drinkboston.com

During last month’s drinking spree … oops, I mean research expedition … in San Francisco, I appropriately came across some excellent writing about hangovers. A recent New Yorker article, A few too many: Is there any hope for the hungover?, goes deep into the world of hangover remedies. The two major types are discussed: folk (Russians swear by pickle juice and vodka) and pharmaceutical (preventive pills like RU-21 — get it?).

The body of research on hangover cures is thin, notes the writer, Joan Acocella. That’s basically because no upstanding research institution is willing to do what is required to find a treatment for the effects of over consumption: bankroll a massive study involving a large population of drunken (read: difficult to control) human test subjects who, most people think, deserve to suffer the consequences of their folly anyway. “Which is curious, because anyone who discovered a widely effective hangover cure would make a great deal of money,” notes Acocella.

In describing the different physiological and psychological facets of a hangover, she quotes the master, British novelist and bon vivant Kingsley Amis. He describes the “metaphysical hangover”: “When that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future begins to steal over you, start telling yourself that what you have is a hangover. . . . You have not suffered a minor brain lesion, you are not all that bad at your job, your family and friends are not leagued in a conspiracy of barely maintained silence about what a shit you are, you have not come at last to see life as it really is.”

Brilliant. Doesn’t it make you feel better? Luckily, Amis wrote three books on drinking — On Drink in 1972, Everyday Drinking in 1983 and How’s Your Glass? in 1984 — which have recently been gathered together and reissued as a single volume titled Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis. Maybe a little eloquence on the pleasures and pains of overconsumption is all the cure we need.

Here’s another reason to go to drinkboston’s World Cocktail Day event: you’re apt to pick up some fascinating knowledge from our guest bartenders.

Example: Brother Cleve was doing some research on the cocktail he’ll be mixing, the Bijou (gin, sweet vermouth, green Chartreuse, orange bitters). I found only a vague citation that the drink was named for the Broadway theater the Bijou, which opened in 1917. Turns out, says Cleve, that the cocktail predates the theater by 35 years. It seems to have first appeared in Harry Johnson’s Bartender’s Manual from 1882.

Then he tells me this: after locating the Johnson book on eBay and opting not to pay the “thousands of dollars” asking price, he stumbled upon a free, digitized copy online. OMG!

The Johnson book (1934 edition) and three other out-of-print bar and cocktail guides are available as PDFs on the Exposition Universelle des Vins et Spiritueux web site. The EUVS is a wine and spirits museum in southern France built by Paul Ricard, who founded the spirits conglomerate Pernod Ricard in 1932. Its huge collection of artifacts is currently undergoing a two-year restoration, and part of the project involves putting some of the rare books in the collection online. In addition to the books (more of which are on the way!), there are drink lists and menus from the late 1800s to the 1930s. Right now the books available are:

Harry Johnson’s Bartender’s Manual (1934)

The Cocktail Key, by Herbert Jenkins Ltd. (1920s)

American Bar: Recettes des Boissons Anglaises et Americaines (1904)

Collections and Creations, by Henry Lyman (1934)

One tiny caveat: you can download these books to your computer, but that’s about it. They are password-protected. You can’t print them out. You can’t copy images or pages from them or doctor them in any way. Believe me, I tried. Still, this is about as exciting as it gets for the cocktailian. See you Tuesday!

Mr. Boston’s Official Bartender’s and Party Guide is the only thing on my iPod right now. Yeah, in order to install the Mac version of the Guide, I had to re-format my iPod, which, being a hand-me-down from Scott, was originally formatted for Windows. As anyone who has struggled with iTunes’ sociopathic quirks knows, that meant I had to erase everything on the damn thing — 35 gigabytes of music, roughly.

But now I have 1,200 cocktail recipes on hand wherever I go! Who needs the entire Beatles catalog when you have the Mr. Boston drinks database? (OK, I’m not sweating too much. I’ll have both as soon as I re-load my iTunes library back onto the pod.)

Even after all that, I highly recommend this thing. It’s really cool. You scroll through cocktails in alphabetical order by base spirit, and there are short histories of liquors, tips on bartending and party planning, etc. The screens are ultra-clean-looking and easy to read. You may be wondering: is this some jive-ass, out-of-print version of the Mr. Boston Guide? No. It’s based on the latest, “platinum” edition released a few years ago and edited by drinks writer and Boston Magazine contributor Anthony Giglio.

