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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Episode 69: French 75

• 1½ ounces gin

• ¾ ounce fresh lemon juice

• ¾ ounce simple syrup

• 3 to 4 ounces Champagne

• Lemon twist garnish         

Combine gin, lemon juice, and simple syrup in a cocktail shaker with plenty of ice and shake until frosty.
Strain into a large champagne flute or coupe. Top off glass with Champagne & garnish with lemon twist.

Like a lot of classic cocktails, the origins of the French 75 are a little murky, but we do know one thing for sure. This cocktail was named after a fast-firing 75-millimeter French field gun from WWI that was known for firing faster and more accurately than other guns.

While the classic recipe we know today calls for gin, lemon, simple syrup, and champagne, some older recipes call for cognac rather than gin. Some people believe that this cocktail actually grew out of an allied fighter pilot unit made up of both French and American soldiers during the first world war. They used to drink cognac and Champagne mixed together after successful air raids, and would toast to the 75-millimeter gun that kept them safe. 

One of the most popular and commonly cited origin stories is that the French 75 was invented by Harry MacElhone at Harry’s New York bar in Paris. Whether he actually invented it or just popularized it we can’t be sure, but we do know that his version called for cognac rather than gin. While gin is much more popular today, a lot of people say that the cognac version is definitely worth a try.

In 1927, the more contemporary gin-based recipe we know today appeared in print for the first time, in a cocktail book called Here's How. When this version was published again in 1930 in Harry Craddock’s “The Savoy Cocktail Book”, the French 75 recipe we know today was spread to bars around the world.

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Episode 65: Tom Collins

• 2 ounces London dry gin

• 1 ounce fresh lemon juice

• 1/2 ounce simple syrup (1:1 sugar:water)

• Soda water

• Optional garnish: lemon wheel & maraschino cherry

Add the gin, lemon juice and simple syrup to a Collins glass. Fill the glass with ice, top with soda water, and stir to combine. Garnish with a lemon wheel and maraschino cherry if desired.

While we don’t know for certain who came up with the Tom Collins, we do know that the first written Tom Collins recipe is from the second edition of Jerry Thomas’ “Bartender’s Guide”, published in 1876.

We also know that the name likely came from a strange prank that was popular in New York in the early 1870s. People would tell a stranger in a bar that a man named Tom Collins was walking around the city telling lies about them, and that they had better find him and stop him from slandering them even more. Whoever heard this story would go up to the bar asking for Tom Collins, and as the story goes, some bartenders decided to invent a drink they could serve to anyone at the bar asking for Tom Collins.

From New York the prank spread to other cities, and in 1874, the Gettysburg Compiler wrote, “Have you seen Tom Collins?”

“If you haven’t, perhaps you had better do so, and as quick as you can, for he is talking about you in a very rough manner–calling you hard names, and altogether saying things about you that are rather calculated to induce people to believe there is nothing you wouldn’t steal short of a red-hot stove.”

“This is about the cheerful substance of a very successful practical joke which has been going the rounds of the city in the past week. It is not to this manor born, but belongs to New York, where it was played with immense success to crowded houses until it played out.”

The Great Tom Collins Hoax of 1874 was so internationally well known that two years later Jerry Thomas included his own Tom Collins recipe in his bartender’s guide. His initial recipe was a bit complicated though, so over the years bartenders simplified it into the Tom Collins recipe we recognize today.

While this seems to be the commonly accepted origin story, David Wondrich believes that it actually could have been named after a bartender at a popular London hotel in the 1870s. Many hotels in London at the time were famous for their gin punch recipes, but bartender John Collins decided to switch things up and make his gin punch into a cocktail instead. His hotel was trendy with young people, and the cocktail was a relatively new invention, so they loved it and it was an instant hit. Unfortunately for John Collins, his cocktail recipe called for Old Tom gin, and somehow people may have mixed up the names Tom and John and started calling the drink a Tom Collins. It is also possible that both stories are true and people started calling John Collins’ cocktail a Tom Collins because of the popularity of the Great Tom Collins Hoax of 1874.

One thing that isn’t up for debate is that by 1876 the recipe had found its way to Jerry Thomas. Along with lemon juice and soda water, Thomas’ recipe called for gum syrup as a sweetener, and likely would have been made with old world Dutch Genever gin. Instead, modern versions use London dry gin and simple syrup along with the lemon juice and soda.

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Episode 53: Amaretto Sour

• 2 oz. Amaretto

• 1 oz. Fresh lemon juice

• ½ of a fresh large egg white (or ½ oz of Pasteurized egg whites if you prefer)

• Garnish: Good quality cocktail Cherries and a few dashes of Angostura bitters

Combine all of the ingredients in a shaker and “dry” shake without ice for 5 seconds. Add ice and shake again for 15 seconds. Strain into a chilled rocks glass filled with ice and garnish.

