drinkboston.com

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.

Anyone wondering where our best bartenders got the inspiration to revive classic cocktails must read William Grimes’ article on Jerry “the Professor” Thomas in today’s New York Times, “The Bartender Who Started It All.” Specifically, it’s an article on Esquire magazine drinks correspondent David Wondrich’s new biography of Thomas, Imbibe. Grimes, himself a noted food and drink scribe, writes:

“As Mr. Wondrich justly observes, Thomas, by departing from the code of the bartending fraternity and sharing his secrets, earned his place as ‘the father of mixology, of the rational study of the mixed drink.’”

Thomas lived from around 1830 to 1885 and wrote the first bartending book, variously titled the Bar-Tender’s Guide, How to Mix Drinks or The Bon-Vivant’s Companion. Don’t own a copy? You’re in luck, because bartender-blogger Darcy O’Neil of The Art of the Drink has published the Bar-Tender’s Guide (whose copyright has expired) online.

Wayne Curtis could be the best drinks/history/travel writer working today. You probably already know this if you have read And a bottle of rum: A history of the New World in ten cocktails. I picked up an autographed copy at Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans this summer after prancing like a schoolgirl up to Curtis’ table at an authors’ reception and introducing myself as a fan.

He gets that drinking is both a sublime and shiftless pursuit, and he chronicles the history of rum with an appropriate mixture of fondness and cheek. He traces the spirit’s ups and downs, from its origins in the pirate-riddled trade routes between the Caribbean and the Colonies to Medford, Massachusetts’ once-bustling rum distilleries to the long-lived tiki drink craze to today’s cocktail-of-the-moment, the Mojito.

The narrative is engaging and solidly researched. It contains a lot of nuggets surprising even to those who know a thing or two about spirits — like that the daiquiri caught on in Cuba in the early twentieth century because of an ingredient that had only just become widely available: ice. Also, even though I knew the Andrews Sisters song “Rum and Coca Cola,” I had no idea how big that drink was during and after WWII. It marked the early phase of a trend toward bland and sweet drinks that continues to this day with our myriad vodka-based alco-pops. Luckily, the back of the book has several good rum cocktail recipes that serve as an antidote to that silliness.

Incidentally, one of the people Curtis acknowledges in the back of the book is Jeff “Beachbum” Berry, historian and resurrector of tiki drinks and the culture that surrounded them. He talks about his latest book, Sippin’ Safari, and the legitimacy of the original versions of drinks like the Zombie and the Mai Tai, in this recent Salon article. Give it a read while you’re waiting for And a bottle of rum to arrive in the mail.

I present to you something that’ll make imbibing in Beantown a little easier: a Google map of best Boston bars. Happy wandering.

Anyone out there good at map mashups? I’d love to put best Boston bars and the MBTA on the same map. If you can make that happen, I will personally buy you a drink at the Boston-area bar of your choice.

Michael Jackson, the British drinks writer known as the Beer Hunter, died yesterday in London. He was 65. If you have visited a beer bar or brewpub and enjoyed the flavorful, varied selection of beverages found therein, you can thank Jackson for that. He basically invented the field of beer writing in the 1970s and ’80s and thereby shepherded and hugely influenced the worldwide beer renaissance that has occurred since then.

He inspired most if not all of the beer writers working today, including me. I have a few of his books: Great Beers of Belgium, the Bar and Cocktail Companion and an autographed copy of the Beer Companion. He also inspired artisanal brewers in the U.S. who lovingly revived the near-forgotten beer styles these books describe — stuff like porter, bock and IPA. It is in large measure because of him that mass-produced light lagers no longer monopolize the beer market like they did 20, 30 years ago.

Jackson succeeded because he wrote well. In his columns, he could be witty and poignant in the same paragraph, and his descriptions of drinks were concise and expressive, not florid. He wrote like he was talking to you, bringing you along on a pub crawl around the world. I met him briefly only a couple of times, including at a 1999 dinner at Redbones BBQ, where the above photo was taken. Philadelphia-based beer writer Lew Bryson knew him fairly well and wrote a heartfelt remembrance of the man, who had fought Parkinson’s disease over the past several years.