I showed it to a bartender friend of mine last night — someone who has an impressive library of rare, old cocktail books — and this individual exclaimed, “I want that!” If you want it, too, you’re in luck, because the Guide’s producer, Raybook, is having a sale — two sales, actually. Until the end of May, you can use the code SPRING08 to get a 20% discount off the download, which is currently already on sale for $15.99 (down from $19.99). So, if you’re not in iTunes limbo and you have 246 megabytes to spare on your iPod, you can’t really lose here.

If you attended LUPEC Boston’s Ladies Night at Toro on Sunday, it’s entirely possible that the sea of bodies filling the room prevented you from noticing that the Ladies United for the Preservation of Endangered Cocktails were selling a book. That’s OK, because for $15 you can still get a copy of the Little Black Book of Cocktails: Namesake & Favorite Recipes by LUPEC Boston.

It’s a great-looking little volume, and it’s for a good cause. Cambridge photographer Matt Demers took photos of all the Ladies as part of what he calls his “pearls project” — portraits of a variety of women he knows, inspired by the iconic Eugene Richie portrait (below) of 1920s film actress Louise Brooks. Damned if that Matt doesn’t have a way of making everyday gals look like glamour-pusses. We (yes, I am a founding member of LUPEC Boston) were so pleased that we decided to put our photos together in a book, along with cocktail recipes, and give the proceeds from the books’ sales to an organization that seriously helps women feel better about their appearance. That organization is the Friends Boutique at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, which provides wigs, prosthetics, scarves and other items to people dealing with the side effects of cancer treatment.

Each portrait in the book is accompanied by recipes for the subject’s namesake cocktail (mine’s the Barbara West) and two favorites (I chose the Jaguar and the Maharaja’s Revenge, by two of Boston’s best bartenders). The book contains roughly 40 recipes, all classics or inspired by classics.

Instructions for ordering the Little Black Book by mail are on the LUPEC Boston blog. And starting this weekend, you can purchase a copy at Magpie (617-623-3330) in Davis Square, Somerville, or Buckaroo’s Mercantile (617-492-4792) in Central Square, Cambridge. But give these places a call first to make sure they’re not sold out.

Drinkboston contributor Scott Howe was trying to explain Tales of the Cocktail to his fellow office workers, most of whom have never sampled a Sazerac, never mind traveled to the Deep South in midsummer to discuss the history of the Martini. The notion of a “cocktail conference” wasn’t quite registering with them. As they gave him quizzical looks, he hit upon an analogy. “It’s like MacWorld for drunks.” They nodded in understanding.

Tales isn’t just a conference. It’s a giant, week-long, educational cocktail party in the birthplace of the cocktail, New Orleans. And it’s a pilgrimage that every Craft Cocktail Convert in the nation makes at least once to anoint him/herself with Peychaud’s bitters. Where else can people attend classes where the instructors serve drinks and don’t assign homework?

Tickets for Tales of the Cocktail, which takes place July 16-20 at the Hotel Monteleone in the French Quarter, go on sale today. If you’re thinking of going and want to stay at the hotel, book your room ASAP — attendees get a special rate of $99/night. All the info you need about seminars, events, dinners, hotel reservations, sponsors, etc. is on the Tales website.

Oh, and for the first time this year, there’ll be a group blog, Blogging Tales of the Cocktail: 2008, where drinks bloggers from around the country (me included) review seminars and discuss their experiences, among other topics. In case you missed my impressions from last year’s TOTC, click here.

If you’re a fan of Esquire magazine drinks writer David Wondrich, and you bought his recently published book, Imbibe!, perhaps you’d like to get the book signed by the author himself. On Monday, March 10, Wondrich will be in Boston signing copies of his biography of Jerry Thomas, the father of American bartending. The signing happens from 12:30-2:00 at Stir, chef Barbara Lynch’s demonstration kitchen and cookbook library. Wondrich will join John Gertsen, who works with Lynch at the famed No. 9 Park, later in the evening to teach Stir’s monthly cocktail class. This installment of the class, Winter Warmer Cocktails (aka Who Needs Ice?), is sold out, but there are plenty more in the works — just click on “Calendar” at the Stir website.

