Brown writes:

Surely both consumer and pundit proffered this deluge by pushing the latest in cocktail trends and charting maps where you can drink new cocktails made with quirky ingredients such as dehydrated carrots, yogurt and thai chiles. Not that any of those ingredients ipso facto make a bad cocktail. On the contrary, I love the incorporation of new ingredients, but here the impetus is sadly on creativity and not craft, likely fueled by
something Sigmund Freud dubbed the “narcissism of small differences.”

With this specific narcissistic tendency, each person creates their own little world populated with minor and specific tastes that hardly do more than draw an artificial distinction between similar categories. There’s certainly a place for preference but underlying a person’s insistence on “not too sweet, floral and spicy” versus another’s “violet, tart with a hint of jalapeño” are irreconcilable differences that are waved as though they were flag and country, creating a tribe-of-one prepared to battle opposing tribes for failing to recognize the universality of their claim. What place does a well-made daiquiri have in this world?

…

Too often, bartenders, rather than sharpening our axes, studying, searching and trying to find meaning among the thousands of cocktails already created, the neophyte–and even sometimes seasoned veterans, I’m afraid–indulge in the worst possible fantasy: that of some mixological Prometheus who steals the eternal flame of creativity from the old, stuffy Gods and re-imagines it as lavender-infused ice or cinnamon-ancho rim. The unfortunate result is that it’s our liver and not theirs that is forever picked at by these often vile and outlandish combinations.

Yes. Yes. A thousand times, yes. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, just because you can make it doesn’t make it a good idea.

Brown goes on to suggest some solutions to this problem – basically guidelines for how bartenders can protect themselves (and their customers) from their own worst instincts.

The 90/10 Rule
This rule was born with a simple proposition. For every cocktail you create, try learning nine classic cocktails first, or 90% of your cocktails should be classics and 10% should be new creations. This rule is by no means fail-proof but it’s certainly a way to make sure you practice the basics before proceeding. The very worst that could happen is that you add nine new drinks to your repertoire. Not so bad really.

Forget About It
Remember the recipe for that cocktail you created in 2004? What was it, Sage-infused Tequila, Navan and grapefruit? No, then forget about it. If you have trouble recalling the ingredients to your past creations it may well be because the drink sucked. Trust me, the best recipes are ones that come to mind easily, are often requested and frequently suggested. Everything else is likely fodder.

The Shift-drink Test

If the “90/10″ and “Forget About It” rules fail you, your next line of defense may well be the best one of them all and it goes for both professional and amateur bartenders alike. We become the most critical after a hard-worked shift behind the stick (or any job really). At the end of the day, we just don’t have the tolerance we had at the beginning for pure and utter crap. Imagine sitting down to a Cachaça blood-orange toddy with a bacon-crusted rim. If you can’t, it’s because you have gone too far and are now teetering on that jagged cliff. Go make yourself an old fashioned and relax.

I think these are pretty spot on and, I hope, recognizable as common sense ways to ensure good practice by craft bartenders.

One of the things I love about cocktails is the ability to create, to experiment, to test. In my early days of home bartending, that’s mostly what I did because it was exciting to think I was coming up with something (presumably) for the first time. Of course most of what I came up with was either not good at all or if it was passable, it was fairly forgettable.

Over time I’ve learned that I’m better off making small changes in familiar formats that are easy to remember than trying to start from scratch. I know exactly how I like my Dry Martini, depending on what gins or vermouths or bitters I use. I love playing around with funky tiki drinks. I’ve found some very small tweaks to the Gin Ricky that work great for me. And I’m always swapping around the combinations of vermouth and amari in my Americanos and Negronis.

And that’s just me at home. When I drink out, I tend more towards classics than experimenting with new creations with lots of custom infusions, syrups, and house-made ingredients. Why? Even if I love them, odds are they won’t be replicable by me or most any other bars. They are almost guaranteed to be lost to the ages as soon as the cocktail menu changes. I want more dedicated efforts at permanence than that! I want the romance and the history of drinking 100-200 year old cocktails!

