Tabasco Sauce in the Applejack

All but the most degenerate boozers reach for some drinks before others. Nothing wrong with having our favorites, although the punctilious zealotry of the martini and mint julep crowds can get overbearing. Throw all the juices, syrups, tinctures, spices, and whatnot at the modern bartender's command into the equation and folks can get downright obsessive about what works in their cups and what doesn't. "Any guy who'd put rye in a mint julep and crush the leaves," wrote opinionated Kentucky bullshitter Irvin S. Cobb, "would put scorpions in a baby's bed." Exaggeration. Probably. Who knows? Cobb lied like it was his job. Because it was his job. But scorpions, though? Best to keep that old corn guzzler away from babies and not chance it.

Hot sauce is where I usually put on the brakes when it comes to cocktails. All things being equal, a dose of cayenne, chipotle, or tabasco peppers in the glass will generally make me pass. The heat's no problem. In fact, we bust out homemade hot sauces for weekend breakfasts and weeknight dinners often.  On a hot day, a round or three of micheladas hits the spot. When the temptation to mix chiles and liquor occasionally does strike, it's liable to take the guise of a Snapper, that vastly superior Bloody Mary cousin that replaces vodka with gin. We've used Cholula to good effect in a Caesar-type concoction titrated with the barest volume of absinthe. A sangrita with blanco tequila is not the worst option for daytime drinking. The common element? Tomato. Paired with and tempered by tomato, hot sauce might — just might — bring a drink together, but otherwise in most drinks the stuff is just gimmicky, an exercise in machismo, in how much heat one can handle. 

Or it's a prank. 

Back in Philadelphia, cheesemonger friends collected the oily drippings from fifty- and hundred-pound aging provolone cheeses in eight-ounce plastic tubs. After weeks or even months, they'd label the cloudy, yellowish — and pungent — accumulation Prank Juice. At some point, some jackass who needed taking down a peg was going to swallow that nightmare fluid. 

Hot sauce in so many drinks is kin to that South Philly prank juice. And the joke is old, old, old. From 1904 to 1908, cartoonist H.C. Greening penned a comic that featured Uncle George Washington Bings, Esquire, a literary descendant of cannonball-riding Baron Münchhausen and forefather of 1960's blowhard Commander McBragg. In the strips, Bings was a small-town braggart, forever telling tall tales about his exploits around the world. The Los Angeles Herald ran a six panel strip in 1905 which Bings belittles a fire-eater to villagers sitting around a bar's pot-bellied stove. "Why," he claims, "I could make that bluff look like a December frost." As he warms up to some choice braggadocio, the mischievous bartender dashes hot sauce in his applejack.

His reaction? Just about what you'd expect from anyone who'd been given a well-deserved dose of prank juice.

Too small? Click it!

Goes well with:

• Allan Holtz's thumbnail on Greening and Uncle George Washington Bings in Stripper's Guide.
• Clam Squeezin's, Absinthe, and the Bloody Fairy Cocktail — that Cholula thing I mentioned.
• Applejack in the church lemonade? Sure, why not?
• More apples. I wrote a piece on American apple spirits (including applejack, cider royal/cider oil, apple-based absinthe, and more) for Distiller magazine last Summer. Here it is.
• More properly meant for mixing with pulled and chopped pork, the North Carolina barbecue sauce we make around here is not much more than vinegar and ground chiles. Nevertheless, it's great on eggs, red beans, and even the occasional gumbo. You're on your own if you put it in drinks. Here's the complete recipe. 
• Historically, saloonkeepers and bootleggers might add hot chiles to alcohol to give the liquids a kick or bite and mask the taste of poorly made or adulterated beverages such as the swipes of 19th century Hawaii.

Nearly a Liter of Lemon Drops

While I take great pleasure in some agressive and obscure cocktails with the occasional outré ingredient, not all of my friends do. In fact, most of them don't give a damn about absinthe, moonshine, homemade bitters, or the latest alpine liqueur. For them, a Jack & Coke, a SoCo on ice, or just a splash of bourbon is fine.

Sure, I'd like it if people — especially people I care about — developed more sophisticated tastes in mixed drinks, but more importantly, I want friends to enjoy themselves at my house. I want each of them to have a drink he or she wants and likes. Foisting baroque cocktails on them with ingredients they're not going to be able to find on the liquor store shelf (and which they don't really want) just isn't being a good host.