No, it’s not a tool for measuring how much Budweiser you drink, it’s a way to find out what kind of wines your taste buds prefer. Check out the Taste Budometer. “The Taste Budometer will ask you simple questions about salt, coffee and mixed drinks that are proven in many studies to align with taste sensitivities,” says the web site. Once you complete the survey, you’ll be assigned a classification based on your taste preferences.

According to the Budometer, I’m what’s known as a Tolerant Taster. “We demand intensity, plenty of oak and power. BIG is better! High alcohol wines often taste rich and delicious.” My supposed favorite white wines? “Reserve-style Chardonnays from around the world. Rhone-style whites. Frankly I’d just rather have red wine.” And my favorite reds? “Cabernet Sauvignon and blends. Rhone and Rhone-style blends. Old-vine Zinfandels. Brunellos, Super Tuscan, Barolo, and Amarone from Italy. Intensely flavored reds from France, Spain and South Africa.”

Based on my relatively limited experience with wine — my income allows me only a passing familiarity with a lot of the fancy stuff named above — those results are pretty accurate. But they’re limited. I like a much wider variety of whites, for example, as well as some lighter reds. Granted, the Budometer is still in its beta stage. As the web site explains, it currently takes into account only the “sensory discrimination” aspect of your wine preference, not its “aspiration value.” Huh?

“The founders of the Taste BUDOMETER postulate that people’s preferences in food, music, wine and all things ’sensory’ can be best understood in two primary dimensions: Sensory Discrimination and Aspiration Value. While people are distributed all across these two dimensions, the deep genetic and cultural influences at work mean, in reality, that people are highly clustered into groups within the Flavor-Aspiration Matrix.”

Apparently, the prime-time version of the Budometer will feature a way to measure that “aspiration value,” the better to find out where you fall in the Flavor-Aspiration Matrix. Finally, a personality test for winos.

Thanks to Stan Hieronymus, author of Brew Like a Monk, for the Budometer tip. It happened to be part of a post on his Appellation Beer blog that mentioned my latest Ms. Mug column for Ale Street News, The Pink Elephant in the Room.

I love visiting bars. I hate visiting bar websites. One of the little-known drawbacks of being a drinks writer is the amount of time you spend searching for the Skip Intro button on restaurant, club and bar homepages. These sites are notorious for forcing on you a little Flash movie of the lounge area, or slide show of signature dishes and cocktails, complete with urbane musical accompaniment, before you are allowed to see the navigation. Then, when you finally get past the intro, you find yourself in a site that uses frames — those little windows, popular in 1998, that you have to scroll through — rather than separate web pages for each section. And don’t even get me started on menus in PDF. Nearly every bar and restaurant on the planet makes you download their menu to your desktop and view it in Acrobat. Is it asking too much to simply put the text on the actual web page? Oh, but wait, you’d need a web expert to hack into those damn frames…

I didn’t set out to pick on anyone in particular here. The examples above were easy to find, and there are dozens more like them. That’s my point. Bad websites are rampant in this industry.

Regarding what I said about frames — it’s not that these sites look out of date. Most of them are quite slick. It’s that they act out of date. Mr. or Ms. General Manager, that flash intro may have seemed awesome the first time your web developer played it for you, but after the ninth time, when all you’re trying to do is take a quick look at the wine list, it’s annoying as hell. And the shoddy navigation on some of these sites can be comical. On the Beehive’s website, for example, click on Special Events (after watching that cool intro, of course). Where does that take you? Not to a list of special events, as you might expect, but to a page that says, “Beehive Special Events. Click here for more information.” Click there, and yet a third page opens in a new window with the info you’re looking for. Incidentally, I will be at the Beehive on the 27th to see Titler, who has a completely hallucinogenic website.

I know, restaurant folks don’t tend to have their fingers on the pulse of web technology. That’s why they’re mixing cocktails, cooking food and serving dinner, not sitting in an office. But what they need to understand is that if a potential customer visits their restaurant’s website, he probably landed there only after Googling, say, “sushi, Boston,” reading a few reviews on Chowhound and local blogs, and asking around the office to see if anyone has been to the place. At that point, all he wants to do is check out the latest menu and find the T stop nearest the destination. My advice? Give him a clean, easy-to-navigate website where he can readily find that info, because he wants to be wowed by your food, drinks and service, not your homepage.

