dates to 1972. I emailed Hurley to ask about the date, but he couldn’t point to a definite source, which is not uncommon when you’re dealing with this sort of thing. It’s like finding some initials next to “85” scratched into the cement on a sidewalk: you’re pretty sure that someone did that in 1985 but you’d have a tough time proving it.
FWIW, if I had to guess where this chart originated, I’d say that the Calcomp plotter demo got out there somehow (maybe at a trade show or published in an industry magazine) and every engineer took a crack at their own version, like an early internet meme. Cleve Ketcham drew his by hand while others probably used the CAD software running on their workplace mainframes or minicomputers.
Anyway, if anyone has any further information about where these CAD-style cocktail instructions originated, let me know. (thx, @john_overholt & tre)
Years of rigorous experimentation and study — botched attempts and inspired solutions — have yielded the recipes and techniques found in these pages. Featuring more than 120 recipes and nearly 450 color photographs, Liquid Intelligence begins with the simple — how ice forms and how to make crystal-clear cubes in your own freezer — and then progresses into advanced techniques like clarifying cloudy lime juice with enzymes, nitro-muddling fresh basil to prevent browning, and infusing vodka with coffee, orange, or peppercorns.
Practical tips for preparing drinks by the pitcher, making homemade sodas, and building a specialized bar in your own home are exactly what drink enthusiasts need to know. For devotees seeking the cutting edge, chapters on liquid nitrogen, chitosan/gellan washing, and the applications of a centrifuge expand the boundaries of traditional cocktail craft.
Written by renowned bartender and cocktail blogger Jeffrey Morgenthaler, The Bar Book is the only technique-driven cocktail handbook out there. This indispensable guide breaks down bartending into essential techniques, and then applies them to building the best drinks. More than 60 recipes illustrate the concepts explored in the text, ranging from juicing, garnishing, carbonating, stirring, and shaking to choosing the correct ice for proper chilling and dilution of a drink. With how-to photography to provide inspiration and guidance, this book breaks new ground for the home cocktail enthusiast.
I’ve been beefing up my home bar over the past few weeks and hopefully this book will help me along in the technique department. Nothing in there about catching glasses behind your back, but no book is perfect, I guess. (thx, gabe)
Featuring hundreds of recipes for signature Death & Co creations as well as classic drink formulas,Death & Co is not only a comprehensive collection of the bar’s best, but also a complete cocktail education. With chapters on the theory and philosophy of drink-making; a complete guide to the spirits, tools, and other ingredients needed to make a great bar; and specs for nearly 500 iconic drinks, Death & Co is destined to become the go-to reference on craft cocktails.
11 Madison Park is either a very good restaurant or the absolute best restaurant in New York City. It depends on whom you ask. But don’t ask me: I’ve only had a drink at 11 Madison Park, and that drink was a Long Island Iced Tea. It came in a highball with four perfect cubes of ice and a wedge of lemon. It cost sixteen dollars and tasted just like college.
“I haven’t served one of these in six months,” the bartender told me. Like his peers at the other fine New York bars and restaurants where I have lately been ordering Long Island Iced Teas, he had repeated my order back to me: “Long Island Iced Tea?” His neck muscles tightened, giving bloom to a gritted smile. That smile said: “The customer is always right.” I confirmed the order, and he obligingly prepared it. Later, when we struck up a conversation, he told me the last person to order a Long Island Iced Tea at 11 Madison Park “was definitely not from New York.”
True story: the guy who invented the Long Island Iced Tea is named Bob Butt.
First of all, it’s $10. Your homemade Old Fashioneds and Whiskey Sours will stay delightfully undiluted with large ice cubes. Your kids will say, “Holy shizzle, look at the size of those fracking ice cubes! Swaggy fresh! {emoji drinking glass} {emoji smiley} {emoji thumbs up}” The Instagramming of your at-home cocktails will get 20% more faving action. The tray is cheaper and probably easier to use than these spherical ice molds (which, admittedly, I had never seen before and do look pretty cool and I think I might have to get them yup just pushed the Add to Cart button so I will let you know how it goes). Your friends will gape in wonder at your seemingly fancy-cocktail-bar-grade at-home cubes and ask you where you got such a wonderful contraption and you can tell them, hey lady I don’t ask you about your secrets just drink your drink.
Cocktail enthusiast Martin Doudoroff explains how to make an Old Fashioned without using any of the “various bad ideas” (e.g. “There is no slice of orange in an Old Fashioned”) that have crept in over the years.
Sugar (and the scant water it is dissolved in) mellows the spirit of the drink. Not much is required, just a little, as the quality of today’s spirits is so much higher than it typically was when the Old Fashioned was born. A little splash of simple syrup generally suffices. Gum syrup, rich simple syrup, demerara syrup, brown sugar syrup, sugar cane syrup (the variety filtered of molasses solids) all are great choices. Agave syrup or other neutral diet-sensitive sweeteners may suffice.
Honey, maple syrup, molasses or other strongly-flavored sweeteners do not belong in an Old Fashioned, which is not to say you cannot or should not create nice variations on the Old Fashioned with them.
With the current popularity of the craft cocktail bar, massive ice cubes, and vigorous cocktail shaking techniques, comes the risk of injury.
“When they’re shaking a drink, it’s very similar to the motion of a pitcher, or a tennis serve or throwing a football,” said Lisa Raymond-Tolan, an occupational therapist in New York. “It’s the same motion, back and forth, back and forth, rotating up high. You have a heavy weight at the end of the arm, out in the air. It’s not just the shoulder. It’s the wrist as well.”
One of the bartenders at Varnish, Chris Bostick, shook his cocktails so vigorously that he ripped out the screws that had been inserted in his clavicle after a snowboarding injury. He was sidelined for weeks.
Maybe instead of Tommy John surgery, they’ll start calling it Johnny Walker surgery.
Many of the fancy-dan cocktail bars serve their drinks with huge ice cubes so that even slow sippers don’t have to deal with over-watery cocktails (less surface area = slower melting). If you want to do the same thing at home, get yourself the impressively named Tovolo King Cube tray; it’ll churn out an infinite number of 2-inch cubes for about $8. (via american drink)
Mr. Uyeda, who owns a bar named Tender in the Ginza district, is the inventor of a much-debated shaking technique he calls the hard shake, a choreographed set of motions involving a ferocious snapping of the wrists while holding the shaker slanted and twisting it. According to his Web site, this imparts, among other things, greater chill and velvety bubbles that keep the harshness of the alcohol from contacting the tongue, while showering fine particles of ice across the drink’s surface.
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