The Aging Bartender

Time Travel

This one’s a little piece of drinking history for you young kids out there. Back in the day (early 2000s) there was a little tv show called Insomniac. It ran four seasons. The premise? Comedian Dave Attell would travel from city to city for his comedy shows, perform, and then go enjoy the night life

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  • Time Travel

    This one’s a little piece of drinking history for you young kids out there. Back in the day (early 2000s) there was a little tv show called Insomniac. It ran four seasons. The premise? Comedian Dave Attell would travel from city to city for his comedy shows, perform, and then go enjoy the night life…

  • Orange

    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,…

  • New Cocktail Potential: Brine Phu?

    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…

  • Accidental Fermentation of the Week: Shio Koji Corn Pudding

    Corn pudding is simple enough. Juice some corn kernels, put the juice on low heat for about twenty minutes and stir as much as you can remember. The result is a thick…Uh, corn pudding. The heat activates the starches or something like that, I don’t actually know how or why it works, just that it…

  • New Cocktail: Outer Dark

    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.…

  • My Office Versus Your Office

    This is my office. Small. Confined. Dim. Dusky. Orderly. No chairs. Grubby rubber mats on the floor, grime in the corners, otherwise shiny and alluring despite the ailing illumination. Stainless steel surfaces with sharp corners and odd smells from old, poorly operating drains. A messy enterprise, this transference of alcohol, syrups, sodas, and citruses. That…

  • Metaphor Corner: Cocktails and Songs

    If you don’t know this already, a cocktail should be put down the old gullet inside five minutes, preferably sooner than that. If it sits too long it’s just no good and the best ones are finished quickly without you really knowing it. The really good ones you can listen to over and over, they…

  • “Hello Mr. Aging Bartender…”

    “I am in need of some assistance. I’m assisting in putting together a new bar menu for the place I work at and I pitched the idea of making an allspice dram to which they put full responsibility of that task on myself. I know that there is the long drawn out way of making…

  • Metaphor Corner: Chef as Jedi, etc.

    All the great fighters make a return and most of them go for one final run before they call it all in. The old adage goes like this: Power is the last thing to go. Everything else can fall to the wayside, but power is the great equalizer. There have been many greats who have…

  • At Home Bartending Hijinks: Blackbeard’s Quaffer

    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.…

  • Lawn Sleeves?

    In the pantheon of old classic cocktails, one of the oddest, most labor intensive, and least popular today, has to be the bishop, and following that, the big, ultra bizarre riff called Lawn Sleeves, apparently named after the sleeves of a bishop. Yeah, can’t get any weirder or old school than that. In form, the…

  • New Cocktail: Iron Butterfly

    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…