The Aging Bartender

What the Hell is a Deshler?

I received a text late last night from a good friend asking me “You know how to make a Deshler?” Huh? My response: “Is that a classic car?” “No.” “A cocktail?” “Yes.” I searched for it this morning. Here’s the modern specs from liquor.com: Deshler 2 oz. Rye 1 oz. Dubonnet .25 oz. Cointreau 2

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  • What the Hell is a Deshler?

    I received a text late last night from a good friend asking me “You know how to make a Deshler?” Huh? My response: “Is that a classic car?” “No.” “A cocktail?” “Yes.” I searched for it this morning. Here’s the modern specs from liquor.com: Deshler 2 oz. Rye 1 oz. Dubonnet .25 oz. Cointreau 2…

  • Menu Blues

    No, I’m not going to lock myself in a room and do a bunch of heroin until I come out with the greatest cocktail menu of all time. No, I’m not relating cocktail menu creation to one of the greatest jazz albums, if not the greatest jazz album of all time. Yes, I’m a little…

  • A Walk in Hollyood

    I, like many others, always thought Hollywood was a shithole. An endless mass of trash and homeless, a place I never thought I would live, even on the outskirts. I thought this of L.A. before I moved here. That it was all the same, a gigantic sprawl of crap…And it is in some ways…But not…

  • No Lime, No Lemon, No Chance, Dude

    Caught in the wave of scrolling and damaging my own brain yesterday, I came across some jackass who mentioned something about how bars that use too much lemon and lime in their drinks on their menus aren’t thinking hard enough and he went on to say we should be using different products such as verjus,…

  • One of These Days

    That’s the chorus from an old Neil Young tune from the 1992 album Harvest Moon. A song oozing with soul. The lyrics of which deal with a man looking back on his life, thinking of his old buddies from over the years, and the places he’s lived, and how it’s one of those things in…

  • My Secret Egg Nog Ingredient

    I’ll spare you any bloviating this morning. Time. That’s the secret. Although, I was going to be an asshole and say patience, but pulled out at the last second. There’s a lot of good nog recipes out there and let’s face it, you combine sugar, egg yolks, cream, milk, and tons of booze in the…

  • More on the Persimmon

    My first encounter with a persimmon was a recipe in the The Zuni Cafe Cookbook by Judy Rodgers. “Air-Dried Beef & Fuyu Persimmons with Extra-Virgin Olive Oil & Balsamic Vinegar.” The book was given to me after a trip to San Fransisco with my ex-girlfriend, the first time I had ever been, and where the…

  • Bar Hack: Salted Persimmon Honey… Notes on Persimmon Cocktails Over the Years

    “How much honey?” Angel said. “It’s 1:1,” I said. “How much salt?” Angel said. “Just a pinch,” I said. That’s about it. This works with several different fruits, not just persimmon. Plums come to mind which is where the idea originated. I haven’t tried it with anything else that I can remember off the top…

  • The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills

    You blink one day and look back and wonder what the hell and where it all went. I went north yesterday for a coffee and as I approached Hollywood I saw a dead rat on the sidewalk and a person on a bench bundled from head to toe in sheets like a corpse about to…

  • Quince, the Final Frontier

    I had an old 13″ black and white TV in my bedroom as a kid. Four channels. ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS. There were two dials on the set, one for the channel and one for the…I have no idea…But every so often I could adjust both, toggle the antennae a bit and get a…

  • Vintage Cocktail of the Day: Porto Flip

    From the confines of the Gentlemen’s Companion II circa 1939 by Charles Baker comes this puppy. Back in the day these guys were putting egg in pretty much everything. Heating up some beer, adding an egg and maybe a couple three four ounces of scotch. During this era, or at least in this book, we…

  • A Standing Army of Bartenders

    A quick Google search this morning informed me there are somewhere between 400,000 to 500,000 bartenders currently at work in America. I’m not sure how this is even possible, but I’m impressed. That’s around the same amount of soldiers currently employed in all the branches of the military in this country (U.S. of A). If…