Grossmuttis Kartoffelsalat (We Call it Tater Salad)

Since moving to body-conscious Southern California, I’ve cut way back on taters, but with Irish roots on one hand and German on the other, I’ve got a double spudlust that makes my knees nearly buckle at the prospect of something so verboten as a bacon-studded German potato salad.

What better time than Memorial Day, though, to bust out a big bowl of the stuff to satisfy my lust for carbs? For weeks, I’d been craving the bacon fat-and-vinegar-laced salad that Philadelphia chef Fritz Blank used to make for staff lunches or special occasions when I would visit. It wasn’t the kind of food he’d serve at his fancy French restaurant Deux Cheminées, but to bolster our holiday grill of bratwurst, burgers, and chicken, it was just the ticket.

Blank, a former Army captain and microbiologist, is meticulous about recipe preparations and his original notes for this salad are worth reading for the amount of precise detail about the recipe. This meticulous scientist makes legions of jigger-wielding nouveau “cocktailians” look downright sloppy. Scroll down for a link to his notes and procedures for his grandmother’s potato salad.

With apologies to Fritz, I’ve adapted his grossmutti’s Kartoffelsalat to my kitchen and tastes. Most notably, I’ve cut the fat by nearly half (but kept every single drop of bacon fat) because I don’t care for an overly slick salad. I also used Yukon Golds, but cut into small slices, somewhere between the coin-shaped slices he calls for and the cubes he reserves for American-style potato salads.

Roll out the barrels, baby: this German classic is good all summer long.

German Potato Salad

5 lbs C or B-sized golden potatoes
1 ½ gallons of water
½ cup salt

¾ lb. double smoked bacon, cut into 1/4-inch slices
1 cup thinly sliced green onions, white part only
¾ cup fresh parsley, chopped “medium”
1 level tablespoon freshly cracked black peppercorns
1 ½ tablespoons coarse sea salt
1 cup of rice wine vinegar or a mild champagne vinegar
1 ½ cups oil mix (combined rendered bacon fat plus peanut oil)

Place the potatoes, ½ cup salt, and water into a 16-quart pot. The water should cover the potatoes by about 4 inches. Bring to a full boil over high heat; reduce to a gentle boil and cook uncovered until the potatoes are tender yet firm. Start testing after about 20 minutes. Test by sliding a knifepoint into potatoes: it should go in easily with minimal resistance. Carefully drain placing the potatoes in a single layer onto a tray to cool slightly.

In the meanwhile, render the bacon over medium heat until crispy, but not hard. Drain and reserve the drippings.

While the potatoes are still hot but able to be handled, slice them into bite-sized slices (or the “coins” Blank calls for) into a large mixing bowl. The slices should about 1⁄4-inch thick or slightly more, and should not break apart or crumble.

Add all of the remaining ingredients on top of the potatoes, and mix gently with a large spoon, silicon spatula, or your hands to distribute everything evenly. Do not overmix or break up the slices.

Let the salad sit for a few hours at room temperature to develop the flavors. Taste carefully and re-season if necessary with salt, pepper and/or vinegar. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Goes well with:

• Blank’s original recipe for his grandmother’s potato salad on his message board Ask Chef Fritz.
• A Chef & His Library, an exhibit I curated about Blank’s extensive cookbook collection at the University of Pennsylvania
• Mimi Sheraton’s The German Cookbook: A Complete Guide to Mastering Authentic German Cooking
• Horst Scharfenberg’s The Cuisines of Germany: Regional Specialities and Tradition Home Cooking
• The New German Cookbook: More than 230 Contemporary and Traditional Recipes by Jean Anderson and Hedy Würz
• Karl Friedrich von Rumohr’s The Essence of Cookery (Rumohr, writing in the 19th century, has been called “Germany’s Escoffier.” Take that for what it’s worth).