One group of friends in particular likes lemon drops. Likes? Strike that. These guys will destroy shot after shot of the sweet-tart vodka drink. So for them, I keep a liter bottle pre-batched in the freezer. Hey, it's cheaper than good whiskey and faster than making cocktails à la minute. More importantly, the guys love it. It's not a sure thing that it will be there, but three times out of five, if you pop open our freezer door, a frosted bottle of slushy yellow liqueur sits on the bottom shelf, ready to be doled out in shotglasses. Not quite as thick or sweet as homemade limoncello, but the same general idea.

Nearly a Liter of Lemon Drops

18 oz/530ml lemon/citrus flavored vodka
9 oz /270ml freshly squeezed lemon juice
4 oz/120ml simple syrup (I use 2:1) 

Shake, strain, into a one-liter bottle, and store in the freezer. Serve in shot glasses, sugar-rimmed or not, according to your taste. 

Right out of the freezer, the mixture will contain lots of ice shards which quickly melt. It's up to you whether to take this one slushy or wait a few moments and down it once it smoothes out. In The Jox of Mixology (Clarkson Potter, 2003), Gaz Regan suggests swapping triple sec for the syrup for "more depth and character." I myself have been known to spike the liter of lemon drops with a teaspoon (5ml) of Angostura bitters which, to my mind, have an affinity for lemon.

Goes well with: 

• Victoria Moore's 2009 book How to Drink. In it, she writes a number of sensible things. One in particular seems apropos: “It’s often said that life’s too short to drink bad wine, but I’d go further. Life’s also too short to drink good wine, or anything else for that matter, if it’s not what you feel like at the time. There’s no point in popping the cork on a bottle of vintage champagne if you really hanker after a squat tumbler of rough red wine.” 

A Dispiriting Glimpse at Molecular Mixology's Latest Offering

My book Moonshine has lots of sidebars, little snippets of text related to the nearby sections, but just enough off-topic that they felt clunky in the main copy. They reflect my scattershot, parenthetical way of thinking and the somewhat difficult time I have keeping my tongue in check. One such sidebar I cut from the final draft concerned booty bumps.

Booty what? Oh, come now. Don't tell me you've never heard of booty bumps.

Photograph: Franck Fife/AFP/Getty Images from The Guardian

Working from the delusion that those around them are unable to detect its aroma, certain day drinkers drink only vodka. Regardless of federal guidelines that specify vodka is to be odorless and tasteless, it is neither. In fact, vodka has a distinct odor and only seems odorless and tasteless when compared with whiskeys, rums, brandies, and other spirits that have more obvious characteristic smells. In other words, we're all onto you, drunkie.

Consumers who want to employ an even sneakier workaround, several informants explained, may take their alcohol from the other end. They may, in effect, take vodka enemas. Ethanol is absorbed rapidly into the bloodstream through the membrane of the lower intestine, delivering the alcoholic punch of a shot of booze, but without the resultant telltale vodka breath. The booty bump. Of course, it's easy to take poisonous amounts of alcohol into one's system accidentally through this inelegant backdoor method. Lest there's any uncertainty; it is not advised.

The things one learns in the course of pursuing a life in alcohol.

I was reminded of this alternate quick-delivery system because this Sunday's Guardian featured a story about the WA/HH spray that's just gone on sale in Paris. Kim Willsher writes:

With one squirt, its inventors promise, you'll feel all the euphoria of being inebriated for a few seconds without the nasty side-effects of behaving like an idiot and falling over. 

Willsher goes on:

With each squirt from the WA/HH spray delivering just 0.0075ml of alcohol and about 20 squirts in each €20 (£16) lipstick-sized spray, it's pricey night out – the equivalent of €1,300 (£1,000) for a unit of alcohol.

What's next? Whiskey tabs that dissolve on one's tongue? Patches that deliver small but continuous doses of Cognac for hours on end? Call me old fashioned, but I like my whiskey, wine, cider, port, rum, punch and other boozy repasts down my throat in liquid form. Ok, and maybe occasionally as a jelly. I enjoy the taste of alcoholic drinks. God help us all if we grow old in a world where the best option for a stiff drink is £1,000 spritzes of aerosol grain spirits.

If molecular mixology continues in this direction, that ass full of vodka might not seem like such a bad idea.

Crystal Head Vodka Cut Down to Size

“Oh, well, would you look at that?”

