The Aging Bartender

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…

Read more

Recent posts
Recent photos

  • 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…

  • 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…