In the Beer Companion, Jackson describes what it’s like to drink Kolsch beer in its city of origin, Cologne, Germany. Many of us have had vivid, poetic beer-drinking experiences, but Jackson could actually put those experiences into words:

“In Cologne’s brewpubs during the early evening, small casks are raised from the cellar by dumb-waiter, tapped, and exhausted within minutes. To the visitor, in the jostled space of the standing area (known to the locals as the Schwemme, or ’swimming bath’), it is an impressive sight. The waiters, whose uniform jackets or shirts are traditionally blue, over leather aprons, carry specially designed circular trays that hold the glasses like cartridges in a revolver.”

Here’s a loud clink of the glass to Paul Clarke, the Seattle-based cocktail writer (frequently for Imbibe) who publishes the well known blog Cocktail Chronicles. In a post called Link Love, he talks up several drink blogs, including this one and the LUPEC-Boston blog. I, for one, am excited to be part of such a vibrant nationwide community of cocktailians and barflies. Woohoo!

By Scott N. Howe

In days gone by, people drank booze because drinking pretty much anything else would kill them. This may sound scary but, believe you me, our ancestors made the best of this bad situation. They built villages around beer, formed churches on wine, raised armies with rye. Our founding fathers even wrote the U.S. Constitution in between epic sessions of whiskey, wine, and cider intake.

This all may be hard to comprehend in our modern era of $12 appletinis sipped while sending text messages to clients from a booth at the back of a theme bar. Still, understanding how we got from there to here can teach valuable lessons to today’s tippler. Fortunately, author Barbara Holland has collected these lessons in a small but tasty new tome, The Joy of Drinking.

Holland explains how booze has been part of all the world’s cultures since the world started developing cultures. Everywhere and forever, people have been picking the local fruits, vegetables, nuts, and flowers and concocting soul-soothing, mind-expanding potables. She calls drink “the social glue of the human race,” and claims that “(N)o major civilization ever arose from a land of water drinkers.” As such, she cannot abide prohibitionists or coffee achievers, and she heaps special scorn on modern health nuts with their plastic water bottles and desperate commitment to wellness. Holland also takes a few shots at know-it-all drink snobs. “(I)n the metropolitan haunts of the highly sophisticated,” she snarls, “the cocktail is no longer an instrument of friendship but a competitive fashion statement, or one-upmanship.” Ouch.

Instead, she lavishes high praise on elegantly sloshed icons like Nick and Nora Charles of the Thin Man movies and wistfully wonders what it might have been like to down a few tankards with Bill Shakespeare and his literary pals at the Mermaid Tavern. Holland even devotes an entire chapter to the hangover, reporting that for much of history, the morning after was nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, a bad hangover was once a sign of worldly sophistication and social cachet!

If you’ve ever felt guilty (even a little bit), about your drinking habits, then pick up The Joy of Drinking immediately. In a few short pages, you’ll realize, dear drinker, that you are part of an ancient and noble tradition, one that links you to the great leaders, the great artists, and the just-plain-folks who have made life worth living since the dawn of time. In fact, in a few short pages, your inhibitions will disappear, a warm glow will encase you, and all will be well.

If you’re curious about absinthe, aka the “green fairy,” check out the Virtual Absinthe Museum. You could lose an afternoon there as easily as if you were actually drinking the stuff.

“It’s the fruit of many years’ research and is the largest and most authoritative site on the internet devoted to the history and lore of absinthe,” says David Nathan-Maister, who publishes the site and runs Oxygénée Ltd., a U.K.-based business devoted to all things absinthe, including both new and vintage bottles of the storied herbal spirit. The company takes its name from a poster advertising Cusenier’s Absinthe Oxygénée, “one of the greatest brands of the era” — the “era” being the time before absinthe was banned in 1915. The ban (which has been lifted in Europe but not the U.S.) and lots of other fun facts are covered in the site’s Absinthe FAQ. And you can buy nice, Art Nouveau posters there, too.

Todd Maul, who tends bar at the newly re-vamped Rialto in Cambridge’s Charles Hotel, emailed me recently, asking, “Could you do a posting on bartending books?” Specifically, he was curious about which books other ‘tenders around town found most useful. I decided to add to Todd’s idea and ask whether any of Boston’s libation gods and goddesses recommended a particular bartending school.

