Episode 71: Brandy Cobbler

• 3 ounces brandy or cognac

• 1/2 ounce simple syrup

• 1 to 2 ounces club soda, to taste

• Orange slices and seasonal berries, for garnish

Line an old-fashioned glass with orange slices and fill with crushed ice, Then pour in brandy and simple syrup. Stir to combine, and top with soda. Add the fruit & berry garnishes (skewered or piled on top of the ice).
Serve with a straw and enjoy.

Cobblers became popular toward the end of the 1830s, around the same time that the ice trade in the US was expanding, making it easier to create cocktails with loads of ice. Much like a julep, cobblers call for crushed ice and plenty of it.
In fact, no one is exactly certain where the name cobbler comes from, but according to David Wondrich, it may have something to do with the “cobbles” of ice the cocktail is built on.

Originally cobblers were always made with wine or fortified wine. The sherry cobbler was definitely the most popular variety, but in Jerry Thomas’ 1862 bartenders guide he also includes recipes for a Catawba wine cobbler, a claret cobbler, a Hock cobbler (British term for German white wine) and a sauterne cobbler.

But sometimes cobblers were made with stronger spirits. Jerry Thomas also included a whiskey cobbler recipe in his book, and according to David Wondrich, Brandy cobblers were also super popular in the 1850s, especially in New York.

Once you have crushed ice and sliced citrus, building a cobbler is very easy to do. The one thing to keep in mind though is that Jerry Thomas insists that special attention needs to be paid to how it’s presented. 

“The cobbler does not require much skill in compounding, but to make it acceptable to the eye, as well as to the palate, it is necessary to display some taste in ornamenting the glass after the beverage is made.” He even includes an illustration of how a cobbler should look.

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Episode 70: Between the Sheets

• 1 ounce cognac

• 1 ounce light rum

• 1 ounce Cointreau or triple sec

• 1/2 ounce lemon juice

Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker with plenty of ice. Shake until frosty and strain into a chilled coupe glass. Garnish with a lemon or orange twist if desired

Harry MacElhone from Harry’s New York Bar is often given credit for inventing a whole slew of classic cocktails, like the French 75, the White Lady, the Old Pal, the Monkey Gland, The Bloody Mary, and the Sidecar just to name a few. But dig any further than the surface and it’s much more realistic to say his bar just popularized recipes rather than actually creating them.

The modern version of the Between the Sheets is basically just a twist on a classic sidecar. If you eliminate the sugar rim and add some white rum, boom, you have a between the sheets. Many older recipes actually call for gin rather than brandy though. Some cocktail historians believe that the true origin story of this cocktail is that it was invented in the United States sometime during prohibition as a gin-based cocktail, but that when Harry’s Bar heard about the recipe, they switched the gin for cognac to make it smoother and more elegant.

Either way, the cognac and rum based version from Harry’s bar is the one that really took off and became the iconic and classic Between the sheets that people know today.

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Episdoe 64: Greyhound

• 2 oz Vodka

• 4 oz Grapefruit Juice (pink is sweeter and prettier) 

• Lemon or grapefruit twist

Pour the vodka and grapefruit juice into an old-fashioned glass over ice and stir to combine and chill. Garnish with a twist if desired.

We know that the first published recipe for a cocktail made with grapefruit juice similar to the greyhound was in 1930 in Harry Craddock’s Savoy Cocktail Book. This recipe wasn’t called a greyhound though, and it was made with gin, not vodka. It wasn’t until 1945 that Harper’s magazine finally published a recipe for a Greyhound made with vodka.

As it turns out, the Greyhound bus line used to own a chain of restaurants called Greyhound Post House that were located in their bus terminals so people could eat during their travels without having to leave the bus station. When Harper’s published their Greyhound recipe in 1945, they wrote that the recipe was popular in the Post House Restaurants and that’s why they called the cocktail a greyhound. Who knew this delicious classic was named after a bus line?

In the following decades, greyhounds remained popular, thanks largely to vodka marketing dollars. In the 1960s, most Vodka brands had Russian sounding names, and they were worried about public perception during the cold war, so they put a ton of money into marketing and PR to help people forget the Russian ties. A large part of their marketing was finding recipes that were super simple and easy to make at home with just a handful of ingredients, which is part of the reason the Greyhound remains such a classic even to this day.

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Episode 52: Adios, Motherfucker

• 3/4 ounce vodka

• 3/4 ounce white rum

• 3/4 ounce silver tequila

• 3/4 ounce gin

• 3/4 ounce blue curaçao

• 3/4 ounce simple syrup

• 1/4 ounce lime juice, freshly squeezed

• 1/2 ounce lemon juice, freshly squeezed

• Lemon lime soda, to top

• Garnish: lemon wedge

Add the vodka, rum, tequila, gin, triple sec, simple syrup and lime & lemon juices to a Collins glass filled with ice. Top off with a splash of lemon lime soda and stir gently to combine. Garnish with a lemon wedge and serve with a straw.