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Garlic-Spiked Honey and Anise Short Ribs

Talk about easy. Not only is this recipe quick, it’s stolen. I blatantly lifted the idea for garlic-spiked honey-and-anise ribs from British writer Nigel Slater, though I goosed his spice proportions for a more aggressive bite. Slater’s simple concept in The Kitchen Diaries—writing compellingly about his home-cooked meals over the course of a year—makes the book joy to read. Well, that and his obvious love of the topic. This is one of his cold weather dishes and, since San Diego doesn’t get cold as it’s understood elsewhere, it’s a year-round meal for us.

Once every few months, generally when I’m in a funk about something, I toss this together using nothing but ingredients from our home larder and a rack of ribs I’ve picked up from the butcher. The massive pan-Asian 99 Ranch Market serves nicely.

Slater uses less garlic, black pepper, and red pepper, but marinates the ribs and wouldn’t object to an overnight rest. I ditch the marinade and oopmph up the spices Your call. If you don’t have the star anise, though, do try to pick some up. It really makes the ribs zing and gives an exotic touch that suggests, oh, maybe some tiki drinks are in order with this. It makes such a difference, in fact, I keep a jar of the stuff on hand solely for this recipe.

The pork ribs should be cut across the bones, flanken-stlye, yielding several long strips of short ribs which should then be cut cross-ways into small bites of two-three bones each.

Garlic and Anise Short Ribs

1 rack of pork ribs, cut flanken-style (about 4lbs/1.8 kilos)
7 Tbl Honey (orange blossom)
4 Tbl Oyster sauce (Lee Kum Kee brand)
6-8 cloves garlic, crushed
1 Tbl Aleppo pepper (or red pepper flakes)
5 Star anise (whole)
1 tsp black pepper, coarsely ground
½ tsp sea salt

Preheat the oven to 350°F/175°C

In a 9”x13” Pyrex dish, mix the honey through sea salt.

Rinse and pat dry the strips of ribs. If you like, you may remove the membrane along the back, bony side. Cut between every second or third rib to make small bite-sized portions. Using a spoon or spatula, mix the ribs and sticky sauce together. Roast for about an hour and fifteen minutes.

Slater recommends serving these over rice with pan drippings. I’ll often throw in some steamed broccoli and swap out Vietnamese rice noodles (bun) for the rice. Either way, break out the napkins: this one’s going to be messy.


Goes well with:

• Nigel Slater's website and column in the Guardian
• The Kitchen Diaries on Amazon

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Oh, fer Feck’s Sake: Scott Beattie’s Artisanal Cocktails

Those of you in the San Francisco Bay area this week are in for a treat. Like Martin Cate before him, Scott Beattie, author of Artisanal Cocktails, will be tending bar as a guest at Bourbon and Branch this Thursday and Friday (May 14-15). Go if you can. The man is doing something truly special.

Those of you not in the Bay area—well, you can just suck it.

Missouri? Suck it. North Carolina? Suck it. Mississippi? Iowa? Nebraska? Maine? Suck it. Even New Orleans, with one of the most vibrant cocktail scenes in the world, you know what to do. In more ways than one, you can’t make it.

Beattie’s subtitle—Drinks Inspired by the Seasons from the Bar at Cyrus—belies the real inspiration here. This is undeniably a book rooted in California’s bountiful wine country. The drinks—beauties, each and every one—call for fresh produce, brilliant edible flowers, top-shelf liquors from craft distillers, esoteric essential oils, and fresh herbs to such a degree that cocktail enthusiasts outside that organic heirloom microcosm might feel themselves just…taunted.

There are foams and homemade pickles, amaranth spears and bamboo springs, tomatoes, watermelon cubes, celery root threads—garnishes that make the orchids on our home bar seem downright pedestrian. Some of his cocktails are so freighted with produce that they become as much conversation pieces as refreshment. Straw? Fork? Camera? Peterson’s Field Guide to North American Wildflowers? What do I reach for here?

