Bar Scrawl

So I checked out the seminar “The Martini – The World’s Most Personal Drink” in hopes of changing my mind. It started out well:

The Gypsy Queen, invented at the Russian Tea Room, is pretty simple:

• 2 parts vodka
• 1 part Benedictine
• dash of bitters

Then Joe McCanta, bar chef and ambassador for Grey Goose Vodka, introduced the thesis of his talk:

Basically, the martini has been through a lot of variations over the last 130 years or so – it’s been made with gin and vodka, sweet and dry vermouth, shaken, stirred, and garnished with a cherry, olive, onion, and a lemon twist.

But at basically every stage, recipes noted that some customers would want it a little different, from the Martinez in 1887, described in “Jerry Thomas’s Bar Tenders Guide” with the note “if the guest prefers it very sweet, add two dashes of gum syrup” to the Stork Club Bar Book in 1946, which drily says: “Bar practice at the Stork favors the noncontroversial stirring … but the management will oblige by having them compounded in a cement mixer or butter churn if that is what the customer wants.”

McCanta’s conclusion was: “The history of the martini is about discovering what you personally like, and drinking that.”

So I’m going to invest some time in exploring martini variants to see if there’s one I’ll care for. I tried a Martinez at Tooker Alley the other night, and… not bad.

Next: back to the tasting room!

After the bitters lecture I raced downtown for Afternoon Punch at the Dead Rabbit, hosted by Imbibe Magazine.

Imbibe is a great magazine about drinking – every time I pick it up I think “I should read this more often.” The Dead Rabbit is – straight up – one of the best cocktail bars in the world. It has a ground floor taproom for beer and casual drinking, and an amazing cocktail den on the second floor that specializes in 19th Century cocktails. But this event…

They were serving “Spider Punch,” from an 1869 recipe book (“Cooling Cups and Dainty Drinks). It’s made with No. 3 London Dry Gin, Prado Pastis, bitters, lemon juice, lemon sherbet, lemon liqueur, and green tea, but I don’t know the proportions, and if you Google it you come up with a bunch of Halloween recipes, so you’ll just have to go to the bar it for yourself. Anyway, it made for a relaxing afternoon, and I had several glasses:

My first event of the 2014 Manhattan Cocktail Classic was Dale DeGroff‘s lecture on the history of bitters, titled “I’ll Take Manhattans!” at the Macao Trading Company in Tribeca.

Bitters were essential to the invention of cocktails. The first reference to the term, in a newspaper article from 1806, explained: “A cock tail is a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters.” So without bitters, we don’t have cocktails!

Other tidbits from Dale’s talk:

• Bitters were first patented as a digestive aid in 1690.
• They were sold as medicine, mostly because taxes were cheaper that way, but they also got sold as snake oil cure-alls.
• Angostura bitters are named after the town in Venezuela, not after the angostura tree.

And at each table there were five different kinds of aromatic bitters:

So we tasted each of them! Some notes:

• Angostura has a lot of baking spices – allspice and cinnamon notes
• Abbott’s is even more bitter, but with some hints of orange
• Bitter Truth has a licorice flavor
• Pimento is super-bitter! DeGroff joked that one bartender is using just a single drop of it in his Manhattans
• Fee Brothers had a sweet, cinnamon flavor, like a Red Hot candy

And then everybody got a full-sized Manhattan, each made with the bitters of their choice.

But really, my favorite part may have just been DeGroff telling stories about his life as a bartender. If you don’t know – he’s the founder of the craft cocktail movement. Basically, he was the first guy in the modern era to think “Hey – maybe cocktails should actually taste good!”  But his vision of a bartender isn’t just a guy who knows drink recipes: