August 10th, 2007
Indulge me while I dredge up more memory fragments from the sotted swirl that was Tales of the Cocktail 2007. The event still lingers in my mind, and I’m not alone. Paul Clarke over at Cocktail Chronicles admitted, “Yes, I’m still going on about it,” in a recent post. Specifically, Paul welcomed readers who landed on his blog from Salon.com, which interviewed him during Tales week for a recent article called It’s always cocktail hour somewhere. Way to go, Paul! Then there’s poor John Myers over at the Thirstin’ Howl, who is poetically “wracked and paralyzed” with longing for New Orleans now that he’s back home in Portland, Maine. Oh, dear. Read his ode to NOLA, then post him a comment with a few cheery words, will ya?
Now for some of the things — ah, the magic moments — that made my short visit to New Orleans stick in my head.
Freelance tuba. I’m at Vaughan’s Lounge at around 2:00 a.m. Kermit Ruffins and the Barbecue Swingers are in mid-set, and the crowd on the floor is pretty densely packed. Suddenly, a shiny tuba is being carried by its owner above the dancers’ heads, and the band is beckoning this guest musician to join in. The guy apparently keeps his instrument on hand whenever he goes out, just in case the evening’s musical act needs someone to sit in and provide low brass notes. In Boston, you might see a sit-in musician go out to his car during a show and grab a guitar. Maybe a saxophone. But a tuba? Only in New Orleans.
Ernie K-Doe’s Mother-in-Law Lounge. This might be the most wonderfully weird bar I’ve ever been in. It is a shrine to the R&B performer who looked a bit like Little Richard, sang the 1961 hit song for which the lounge is named, and prototyped the modern hip hop alias by changing his last name from Kador to K-Doe. K-Doe died in 2001, and his widow, Antoinette, keeps the place going. This involves maintaining an Ernie K-Doe mannequin dressed in some of the outfits the singer actually wore. There are tons of photos and memorabilia of the K-Does and their friends on the walls and, best of all, a giant Ernie K-Doe head that I’m guessing makes appearances in Mardi Gras parades. The Hurricane Katrina flood badly damaged the lounge, but luckily, friends and fans donated money to renovate the place. (Read a recent USA Today article about the bar.)
Taggart hugs a fan. As I mentioned in my previous post about Tales of the Cocktail, Chuck Taggart was among the featured panelists. His writing about cocktails (and food, music and politics) on the Gumbo Pages has attracted many admiring readers over the years, including Jackson Cannon, the mixology guru at Eastern Standard. After a seminar on vermouth, Cannon walked up to Taggart to introduce himself. He did this by handing Taggart an actual cocktail menu from Eastern Standard — a cocktail menu that happens to credit Taggart for a drink called the Hoskins. At first, Taggart merely perused the menu with admiration for a bar that would serve up obscure classics like the Brooklyn, the Alaska and the Vieux Carré. Then his eye fell upon the Hoskins, with his own name next to it, and the look of admiration turned into one of open-mouthed surprise. So tickled was this L.A.-inhabiting New Orleanian that a bartender in Boston, Massachusetts, paid tribute to him, he reached up and gave Cannon a big bear hug. And you thought a cocktail convention couldn’t be touching.
Distance bartending. My companion in drink during the week of Tales was fellow Bostonian Misty Kalkofen. She is much more familiar with New Orleans than I am, and she served as my guide to the coolest bars and restaurants in the city, for which I was immensely grateful. Every afternoon, when we finished drinking cocktails for educational purposes, we climbed aboard the Carousel Bar in the Hotel Monteleone to drink cocktails for fun purposes. Remarkably, Misty remained alert to respond to emergencies at Green Street, the bar she manages back in Cambridge. Once, while sitting at the Carousel Bar, she helped out a co-worker by text-messaging him the recipe for a Fort Washington Flip. The words on her phone screen in the photo read, “applejack, benedictine, maple syrup, egg.” Go to Green Street and try one.
Those who served us. On a more bittersweet note, I have to mention the fact that even in the touristy, unscathed French Quarter, the repercussions of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans’ psyche were apparent. There was an undercurrent of wariness and suspicion in the demeanor of bar and restaurant folks we encountered. (They were totally competent and professional, nonetheless.) Mario at the Napoleon House curtly serving us Pimm’s Cups… Paul at Tujaques sizing up the Sazerac-fueled Boston tourists as potential jerks… Antoinette gruffly asking who we were before letting us enter the Mother-in-Law Lounge for a birthday party… Who can blame them? Maybe these individuals’ circumstances were bad in the aftermath of the storm, maybe they weren’t. But it was clear that a person didn’t have to live in a FEMA trailer to feel beaten down with worry over the fate of his/her city. There was nothing we could do except be polite and leave big tips. It seemed to work a little. By the end of our visits with Mario, Paul and Antoinette, a glimmer of camaraderie appeared in their hardened expressions, and we were glad for that.
