Finally, this place is gonna start looking a bit more like it used to!

As of today, we’ve got the basic look of the blog down.  The theme is based on the free Vesper theme by Valen Designs, which had the kind of layout we were looking for, if not so much the exact look.  (I wasn’t really down wit’ da urnge.)

The custom Looka! theme was designed by my friend Marleigh Riggins Miller of SLOSHED! fame.  Not only is she a terrific cocktails and spirits writer and drink-maker, she’s a very talented graphic designer — the kind of stuff she does for a living — and she did a really lovely job.  It’s still a work-in-progress, and over the next few days or week or two we’ll roll out other features, including navigation along the header with links to full archives, an about page, a list of cocktail recipes (i.e., the old “Cocktail of the Day” feature, which I will gradually import into WordPress going as far back as I can), a page of links (instead of that really long frakkin’ sidebar) and maybe some more.  We’ll see!

I also want to thank my friend Jay Hepburn of Oh Gosh! (the UK’s premier cocktail and spirits weblog, in my humble opinion) for his preliminary work in helping get this place ported to WordPress.  He’s meeting Wesly and me at the Connaught Bar in London next Thursday, and I think there’ll be a drink or three there with his name on ’em.

Onward and upstairs!

A few weeks back Wesly and I met up with Mary, Steve and Diana at Langer’s Deli, which is widely recognized as having the best pastrami anywhere (and I even know some New York Jews who agree — let the arguing begin!). When we parked at their parking lot a block away, we saw the most bizarre mural painted on the building wall next to it.  For a few minutes we were scratching our heads and saying, “WTF?”

Finally Steve was the one to get it. “It’s swine flu!”   We thought the snot streaming out of the pig’s nose was the killer touch.

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My friend Matt the RumDood once told me, “Your blog takes friggin’ forever to load on my mobile.  I could start loading it, go eat lunch and then maybe I can read it afterward.”  Well, something like that.  He probably said something a bit more epithetic than “friggin’,” at least.

Well, gnash your teeth no more.  As of now, if you care to read this weblog on an iPhone, iPod Touch or Android phone, it’ll look like this:

Pretty spiff!  (Yes, I know I’m easily impressed, but this kinda entering-the-current-century stuff is all very new to me.)  You can read posts, comment, forward them, log in as a user/subscriber, forward to Twitter and a bunch of other social bookmarkers, or flip a switch to turn the mobile theme off and look at the full site. Alas, you can’t look at Flash videos, but that’s a limitation of the phone.  If you have some other kind of mobile, at least the new WordPress site should load a lot faster than my ridiculously bloated hand-coded versions did (most of which averaged around  200K of code alone, not counting pictures!).

Making life easier for our readers!  I’ll drink to that.

I always try not to make any assumptions about my readership. I know there are a lot of cocktail geeks, nerds, and– er, ahem, aficionadoes and enthusiasts out there, but new folks discover this weblog all the time and might be new to the joys that the cocktail brings into our lives.

One of the very greatest cocktails in the history of Humankind, in the top five certainly, is the Manhattan Cocktail. Even though it’s basic — whiskey, sweet vermouth, bitters — there are many subtle variations. Bourbon or rye (I prefer the latter, but I’ve had dynamite Bourbon Manhattans depending on the Bourbon), brand of sweet vermouth, 2:1 or 3:1 (I think 4:1 is not enough vermouth), type of bitters. We’ve made dozens of variations, and enjoyed them all.

For the record, you may not omit the bitters in a Manhattan any more than you would cook a steak without salt and pepper. It’s worse than that, actually, and you are free to politely but firmly correct anyone who claims that “nobody wants bitters in a Manhattan,” which I’ve actually had some bartenders say to me. It’s like a chef saying that no one wants their food seasoned.

Here’s how we make them at home most of the time.

The Manhattan Cocktail

2 ounces Rittenhouse 100 proof rye whiskey.
1 ounce Carpano Antica Formula sweet vermouth.
2 dashes Angostura bitters.

Combine in a mixing glass with cracked ice and stir for 20-30 seconds. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass and garnish with a brandied cherry or, for a drier and more sophisticated flavor, express the oil from a lemon peel over the drink and garnish with the peel.