No-one knows for sure who first came up with the recipe for the Amaretto Sour, but we do know that it was created somewhere in the USA, sometime in the 1970s, when Italian liquors were starting to become fashionable in America.

Italians had been trying to introduce their spirits to an American audience for years, but it seemed that the bitterness of many Italian spirits was too much for most Americans in the 70s, who preferred their alcohol on the sweet side. Campari and the Negroni cocktail, for example, had a really hard time squeezing into the American market, but thankfully for Italy, Americans found the sweet nutty flavor of Amaretto to be very easy to drink.

 Amaretto (Italian for "a little bitter) is a sweet, slightly bitter, almond flavored liqueur traditionally made by soaking apricot kernels in brandy. Today it can also be made with peach stones, sweet almonds, or bitter almonds.

While we don’t know who or where or when the amaretto sour was invented, we do know that in the 70s the recipe would have been as simple as mixing amaretto with ready mixed bar sour mix. Such a simple recipe could have come from anywhere and it’s highly likely that multiple bars started selling them independently of one another and the popularity spread until they were ubiquitous in the 1980s. They remained popular in the 90s but eventually fell out of favor. Today though, they’re actually starting to make a bit of a comeback, but most of the new-fangled recipes that bars are serving today mix the amaretto with whiskey to increase the alcohol content and balance the sweetness. The recipe above contains only amaretto, but instead of sour mix, it calls for fresh lemon juice and egg white. Since amaretto is sweet enough on its own, no sour mix is necessary.

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Episode 51: Clover Club

• 2 ounces gin

• 1/2 ounce lemon juice

• 1/2 ounce raspberry syrup * see note

• 1 large egg white

• Fresh raspberries, for garnish

In a cocktail shaker combine the gin, lemon juice, raspberry syrup, & egg white. Shake vigorously (without ice) for 10 seconds. Add ice and shake until frosty cold. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a skewer of 3 fresh raspberries. Serve and enjoy.

*Note: To make raspberry syrup combine 3/4 cup of water and 1 cup of sugar, 1 cup of raspberries (fresh or frozen) and mash the raspberries up into a pulp. Strain out the seeds before using.

According to "The Old Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book," the Clover Club was first created in the late 1800s at the bar of the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia. This popular hangout drew crowds of writers, lawyers, and titans of industry, who would meet and talk over cocktails, and the elegant Clover Club made with gin, lemon juice, raspberry syrup and egg white was a favorite among them.

The cocktail slowly grew in popularity, eventually becoming a nationwide sensation by the late 1910s and early 1920s. After prohibition though, it basically faded into obscurity, and by the 50s was largely forgotten. This is probably because A) nobody used raspberry syrup anymore and wanted to use grenadine instead, and B) there was another cocktail, the pink lady, that was taking the clover club’s place. A pink lady is essentially a clover club made with a mix of grenadine and applejack instead of the raspberry syrup. It sounds like the applejack adds something interesting to the drink that you would lose if you just used grenadine. According to "Gaz" Regan in "The Joy of Mixology," you have to use real raspberry syrup to make a Clover Club, because "without it, this drink isn't much to talk about."

Thankfully this delicious cocktail is popular again today, thanks largely to its inclusion in Gaz Regan’s 2003 book, “Joy of Mixology,” and the 2008 opening of a now-famous cocktail bar in Brooklyn named after the drink.

Episode 41: Ward Eight

• 2 ounces rye whiskey

• 1/2 ounce lemon juice, freshly squeezed

• 1/2 ounce orange juice, freshly squeezed

• 1/2 ounce (real) grenadine *see note

• Garnish: maraschino cherries and an orange slice

Add the rye whiskey, lemon and orange juices and grenadine to a shaker with ice and shake until well-chilled. Strain into a tall glass with ice and garnish with cherries and an orange slice

*note: Real pomegranate-based grenadine has a much nicer flavor than the bright red sugar syrup from the supermarket.

The origin stories for many historic cocktails can be sometimes be difficult to trace or confirm, but the Ward Eight isn’t one of those cocktails.

The Ward Eight is one of, if not the, most popular cocktail ever created in Boston, Massachusetts. It was conceived in 1898 at the Locke-Ober Café to celebrate the election of Martin M. Lomasney to the state legislature. Lomasney was a politician who wielded considerable power in Boston for 40 years, serving as a state senator and representative, as well as a political “boss” in the city’s eighth ward (hence the name). Some stories point out that it’s odd that Lomasney was so sure of he’d win before election day that he had the bar create a new cocktail just for his victory party. Rumor has it he had fixed the election.

We’ll never know for sure, but we do know that the Ward Eight is essentially just a riff on a rye Whiskey Sour sans egg white. You substitute some of the lemon juice for orange juice and swap out the simple syrup for grenadine.