Unlike Beattie, who grew up in Northern California with its vibrant foodie culture, I’m from the Midwest. You know, the place where the citrus is waxed, the hearts of palm canned, and the shiso is…wait, the what? Might as well call for moon rocks and muddled hen’s teeth.

Seriously, this isn’t a recipe book. This is cocktail porn. If you enjoy cocktails to begin with but also revel in the inherent escapism of National Geographic magazine or the Travel Channel, then you may get a serious kick out of Artisan Cocktails.

Hats off to Sara Remington for her gorgeous photography—lots of bokeh beads of condensation glimmering on glasses, Technicolor blossoms, and cocktails that resemble table centerpieces more than something you’d actually drink.

If you’re at all into cocktails, check out the book. It’s not like others you may own. But as a practical manual for mixologists outside northern California, it’s best viewed as inspiration for using your own local produce and resources to make amazing cocktails. How so? Well, if you intend to make each drink in the book, you’ll need (this is just a partial list);

• 500 micrograms of B12 powder
• kefir lime leaves
• lotus root
• rosemary blossoms (the little purple flowers, not the leaves)
• fresh hearts of palm
• pickled fennel
• black sea salt
• red sea salt
• verjuice
• anise hyssop leaves
• fennel fronds
• fenugreek
• candied rhubarb
• bamboo sprigs
• lemongrass (for candying)
• sunflower petals in chiffonade
• yuzu juice
• dehydrated peach chips
• jasmine blossoms
• heirloom tomato water
• pickled celery root threads
• powered vitamin C

So, you’re in Kansas City, Wilkes-Barre, Des Moines, or Tupelo. Unless you’re willing to pay extraordinary shipping charges, there are some drinks here you just can’t make. But you can follow Beattie’s lead and make cocktails that are so rooted in your hometown that anyone tasting it would know exactly where it came from.

Get to know your florist. Become a regular at your farmers’ market. Suss out the local liquor in your area. Got recent immigrants in your hometown? Find out where they shop and begin learning their flavors. Start a garden to supply your bar with the garnishes you want to use. Cooks do it, why not bartenders and cocktail enthusiasts?

Say you’re in Western North Carolina. The nearest lotus root is in Atlanta. Skip that drink. Maybe try a bloody mary with local heirloom tomatoes, pickled ramps, and, what the hell, a rim of coarsely powdered pork rinds. If you’ve got respectable moonshine, ditch the vodka and go all-local. You get the idea.

I’m not likely to make recipes exactly as presented in Beattie’s book, but it’s got me wondering what, other than margaritas and micheladas, San Diego cocktails might become. I haven’t put the thing away in three weeks.

Scott Beattie (2008)
Artisanal Cocktails: Drinks Inspired by the Seasons from the Bar at Cyrus.
Ten Speed Press
ISBN: 1580089216
$24.95

Order here from Beattie's website.

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Bookshelf: Joanne Weir’s Tequila

First in my roundup of summertime cocktail books is Joanne Weir’s enthusiastic primer Tequila: A Guide to Types, Flights, Cocktails, and Bites. In case you should miss it, the James Beard award-winning writer has become an evangelist for 100% agave spirits. Don’t bother her with the golden mixto tequila one usually finds in happy hour margaritas. “Only a fool,” she insists, “would drink mixto.” Mixto, made from almost half sugar, is the common stuff that has helped bestow tequila with its race-to-the-bottom-of-the-bottle, girls-gone-wild, I-don’t-remember-how-I-got-here reputation.

Tequila is a solid introduction for drinkers who want to expand their understanding of how to enjoy this Mexican spirit. It’s not the last word in tequila or even history, but the book primes the conversation by outlining the production and characteristics of blanco (or plata), reposado, añejo, and extra añejo tequilas, suggesting ways to enjoy them as flights, and then diving into recipes.

To that end, Weir has enlisted some of today’s better-known bartenders to present tequila cocktails. Now, a tequila cocktail isn’t as easy as it sounds. Gin is a fantastic mixer, as is rum. And vodka? Making tasty vodka drinks is no harder than combing your hair. But tequila can be troublesome, its big flavors prone to shouldering into and overwhelming a drink. Other than margaritas and shots, most drinkers aren’t sure what to do with it. Why fix, the thinking goes, what ain’t broke?

Well, because the world is tastier than frozen margs.

Enter mixologists such as Lucy Brennan (Mint) Audrey Saunders (Pegu Club), James Meehan (PDT), and Philip Brady (Death & Co.). In all, almost two dozen well-known enthusiasts step up to the challenge of crafting tasty tequila cocktails. Herein you’ll find the Aperol Sunset, la Chupparosa, the Chartreuse-spiked Kama Sutra, and the Surly Temple (ok, perhaps the girls still go just a little wild). Duggan McDonnell of San Francisco’s Cantina, offers his

All the King’s Men
1 ½ oz reposado tequila
½ oz Averna
½ oz ruby port
1 tsp agave nectar
1 oz freshly squeezed lemon juice
1 to 2 oz ginger beer
1 paper-thin ginger slice, for garnish

Combine tequila, Averna, port, agave nectar, and lemon juice in a cocktail shaker with plenty of ice. Cover and shake for five seconds. Simultaneously strain the mixture and pour the ginger beer into a Collins glass filled with fresh ice. Garnish with the ginger slice.

And because this isn’t a one-tequila-two-tequila-three-tequila-floor celebration, but an introduction to more sophisticated drinking, Weir offers cooking recipes. Gonna drink? Gotta eat. All her recipes—from red chile pepper pickles and chorizo hand pies to carnitas and, yes, even cupcakes—include 100% agave tequila, sometimes at multiple stages. I’ll pass on the tequilamisu, but with recipes for ceviche, grilled steak, and chilled melon soup that won’t heat up the kitchen, Tequila makes for some inspirational summer reading.


Goes well with:

• Tequila: A Natural and Cultural History by Ana G. Valenzuela-Zapata & Gary Paul Nabhan.
• Tequila: A Traditional Art of Mexico edited by Alberto Ruy-Sanchez
• Dianne Kennedy’s The Art of Mexican Cooking
• Patricia Quintana’s El Gran Libro de los Antojitos Mexicanos (in Spanish)

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Kickstart Summer with Three New Cocktail Handbooks

As an historian, I favor old cocktail books with their line drawings, rough paper, and palpable letterpress impressions on pages—the care with which they must be handled all suggest fragile treasures. Even the smell of quietly acidifying old paper has its appeal. After all, any one of those old tomes might contain neglected bits of wisdom, recipes, or processes that been forgotten with the passage of time. It’s from just such old books that I’ve pulled some of my favorite drinks, syrups, tinctures, and other concoctions.

Newer books—those offering 1001 cocktails or purporting to be “complete” guides to mixology—too often merely catalog recipes without an eye to whether they are accurate or even work as balanced creations. Their places on remainder and close-out shelves are well-earned.

Three deserving a closer look, however, have come across my desk recently. With summer on the way, I’ll be referring to each over the next few months for ideas on keeping cool. I’ll talk about each over the next week.

Judging American Brandies

In early April, The American Distilling Institute convened a panel of judges in Alameda, California to evaluate dozens of American fruit spirits. The submissions ranged from European-inspired varietal grappas and whole-fruit-in-the-bottle pear eaux de vie to a purportedly extinct American spirit, barrel-aged peach brandy. By day’s end, 58 spirits had been swirled, sniffed, sipped, and sometimes spat. Along with Rogue Spirits’ distiller John Couchot, I poured a fair number of those half-ounce doses for judges sequestered behind sliding doors off the upstairs aerobar of St. George Spirits.

Talk about two kids in a candy store.

As John and I poured spirits from competing distilleries, we scoped out the expansive liquid arsenal before us. Occasionally, a brandy once opened had an aroma so beguiling that our eyes locked, our lips curled into bookend smiles, and we were compelled to do some pre-judging of our own.