An informal, off-the-cuff survey yielded the following: 1) Dale DeGroff, Jerry Thomas (1825-1885), and Charles Baker (1895-19??) were the first-, second- and third-most cited bar-book authors; 2) bartending school is generally not recommended — but it’s not entirely dismissed. Survey respondents were Jackson Cannon of Eastern Standard, Brother Cleve (Boston-based cocktail historian), John Gertsen of No. 9 Park, Sean Holland of The Independent, Todd Maul of Rialto, Ben Sandrof of Noir and Max Toste of Deep Ellum. (Thanks, guys.)

Bartending books/authors
* More than one citation

Stanley Arthur - Famous New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix ‘Em

Charles Baker - Gentlemen’s Companion (aka Jigger, Beaker and Glass: Drinking Around the World) *

Harry Craddock - The Savoy Cocktail Book

Dale DeGroff - The Craft of the Cocktail *

David Embury - The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks *

Ted Haigh - Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails

Paul Harrington - Cocktail: The Drinks Bible For The 21st Century

Stan Jones - Jones Complete Bar Guide

Playboy Magazine - The Playboy Bartender’s Guide

Gary Regan - Joy of Mixology *

Ted Saucier - Bottoms Up *

Eugene Shewmaker - The International Bartender’s Guide

Jerry Thomas - How to Mix Drinks, A Bartender’s Guide *

Jack Townsend and Tom Moore McBride - The Bartender’s Book

Cannon likes Thomas for “the roots, philosophy of the trade and obscure recipe and ingredient info,” David Embury for “recipes and culture,” Gary Regan for “theory of drink relations, technique (watch his recipes though, not always sound)” and Dale Degroff for “recipe, technique and hospitality.” Holland likes The International Bartender’s Guide because, “For me, it’s organized in a way ‘my’ brain understands. I use it on the job for cocktail recipes I’m unsure of.” Maul notes that Bottoms Up has “some cool illustrations, a bit on the erotic side, but well done.” And Toste says he likes Famous New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix ‘Em for its “historical reference and background on cocktails, Craft of the Cocktail for its modern take on classic cocktails and history of barmanship, and the Playboy Bartender’s Guide for its huge volume of recipes.”

Bartending school

Cleve: “Go work for Misty (Kalkofen), John, Jackson, Ben or John Byrd.”

Cannon: “I don’t think bartending school is the way the go. I always recommend getting any job that is open in a bar/restaurant that you admire. Watch and learn from the bartenders and study [Degroff, Embury, Regan, Thomas].”

Gertsen: “I really don’t have much experience with bartending schools. I met recently with teachers from Johnson and Wales, and it seems like they are launching a great mixology program there. And finally a quote from the late Max Allen Jr. (Bartender Emeritus of the Seelbach Hotel): ‘It takes five years to learn how to bartend; the first two to learn what to do; the second two to learn what not to do, and the last year to learn how to do it nicely.’”

Holland: “Bartending schools?… well, never been. There was once a woman at [the Independent] who insisted that an Alabama Slammer was made with Absolut vodka… and she told me that she should know because she went to bartending school. If anything, I would recommend someone OPEN a bartending school — seems a lot of people go who never end up bartending.”

Maul: “Yes, I did go to bartending school. It was in 1992 in Albany, NY. I don’t remember what the name was or what it cost… I’m not sure I would recommend sending anyone to bartending school. I think picking up Sundays or that one ‘no one wants it shift’ as a bartender is the best way to get your foot in the door.”

Sandrof: “I went to the Professional Bartending School of New England. It was a week-long course consisting of five classes. I would not say that I consider it a complete waste of time, but I could teach someone all the info in a day if they wanted to learn. What it was good for, however, was allowing you to become familiar with bottles, speed pours and tools. We also had to memorize the top 30 drinks, and that came in handy. When someone asked me to make them a martini or a margarita, I did not have to stare back blankly. IT DID NOT, however, help to get me a job. I found that most people in the restaurant industry do not consider a bartending course important at all. It doesn’t hold a candle to actually having experience behind a bar. It just seems to be one more credential on a resume.”

Toste: “I don’t recommend it. I recommend going out and getting a job at a bar, watching and learning, going out to bars as a customer and observing other bartenders, reading books and stocking your bar at home. Good barmanship is as much about good service as good technique.”