The Aging Bartender

Category: Cocktails!

  • New Cocktail: Hooked on Lee

    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…

  • New Cocktail: Sherry Garcia

    Sometimes I experience delusions of grandeur. The psychologists call this “positive fantasy.” I like to also call it “Destined for Greatness” where I think about something to such a degree that it seems real before any of the actual work is complete. This used to happen to me in the early days when I first…

  • Eating and Drinking with the Seasons

    Just a couple of random chumps at the bar last night…Or so I thought…I was speaking with a couple of regulars I hadn’t seen in almost a year, just flapping my gums as usual about how most restaurants and their bars don’t follow along with the seasons, which to me is a little puzzling considering…

  • New Cocktail: Tooger’s Revenge

    File this one under worst cocktail names ever. My grandmother had this mangy old cat named Tooger. Stark white and always sleeping. When she died, my eccentric uncle David adopted her and brought her up to his place in the island community of South Hero, Vermont. Anyway, the damn cat lived forever. It was already…

  • Notes on the Mezgroni

    “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” This quote has zero relevance to this post, I just wanted to say it. Mez is in, rum is out. With Don Ciccio e Figli’s Luna Aperitivo being discontinued (undistributed to the West Coast? No idea.) we’re going another route…

  • Notes on the Sidecar

    You can’t talk about a sidecar without first talking about a brandy crusta. I’ve never actually had one. I’ve heard of it, but never knew the specs until now. Again, it’s a cocktail with an impossible to find static recipe on the interwebs. Like the La Louisiane, each site I visited has something different and…

  • New Cocktail: Splitsville

    I’ve officially named this part of the season, “The Inbetween.” Slow, shitty weather, no stone fruit yet…Basically just super depressing. Yay! But, but! There is always a silver lining if you dig through the dismal thoughts, crawl through the sewer pipe to salvation. Slowness means more time for experimentation. Oh yes, there’s all kinds of…

  • Obscure Cocktail Alert: La Louisiane

    New Orleans is well known for what I call the stellar stirred, the Dynamic Duo. Two of my favorite cocktails of all time. The Vieux Carre, a simple, split base mash up of a Manhattan but with the addition of Benedictine, a French herbal liquor, and the Sazerac, (the official cocktail of The Big Easy)…

  • New Cocktail: Nobody’s Fool

    A lot went into this cocktail, ingredients, not thought, and like all the good ones…It just sort of happened. The ingredients were there but it was entirely unplanned. A love child born of all kinds of weird shit…Scraps…Different cocktails…Infusions…Luck…Timing…And one of our all time favorites, the Be somebody. Yeah, when you come up with a…

  • New Cocktail: Double Impact

    This one spawned from a past favorite, the Triple Lindy, in addition to the seasons just not wanting to change fast enough due to all the crazy weather here in Southern California. Hey, there’s almost always going to be nice tomatoes like these little sun gold suckers. I thought about what made the Triple Lindy…

  • Death of a Cocktail

    Adios, El Negroni. You were good. Yes, there comes a time when the old death shroud must be pulled over the big favorites. This was a forced demise, which for better or worse, pushes me to have to come up with new shit. I’ve thought about this for a little while now. We’ve got the…

  • New Cocktail: Schnucki Putzi

    Schnuckiputzi, our first $100 cocktail is going to the top of the seasonal menu today. I’ll admit, it took more technical know how than I had at my disposal. We sought out only the world’s finest for this one. Three consultants: Nico DeSoto, Jillian Vose, and the magnificent Phil Ward. They owed us a favor…