Episode 32: General Burnside's Favorite

• Juice of half a lemon (1/2 oz)

• 2 oz Brandy (preferably VSOP)

• 1 oz Jamaican Rum

• 3/4 oz orgeat syrup (use one made with real almonds and cane syrup)

• Garnish: Fresh grated nutmeg, and lemon slice if desired

Rinse out a glass mug or punch cup with boiling water to warm it up. Pour the water out and add lemon juice, brandy, rum, and orgeat. Top the mug off with more hot water. The larger the mug you use, the more watered down the drink will be, but this is a strong drink so that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Grate some fresh nutmeg over the top, and serve with a lemon slice if desired.

During the civil war, soldiers were drinking so much whiskey that over the years the supply ran out and couldn’t be replenished fast enough. Fortunately for the wealthy officers and generals, they could get their hands on fancy imported brandy and rum when the whiskey supply ran low.

One such general was General Ambrose Burnside from Indiana. He was a terrible general famous for 3 things, an army career that included some devastating and embarrassing defeats, facial hair so wild and distinctive that sideburns are literally named after him, and a fancy pants punch recipe he liked sharing so much that in 1863 Jerry Thomas published it with the tagline, “This superb drink was forwarded to me by special messenger from the General.”

This punch recipe is served hot, which may seem odd to us today, but was fairly common at a time before refrigeration and cheap, plentiful ice. In fact, instead of hot water, a lot of punches would have been cut with black or green tea to add flavor.

The recipe includes lemon juice, French brandy, Jamaican rum, orgeat syrup, hot water, & nutmeg, and the flavor is reminiscent of a hot toddy.  This was some fancy shit back then. French brandy and Jamaican rum were expensive and hard to get during the war. Quite a flex. Instead of everyday sugar, he used fancy ass French almond flavored orgeat syrup instead. Nutmeg was also very fancy and showed that you could afford fancy ingredients.

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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 30: The White Russian

• 2 oz vodka

• 2 oz khalua

• 2 oz light cream or half & half

Pour vodka and khalua over ice in a rocks glass & stir. Gently pour the cream over the top. You can stir in the cream to combine everything, but I think it looks nicer if you keep the layer of cream separate on top and let the drinker stir it together themselves.

The recipe for the White Russian first appeared in print in the Oakland Tribune in 1965. The recipe was simple, it called for, “1oz. each Southern, vodka, cream”. “Southern” was short for “Coffee Southern”, which was a popular brand of coffee liqueur that used to be made by Southern Comfort. It’s not around anymore so most people use Khalua today.

The funny thing about the name of the White Russian is that the recipe doesn’t come from Russia and there’s nothing particularly Russian about it. It turns out though, that before the 1950s, vodka wasn’t very popular in the US, and at one point it was considered a strange, foreign spirit that was only consumed in Russia. When people outside Russia first started drinking it, they gave vodka based cocktails names that had the word Russia in them, or at least a nod to Russia, like the Moscow Mule.

It took a few years after the recipe was first published to really take off, but by the 70s, the White Russian was everywhere. It’s strong, easy to make, and easy to drink, and people in the 70s loved it. After the 70s though, popularity fizzled and it almost disappeared until 1998 when The Big Lebowski came out and made it popular again.

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Episode 29: The Knickerbocker

• 2 ½ oz gold rum

• 1 teaspoon orange curacao liqueur

• ½ oz raspberry syrup (see below for recipe)

• ½ oz fresh lime juice (save lime “shell” for garnish)

• Fresh raspberries for garnish

Combine rum, curacao, raspberry syrup, & lime juice in a cocktail shaker with ice and shake until frosty. Strain into a rocks glass filled with crushed ice.

To garnish, flatten a squeezed-out half lime shell into a “cap” and place on top of the drink, then top with a few fresh raspberries before serving.  

Raspberry Syrup

• 2 cups of demerara sugar

• Pinch of salt

• 1 cup of water

• 12 oz raspberries (fresh or frozen)

Stir sugar and water over low heat until sugar has dissolved. Turn off heat, add raspberries, and stir and crush the raspberries until they’re broken up into a pulp. Strain into a jar and refrigerate for up to a week.
Any syrup not used within a week can be frozen for later use.

In 1809, Washington Irving published “A History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty”, under the name "Diedrich Knickerbocker".

The name Knickerbocker originally came from a style of pants that Dutch settlers wore, but thanks to this book, the word came to signify an upper-crusty New Yorker who could trace their ancestry to the original Dutch settlers. Before long though, people just started using the word to mean anything and everything New York-y.

City leaders started naming streets and landmarks “knickerbocker”. Businesses across the city started naming themselves things like Knickerbocker Magazine or Knickerbocker beer, there’s a Knickerbocker hotel, and even the name of the New York Knicks is short for knickerbocker.

