The Aging Bartender

Hey, Habanada!

If you’re like me, you like, no love, the flavor of the habanero, but the burn can be a little too much for your Northeasternly suburb rooted sensibilities. Yeah, I look forward to the singe, the blaze, the smolder, the lips afire, but something really happens to my white bread physiognomy when I go too…

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  • Hey, Habanada!

    If you’re like me, you like, no love, the flavor of the habanero, but the burn can be a little too much for your Northeasternly suburb rooted sensibilities. Yeah, I look forward to the singe, the blaze, the smolder, the lips afire, but something really happens to my white bread physiognomy when I go too…

  • Bar Hack: Homemade Passionfruit Hootch

    Ever wonder what to do with your passionfruit scraps? I’m here for you. Follow the procedure laid out in this blog post and you’ll impress your friends, stoke the fires of your haters, yes, yes, make your enemies even more jealous, and while you’re at it, be the envy of all onlookers. Yes, listen to…

  • Bar Hack: Passionfruit Husk Vermouth

    So, you’ve made your passionfruit syrup with your nice, local, organic passionfruit you bought at the Santa Monica Farmer’s Market, or in my case, the Larchmont Farmer’s Market, anywho, you’ve got a big pile of all those weird husks leftover. Now what do you do? Well, it’s a good thing I got up this morning…

  • Nobody’s Fool Revisited

    Someone on the grams, Zuffenhausen Syndikat, (@zuffenhausen.syndikat) this crazy German page with souped up Porsches, requested the entirety of the specs and recipes for this cocktail. It’s a doozy, but here goes…Hopefully they don’t drink and drive…Hmmm…Now I’m thinking about all sorts of funny things for cocktail names like Autobahn, but not the German road…

  • Old Cocktail: Glass Hammer

    It’s a goodie. We’re at the beginning of passionfruit season and everything old is new again. There’s something tremendous about the combination of passionfruit, gin, absinthe, and champagne. Not exactly Led Zeppelin but more like Pink Floyd during the Gilmour/Waters era with a raging brook nearby. We did something similar with plum and other ingredients…

  • New Cocktail: Anybody’s Game

    There was a mistake and Chef had a bunch of blackberries…And when I mean a bunch, it was a fuck ton…Some sort of alteration concerning the beets and berries dish, a switch, and a misorder. At any rate, piles of blackberries. We had to do something with them so they didn’t go to waste. I’ve…

  • What to do with Ten Pounds of Habaneros: Part Two

    At this point, I’m not even sure what the hell I was thnking. I severely overestimated the amount of habaneros I would need for the entire year and ended up with a conservative three to four year supply, maybe more. Expect habanero drinks on the menu permanently for the foreseeable future. That’s not a bad…

  • New Cocktail: To Live and Die in L.A.

    As per the name, think of this one as a counterfeit or poor person’s Naked and Famous, the semi-famous cocktail created by the one and only Joaquín Simó down in New York’s Death & Co. back in the day. It uses almost none of the ingredients but still contains the quaffable weirdness of the original.…

  • What to do with Ten Pounds of Habaneros: Part One

    Strap on your gas masks and hazmat suits, everybody, habaneros are finally in season here in old SoCal. What does this mean? For most, nothing. For the humble Rustic Canyon Bar Program, however, we like to get to work and make two types of our own bitters out of all this nonsense. We do one…

  • Sunflower Amazake

    If you don’t hear the word “sunflower” and start unconsciously singing the Post Malone/Swae Lee song from Spiderverse in your head, there may be something wrong with you. For a long time, humming the song was the only thing that put my son to sleep. It’s in my goddam DNA. It’s a catchy one…and in…

  • Strawperol, Revisited

    Following up to this and this. One fine afternoon in April of 2023, some chump behind a bar added some unwashed, organic strawberries from the Santa Monica Farmer’s Market to a jar with some Aperol, forgot about it, and then opened the jar to a surprising but familiar little pop and fizz. The result: Strawperol.…

  • Notes on Nobody’s Fool

    Punch just did a real nice article on an oldie but a goodie, the Nobody’s Fool from this past April. I’m not sure why, but the photographs make the cocktail look a weird orange and not pinkish-red, but anyway…It was a cool experience. There’s some serious imposter syndrome going on with something like this. For…