drinkboston.com

Stuff@night’s 2008 Dining Awards are online, and I am tickled to report that the magazine has named drinkboston.com Best Local Food or Drinks Blog. S@N calls this space “required reading for discriminating dipsos.” *Sniff.* That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.

Also on the list are the B-Side (Biggest Loss), Drink (Most-Anticipated Opening) and J.J. Foley’s (Neighborhood Bar Most Needed by Its Neighborhood). Congrats to all!

I don’t know — any bar that doesn’t completely skew to the jello-shot set is fine with me. But Boston.com asked me to suggest a few Boston bars for the over-35 crowd, and I obliged. Let the list-bashing begin (not to mention the criticism of my phone-interview grammar — eek).

A shout-out to Wade Tonkin and Karen Garcia of the West Coast culinary blog UltimateFoodie.com. They are coming to Boston for a trade show in a couple of weeks and figured that the best way to get psyched up for the visit was to interview locals who know where to eat and drink. They tasked me with recommending bars near the Seaport Hotel and the World Trade Center, where the trade show’s taking place. A somewhat tough assignment, given that that neighborhood still has a ways to go before it can be described as bustling, but I did my best. I also got to recommend some great beer bars and the stellar Eastern Standard.

God bless Boston Globe correspondent Liza Weisstuch. She attended the events of Tales of the Cocktail with, of all things, a notebook, writing things down. Her short, sharp summaries of each day appear in today’s Globe article “Mixing it up with the best of them.” Not that I’m mentioned anywhere in the article. Nope, not at all.

One of Boston’s best bartenders, Jackson Cannon, is the subject of an admiring profile in today’s Boston Globe. Congrats, Jackson — well deserved. Careful readers will notice that one of writer Meaghan Agnew’s sources was … moi.

This is a good time to point out that Jackson and his hardworking, talented bar staff are currently doing some recipe testing for drinkboston’s Flowing Bowl Punch Party. The party takes place at Eastern Standard on Monday, June 30. Watch this space for more details as the event’s menu takes shape…

Speaking of the drinkboston Flowing Bowl punch party at Eastern Standard … I mention the event in a guest post I did for the Condé Nast Traveler blog. The post starts with a little promo about LUPEC Boston’s Little Black Book of Cocktails and ends with a shout-out to our fair city’s summer cocktails and bar-oriented events. It’s all a long way of saying, “Drinking in Boston rules.”

“The prospect of drinking with Lauren Clark, booze journalist and walking alcohol encyclopedia, is daunting.”

So begins an article in the latest Weekly Dig. It’s part of a twice-per-year feature called 5 Drink Minimum, where the Dig sends its writers out to report as much as they can remember of a long evening at a local bar. This year, some of the writers paired up with various, um, industry professionals at the bar of the latter’s choice. That’s how I wound up drinking at Deep Ellum with News Editor Cara Bayles. We had a bang-up time, and I have to say she did a nice job with the piece considering what her notebook looked like at the end of the night.

For those of you who saw the segment on NECN’s Chet Curtis Report, here’s the recipe for the Marconi Wireless, the cocktail I demo’d on the show:

1 1/2 oz applejack
3/4 oz sweet vermouth
2 dashes orange bitters

Stir all ingredients over ice in a mixing glass. Strain into a cocktail glass.

The reason I chose this cocktail is that, since it uses America’s oldest native distilled beverage — applejack — it is the perfect thing to celebrate one of our oldest holidays, Thanksgiving. Appearing as a founding member of LUPEC Boston and the publisher of drinkboston.com, I mixed this drink on the air. And there were no major spills. Here’s my original post about this interesting drink. Cheers!

The drawback to publishing a blog on bars, bartenders and imbibing is that I’m sometimes too busy going to bars, hanging out with bartenders and imbibing to sit down and write. It has already been quite a week. Let’s see, Saturday was Green Street, where I sampled a savory Hearst made with Carpano Antica, a rich, aged cousin of Punt e Mes. Sunday night was the B-Side Lounge, where I indulged in Edisonians (and learned that hardly anyone orders these non-Combustible mixtures of brandy, lemon juice and Campari. Wha?! Too ‘mid-1990s’ maybe? Time for an Edisonian revival!). Monday night was supposed to be a quick, quiet little outing at the Independent but ended up being a marathon of Chimay Trappist ale after we ran into some friends. Tuesday was Redbones’ Northwest Brewers Dinner. And Wednesday was the Electric Six and Schlitz tallboys at the Middle East. Tonight I sleep, for the biggest night of this crazy week comes tomorrow, when I’ll have a cocktail with Mr. Chet Curtis.

The Chet Curtis Report airs on NECN (New England Cable News) at 8:00 p.m. At some point during the show, I’ll be mixing up a vintage cocktail and chatting with Chet as a representative of the Boston chapter of LUPEC (Ladies United for the Preservation of Endangered Cocktails) — you know, the ones who threw the LUPEC Boston Tea Party to benefit Jane Doe, Inc. Of course, I’ll mention drinkboston.com, too. I fully expect that at 8:00 p.m. on a Friday night, you’ll be where you’re supposed to be: at a bar. That’s why I’m telling you about this now, so you can Tivo the show and watch it Saturday morning (OK, afternoon). I don’t know yet whether the segment will be available online. If it is, I’ll link to it in a later post.

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.