The Aging Bartender

New Cocktail: Triple Whammy

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

Read more

Recent posts
Recent photos

  • New Cocktail: Triple Whammy

    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…

  • Notes on the Closed Loop Cocktail

    Isn’t she lovely? Look up and you’ll see a “closed loop” method we’ve been working into the program a bunch during this nice wave of stone fruit and corn. It’s a whole system now and I’m ashamed we haven’t been as aware of it in the past. Although we’ve had similar techniques where we employ…

  • Daddy’s Cough Syrup

    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…

  • Rock and Rye

    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…

  • New Cocktail: Unforgiven

    Angel finalized this one and named it thus. He had Clint on the brain, I suppose. A little grim, but why not? Naming cocktails is tough and although this isn’t something the cowboys would have drunk, I think maybe there could have been some old western bartender who moved out from the big city to…

  • New Cocktail: To Wong Foo (Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar)

    Bad name for a drink? Dunno. We’ll call it To Wong Foo for short. I scrolled through my notes list of potential cocktail names. There’s some good ones in there. This was almost named Bro Hug, but then I realized we’re using Wong Farm’s (Riverside, CA) mangoes in this beverage and there was also a…

  • Tiki Jello Shots?

    Trust me, it looked better last night. Sort of like that old joke, “I went home at two with a ten, and woke up at ten with a two.” The abomination pictured above is one of a few tiki jello shots I made during service as an experiment. Yes, I know, it looks like it…

  • New Cocktail: Voodoo Economics

    A mai tai and a horchata see one another on the street and intertwine. This was the thought process behind our newest tiki beverage. Yeah, it’s been awhile since we’ve had a rum cockatoo on the seasonal side. It’s a good, strong one. I got the idea doing all the reading about the Clover Club…

  • Cynar and Stout?

    Some dude came over to the bar from a table last night and said, “Hello, I’m European, my English is not so good. Do you have a stout?” “Yes.” “Do you have Cynar?” “Yes.” Will you pour me two ounces of Cynar into a glass and then put a stout over the top of it?”…

  • Egg White Conclusions: Part Three

    This will hopefully wrap up all of this whiskey sour/egg white nonsense. I don’t know how I started walking down this path. I thought it would be a simple explanation. Hard time catching up? Read parts one and two first, then circle back. This originally was just a rant about how annoying egg white cocktails–ahem,…

  • Enter the Egg White: Part Two

    Continued from yesterday’s post. Also some editorial stuff here. Ugh, I misspelled “cocktail” right in the title. Sometimes you’ve got to pay better attention, old timer. I actually misspell stuff quite a bit as I’m rushing to get these puppies out in the morning. Jo usually points them out to me. But “cockail?” Yeesh. I…

  • The Egg White Cocktail is a Young Person’s Game

    I will attempt to make this post as coherent as possible. It’s early, service was long and full of shaken drinks, and I’m dealing with an insane toddler who wants nothing more than to steal this time from me. There’s always a big playlist on the docket for Sundays and this one is no different,…