From the category archives:

In the library

All the booze that’s fit to print

July 30, 2008

Nice: GREG BOEHM was galled when prices of out-of-print cocktail books skyrocketed along with the popularity of cocktails, a familiar gripe of any drink enthusiast who has been ensnared by the anachronistic charm of old bar books. Read it all, at the NY Times.

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MxMo in the Crescent City

July 28, 2008

For this month’s Mixology Monday, which has a New Orleans theme, I’m going with a couple of drinks, both inspired by panels that I attended at Tales of the Cocktail. The first drink is the Sloppy Joe’s Mojito, inspired obliquely by the To Have and Have Another panel, on the drinking life of Ernest Hemingway. [...]

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MxMo: Rum

May 12, 2008

One recent afternoon, Mrs. Bitters and I were in our new favorite wine and spirits shop, Eno Fine Wine and Spirits on Westminster Street. While Jen shopped for that evening’s vino, I studied the spirits shelves. One thing that caught my eye was Thomas Tew Rum, distilled very near by, in Newport, RI. The distillers [...]

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MxMo: Limit One

March 16, 2008

For this month’s Mixology Monday, I decided to highlight a cocktail called the Diamondback, which I first saw in the September/October 2007 issue of Imbibe magazine. Our taskmaster, Rick, demands we tax our livers with drinks that “contain at least 3oz of 80-proof spirit or have less than 1/2oz of non-spiritness.” No Rick! Don’t throw [...]

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Hello, nurse!

January 23, 2008

Saucier’s book is known not just for its recipes but also for its risqué illustrations of young women. Well, I say risqué, but they’re only so by 1950s standards. Today, they’re rather tame. Personally, I think they’re charming and fun. I know, I know. Portraying women in such a cartoonish way has its pitfalls, as [...]

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Bottom’s Up!

January 22, 2008

Well, I apparently paid way too much for it, having embroiled myself in a bidding war on eBay and being too stubborn to back out, but I finally have a copy of Ted Saucier’s saucy 1951 cocktail book, Bottom’s Up! For those of you who don’t know the book, it’s a hefty thing, at a [...]

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Wow

November 8, 2007

Following David Wondrich’s instructions in Imbibe!, I just made Sangarees. Port, a little sugar, some ice. Shake it up, pour it out and grate nutmeg on top. Tasty.

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Moonshine!

November 4, 2007

Forty-some years ago, my father was an auditor for the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, working from HUD’s offices in Lexington and Covington, Kentucky. His duties sometimes took him into the mountains of Eastern Kentucky, and in those days (we’re talking around 1965 or so), he met some resistance from local townsmen who [...]

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Lost and found

September 9, 2007

As most of you already know, two classic lost ingredients have started peppering liquor stores again–absinthe and crème de violette. I found the Lucid absinthe about a month ago, but it was only last week that I finally tracked down this beauty: The first damn thing I did with it was to mix a proper [...]

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