Yeah, sometimes you’ve got to muddle. I dislike it. It’s a pain in the neck, it’s messy, but there’s nothing else like violent, controlled squishing if you want to put fresh fruit into a cocktail. The hardest thing about any stone fruit is that it’s best fresh and ripe. There’s nothing like a perfect peach in the summer. Pies, ice creams, drinks, can all have that element of let’s say, peach flavor, but nothing tops the real McCoy. “But, but, you could say that about any fruit.” Not really. I think passionfruit is better in a drink than raw, same goes with almost any citrus, perhaps because they’re so mainstream and we’ve been eating them our whole lives. Guava aren’t so great without some sugar and rum and they’re a pain in the ass with all the little toothbreaking seeds. Raspberries are better thrown into a tin and smashed apart with gin and sherry. I could go on. I’ve got fruit on the brain.

Now that I’ve mentioned raspberries…Good raspberries, the tart suckers, are one of the many little bartender cheat codes. They add acidity, color, and not so much sugar. Do yourself a favor and make a Clover Club sometime with muddled raspberries instead of raspberry syrup, you’ll see.

Here’s another little tip for you: Absinthe and plum. You see, anise is a bit like orange, it kind of goes with everything, but you have to trick people into thinking they like it. There’s a lot of people out there who were scarred by black jelly beans as children, so you’ve got to be careful. Also, people hear the dreaded word “absinthe” and think it’s going to make them lose their shit if they drink it. Yes, it’s something called “thujone” a chemical in the wormwood. No, you’re not going to freak out. Yes, it’s a neurotoxin. No, it won’t harm you unless you go on a serious absinthe bender. What the commoner might not know is that absinthe is almost always very high proof (130 ish range), so just two ounces is almost double that of any normal measured drink. People back in the day drank it with sugar and water with a special little device called uh, an absinthe dripper.

There you go. You put some absinthe in the thingie up there, set yourself up with some fancy glasses and sugar cubes and then drip, drip, drip the light fandango. Yeah, some part of me could probably justify buying an antique one of these babies on eBay and then be annoyed with myself later as it sits in the corner gathering dust. At any rate, it’s some real hippie shit. Proper absinthe will turn milky and green (hence the nickname green fairy) with the addition of water, sort of like how good gin will turn bluish.

One of our newer regulars came in the other night and this new one, an odd combination of the influences of Angel and the Ranfer, just popped out of me. He’s a vodka drinker but I may have turned him over to more delicious spirits such as gin and absinthe. That’s my primary motive, get them out of their comfort zone, get them to trust me and eventually drive them down a dark road with a trunk full of rum. I called this new one the Butterfly Effect at first but he called it Iron Butterfly which I thought was apropos.

Iron Butterfly

1 oz. Gin

.5 oz. Salted Plum Honey

.5 oz. Lemon Sherbet

.5 oz. Fresh Lemon Juice

.5 oz. Absinthe

One plum/pluot quarter, muddled

3 large raspberries, muddled

Muddle, double strain, top with 3 oz. champagne.

Who or what the hell is Iron Butterfly? I got this question a lot last night. They’re a band from the sixties. A one hit wonder who produced the psychedelic hymn “In-a-gadda-da-vida” back in 1968. Yeah, the sixties were a long time ago now. Five decades. I wonder, do kids still listen to Jimi Hendrix and The Doors? Creedence? Cream? Pink Floyd? Psychedelics have become more researched now than ever before but I wonder if that style of music, originally intended to be accompanied by magic mushrooms and LSD, is a hit among the low energy, ADHD, entitled, narcissistic, closed off from reality, smart phone and Instagram/Tik Tok, adderall generation?