Maybe it’s just me. Or me and Derek Brown. Your mileage may vary for sure and I certainly don’t think there is a wrong answer here, so please don’t be offended if you disagree.

Hogo, a new rum bar from Tom Brown, opens today on 1017 7th St NW, just down the block from The Passenger. I was able to check it out last night and came away incredibly impressed. Per an email from Derek Brown, “Hogo is a word used in the Caribbean to designate “high taste”–shortened from the French word hâut-gout–but it really describes the funky, inexplicable taste that you find in traditional aged-rums.” The name fits the interior design of Hogo, which is a mix of comfortably-appointed lounge and nautical and Tiki themed graffiti.

Hogo’s Diner

In the back of the bar, there’s a diner. Hogo will be rotating menus on a regular basis to feature some of the city’s top chefs. To start, The Passenger’s Javier Duran is manning the kitchen and the menu is “Hawaiian diner food.” For those not familiar, Hawaiian food is mostly a mix of greasy comfort food and relatively cheap meats. I lived in Hawaii for a while and came away incredibly impressed. Spam Musubi is one of Hawaii’s iconic snacks, featuring a big slab of Spam wrapped on a bed of sushi rice. It’s available at most diners and lots of gas stations too and it’s never been something that I’ve been taken by. But the Spam Musubi at Hogo is simply amazing – something that is at once casual and fancy, paired with a wasabi aoili.

Spam Musubi

Other traditional offerings included a Loco Moco – two hamburger patties topped with fried eggs and pork sausage gravy, accompanied by rice and mac salad – and a combination plate of Kahlua pork and Kalbi beef. Both were pretty outstanding. Again, this is essentially Hawaiian comfort food. While it’s heavy on the calories, it’s rich in flavor and makes a great accompaniment to some strong rum cocktails.

Loco Moco

Since Duran is only the chef at Hogo for the first month, I highly recommend checking it out soon, as this is probably the best Hawaiian food I’ve had on the mainland ever.

Tom has been hosting Tiki Tuesday every week at The Passenger for quite some time now. The practice shines through in the menu and execution in the drinks on the menu at Hogo. I sampled four cocktails last night and each was outstanding.

First up was Black Heart’s Punch, modified from a recipe from Trader Tiki that was made with Cruzan Blackstrap Rum, homemade cinnamon syrup, lime juice and tonic water. It was deep, rich, flavorful and refreshing – a perfect entry into accessible yet interesting Tiki cocktails.

Pinky Gonzales is a classic tiki drink from Trader Vic that’s basically a tequila Mai Tai. At Hogo it’s made with Espolon blanco and Espolon reposado tequila, Cointreau, lime and orgeat. It’s very light and had a well-balanced use of orgeat and citrus, so the almond syrup could shine through as a sweetener and not fade into the background.

Pinky Gonzales

In our final round we had a Ti Punch, which is basically a rum old fashioned made with cane syrup and rhum agricole. We also had a Jungle Bird, a cocktail created in 1978 at the Aviary Bar in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Made with Blackwell Jamaican rum, Campari, pineapple and lime, it’s about everything one could want from a Tiki drink with bitter components. It’s bitter sweet, but not overpowering, with an intense tropical feeling.

Every cocktail we had was perfectly prepared, balanced, and interesting. The menu is fairly expansive, with 15-20 drinks in all, so it will take some time for one to make their way through it. That said, I can’t recommend Hogo highly enough. From the cocktails to the food to the ambience to the fact that it’s a project from some of DC’s most respected bartenders, check out Hogo as soon as you can.

Via The Lively Morgue:

Dec. 21, 1933: From the Mid-Week Pictorial. Americans visiting Paris celebrated the end of Prohibition in the United States in a “real two-fisted manner,” its original caption stated.

I’m not sure why Americans abroad waited 16 days to celebrate the end of Prohibition, but it sure looks like they had a good time.

Be sure to raise a glass in honor of the 21st Amendment today.