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[Well, I had hoped to hold off on posting until the blog redesign was done, but it’s been over two weeks since I posted, and I really ought to make sure you know I’m not dead, and that I’m still writing.  We will, I hope, have a Grand Unveiling soon!  Now, on to the matters at hand …]

Last Thursday night was another edition of Thursday Drink Night, taking place as usual in the Mixoloseum Chat Room. Bartenders, mixologists, cocktail writers, enthusiasts and more join into an affable rabble as we mix drinks and stay up too late.   TDN always has a theme, and sometimes an official sponsor, and last night it was a new product called Square One Botanical Spirit.  “Botanical Spirit”?  What the hell’s that?  Good question.

DRAMATIQUE™ bottle photo by CocktailNerd

Square One is most well known as a company that makes organic vodka. I understand it’s quite good as vodkas go, but as I’m not a vodka man I never paid it much attention.  Then came their second release, a cucumber flavored vodka that I got to try at The Sporting Life, a monthly gathering of local L.A. bartenders and cocktail nerds, with drinks made with the product by H. Joseph Ehrmann of Elixir in San Francisco.  H. made us some mighy fine drinks with it, and I found it to be quite a bit more interesting than most flavored vodkas I’d come across.

Recently Square One released Botanical, which is quite pointedly not labelled as a vodka.  It’s far, far more than a flavored vodka, and almost resembles a gin in its botanical complexity.  In fact, if it contained juniper (which it does not), it’d be a pretty tasty New Western-style gin.  As it is, it’s a pretty tasty … um, something.  We don’t exactly know what to call it.  It’s not flavored vodka, but more.  It’s not gin because there’s no juniper, not aquavit because there’s no caraway.  So far, it’s pretty unique, and perhaps “specialty spirit” comes closest, clunky as that is.

Square One Botanical’s botanicals include pear (which is the most forward), lavender, rose, chamomile, lemon verbena (a flavor and aroma that I adore; I wash with lemon verbena-scented soap every day), rosemary, coriander and citrus peel, in a base of neutral rye grain spirit that’s given as clean a fermentation as possible, just one pass through the column still and one simple filtration.  Another difference between this and a gin (besides the lack of juniper, of course) is that the botanicals go in afterward, and aren’t in the still during distillation.

The pear comes up in front, not like a pear-infused vodka (most of which I don’t really like) and not nearly as strong as a pear eau-de-vie, but still impossible to miss.  The lavender and rose gently envelop it, and any other lavender element you’d care to add to a cocktail based on this spirit (syrup, tincture or bitters) would go quite nicely.  The other spices are subtle, but provide a cushion upon which the flavor structure rests.  I really have to hand it to Square One for thinking outside the box on this one.  They wanted to produce something different, and they did — not only that, it’s good.

In coming up with an original cocktail for TDN my first thought was to treat it like a gin and make something Martini-like with it, just Square One Botanical with perhaps some Dolin Blanc sweet white vermouth to accent its fruity notes, but I decided to skip over that and head for something a bit more complex.  (I still might try that, though.)  I wanted some citrus to go along with that pear, some ginger too (I love that combination), and I wanted to boost the pear and lavender notes inherent in the spirit.  Here’s what I came up with.

THE AQUARIA COCKTAIL

2 ounces Square One Botanical spirit
1/2 ounce Domaine de Canton ginger liqueur
1/4 ounce fresh lime juice
1/4 ounce fresh orange juice
2 barspoons pear eau-de-vie (I used Purkhart)
1 dash Fee’s Old Fashion Aromatic Bitters
1 dash Scrappy’s Lavender Bitters (or lavender tincture)

Combine in a mixing glass, add ice, pop the shaker tin on and shake for a slow count to ten. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass, garnish with an orange peel.

The lavender bitters are optional, since they’re not easy to get.  Scrappy’s Bitters are a small-batch bitters maker out of (I think) Seattle, and while their lavender bitters are pretty one-note (lavender, with a bitter base) it works beautifully with this drink.  I think it’d work even better with Bobby Heugel’s house-made lavender-vanilla bitters from Anvil, but as I didn’t have any this did the trick.  In fact, I’m considering adding some vanilla extract to Scrappy’s to see how that works.

See the Mixoloseum weblog for more original recipes using Square One Botanical that flew into the ether that night — there were some mighty fine ones.