So, Scott and I are at Sav-Mor Liquors on McGrath Highway in Somerville the other day, buying what we usually buy at this seedily lit booze warehouse — a hodgepodge of 2-for-$12 wines, cheap-ass beer in cans and a good microbrew (which, this time of year, tends to be Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale) — when the indifferent sales clerk throws a little booklet into our bag of merchandise.

Now, Sav-Mor is the kind of place that sells economy-sized jugs of Mudslide Mix on the low end and Chivas holiday gift sets on the high end, so when I get home and start to flip through the booklet, called the Guide to Good Hosting 2008, I’m expecting page after page of “martini” recipes like Lingonberry Allspice Cosmos or some such Martha Stewart-y thing.

Instead, I land on page 7 to find the Whiz Bang:

1 1/2 oz Johnnie Walker Red Label
1/2 Noilly Prat dry vermouth
2 dashes grenadine
1 dash Lucid absinthe or, if not available, use Pernod or Herbsaint
2 dashes Gary Regan’s Orange Bitters No. 6

Shake ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled martini glass.

Um… WHA?! A cocktail calling for not only scotch, but dry vermouth, orange bitters and absinthe “or, if not available, use Pernod or Herbsaint”?! Wondering if this throwaway little pamphlet was written in magic ink that somehow gleaned my drinking preferences, I read on. There were recipes for a Vesper, a Gin Sling and a Honeymoon Cocktail (1 1/2 oz Laird’s Apple Jack, 1/4 oz Benedictine, 3/4 ounce Hiram Walker Orange Curacao, 1/2 oz fresh lemon juice), among other respectable drinks. And not only were many of the called-for ingredients of some quality (Luxardo Maraschino liqueur anyone?), the following tips appeared in a section called “Home bartending - become a great mixologist at home”:

“Serve your cocktails icy cold. The colder the better.”
“Use only fresh fruit whenever possible.”
“When the ingredients are clear liquids, STIR for proper mixing.”

Whoa. Any novice who comes across this booklet and actually follows its recipes and advice stands the chance of making a decent cocktail for his holiday gathering — and thus exposing his friends and family to the concept of a well-crafted drink intended for adults. The Guide to Good Hosting 2008 is a Christmas Miracle for the Cocktail Revolution.

Turns out the Guide is put out by the Beverage Media Group, the longtime publisher of liquor-industry journals whose writers include people like Dale “King Cocktail” DeGroff. DeGroff, of course, is one of the leading lights of mixology and a founder of the Museum of the American Cocktail. Even if he wasn’t directly involved in producing the Guide, his influence is all over it. Now, if only the retailers who hand these booklets out — hello, Sav-Mor — would actually sell the ingredients in the recipes … Luxardo Maraschino, Regan’s Orange Bitters … hell, rye whiskey would be a good start. I’ll have to wait ’til next year for that miracle.

Erik Ellestad, who hosts the Spirits & Cocktails forum on eGullet.org, recently sent me a link to the second in a series of profiles he’s doing on San Francisco bartenders. He was partly inspired by drinkboston.com’s bartender profiles, but his profiles differ from the ones found here in their connection to a particular quest. Erik explains:

“Yes, I am making ALL the cocktails from the Savoy Cocktail Book in alphabetical order. I am currently on ‘D’. When I can get it together enough to work with a local bartender, I give them a choice of something like the next dozen cocktails and we taste a couple of them together. So far it has been pretty cool.”

I’ll say. His latest profilee, Josey Packard of the Alembic Bar, mixed up the Diki-Diki and the Devonia, in addition to offering a few other cocktail and biographical tidbits. Check it out. Apparently, Josey has ties to Boston, because she says she created the signature cocktail for the Boston Athenaeum’s 200th anniversary in 2006. I’m intrigued, since I’ve been involved, along with Misty Kalkofen of Green Street, in creating a cocktail for the Athenaeum’s Roaring Twenties party later this month. (Sorry, but the party’s only for Athenaeum members.) Josey, I don’t know you, but if you come across this post, email me!

Erik’s Savoy project is the framework for “Resurrecting Spirits,” a recent San Francisco Chronicle article about lost cocktail ingredients like absinthe, pimento dram, falernum and Batavia Arrack. The article’s author is Camper English of Alcademics. I’d like to send a heartfelt thanks to Camper for mentioning in his article my post, Operation 1919, about reviving lost cocktail ingredients in the Boston area.