It’s not surprising that the name also attached itself to a cocktail. The new drink started being mentioned in newspapers in the 1850s, and then Jerry Thomas published the first written recipe for the drink in 1862. It’s made with golden rum, orange curacao (triple sec), lime juice, and raspberry syrup, which was basically the grenadine of the 19th century.

There are a bunch of variations on this cocktail now with a ton of added ingredients, but this version is almost identical to the original Jerry Thomas recipe.  

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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 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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Episode 26: The Aviation

• 2 ounces gin

• 1/2 ounce maraschino liqueur (preferably Luxardo)

• 1/2 ounce lemon juice

• 1/4 ounce crème de violette *see note

• Luxardo Maraschio cherries (optional garnish)

Add the gin, maraschino liqueur, lemon juice, & crème de violette to a cocktail shaker with plenty of ice. Shake until frosty and strain into a chilled coupe or cocktail glass. Garnish with a maraschino cherry.

*note: We recommend Rothman & Winter brand crème de violette because it’s made the traditonal way with natural ingredients. We tried this cocktail with another brand that used artificial flavors and colors, and it was, frankly, terrible.
If you can’t find crème de violette, you can also use another violet flavored liqueur called crème Yvette.

The recipe for the Aviation was first published by Hugo Ensslin in his 1916 book “Recipes for Mixed Drinks” but it was likely invented a bit before that. It contains gin, lemon juice, maraschino liqueur and a violet flavored liqueur called crème de violette, which gives the cocktail it’s purple color.

This cocktail was popular in New York in the 20s but when the recipe was included in the famous “Savoy Cocktail Book” in 1930, it’s popularity spread. Unfortunately, the recipe in that book left of the crème de violette.  By the 1940s the Savoy recipe without the crème de violette was probably the most popular version of this cocktail, but we think the original recipe is much more fun & interesting.

Crème de violette was discontinued in the 1960s, but a spirits company called Rothman & Winter found the original recipe and brought it back in 2007.

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Episode 25: Triple Berry Wine Cooler

According to the kitchn, all you need to remember to make a wine cooler at home is the ratio 4/4/2. You can create any flavor profile you want, as long as you use with 4 ounces wine, 4 ounces soda, and 2 ounces of liqueur.
We decided to go with the classic combination of dry white wine and lemon lime soda, and then 80s it up with some mixed berry flavored triple sec to create a homemade triple berry wine cooler.

Triple Berry Wine Cooler

• 4 oz dry white wine

• 4 oz lemon lime soda

• 2 oz triple berry triple sec (recipe below)

• Fresh berries for garnish

Add ice to a large wine glass or pint glass. Pour wine, soda, & triple sec over ice and stir to combine. Top with a few fresh berries for garnish.

Triple Berry Triple Sec

• 16 oz Triple Sec

• 12 oz frozen mixed berries (ideally blackberries, raspberries, & blueberries) 

Combine in a sealable jar and let soak for 24 hours. Strain out berries and refrigerate liquor. 

Originally, wine coolers were something made at home using light, dry white wines mixed with lemon-lime soda. Essentially, they were just a tarted up version of a white wine spritzer.

By the early 1980s though, store bought wine coolers were being marketed as soda for adults. They came in individual size bottles with easy open twist off caps, and they contained real fruit, artificial fruit flavors, and cheap wine, with roughly the same alcohol content as beer (4-6%). Flavor-wise, they were kind of a combination of a wine spritzer and sangria. 

According to the Chicago Tribune, in 1985, wine coolers accounted for close to 10% of all wine consumption in the United States. By 1987 at their peak popularity, that number was up to 20%, and wine cooler sales topped a billion dollars annually. 

The original bottled wine cooler was called California Cooler, which was founded by a couple of southern California 20-somethings. Michael Crete, the cooler’s inventor said, “The gang would get together on the beach in Santa Cruz, and I would mix together all these tropical flavors—pineapple, grapefruit, lemon-lime, white wine, and a little bit of club soda.”

At the time, Crete was working in wine and beer sales, so he teamed up with his high school buddy with a business degree and they spent a year and a half perfecting the formula.

California Cooler took off like crazy. They were selling 10 million cases a year by 1984. But before long, the big wine producers like Gallo wanted in on the boom. They launched Bartles & Jaymes in 1985, flooding primetime TV with ads. Seagram’s followed suit, and before long California Cooler was losing market share and fast.

By 1987, wine coolers were EVERYWHERE, but by 88 & 89, people were starting to lose interest, and sales started to dip across the board. The real death knell for wine coolers though came in 1991 when Congress more than quintupled the excise tax on wine from $.17/gallon to $1.07/gallon. 

This made wine blending a losing game and before you knew it, sweet carbonated malt beverages like Zima and Smirnoff Ice jumped in to take over the market. Bartles & Jaymes and Seagram’s both launched their own malt beverages, but California Cooler didn’t’ survive.

