I went over this one just the other day but finalized it last night. Speaking of last night, the winemaker Matt Morris came in after along hiatus. Love this guy. I actually had some weird imaginative thoughts about him after he left. No, not the ones you think. I started fantasizing he was this world’s…

What is the building block to a julep? Well, the traditional beverage, made popular by the Kentucky Derby, is a just an old fashioned sans bitters with some muddled mint poured over shaved ice in a tin cup. Pretty yummy. Here at Rustic we have almost none of the hardware for it. We do, however,…

I have all of five minutes of this hectic day to post this. Let’s see how I do. The sous at Birdie G’s posted a picture of a green gage plums with chamoy. I mentioned I would steal it and so I did. Not sure if this one is going to make it to the…

Sunny Delicious, Orangina, Orange Creamsicle, Orange Julius…It goes on and on. So much damn orange. So interesting. It’s been firmly ingrained within our subconscious. Everything orange is the best, except for cocktails. In cocktails, orange juice is the absolute worst. Flabby is the word that comes to mind. It’s neither acidic or really that sweet,…

Stirred cocktails are both easy and hard. Whut? Maybe I should rephrase. Seasonal stirred cocktails are difficult. You can go with bitters or some sort of seasonal type of vermouth, maybe an infusion, but the infusion has to be crystal clear and we have no centrifuge. I’m of the school that a stirred cocktail, especially…

Well, first things first. Yes, it’s a two fold literary reference. It began in the bible and ended with Cormac McCarthy. His second book by the same name was intended to be the opposite of Faulkner’s Light in August but the novel, Outer Dark also stemmed from The Book of Matthew in the New Testament.…

Yet another so-so black Manhattan variation. It tasted exactly like something I made with two normally fantastic ingredients that I didn’t want to waste once they were together. Blackbeard’s Quaffer 2 oz. Aged Rum 1 oz. Averna 6 Dashes Ango Twist of a lemon slice. This isn’t that great. The lemon jangles against the rum.…

Triple the mango, triple the milk…Lot’s of rum. This is what happens when tiki meets India. No one said you couldn’t mash two cultures together to create a great Frankenstein’s monster of a drink. It’s alive. In terms of execution during service, this one could have less ingredients. When I wrote the recipe out, Angel…

I’m going to figure out how to put this on the menu. No silly, not the image you see above (although that would be amazing) but rather a form of what I put down my gullet last night as an experiment to quell my aching throat. First off, yes, it worked. Second, it regrettably wasn’t…

We do a batch of Rock and Rye every year at Rustic during citrus season. The whole fun is forgetting about it and then, months later, remembering it’s there. The last couple of years, instead of serving it by itself on a BFR, we’ve added it to a punch (2022) or as a component of…