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Not everyone who reads Summit Sips will understand the implications of posting the Cosmopolitan as our Drink of the Week. In cocktail geek circles, the Cosmo is the quintessential "bad drink" of the late 1980's and 90s. Some craft cocktail bars even banish them (along with with Budweiser, cell phones, etc.) as a House Rule "no-no". It's just over two decades old placing the origin during a time before the current cocktail renaissance, but is it that hard to imagine how we might appreciate these ingredients if it were invented today? We think it's time to set aside pretentious attitudes and recognize that although it's possible to perpetuate everything that can be wrong with a Cosmopolitan, if you know what you are doing it can be delicious drink. We'd be lying by omission if we didn't admit that it happens to be one of our own guilty pleasures.
The Bad? What can
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Named for the Algonquin Hotel on 42nd street in New York, this cocktail gained popularity after Prohibition as the hotel became known for the regular lunch gathering of Alexander Woollcott, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Harpo Marx and others. It’s still served at the hotel today, but you don’t have to go there to try one. Nor do you have to be a member of an exclusive roundtable lunch group. It's a breeze to make and the ingredients are easy to find.
Algonquin 2 oz rye whiskey 1 oz dry vermouth 1 oz pineapple juice
Stir with ice. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass.
According to David Wondrich, this drink is even better with a few dashes of orange bitters. He recommends Fee Bros. West Indian but also suggests using a squeeze of orange peel. There’s definitely an improvement with the extra kick of orange, but you also have to pay
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The Toronto combines two things we love: rye whiskey and Fernet-Branca. Some accounts suggest that this drink was originally made with Canadian whisky which makes sense, especially considering that it’s called the Toronto cocktail. But there’s more to love when you make it with rye. We haven’t written too much about Canadian whisky. It’s a popular spirit, to be sure, represented by a multitude of brands in most liquor shops. We have nothing against the smooth flavor of Canadian whisky, but there’s a reason it doesn’t appear very often in recipes.
Canadian whisky (spelled without the “e”) is a blended product. Blended in this context refers to a spirit made by combining a pure distillate with neutral alcohol. For example, Laird’s Applejack comes in two varieties, a pure, bonded apple brandy and a blended version. The bonded Applejack is made entirely from distilled cider wine, whereas the blended version contains
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The Anodyne Cocktail—for whatever ails you. The name means something that alleviates or eliminates pain, so I guess it could apply to any drink, but in this case it was chosen for a medicinal combination of ingredients first tried by Wesley Moore in 2009 when it appeared on Chuck Taggart's Looka! Gumbo Pages weblog. According to Chuck, the cocktail was inspired by the Perfect Martini which is a Martini made using equal portions of both sweet and dry vermouth.
The first thing you might notice is that this drink doesn't use a typical sweet vermouth, nor a typical dry one. It wouldn't be very innovative if it did. Instead, the substitutions are far more interesting and the proportions are such that they setup a wonderful balance between them. As simple as it sounds, it's much more than a basic substitution riff. What we have with the Anodyne is another
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You just don't find many cocktails made with Scotch whisky. Perhaps it's hard to produce combinations that work well together considering the prominent flavors that are typical of any good Scotch. Nevertheless, a few creations have succeeded, and the Blood and Sand is one of them. I'm not saying the world needs more Scotch cocktails. Those of us who enjoy Scotch will say it's just fine on its own, but not everyone likes to sip spirits neat. Here's a chance to try something that is pretty rare in the world of mixology.
As uncommon as Scotch cocktails are, you might expect a working recipe to look better on paper, so when you see what's in this, you wouldn't think the combination can work. I have to say that if I set out to create a Scotch cocktail myself, it might take me a while before I would try mixing these
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Yesterday, I attended the "Mixology 3: Make Your Own Bitters" event organized by Studio Bricolage and hosted by the Bradstreet Crafthouse at the Graves 601 Hotel. I was one of about 40 individuals in attendance at what was the third event in a mixology educational series. Although I missed the first two installments, I was happy to finally attend. I found this event to be hands-on and informative and I thought I would post a quick review.
Everyone was pre-registered, so we were greeted at the entrance with printed name tags and a chilled cocktail—a fantastic way to start. Rocky Mountain Punch which is a heavenly mixture of rum, maraschino liqueur, lemon juice, champagne or pineapple juice with Angostura bitters made a pleasant and refreshing introduction to the topic of the afternoon: Bitters.
The group was divided into two sections. Some were led into the back
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You don't have to be a fan of AMC's Mad Men to be interested in the Old Fashioned cocktail. Even though it's Don Draper's favorite, you too can make this one like a Madison Avenue executive. The fact is, the Old Fashioned comes from an era long before Don started drinking. It's always regarded as a classic, and indeed, along with the Sazerac, it is probably one of the earliest cocktails to be created. The original definition of the cocktail was first printed in 1806 when it was described as "spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters." The Old Fashioned perfectly fits these requirements, although today the word cocktail is used to describe virtually every variety of mixed beverage.
So, what is the Old Fashioned? Well, it's a drink that has earned it's own glass, for one. While there are many variations, and some that take additional ingredients
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