The Adios Motherfucker is basically just a Long Island with an LA twist. In place of the triple sec, you use blue curacao, and instead of cola, you use sprite or 7up. Other than that, it’s the same drink, but in this case, instead of looking like iced tea in the glass, it looks like a glass of drain cleaner with a lemon twist.

As a variation on another drink, it’s a bit hard to pin down the exact origin story, but it seems like it most likely came about sometime in the 80s, though I’ve read some unverified stories from people who say they were drinking them as early as the 70s. Either way, by the 90s they were certainly very popular, especially in southern California.

The Adios Motherfucker also goes by many other names. Adios, AMF, Adios Mother F-er, Walk Me Down, Blue Motorcycle, & Boston Tea Party.

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Episode 49: the Scorpion Bowl

Serves 4 to 6 people

• 3/4 bottle (19 oz) Puerto Rican Rum

• 1 oz gin

• 1 oz brandy

• 8 oz lemon juice

• 4 oz orange juice

• 4 oz orgeat syrup

• 2 sprigs mint

• 1/4 bottle (13 oz) dry white wine

Combine all ingredients in a a large pitcher or bowl. Mix thoroughly and pour into a wide bowl filled with cracked ice. It’s best to let the ice melt a bit and replenish with more ice just before serving. Garnish with gardenias if possible. Otherwise garnish with fresh mint, edible flowers, and/or citrus wheels. Serve with long straws.

The Scorpion Bowl was invented by Vic Bergeron, one of the two men most famous for popularizing tiki culture, at his restaurant Trader Vic’s in Oakland California. According to Bergeron’s 1946 book “Trader Vic’s Book of Food and Drink”, he was inspired to come up with the Scorpion Bowl after he took a trip to Honolulu in the late 30s and was served a cup of a traditional Hawaiian punch called Scorpion at a Luau. He said it was made with a Hawaiian moonshine called Okolehao, along with handful of other ingredients including orgeat, mint, and a combination of fruit juices. He especially loved the presentation of the drink served in a large communal bowl. Inspired, he returned to his restaurant in Oakland and created his own variation using rum, since he couldn’t get Okolehao in the states.

The only problem with this story is that there was no traditional Hawaiian punch called scorpion and there never was. One historian trying to authenticate Trader Vic’s story dug back through all kinds of bar menus, recipe books, diaries, letters, and travel memoires, and couldn’t find a single mention of it. But just when he was like, oh okay Trader Vic is full of shit, he found a gossip column from 1938 that actually did mention the Scorpion. Not only that, but the column even gave a recipe. However, far from being a traditional Hawaiian drink, it turned out the Scorpion was actually something created by Hawaiian surfers who made their money showing tourists around Honolulu. Much like the famous tiki cocktail it inspired, the Scorpion Vic Bergeron was served in 1938 was a fake made to look Hawaiian specifically with the goal of separating tourists from their money. Whether he was really fooled, or he knew it wasn’t authentic and didn’t care, we’ll never know. What we do know is that he took the idea back to Oakland, tweaked it a bit, and created a tiki classic that’s still served in tiki bars around the globe.

This recipe was published in Oakland in 1946, just as GIs were returning from the South Pacific after WWII, and the whole West Coast was whipped up into a Tiki frenzy fueled by fruity, boozy, tropical cocktails like the Scorpion Bowl. Over the years, Bergeron continued to tweak, simplify, and perfect his recipe. If you order a Scorpion bowl at a bar today, you’ll likely be served a much simpler recipe, published in 1972, with fewer ingredients. This 1946 version originally served 12 people. I scaled it back for to serve 4.

This older version predated the invention of the tiki punch bowls we see in most tiki bars today, and instead would have been served in a large but simple punch bowl with 20” long straws. If you have a modern tiki bowl though, this scaled back version should fit well in it.

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Episode 46: Sea Breeze

• 2 oz vodka

• 3 oz cranberry juice

• 1 1/2 grapefruit juice

• Lime slice for garnish (optional)

Fill a tall glass with ice. Pour Vodka and Cranberry into glass and stir. Top with Grapefruit juice. Garnish with lime and serve with a straw.

Most of us think of the Sea Breeze as a cocktail from the 1980s, and while they certainly were very popular then, they actually first blew up at the end of the 1960s thanks to some high profile marketing.

In the early 60s, vodka’s popularity hit a stumbling block thanks to the cold war and the fact that Americans saw vodka as a Russian liquor. So, the people at Smirnoff threw a bunch of money into rebranding, and by the end of the decade, gin was out, and vodka was taking over as America’s clear liquor of choice.

Part of the reason they were so successful was a push to find vodka based cocktails that were easy to make and easy to drink. Thanks to big vodka’s marketing dollars, a whole category of vodka based “coolers” took off at the end of the 60s. It started with the cape codder, or vodka & cranberry which used to go by the name “Harpoon” when it was made with gin. But there was also the greyhound – vodka and grapefruit juice, and the salty dog, which added a salt rim to a greyhound. Then there was the sea breeze, which combined the cranberry and grapefruit juices, and the bay breeze, which was made with cranberry and pineapple juice.