When tasting spirits, judges may talk of straightforward smells and tastes of orange, peach, pineapple, juniper, or almond notes. They can also sometimes get more esoteric and less complimentary with the references—yeast extract, blackcurrant leaves, white pepper, biscuits, varnish, Band-Aid, fungal, paint thinner, or boiled cabbage notes aren’t unknown.

Conference attendees sampling after the judging.

That’s all well and good, but it can lead to some seriously overwrought prose in the wrong hands. Consider an approach espoused by Gary Regan at last year’s Tales of the Cocktail. Regan’s particularly Spartan approach to evaluating spirits called for using as few words as possible: one word is best, two is good, three is ok. Anything more than that and you may be blowing hot air up our skirts.

There is a middle ground, of course. I like the one-word approach. Orange. Oak. Peat. Even Autumn or Grandpa. Gets at the heart of the thing immediately. Provides a nice platform for developing what you’d want to do with the spirit. But well-made spirits (and some disastrous attempts as well) may be more complex than a mere three words capture. As a heuristic device, Grandpa gets the mind working, but he’s not a monolithic aroma. What else does he smell of? Cigars? Old shoe leather? Aqua Velva? Freshly-mown grass? Grandma, perhaps? We’ll put aside for the time being what he might taste like.

Stepping up to classify those points that distinguish gold medal spirits from also-rans, the Wine & Spirits Education Trust has developed an approach to liquor tasting that guides tasters through evaluating a spirit’s appearance, nose, palate, and aroma & flavor characteristics (download Level 4 Diploma - Spirits pdf here).

ADI’s hundred-point system is informed by WSET’s system, but it heavily weights a spirit’s aromatics and flavor. When evaluating the spirits, the eight judges assigned points in six categories;

• Appearance (10)
• Aromatics (30)
• Flavor (30)
• Mouth Feel (10)
• Finish (10)
• Balance (10)

By the time the judges emerged from the private room, clear winners had already emerged. By the by, notice that Peach Street Distillers of Colorado took home five medals. Congratulations, boys. And congratulations to all the winners. They are:

Fruit Infusions (fruit infusion in a fruit spirit)
Gold: St. George Spirits—Aqua Perfecta Framboise Liqueur
Silver: Huber Starlight Distillery—Raspberry Dessert Wine
Bronze: Uncle John's Farmhouse & Winery—Apple Dessert Wine

Eau de Vie—Pear
Gold: Westford Hills
Silver: (Tie) Peach Street Distillers & St. George Spirits Aqua Perfecta
Bronze: Harvest Spirits

Eau de Vie—Other
Gold: St. George Spirits Aqua Perfecta Framboise
Silver: Peach Street Distillers Peach Eau de Vie
Bronze: Westford Hills Distillers—Kirsch

Grappa—Varietal
Gold: Peach Street Distillers—Gewurtztraminer
Silver: Peak Spirits—Riesling
Bronze: Peach Street Distillers—Muscat

Grappa—Non-Varietal
Gold: Huber Starlight Distillery
Silver: Great Lakes Distillery

Brandy—Apple
Best of Category: St. George Spirits—Heirloom

Brandy—Other
Double Gold: Brandy Peak—Pear Brandy
Silver: Peach Street Distillers—Peach Brandy

Grape Brandy
Gold: Jepson Vineyards—Signature Reserve
Silver: Jepson Vineyards—Old Stock
Bronze: Osocalis—Rare Alambic Brandy

ADI brandy judges from left to right: Nancy Fraley (CA), Graham Hamblett (NH), Brendan Moylan (CA), Dan Farber (CA), standing moderator Andrew Faulkner (CA), Rory Donovan (CO), Deborah Parker Wong (CA), Hubert Germain-Robin (CA) and Don Beatty (CA). All told, the judges spent eight solid hours judging submissions.