Update:

Here’s a good video on Green Hat Gin and some history from Prohibition in our nation’s capitol:

Do you think the cocktail world sees publishing recipes as revealing secrets? Or more as a way to share and communicate?

I think they fall on both sides. Certainly some of my colleagues are not as giving as others as far as recipes go. Some people proudly consider some of their recipes to be things that they developed over years, they spent a lot of time and energy and resources on them and don’t see the need to just give them away.

But I think there are others, like myself, who are on the complete opposite side. It’s more along the lines of publish or perish. Maybe not perish, but become irrelevant. Maybe it’s because I live in New York, but I find that in New York when you think of a great idea, if you don’t act upon it someone else is going to be acting upon it. I feel like great ideas are more the result of intelligent people putting different things together. So do you want to be remembered, do you want to at least document that when you did it? Or do you want to rely on the oral traditions to verify that? I personally prefer to stake claims. I’d rather document it.

Jacob goes on to write:

A cocktail might appear on my menu for just a few months before it’s replaced with something new. A recipe only lives on if other people make it, and hearing that other people are enjoying my drinks is gratifying. There are merits to making complicated, ephemeral cocktails that only last a season, but it’s also nice to see them proliferate.

I’m with Meehan and Jacob. I’d hope more bartenders share their original cocktail recipes, as a way for helping them spread beyond their own bar. It’s a hell of a lot easier to visit a bar and ask for a modern creation from another cocktail bar if you know the recipe and don’t have to guess at the proportions of ingredients.

But more importantly, one of my favorite things when I go to a craft cocktail bar is seeing them include contemporary recipes from other bars. Smuggler’s Cove in San Francisco is the one who always comes to mind when I think of this phenomenon, but others do as well. And when I belly up to the bar and dream about opening my own joint some day, I would absolutely plan on including a section of the menu dedicated to the brilliance and creativity that currently exists in the cocktail world.

There are scores of cocktail bars in America today and hundreds of talented, creative bartenders, coming up with thousands of new cocktails every year. The odds are only a couple of these cocktails will survive the test of time and still be around in fifty or one hundred years. But (essentially) the only way that’s possible is if the bartenders who created them are publishing their recipes. So I’m all for publishing of recipes and helping spread the good ones around. Hell, that’s a big part of what I want to do with this blog.

I’ve never seen a cocktail recipe that included Jeppson’s Malort before. Malort is a famously bitter (some say unto disgusting) spirit, popular in Chicago and amongst masochistic cocktail enthusiasts. As I am a sane person with no desire to regularly inflict too much pain on my taste buds, I do not keep a bottle of Jeppson’s Malort around my house and therefore have not tried this cocktail to assess its merits. Nonetheless, if for no other reason than novelty (and possibly trolling the gentlemen of Scofflaw’s Den), I present to you The Bukowski.

The Bukowski

1.5 oz Malort
0.5 oz Drambuie
0.75 oz fresh lemon juice
0.5 oz fresh orange juice
0.5 oz honey syrup (1:1)
5 large basil leaves

Combine ingredients in an ice filled shaker. Shake until you’re confident the Malort is mostly hidden behind the other ingredients. Strain and serve on the rocks, but be prepared to duck in the event the person drinking this cocktail throws it back in your face.

OK, enough navel gazing.

I do have something important that I want to share with readers today. Paul Clarke has a post up at The Cocktail Chronicles alerting readers that iconic Seattle barman Murray Stenson is ill and in need of help. Paul writes:

Murray has a heart condition, and may require intensive surgery. As with bartenders everywhere, Murray doesn’t have medical insurance, and he’s unable to work while incapacitated with this condition. Evan Wallace, a longtime friend of Murray’s, set up a MurrayAid page on Facebook, where people like me and you (hint, hint) can make a donation via PayPal to help defray Murray’s medical expenses. UPDATE: There’s now a website for the coordinated efforts to help Murray: murrayaid.org. Also, donating directly through PayPal, as described on the website, ensures your full donation will go to help Murray, without Facebook taking a cut.