Dan Aykroyd is holding my skull in his hands. A genuine smile of surprise seems to play across the actor’s face. I admit that he’s not the first to cradle that heavy orb. His touch, though, is more gentle than that of the craftsman who had taken a saw to it a few days earlier. Right through the forehead he had cut it, a freehand slice that took the top clean off.

Finished mug

Of course, it’s not my own actual head the Ghostbusters star is holding: it’s his. Or, rather, it’s one of his brand. He was in town this weekend signing skull-shaped bottles of Crystal Head, his 80-proof Canadian vodka. The bottles are shaped like human skulls and are so solid you could bludgeon opponents with one in a bar fight. Unlike those who were snapping up bottles from the store's stock, I’d brought my own, slightly altered by a local company that does such things.

I was expecting a crowd. I was not expecting a crowd of hundreds queued up outside a San Diego grocery store, waiting for a chance to plunk down $45 (it was on sale) for a bottle. The line stretches further past a Crystal Head RV than I can make out. When I ask him about its popularity, Aykroyd says that Crystal Head had recently produced its millionth bottle. That’s a lot of glass skulls knocking around the planet.

A matronly woman buys eight. Aykroyd signs them all and poses for pictures. A younger man asks him to sign one for his brother’s upcoming 21st birthday. Done. The former Saturday Night Live comedian is all smiles and charm, working his way patiently through the line while support staff break sweats to open cases, maintain displays, and keep order. I don’t think to ask how many bottles are on hand. Hundreds, surely. A thousand? Possibly.

On the table at BottleHood

But I don’t see any others like mine. Earlier that week, I’d taken an empty Crystal Head bottle to Steve Cherry, co-founder of the San Diego company BottleHood. Cherry’s firm cuts glass bottles and fashions them into drinking vessels, lighting fixtures, candy dishes, candleholders, and even jewelry. He’s a regular at my neighborhood farmers’ market. I’d given him empty bottles before and wanted to see what he could do with one of Aykroyd’s.

His crew turned it into one of my favorite new tiki mugs.

Of the hundreds of brands of cut BottleHood sells — the jelly jars made from Dublin Dr. Pepper bottles, the Patron candy dishes, the drinking glasses of Mountain Valley water — Crystal Head is one Cherry can’t keep in stock. You want an 18-oz Crystal Head drinking vessel? You have to bring him the bottle.

Unless Aykroyd pulls up in that RV with a skid of empties.

Goes well with:

• BottleHood shows up every week at San Diego markets, so we locals are fortunate enough to browse the rotating offerings. but if you're nowhere near, check out their website. They ship. 
• Crystal Head's website.

Paczki — Donuts with Vodka

I spent this last weekend in and around Appleton, Wisconsin, about three hours north of Chicago. Work-related, but there was time enough to explore the area, check out local restaurants, bookstores, liquor stores, bars…and bakeries.

Oh, yes, bakeries. As a kid growing up in Missouri, baked goods were some of my favorite treats: cream horns, cookies, pies, stollen, crumb cakes, and—from St. Louis’s long-closed Lake Forest pastry shop—a rare gooey butter cake. All vestiges and extrapolations of Northern European baking traditions, heavy on German and Swiss varieties.

So when I dropped by Manderfield's Home Bakery in nearby Menasha, I expected some of the bakeshop treats of my youth. Many were there, naturally. But also paczki, fried doughnuts that, while new to me, are probably old hat to anyone who grew up within driving distance of Chicago’s substantial Polish communities.

Paczki (pronounced in those parts “poonch-key”) are tacitly Catholic raised donuts generally available only from Fat Tuesday until Easter. They are often filled with fruit or, sometimes, cream. Some are glazed, some dusted in sugar. Others have no coating at all. And—get this, boozehounds—vodka is sometimes incorporated in the dough ostensibly to keep it from absorbing frying oil. I’m not sure I buy the story at all. Well, the rationale, anyway. Seems like temperature control would keep the oil in check. I’ll defer to the judgment of bakers on the effect of vodka in donut dough.

Since the bakery sells filled paczki only on Fat Tuesday itself and I was engaged elsewhere that day, I walked away with an unfilled version dusted simply with sugar. Where you’d expect a hole in a common American raised donut, each of Manderfield’s paczek has a flat, crisp disc covering one side, something like a tire's hubcap.

Sitting in the car, I cracked open a window to let in the smell of sugar and vanilla that swirled around the parking lot. Pulling apart the donut and cracking though the little crisp disc, I sent a cascade of sugar crystals down my black pea coat. I don’t need paczki every day, but I’ll make a special effort to be near a Polish bakery the next time Mardi Gras rolls around. And by next Lent, I'm going to get the bottom of this vodka thing.


Manderfield's Home Bakery
811 Plank Rd.
Menasha, WI 54952
920-725-7794
www.manderfieldsbakery.com

MxMo XL: Bai Nai Punch

In Thai, bai nai means "Where are you going?" For my friends Barry and Rebecca, who have spent some time in Thailand and just married last month, the common greeting seemed a fitting name for a drink to mark their wedding day.

Since this month’s Mixology Monday's theme is ginger, it’s doubly fitting. More than that, maybe: Matt "Rumdood" Robold is hosting MxMo XL: Ginger this month, so it'll be worth checking in later in the week to see what cocktail recipes have been delivered to his door. The Bai Nai punch uses ginger syrup as well as falernum, a Barbadian syrups flavored with cloves, lime, and other ingredients, including ginger.

The drink is particularly suited to large gatherings such as weddings, pool parties, beach outings, or backyard cookouts. The recipe for the Bai Nai—based on Dale DeGroff’s Perfect Passion from his 2009 book The Essential Cocktail—yeilds a single serving. The syrup recipes that go into it, though, have large yields because they are particularly versatile. While I like DeGroff’s original recipe with its muddled ginger, strawberries, and lychees, it would have been a monster hassle to make it one drink at a time for 180 guests. Instead, I scaled it, made some substitutions, rejiggered the measurements…and added an ingredient.

Lychees provide an exotic but elusively familiar element—the taste is something like table grapes, but clearly not just that, and the aroma is unmistakable (once you know what it is). To give the recipe an additional lychee flavor and aroma boost, I added a small amount of Soho, a lychee liqueur imported by Pernod Ricard. Use it with a light touch—it's tasty, but it doesn’t take much to be too much.

Bai Nai Punch

1.5 oz vodka or 40-45% abv neutral spirits
1 oz. strawberry/lychee syrup (see below)
.75 oz lemon juice (freshly squeezed)
.5 oz falernum
.25 oz ginger syrup (see below)
.25 oz Soho Lychee liqueur

Shake with ice. Strain into stemmed cocktail glass. Garnish with a paper umbrella anchored with an orange slice.

The Syrups

Ginger Syrup
4 oz fresh ginger root, peeled, and cut into small dice
24 oz water
.5 oz fresh lime juice
1 tsp lime zest
1.5 c Demerara sugar

Bring the water almost to a boil in a pan. Add ½ cup to a blender with the ginger. Process briefly to shred the ginger. Rinse out the blender with the remaining hot water, then transfer the ginger mixture back to the pan. Bring the mixture to a boil, then reduce the heat to a simmer and add the remaining ingredients. Leave at a bare simmer for an hour (do not boil). Let cool and strain.

Yield: about 24 ounces

Strawberry/lychee syrup
6 pints fresh strawberries
6 12-oz cans of lychees
2.5 quarts simple syrup (1:1 sugar and water)
The light syrup from two lychee cans

Wash and hull the berries. Add them with the lychees to a large plastic container. Add half the simple syrup and roughly chop with an immersion blender. Add the remaining syrups, cover, and let sit overnight in the refrigerator. Strain.

Yield: about 90 ounces

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Clam Squeezin's, Absinthe, and the Bloody Fairy Cocktail

Kevin Kelpe over at Save the Drinkers has thrown down the latest challenge to drinks bloggers who participate in Paul Clark's (more or less) monthly cocktail throw-down, Mixology Monday. Today’s MxMo has a theme I can snuggle right up to: local flavor.

And, unlike recipes in a lot of my cocktail posts, you can use moonshine or home-distilled neutral spirits easily in this one. Come on, it's MxMo XXX. With those triple-x's in the very name, how could I not post a cocktail recipe fit for home distillers?

Kevin explains today’s theme:

Option 1: Gather ingredients that are representative of the culture/geography/tackiness of your respective cities and make a drink with a truly place-based style. For example, huckleberries are native to the geographical area where I live, as are elderflowers, potatoes, and extremely conservative, closet-case politicians. (I’m just saying!)