Permalink | 4 Comments | Filed under New Orleans |
August 2nd, 2007
Drinkboston.com will join boozy forces with the recently founded Boston chapter of LUPEC (Ladies United for the Preservation of Endangered Cocktails) on Sunday, August 19 to host Chartreuse Cocktails at Green Street in Cambridge. The event starts at 7:00 p.m. (More on LUPEC Boston below.)
Chartreuse, the brilliant green, 110-proof spirit made by Carthusian monks in France and flavored with 130 herbs and other botanicals, is perhaps the noblest of liqueurs. If you’ve had Chartreuse, you know that nothing else tastes quite like it. How do you even begin to describe its bright, herbal complexity? You don’t. You just mix it into a cocktail and admire the distinctive result. At the Green Street event, you’ll taste cocktails made with green Chartreuse, described above, and its sibling, yellow Chartreuse.
On the menu: Two classic Chartreuse cocktails and two new-school Chartreuse cocktails, the latter created exclusively for this event by members of LUPEC Boston. Passed appetizers with fresh, in-season ingredients will accompany the drinks. But wait, there’s more:
- LUPEC Boston members will mix, pour, and discuss Chartreuse cocktails.
- A special guest bartender will, in the guise of a Carthusian monk, be on hand to discuss the history and ingredients of this storied liqueur.
- An additional menu of Chartreuse cocktails will be available for purchase at the bar.
- Ticket price is $35/person including 4 Chartreuse cocktails and passed appetizers.
LUPEC Boston is a classic cocktail society dedicated to “breeding, raising, and releasing nearly extinct drinks into the wild” (a.k.a. Boston-area bars and restaurants.) Founded in February 2007 by Misty Kalkofen of Green Street and 10 fellow cocktail enthusiasts (including moi), LUPEC Boston is the city’s first and only female-oriented cocktail society. The ladies of LUPEC Boston meet once a month to sample delicious cocktails from a bygone era, and learn about the important and nearly forgotten forebroads who sipped them. They also work to improve the lives of Boston-area women, and proceeds from their upcoming events will benefit local women’s charities.
Proceeds from Chartreuse Cocktails at Green Street will benefit LUPEC Boston and the fundraising events they are ramping up for this fall.
Reserve tickets in advance by calling Green Street at 617-876-1655 or emailing LUPEC Boston at lupecboston “at” gmail “dot” com. Or purchase tickets by visiting Green Street at 280 Green St., Cambridge, MA. See ya there!
Permalink | 10 Comments | Filed under Cocktails, Events, Liqueur |
July 27th, 2007
Wow. As we say in New England, that was wicked awesome. The last time I was in New Orleans, I was a dumb college kid hanging out on Bourbon St. drinking Hurricanes with the rest of the tourists. Fast-forward many years to Tales of the Cocktail 2007, where I attended seminars on vermouth and pimento dram and drank Pimm’s Cups at the honorable Napoleon House. The older, wiser me had a much better time.
If drinking cocktails for breakfast, lunch and dinner, then going out at night for more cocktails, is your idea of heaven, this is the event — and the town — for you. At a 10 a.m. session on applejack, we were served a Golden Dawn, a Jack Rose and a Wicked Kiss (a Widow’s Kiss with the addition of rye whiskey). Haigh (Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails), Gary Regan (The Joy of Mixology, Regan’s Orange Bitters), and Chad Solomon and Christy Pope (Cuff & Buttons) presided over the seminar with an unofficial fifth panelist: Lisa Laird of the Laird family. Yes, that Laird family, the ones who have produced Laird’s Applejack since the 1700s and who had George Washington over for dinner before the Battle of Monmouth. The cocktails were made with bonded Applejack, which is distilled with 100-percent apples (no grain neutral spirits) and aged for four years — and which, as far as I know, cannot be had in the Boston area. Too bad.
At Prohibition’s Shadow, which featured Haigh, David Wondrich, Robert Hess (drinkboy.com) and John Hall (distiller of Forty Creek Canadian whiskey), we sipped samples of Forty Creek, a blend of rye, corn and barley whiskies, all distilled separately then blended. That stuff was righteously smooth and had flavors of an old ale, like Thomas Hardy’s. Why Canadian whiskey? Well, where do you think speakeasies got their whiskey during Prohibition? The session itself turned into a bit of a speakeasy when John Myers, bartender, cocktail historian and author of the Thirstin’ Howl, suddenly pulled a bottle of Fernet out of his bag and began dispensing shots. Perfectly appropriate at this sort of convention.
Cocktails and the Blogosphere, another 10 a.m. session (oh, my head!) involved Fancy Free and Police Gazette cocktails by way of illustrating how obscure drinks get re-discovered and popularized through blogs. Full of whiskey and bitters, these are two libations that’ll set the vintage-cocktail enthusiast’s heart aflutter. Paul Clark (Cocktail Chronicles), Chuck Taggart (Gumbo Pages), Darcy O’Neil (The Art of Drink) and Rick Stutz (Kaiser Penguin) presided. The session’s money quote (by Paul, I think): “At the 10th anniversary of Tales of the Cocktail, we’ll be talking about the recently launched 100,000th drink blog.”