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Episode 24: Monkey Gland

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• 2 oz London dry gin

• 1 oz fresh orange juice

• .5 oz real grenadine

• Dash of Absinthe

• Orange twist

Add the gin, orange juice, & grenadine to a cocktail shaker with plenty of ice. Shake until frosty. Add a dash of Absinthe to a chilled coupe or martini glass, and swirl around the glass to “rinse” the glass with the absinthe. Strain the cocktail into the absinthe rinsed glass and garnish with an orange twist.

*notes: The original recipe for the Monkey Gland called for equal parts (1.5 oz each) gin and orange juice, but most modern bartenders prefer this updated version.

The quality of the grenadine you use makes a difference. Real grenadine should have pomegranate juice in the ingredients. If not, don’t use it. You can find it online easily or make your own.

The Monkey gland was invented sometime at the end of the 1910s and became popular during the Prohibition era.

The name of the drink references a Russian-born French surgeon named Dr. Sergei Voronoff who thought that the sex glands of living organisms held the key to health, vigor, and longevity. During the 1910s and 20s, he performed expensive surgeries to graft the testicles of monkeys onto his patients, promising “a life span of 125 years and an old age of a few months.” His work became world famous, and by 1927 Voronoff had done more than 1,000 procedures on his wealthy patients. In reality, his work did absolutely nothing, and he was finally discredited by the 1940s.

Nevertheless, at the end of the 1910s he and his work were a pop culture phenomenon and the Monkey Gland was invented in either Paris or London in tribute. In 1919, a New York Times story carried the headline, “MONKEY GLAND’ LATEST COCKTAIL”, and it wasn’t long before it became a hit in the United States as well. Beyond Voronoff’s mad scientist reputation, the cocktail may have also become such a hit because it contained a small dash of absinthe, which was banned in much of Europe as well as the U.S. because of it’s supposed (but now debunked) hallucinogenic properties. Many bars still had a few bottles of absinthe left after the ban, and the Monkey Gland used so little that they could make it stretch while still giving the cocktail a forbidden and exciting feeling.

No matter the reason, this gussied up gin and juice is surprisingly delicious!

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Episode 23: Ramos Gin Fizz

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• 1 egg white

• 2 oz. Old Tom gin

• 2 to 3 tsp powdered sugar (to taste)

• ½ oz. lemon juice

• ½ oz. lime juice

• 3-4 drops orange blossom water (plus more for garnish)

• 1 oz. heavy cream

• 3 drops real vanilla extract (optional garnish)

• Orange twist garnish (optional) 
  

1.    Place egg white in the bottom of a cocktail shaker tin. Add gin, sugar, lemon & lime juices, & orange blossom water. Shake vigorously for at least two minutes. (This is a DRY shake, do not add ice yet or it will melt and water down the drink.)

2.    Add heavy cream and plenty of ice. Shake for about 15 seconds more, or until the drink feels icy cold in your hands.

3.    Add about 1 ½ oz soda water to the bottom of an 8-10 oz collins glass. Slowly strain the cocktail into the glass. You want the glass to be full, but you don’t want the foam to come over the top of the glass.

4.    Allow the cocktail to sit for at least one minute, then stick a straw through the center of your cocktail and gently push it all the way to the bottom of the glass a few times to make a hole for more soda. Remove the straw and slowly add a thin stream of soda water until the meringue foam rises about an inch or two above the glass.

5.    Garnish with another drop or two of orange blossom water, 3 drops of vanilla extract, and an orange twist.

6.    Add a fresh straw to the center of the drink just before serving.

The Ramos Gin Fizz was created in 1888 by Henry Charles Ramos at the Imperial Cabinet Saloon in New Orleans. It was an instant hit, and before long the bar was often filled with 20 bartenders and "shaker boys" dedicated to making Ramos Gin Fizzes.

In his Famous New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix 'Em, Stanley Clisby Arthur writes, "the corps of busy shaker boys behind the bar was one of the sights of the town during Carnival, and in the 1915 Mardi Gras, 35 shaker boys nearly shook their arms off, but were still unable to keep up with the demand."

It’s no wonder it was so hard to keep up with demand, as the original instructions say that you’re supposed to shake the cocktail for 12 entire minutes to the get the foam right. Thankfully modern bartenders have found a much more efficient way to froth the egg whites in only 2 minutes. The instructions are still a bit complicated and time consuming, but this cocktail is so delicious you’ll be glad you made the effort. The end result is rich and creamy but oddly light at the same time. The flavor is almost like an orange creamsicle all grown up.

Most modern recipes call for simple syrup, but the original used powdered sugar so that’s what we went with. The addition of vanilla extract is a bit controversial. Some say it was Ramos’ secret ingredient, while others insist that he never used it. I think it adds something though, but you’re free to leave it out.

This cocktail also sometimes known as the New Orleans Fizz, and fun fact, Huey P. Long was said to have been a big fan. Some people think of it as a morning drink because the cream and egg white fill and line your stomach while the gin is a bit of the hair of the dog.

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