Option 2: Dig up an old drink that came from your city and revive it! If you can find the original bar, that would be even more interesting.

Since sun-splashed San Diego is home these days, and there is so much cross-border traffic and influence upon and from Baja California just 15 minutes away, I decided to go local with a drink that’s not indigenous, but has adapted to the local climate: the Bloody Mary.

Obviously, the Bloody Mary didn’t originate here. For that, we’d need to turn to 1920's Paris when Russian émigrés were downing prodigious amounts of vodka, then an obscure Eastern spirit rather than the ubiquitous global powerhouse that it is now.

But just try to go to a Sunday brunch or a daytime pool party in Southern California where the host doesn’t serve the tomato-based cocktail. Nothing’s stopping you from having one as a nightcap or even dinner, but in general, it’s not a late-night drink. Instead, it’s meant to be consumed as a palliative, a hair of the dog, or just a way to greet an undemanding day.

Morpheus and I tested a lot of Bloody Mary variants using blind tastings, commercial mixes, built-from-scratch versions, various salt, lime, and chile rims, and assorted accompaniments. In the end, we settled on a fairly standard recipe, with two nods to San Diego’s heavy Mexican influence—and an inspired twist.

The Mexican elements are Cholula hot sauce (which is made from pequin and arbol chiles and doesn't quite have Tabasco's vinegar bite), and Clamato, a proprietary blend of tomato juice and clam broth that seemed called for since tomato-and-seafood cocktails are popular in these parts. If you detest clam broth, use plain tomato juice instead, but consider: In blind taste tests professed Clamato-haters preferred Clamato variants hands-down.

The twist? Absinthe. While we were picking apart our favorite Bloody Mary version, my eye fell on a dasher of absinthe I use for adding very small amounts to cocktails. Also once popular in Paris, but before the vodka years, the high-proof spirit was known as la fee verte (the green fairy). In it went. It’s something you can leave out, of course. I wouldn’t, for instance, go out and buy a whole bottle just for this. But if you happen to have some around, just a few drops transforms a very tasty Bloody Mary into a more complex, suave, and seductive drink: The Bloody Fairy.

Unlike its stature in the history of cities such as New Orleans or San Francisco, absinthe has no claim on the soul of San Diego. But if by “local” Kevin also means as local as my patio, it’s very characteristic of this place.

Be warned, though: too much absinthe ruins this drink and, in this instance, too much can be the matter of a single drop. Titrate to find the perfect balance for your taste by adding a drop, tasting, and adding another drop if the drink will bear it. You could do as I did and repeat until you destroy the drink. But after repeated tastings, I’ve found that five drops is the absolute threshold: more than that makes this cocktail too bitter in an unbalanced, kinda nasty way.

Bloody Fairy

1.5 oz vodka (or your best 40% abv neutral home-distilled spirit)
4 oz Clamato
¼ oz fresh lemon juice
4 dashes salsa inglesa (Worcestershire sauce)
2 dashes Cholula hot sauce (Tabasco or Crystal works, too)
Dash of salt
4-5 heavy grindings of black peppercorns (around ¼ tsp)
3-5 drops of absinthe (or Herbsaint)

Combine in a 12-oz glass, add ice, and stir to mix. Garnish with a celery stick and/or a few slices of pickled jicama.

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Rattlesnake Vodka!

image from www.komotv.com

Over the years researching American moonshine, I came across all kinds of practices and traditions that would make some folks shudder. Animals, in particular (alive or dead, whole or in parts), often worked their ways into liquor. Sometimes critters and bugs were attracted to the sweet warmth of a fermenting outdoor mash. Other times, they were put in there because of supposed medicinal purposes.

Sometimes distillers inserted them into the distillate at the end of a run. Looks like the tradition is a alive in Texas.

When I saw a piece about on the news tonight about Bayou Bob's Brazos River Rattlesnake Ranch, I knew immediately who the intended market was for his rattlesnake vodka...

From an AP wire piece today:

A rattlesnake rancher who calls himself Bayou Bob found a new way to make money: Stick a rattler inside a bottle of vodka and market the concoction as an "ancient Asian elixir." But Bayou Bob Popplewell's bright idea appears to have landed him on the wrong side of the law, because he has no liquor license.

Read more here...

Apparently, Popplewell had 429 bottles of snake vodka and one bottle of rattlesnake tequila. Now, that tequila, I'd be interested in...