I’ve never met Murray Stenson – by the time I made it to Zig Zag Cafe, he had moved on to Canon (and I failed to make it to Canon). But I’ve heard about him for years, most often in connection for his role in bringing The Last Word to international prominence in the modern craft cocktail movement. The Last Word is a truly delightful cocktail:

Last Word

3/4 once gin
3/4 ounce fresh lime juice
3/4 ounce maraschino liqueur
3/4 ounce green chartreuse

Combine ingredients in a cocktail shaker and fill with ice. Shake well for 10 seconds and strain into chilled cocktail glass. Ta-da!

I’m a big fan of this drink. I first heard of it on Paul Clarke’s blog and remember thinking to myself, “I have to go home and make this right away.” The Last Word is the sort of cocktail which demonstrates not only the value of fresh and rare ingredients that is a hallmark to contemporary craft cocktails, but does so while being simultaneously accessible and complex. That is, it’s a great drink to put in the hands of someone who hasn’t experienced quality craft cocktails before.

In fact, a couple of good friends were at Zig Zag a few years back and texted me to ask what they should order to drink and I suggested The Last Word.  I don’t know if Murray was working behind the bar that night, but one of them fell in love with it and as a result has probably finished more bottles of green Chartreuse and maraschino in the last two plus years than any home bartender in America.

If readers of A Jigger of Blog can spare a bit of cash, I’d greatly appreciate it you can chip in at MurrayAid.org.

On Rimmerman’s list, I generally stick within that same price range – occasionally going a bit lower or a bit higher, depending on the offering. But in the year I’ve ordered through Garagiste, I haven’t had a single bad bottle of wine. All have been good, some have been great, and at least two have been other-worldly.

Rimmerman is profiled in this week’s New York Times Magazine. It’s a good read. I’m sure it will add tens of thousands of subscribers to his email list. But frankly, that is an earned consequence. The list is stellar and I highly recommend anyone who’s reading this blog to subscribe to it. You can do so through their website. Rimmerman’s daily emails are educational and his wine is top-notch, so even if you’re not already a big wine enthusiast, you can use this list to expand your knowledge base and decrease the amount of money you’re spending on bad wine.

Two words of caution:

First, this is a potentially expensive email list to be on. You provide your credit card information once, then just order by replying to emails. That is, you don’t have the gut check of typing out your credit card digits that may otherwise slow your online purchases down. Be warned.

Second, this is not a source of instant gratification. Shipments come out by season, not immediately after you place an order. I think it was at least four or five months after my first order before I received the wine. But I promise you, it’s worth the wait.

And there’s a lot of them…

While much of the interview is about his philosophies for bartending and life, Ueno-san’s observation of what makes Japanese cocktail culture unique is really interesting to me. From the Koumbarakis interview:

In Japan we focus entirely on the classics, the vintage way of bartending and not on current trends. There are some trends and techniques that I personally like; People are starting to make their own bitters and vermouths. In saying this, I do believe bartenders should be good at using available products, not making products. There are plenty of products that one can play with. Speakeasy style of bars, vintage books, Mescal in the United States and Rye Whisky in Europe…they are all just trends personally. You can imagine why the Japanese style of bartending got increasingly popular overnight? We are the ones who are constantly surprising. The Japanese style of bartending has not changed in the past 100 years. The rest of world is always looking for something new, something different. We are always focusing on the classics and interpreting those classics in our own way, meticulously and effortlessly.

In my experience, the focus on classic cocktails and perfecting techniques ahead of creating ones’ own ingredients for ones’ original recipes leads to excellence in Japanese bartending. I can relate to the idea that the classics are what are most likely to survive and therefore are the best things to be drinking. Many drinks which have survived from fifty to two hundred years survived because they’re great drinks. Continually trying to make them with greater care and perfection will lead to ever more enjoyable cocktails. While there are literally thousands of contemporary creations by craft bartenders around the globe which are balanced, pleasant, and creative, how many will be around and widely consumed in 100 years? If it’s more than a dozen or two, I’d be surprised. Thus there’s value in what is classic and the Japanese cocktail world seems to place more importance on this than cocktail cultures elsewhere in the world.

