Back to some cocktail shit for a minute. But I’m also going to talk about UFOs. First off, I’d like to thank The Flavor Bible for this little number. Pistachio, honey, fennel work tremendously together, the missing ingredient, was of course the spirit. I had an old tin of genever in the booze closet that looked more like a can of kerosene or lighter fluid than something you should drink (I guess you can drink that other stuff if you so choose. Ever seen the movie, The Master with Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman?). I picked it up in the Amsterdam airport and so it sat, for many years, waiting, waiting for inspiration of some sort.

I think the world, including myself, is pretty unfamiliar with genever. I described it to the staff as the precursor to gin. Hmm. Let’s take a moment to do a quick Google…Ok, I’m right…Ish…But there’s more. Think of genever as malted grain, commonly malted barely, corn, and rye in an equal parts combo. It’s distilled (obviously) then instead of being added to oak, they add botanicals, the big one being juniper. Pretty cool. This was done back in the day because they made unpalatable shit “wine” and really wanted to quaff something, anything.

So, it has the maltiness of scotch without the peat added and the botanicals of gin with a different backbone. Über delish. There’s also some rules involved. You can only make genever in Holland, Belgium, and areas of Germany and France. Like any booze, there’s a ton of cool historical facts and stories behind it. Go find it yourself and learn something moderately useful instead of doom scrolling on instagram and seeing a bunch of fake bullshit lives that only serve to make you feel bad about yourself.

And of course, the cocktail name. Well, I haven’t spoken much about Lee here. He’s one of our former bartenders. He absolutely hated having cocktails named after him, so of course I did, over and over and over. Now, it’s become a mark of excellence and there are rules built in. It’s always going to incorporate gin and usually another Asian ingredient such as shochu, yuzu, etc.

The other night, one of our compatriots from across the street came in. He was big on our old seasonal cocktail, The Education of Lee. He sat down, ordered it, and said to us all, “I’m hooked on Lee!” Well, well, sir, you just named our next one. Thank you, A-Dawg.

Hooked on Lee

1.5 oz. Malt Genever

1 oz. Fresh Lemon Juice

.5 oz. Pistachio Orgeat

.5 oz. Shochu

.25 oz. Fennel Honey

2 Dashes Absinthe

Essence of Lee

Shake it up, double strain it into a chilled small coupe glass. No garnish.

Oh, yeah, the UFO portion of this post. Well, A-Dawg and I share a fascination with all these UFO sightings that have been popping up left and right. Let’s remember now, that this shit is becoming legit. The New York Times has run a number of stories about how the Pentagon now fully admits these things are flying all around. A ton of fighter pilots too have come out and said they saw unidentifiable objects up in the air on their training missions. A LOT of them. Everyday. Vessels that could remain motionless and stay in one place despite the 100 knot winds way up there. Ships with no visible propulsion that could turn on a dime any which way and disappear in a flash.

Hey listen, I’m no kook. Yes, I have an active, vivid imagination and read and watch a shitload of sci-fi, but this type of stuff is being talked about more and more. I don’t know what these things are, I’m not saying it’s aliens from another planet. The distances in space are vast and unimaginable (The closest galaxy to ours, Proxima Centauri, is four light years away). If I had to hazard a guess, I would say whatever these objects are, they’ve perhaps lived here, along with us, and our own meager technology is now able to pick them up more than ever. I’m guessing the governments of the world want to keep this information as guarded as possible in order to not freak people the fuck out. Anyway…It’s obvious we are not alone…