While we do know when and where this cocktail was invented, the recipe itself wasn’t actually written down at the time, so the exact recipe is disputed and there are some variations on it. The most popular recipe is a mix of rye whiskey, lemon and orange juices, and grenadine. Most recipes out there seem to be very similar but some omit the orange juice.

Many modern bartenders today will serve this straight up in a chilled coupe or cocktail glass, but when it was first invented it would have been served over ice in a tall Collins glass.

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Episode 40: Fish House Punch

Lemon simple syrup

• ½ cup sugar

• ½ cup hot water

• Peels from 2 lemons (try to avoid white pith)  

Combine ingredients together in a heat safe jar. Cover and let sit for at least several hours before using.

Fish House Punch

• 2 oz brewed black tea, cooled

• 2 oz amber rum

• 1 oz cognac

• ¼ oz peach brandy

• ¾ oz lemon simple syrup

• ¾ oz lemon juice

• Garnish: Freshly grated nutmeg & a lemon wheel

Combine everything in a cocktail shaker with plenty of ice. Shake just enough to combine, strain into a glass over ice. Garnish with freshly grated nutmeg and a wheel of lemon.

Punch was almost always served at any festive occasions in Colonial America, and they were often made with rum and usually flavored with some kind of citrus. They were also often diluted with brewed tea to add more flavor that water.

 The Fish House Punch is probably one of the most famous punches in American History. According to David Wondrich, the Philadelphia Fish House Punch “deserves to be protected by law, taught in the schools, and made a mandatory part of every Fourth of July celebration.” It was invented at a private fishing and social club in Philadelphia called the State in Schuylkill Fishing Corporation, popularly known as the Fish House.

We don’t know exactly when it was created, but it was legendary for its flavor and potency. Rumor has it that George Washington even drank some in 1787. He wrote in his diary that he was going to dine at the Fish House Club as an honored guest, and after that his diary remained uncharacteristically blank for the next three days.

This would have been a very fancy drink at the time, because so many of the ingredients were imported. Jamaican rum, French cognac, peach brandy from the south, British black tea, and lemon and nutmeg which were also both quite expensive at the time.

Traditionally a large batch of this punch would be flavored with Oleo-saccharum, an infusion of lemon zest and sugar, but to scale this recipe down to a single serving, we went with a simple syrup infused with lemon peels.

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Episode 38: Pisco Punch

• 2 ounces pisco

• 3/4 ounce fresh lemon juice

• 3/4 ounce pineapple gomme syrup

• Optional garnish: a pineapple wedge, pineapple leaves, or a lemon twist

Combine ingredients in a cocktail shaker and fill with ice. Shake until well chilled, about 15 seconds, and strain into chilled cocktail glass. Garnish as desired.

In the late 19th century, one cocktail was basically synonymous with San Francisco.

The Pisco Punch.

Pisco, a Peruvian clear grape brandy similar to grappa, was flooding San Francisco’s ports, so it was cheaper and easier to get in than Whiskey. Bars across the city started serving pisco, including 19th century San Francisco’s most famous bar, the Bank Exchange. In the 1870s A Scottish bartender named Duncan Nichols bought the Bank Exchange and he got so famous for serving up Pisco Punch that people started calling him “Pisco John” and even started calling the Bank Exchange “Pisco John’s”. 

According to legend, a dying stranger “imparted to him the secret formula of a rare punch that went down as lightly as lemonade and came back with the kick of a roped steer.” The reality is that Nichols probably inherited the recipe from the bar’s previous owners. The legend persisted though, because he was the only person in the bar who knew the recipe and wouldn’t let anyone watch as he made batches in secret in the cellar.

When the bar was closed by Prohibition in 1920, people begged Nichols for the recipe, but he wouldn’t budge. Unfortunately, he passed away in 1926 at the age of 72, and took the recipe with him to the grave, and people thought the Pisco Punch was gone forever.

Fortunately, in 1964 a historian was researching a book when he accidentally discovered a letter written by the manager of the Bank Exchange just before Prohibition. It seems that the manager had been carefully watching which ingredients were coming into the bar, and secretly spying on Nichols as he made the punch.

Along with Pisco, sugar, lemon, & pineapple, the recipe’s key ingredient is gum arabic, an emulsifier that prevents sugar syrups from crystallizing. In this cocktail it adds a silky smooth texture that elevates it from a boozy lemonade to the stuff of legend.

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Episode 31: The Penicillin

• 2 ounces mild blended Scotch

• 1/2 ounce ginger syrup *see note

• 1/2 ounce honey syrup **see note

• 3/4 ounce fresh lemon juice

• 1/4 ounce Islay single-malt Scotch

• Garnish: Candied ginger 

Combine blended Scotch with the honey syrup, ginger syrup, and lemon juice in a cocktail shaker with plenty of ice.
Shake until frosty and strain into a rocks glass filled with one large cube. (or regular ice cubes)
Gently pour the Islay Scotch over the top and garnish with candied ginger. 