I can also relate to the idea that we should use the ingredients which are available not only to us as bartenders, but to the general public. While I appreciate and celebrate the creativity of craft bartenders who create their own ingredients as a vehicle to make the epicurean art they wish to make, it makes it hard for home consumers or even their peers elsewhere in the bar world to follow along. The ability to offer a drink that simply cannot be had elsewhere in the world is surely a good marketing move, but it creates a wall between the bartender and those who would want to enjoy her cocktail outside the confines of her bar.

One of the things that makes bartending incredible is that it is closer to baking than savory cooking. Given a recipe and knowledge of proper techniques, any cocktail can be replicated, providing the ingredients are available. This is challenged when bartenders use products which aren’t available on the market and thus serves as a barrier to the spread of good cocktails.

I don’t mean to sound like a curmudgeon. Part of where I stand is based on a recognition over time that while I appreciate the original cocktails of many bartenders and bars, at the end of the day, there are very few which I find truly memorable. I find much greater joy in a perfectly made Martini or Daiquiri than a creative original creation, as the novelty of the new drink wears off with each sip, while the perfect of a classic can last centuries. As much as I appreciate the creativity of bartenders like Phil Ward or Gina Chersevani, at the end of the day I’d rather see American bartenders focus on perfecting classics than buying lotto tickets that their next original creation might stand the tests of time to become a classic itself.

This isn’t about the bartenders, though. It’s much more about the cocktail consuming public. Somewhere along the lines we consumers developed an expectation that every cocktail bar we go into have 8-20 original cocktails. If consumers instead demanded more and better classics, this could change. Though I have no clue when it will be, I would someday like to open a bar and serve only the finest classic cocktails. Until then, I’ll go around, try a couple new drinks when I visit a bar then switch to classics that I know I’ll truly enjoy.

One of Han’s originally created cocktails was recently named by bartending luminary and master craft cocktailian Gary Regan to be one of the 101 Best New Cocktails of 2012. Here is the Age of Reason:

Age of Reason by Han Shan

2 oz Michter’s rye whiskey
5 oz Pierre Ferrand Cognac Ambre
.5 oz Cochi Americano
1 generous barspoon green Chartreuse
1 generous barspoon yellow Chartreuse
10 drops Bittermens Elemakule Tiki bitters
1 lemon twist

Stir over ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Run the twist around the rim of the glass, then discard.

Here’s how Han describes this cocktail:

“The spicy Michter’s rye is the backbone while the cognac smooths the rough edges a bit and the sweet herbaciousness of the Chartreuse(s) play off the spicy bittersweet of the Cochi, with the tiki-inspired bitters doing something alchemical that nothing else on my bar quite did to bring it all together. The lemon oil swipe gives it a brightness in the nose upon first sip and mostly stands back after that as you enjoy this (hopefully) balanced and delicious, easy-drinking, amber-colored quaff.

The drink is named for Tom Paine to recognize the coming together of French & American ingredients. I should have endeavored to find something English to put in there to really make the case but then I’ll call that one the ‘Tom Paine.’

BTW, for me, ‘generous barspoon’= about 1/4 oz. but I always have trouble nailing that with my jigger and one can use a tiny bit less or more to suit one’s tastes. The barspoon works for me. Last note is that the only way you can get one of these (or a decent Manhattan or Sidecar or whatever) at our friendly neighborhood beer-n-shot dive B-Side where I’m currently tending is to alert me ahead of time so I can bring the ingredients with me from home… which I sometimes do.”

And here’s Gaz’s commentary:

The combination of straight rye whiskey and a great (really great) cognac, immediately reminds me of a Vieux Carré, but the similarity ends right there. Han made some bold moves with this drink, and they paid off well—especially in the case of the Bittermens Elemakule Tiki bitters which, on paper, make no sense. In the glass, though, they play a ukulele while the other ingredients dance like Uma Thurman and John Travolta in Pulp Fiction. It’s a drink that brings a smile to my face.

Congrats Han, for making a creative new drink that impressed Gaz Regan!