This on its own probably would have been enough to make these vodka based coolers into American cocktail classics, but as it turned out, vodka wasn’t the only beverage in the 60s that needed a rebrand.

In 1959, a bunch of cranberries in the Pacific Northwest were found to contain traces of an herbicide called aminotriazole, which is basically a bog weed killer that caused cancer in lab rats. The U.S. Secretary of Health told people to stay away from cranberries if they didn’t know exactly where they were coming from, and cranberry farmers took a huge hit.

Enter a little cranberry farmer’s collective that formed in 1930 called the Cranberry Growers Cooperative. Today we know them better as Ocean Spray. In the 60s, to try to get people to start buying cranberries again, they started publishing recipe cards, booklets, and newsletters with all kinds of cranberry and cranberry juice recipes.

At the same time that vodka was pushing for simple fruity cocktails, Ocean Spray was also pushing cranberry juice as a great mixer for boozy drinks. That’s why so many of the vodka coolers that became so popular at the time called for cranberry juice. By the end of the 60s, these “breeze” drinks started appearing in the top ten most popular mixed drinks of the era.

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Episode 28: The Gin Rickey

• 2 oz gin

• ½ oz fresh lime juice

• ¼ oz simple syrup (optional) *see note

• Club soda

• Garnish: lime wheels & twist

Fill a highball glass with ice. Add gin & lime juice (& simple syrup if desired). Stir & top with soda water. Garnish with lime wheels and/or a lime twist.

*note: The original recipe doesn’t call for simple syrup, but modern bartenders have found that a touch of sweetness can help bring out the flavor of the lime juice. We tried it both ways and liked preferred it with the syrup.

The Gin Rickey is one of the few classic cocktails with a clear and well documented origin story.

The first version, made with bourbon, was invented by bartender George A. Williamson around 1880 at Shoomaker’s Bar in DC. It was named after a democratic lobbyist named Colonel Joseph Kyle Rickey (better known as Joe Rickey).

Rickey didn’t like sweet drinks, and usually liked to drink bourbon combined with carbonated water. One day, he asked the bartender at Shoomaker’s to add some lime to his highball, and the Bourbon Rickey was born. Joe Rickey actually purchased the bar in 1883 & went on to become a major lime importer.

The Rickey took off, and before long people were customizing the drink to their liking, substituting other liquors for the bourbon. In 1882 the Gin Rickey first appeared in print, and has been a huge hit ever since. The gin version quickly became more popular than the original bourbon version, and by the 1910s & 20s it was everywhere. In fact, it was even mentioned in the 1925 classic, “The Great Gatsby,” when Tom Buchanan served his guests a platter of Rickeys.

In 2011, more than a century after its creation, the Rickey was declared Washington D.C.’s official cocktail.

Many confuse the Rickey with the Collins cocktail, but the Collins is made with lemon juice instead of lime, and always contains sugar or simple syrup.

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Episode 15: The Classic Daiquiri

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• 3 oz. white rum

• 1 1/2 oz. fresh lime juice

• 3/4 oz. simple syrup (1:1) *see note

Combine ingredients in a cocktail shaker with plenty of ice. Shake well to chill and strain into a chilled cocktail or coupe glass.
Garnish with a lime wheel, wedge, or curl if desired.

note: to make simple syrup heat equal parts sugar and water until sugar is completely dissolved. Cool before use.

The daiquiri is said to have been invented in Cuba around the turn of the 20th century by an American mining engineer named Jennings Cox.

They became popular in the United States during and just after WWII because rum was cheap and easy to find, while whiskey was rationed for the troops.

Daiquiri’s are also said to have been JFK’s favorite drink. He’s reported to have celebrated with a daiquiri when he won the election, and Jackie Kennedy is said to have trained the white house staff to make daiquiris just the way they liked them. 

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Episode 7 - (individual) Gin Punch

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• 1 lemon peel

• 1/2 teaspoon sugar

• 1 ounce lemon juice

• 1 oz cointreau or orange liqueur 

• 1 1/2 oz gin (old tom style preferable)

• Seltzer water

In the bottom of a collins glass, muddle the sugar and lemon juice to release the lemon oils into the sugar. Add lemon juice and stir to try to melt sugar. If you have time, let this mixture sit for a few minutes to dissolve further. Add cointreau, and gin and fill glass with ice. Top off with Seltzer water, & stir to combine. 

Interesting fact: This recipe was adapted for individual servings, but the original Punch recipe dates back to around the Victorian era. It tastes a bit like the Tom Collins that we all know today.

The recipe calls for seltzer, which I assumed was a modern creation, but was actually invented in 1767! Who knew?

This recipe also calls for Old Tom Gin, which is a sweeter, less-botanical style of gin than the more common London Dry style we know today. It was the lynchpin of countless classic cocktails, and was the go-to spirit for mixologists in the 1800s. It largely disappeared thanks to prohibition, but has lately been making a comeback.

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