Notes:
*To make ginger syrup, combine equal parts fresh pressed ginger juice and sugar, and shake or let sit until the sugar dissolves. Don’t heat it to dissolve the sugar. Refrigerate until use. Best used within 24-48 hours.
If you don’t have a vegetable juicer, you can grate the ginger with a grater and then press the juice out through a strainer or cheesecloth. If you live somewhere near a juice place you might be able to have them press it for you, and I think some places sell bottled ginger juice.

**To make honey syrup, combine equal parts raw honey and water. Stir or shake until combined. Refrigerate until use.

The Penicillin was created in 2005 at a bar in the Lower East Side called Milk & Honey. One of their most popular cocktails was a whiskey sour made with honey, which they called a Gold Rush. In 2005, a 22 year old Australian bartender named Sam Ross decided to tinker with the Gold Rush recipe. He cut the honey syrup in the recipe with fresh pressed ginger juice sweetened with sugar, and then decided to swap the bourbon in the recipe with a mellow blended scotch.

Then, to play with the aroma of the drink, he added just a ¼ oz of a smoky single malt scotch over the top, so the smell of smoke from the Scotch would hit your nose before you ever tasted the spiciness of the ginger, the tartness of the lemon, and the sweetness of the honey. It was complex, a little weird, and played with your palate in a really interesting way. He named it a Penicillin because honey, lemon, & ginger are flavors we commonly see together when we’re sick. Like in cough drops, medicine, and hot toddys.

At first the Penicillin wasn’t even on the menu, but was still creating a buzz at Milk & Honey as a secret, off-menu special for New Yorkers in the know. By 2006, it was blowing up, and the next thing you knew, it was everywhere. Within just a couple years, it was appearing on cocktail menus across the globe, and one cocktail historian called the Penicillin “the most well-traveled and renowned new cocktail of the 21st century.”

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Episode 27: The Sidecar

• 2 ounces Cognac

• 1 ounce Cointreau or similar orange liqueur

• 1 ounce lemon juice

• orange twist or wedge (optional garnish)

Combine the cognac, cointreau, & lemon juice in a cocktail mixing glass or shaker. Add plenty of ice and stir until frosty cold. Strain into a chilled coupe or cocktail glass with a sugared rim (if desired) * see note.
Garnish with an orange twist or wedge.

*note: To rim the glass with sugar, dip the rim into a plate with a small amount of water, and then dip the wet rim into another plate with sugar. If you want to do half the rim, you can wipe the other half dry before dipping into the sugar. This allows the drinker to decided if and how much sugar they’d like.

The sidecar was wildly popular in the 1960s, but the recipe had been around for a good long time. In fact, the recipe actually evolved from a 19th century classic called the Brandy Crusta.

The Crusta was a huge deal when it came on the scene because it actually changed the entire idea of what people thought a cocktail could be. The original formula for a cocktail dictated that it should include strong spirits, water, sugar, & bitters. The Crusta however, used lemon juice instead of water, which was practically ground breaking at the time. It was also served in a sugar rimmed glass, which was also seen as an innovation.

When Jerry Thomas included the recipe for the Crusta in his cocktail book, their popularity skyrocketed. Over the years, the recipe evolved. Generations of bartenders put their own spins on it to make it their own, playing with the balance, ingredients, and presentation. Before you knew it, the recipe looked more like today’s Sidecar than yesterday’s Brandy Crusta.

The origins of the name of the sidecar are disputed, but it was likely invented around the end of World War II, either in Paris or London. The common belief is that it was named after an army captain who liked to ride to the bar in the sidecar of his motorcycle.

However, in The Essential Cocktail Dale DeGroff  wrote, “The word sidecar means something totally different in the world of the cocktail: if the bartender misses his mark on ingredient quantities so when he strains the drink into the serving glass there’s a bit left over in the shaker, he pours out that little extra into a shot glass on the side – that little glass is called a sidecar.”

As the Sidecar morphed from the Crusta, it was originally still made with brandy, but brandy can vary a lot in flavor depending on where and how it was made. Just like wine, Brandy can be sweet, fruity, dry, earthy, etc.
So, depending on the brandy used, bartenders would need to adjust the amounts of the other ingredients to ensure a balanced cocktail that wouldn’t be too sweet or too tart.
While Cognac is a type of brandy, the flavor from brand to brand tends to be much more steady, so eventually the brandy was swapped with cognac to ensure a more reliable, balanced final product.

A lot of sidecar recipes call for a sugared rim just like a Brandy Crusta, but some bartenders prefer to leave the sugar off. We’re not exactly certain if the sugar would have been popular in the 60s, so we decided to only coat half of the rim in sugar to give the drinker the option of choosing whether they want the sugar or not.

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