And let that be a lesson about selling liquor without a license.

Dr. Noggin Cocktail

(In which Rowley vents on vodka and christens a new cocktail)

"Dr. Cocktail hereby announces:
Henceforth [the excessively fruity version of an old fashioned cocktail]
will never again be served!
The second version, with 2 dashes of bitters,
1/2 teaspoon of sugar, a few drops of water,
and a lone broad swathe of the orange peel ONLY,
muddled to express the orange oil,
and combined with good rye or Bourbon—
this drink is henceforth known EXCLUSIVELY as the Old-Fashioned
... See? World peace can be that easy."

~ Ted "Dr. Cocktail" Haigh
Vintage Spirits & Forgotten Cocktails

Vodka, apparently, makes me angry. Oh, not in a bloody Mary, of course. And there’s certainly a place for lemon drops in any mixer’s toolkit, especially when less seasoned drinkers are about and you serve ‘em crusta-style with a glittering rim of sugar hardened on the glass's rim and a fat lemon peel collar.

But when I go to a bar serving $11 cocktails that’s got more vodkas than all species and brands of whiskeys combined...sigh. I don't know if it's the Irish in me or the fact that I'm a leo (which gullible people take to mean I'm determined to have things my way), but I just start to sulk.

The neighborhood joint we visited last night had more Canadian whiskies, even, than bourbons. No rye to be seen. What the hell? I secretly suspected the owners were Canucks. Or Kennedys. Fancy vodka drinks filled the menu, with a smattering a gin and rum concoctions. I wanted to like it, honest I did. But the greenhorn bartender was nearly in the weeds just making our two drinks—from their menu, mind you, not some convoluted Jerry Thomas baroque masterpieces that I requested just to break his stones—well, after the first drink, my own mother could have served me chocolate cake on my birthday and I would have been pissy.

So after the first round of their new-fangled cocktails, I ordered an old fashioned from the bar manager. We talked about what I wanted and how it should be done. I watched as he muddled the orange peel with bitters and sugar, drop in ice, and reach for the bourbon. Turned to my friends, Dr. Morpheus and Dr. Noggin who had just joined us, for a beat to admit as they teased me that, yes, I should just have the recipe printed on the back of my cards, then looked back just in time to see him drop it all in a shaker and shake the bejabbers out of it.

Damn it.

This led to a lesson on why not to shake (in short, shaking ruins this particular drink by creating loads of tiny bubbles, making it almost effervescent plus cheap low-density ice-machine ice dilutes the drink way too fast). From the get-go, it tasted spent and watery. Hey, he asked why I wasn’t drinking it, and insisted I tell him.

So he re-made the drink. Less ice, no shaking. Nirvana. In a moment of inspiration, I dropped a half-ounce float of St. Germain elderflower liqueur into the glass. Then we did another that way. The doctors approved. And you know what? I wasn’t pissy any more. The guy salvaged the night for me with a dose of whiskey and professionalism. I’ll still give all that vodka the hairy eyeball, but for his eagerness to get the drink right and for being genuinely curious about why I thought the first version was bad (he agreed), I’m giving him a big thumbs up. And I’ll be back.

In the meanwhile, I'll probably be making more cocktails I've named after the neurologist. With apologies to Dr. Cocktail for gilding the lily, here's


The Dr. Noggin Cocktail

Use a vegetable peeler to get a single, wide piece of orange peel (just the zest, mind you—no white pith or pulp). Because the St. Germain is sweetened, you might back off the sugar called for in Haigh's old fashioned cocktail.

1 broad swath of orange peel
¼-½ tsp sugar
2 dashes of Angostura bitters
2 dashes of water
3 oz bourbon
½ oz St Germain elderflower liqueur

Muddle the orange peel with the sugar, water, and bitters in a rocks glass. Put one or two large lumps of ice in the glass. Pour on the bourbon and give it a brief stir. Add the half-ounce of St. Germain to the top of the drink and enjoy. Repeat as necessary.

Goes well with

• Renewing an Old Fashion, a thorough review of the literature by Robert "DrinkBoy" Hess (in which I was tickled to see we had similar experiences with unsure bartenders) on the origins and variations of the old fashioned cocktail
• Mister Mojito (David Nepove) sells hardwood muddlers in maple, cherry, walnut, and plastic (plus a smattering of other bar supplies worth checking out)