The money quote from the session simply titled Vermouth (with Haigh and Martin Doudoroff, the geniuses behind cocktaildb.com) came from Haigh just as we started: “It’s 11:30 in the morning, and you guys are at a session on vermouth? Get a life!” We sipped a Marconi Wireless (speaking of bloggers rediscovering old drinks) and a Rose and learned that it’s really hard to get information from vermouth producers (Martini & Rossi, Noilly Prat, etc.) on the spices they use to turn red or white wine into a classic cocktail ingredient. One of the panelists did manage to get hold of some info, and she recited a list of ingredients used in M&R and NP, but I was way beyond note taking at that point.
The Lost Ingredients session was a trip. I had never even heard of pimento dram or Batavia arrack, much less tasted them, before that day. The session was basically a live interpretation of “Gone but Not Forgotten,” the article Clarke wrote for the current issue of Imbibe. I urge any cocktail enthusiast to pick up that issue, because Clarke’s article includes info (and some recipes) on some of the amazing, re-emerging spirits we sampled at Lost Ingredients, including: pimento dram, a rum-based, allspice-flavored liqueur rarely found outside Jamaica — we sampled Taggart’s homemade version; Batavia arrack, a sugar cane- and fermented rice-based spirit produced in Java (formerly the Dutch colony of Batavia) and the basis of Swedish punsch; and falernum, a low-alcohol syrup flavored with limes, ginger, almonds and clove and a key ingredient in many tiki drinks. Read more about the Lost Ingredients session here.
Finally, Sunday brunch: absinthe with a little sugar. I walked into that session a little late, and when I entered the room … wow, the licorice perfume enveloped me, a sensory experience I’ll never forget. Chemist and absinthe expert Ted Breaux gave a comprehensive presentation about absinthe history, myth and legal status, which is apparently still kind of fuzzy in the U.S. He devised the recipe for the new, legal-in-the-U.S. absinthe Lucid, which contains wormwood but only a barely measurable amount of wormwood’s active and feared ingredient, thujone. Anyhoo… somehow we were drinking real Swiss and French absinthe (the latter produced from a recipe of Breaux’s) in the traditional way, by very slowly letting ice water drip into the glass until the liquid became cloudy. This stuff was strong — over 130 proof! I don’t think absinthe should be banned, but I’m not sure if I recommend it as the first meal of the day.
In my next post, I’ll provide some snapshots of what happened outside of the Tales of the Cocktail sessions.
Permalink | 6 Comments | Filed under Absinthe, Applejack, Cocktails, Events, New Orleans, Vermouth, Whiskey |
July 21st, 2007
Pimm’s Cups at the Napoleon House. Sazeracs at Tujaque’s. Herbsaint & waters at Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop. Miller High Lifes at Vaughan’s. PBRs at the Circle Bar.
Well, that just about covers my past 48 hours in New Orleans. I’m down here for Tales of the Cocktail (my first year, the conference’s fifth), visiting NOLA’s best bars and attending seminars on applejack, vermouth, lost ingredients, cocktail blogs, etc. The locals seem pleased that the event has drawn a pack of tourists to town during the slow season, and I keep running into fellow Bostonians in bars — that never happens back home!
I’ve been tickled to meet many of the people whom I previously knew only in print through their books and blogs: Esteemed author-mixologists Dale DeGroff, Ted Haigh, Paul Harrington and Wayne Curtis; NYC cocktail celebs Audrey Sanders, Chad Solomon and Christy Pope; and influential fellow bloggers Paul Clarke (Cocktail Chronicles), Chuck Taggart (Gumbo Pages), Darcy O’Neil (The Art of Drink) and Rick Stutz (Kaiser Penguin). What fun!
More on Tales to come. In the meantime, we Bostonians down here are plotting to infiltrate a few of next year’s panels.
Permalink | 4 Comments | Filed under Cocktails, New Orleans |
July 19th, 2007
Max Toste, bartender and co-partner of the Allston beer and cocktail bar Deep Ellum, is quite pleased when he tells me that he sells more sweet vermouth than Absolut, and more rye whiskey than Jack Daniels, as if all is going according to plan. Well, it is. When you put four different Manhattans on your cocktail menu, you’re going to go through some rye and vermouth. Here are the historically correct options under Deep Ellum’s “Manhattan 4 Ways”:
All of the below are 2 parts whiskey to 1 part sweet vermouth, except for the New School.
1930s – Rye (my fave)
Sugar cube muddled with 2 dashes Peychaud’s, 1 dash Angostura; twist
Stirred, straight-up
1950s – Bourbon (Deep Ellum uses W.L. Weller)
Angostura, bourbon-and-vermouth-soaked cherry
Stirred, straight-up
1970s – Canadian Club (Max’s grandfather’s recipe)
Angostura, twist
On the rocks
New School – Maker’s Mark
2 1/2 oz Maker’s Mark, 1/2 oz sweet vermouth; Angostura, cherry
Stirred, straight-up
And congrats to Max! He recently welcomed a baby daughter into the world.
Permalink | 6 Comments | Filed under Boston bars, Cocktails, Vermouth, Whiskey |