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Forbidden Ham: Konohiki Short Pig

If tiki pads paid as much attention to their food as they do drinks, a lot more converts would be listening to Jake Shimabukuro and donning Hawaiian shirts. As it stands, tropical cocktails take the lion’s share of attention while hungry drinkers frequently make do with appetizers that just don’t try as hard as the well-crafted beverages.

Exceptions are out there, of course. Jeff Barry, Wayne Curtis, and Chris DeBarr put together a tiki meal for last year’s Tales of the Cocktail on New Orleans that paired locally-sourced foods with “exotic” spices and reportedly elevated the stellar cocktail experience to new heights (can’t vouch for that as I was making a glutton of myself that night at Cochon with a table full of distillers and snoots of Ted Breaux’s Perique liqueur).

But thoughts of that dinner surfaced recently after I bought a spiral-cut ham. The industrial glaze packet included with the ham reeked of clove oil, too much cinnamon, and too much sugar. So I threw it out. A light glaze was called for while the ham baked, but what to substitute at a moment’s notice? Over the pings of the warming oven, a siren call softly came of tiki cocktails. Yes, tiki would save my ass.

The ham could not be simpler, assuming you have two tropical staples on hand: Angostura bitters and orgeat, the almond syrup called for in drinks such as the classic Scorpion Bowl or San Diego’s own Coronado Luau Special. Heating the orgeat and bitters with Dijon mustard proved just the taste I was going for. Pineapple might work, but I didn’t have any. Clearly, this is a recipe the invites dinking and tweaking.

The ham may be whole or half, bone-in, or boned. In this instance, it a half, bone-in, spiral-cut number.

Konohiki Short Pig

One ready-to-eat ham

Glaze
1 cup/250ml Dijon mustard (whole grain or Creole is fine)
1 cup/250ml orgeat
½ oz Angostura bitters

Preheat the oven to 350°F/162°C. If the ham has skin, cut it off and trim any fat to ¼” or so. Line a roasting pan with aluminum foil and place the ham, fat side up, in the pan. Cook about ten minutes per pound (so about two hours for a half ham, up to three hours for a larger one) or until the internal temperature reaches 130-40°F/54-60°C. Remove from the oven and bump the temperature to 425°F/218°C.

In a small pan, heat the glaze ingredients together and whisk until smooth. Pour this glaze over the ham. If it is spiral-cut, make sure the glaze gets down in between the slices. Heat in the oven another 20-30 minutes, basting now and then with the juices and glaze that pools on the bottom of the pan.

Remove the ham from the oven, cover it loosely with aluminum foil and let it rest about 20 minutes before carving and serving.

And—because I think the guy's amazing—Jake Shimabukuro playing While My Guitar Gently Weeps. You can play it while your short pig gently bakes.


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Bookshelf: Cordial Waters

Volodimir Pavliuchuk is so well known among hobbyist distillers that if he spent a week in internet silence, home distillers from New York to New Zealand would call his local police to make sure the man had not fallen in his boiler.

Pavliuchuk, better known as Wal, is a pillar of Yahoo’s online distillers’ group. His near daily posts about and links to historical recipes, PDFs of old distilling manuals, ethnographic accounts, essays, and dissertations on producing spirits spur hobbyist distillers to recreate bygone, lost, and forgotten spirits. Or, at least, to know about them.

And now Wal has a book. Cordial Waters: A Compleat Guide to Ardent Spirits of the World hit the shelves recently and home distillers everywhere should be breaking out wallets right about…now.

The book covers distilling basics, including simple recipes for creating vodka, whiskeys, brandies, rum, and other spirits from primary ingredients. Purists may balk at plain white sugar in some recipes or additives for emulating peat or barrel aging, but recall that the recipes are for home enthusiasts who may not have access to expensive professional equipment. If those bother you, skip them. There’s plenty enough here worth digging into.















The meat of Cordial Waters—the reason you want to buy this book—is 260 recipes Wal gives for flavored spirits; cordials, liqueurs, flower waters, crèmes, gins, flavored whiskeys and brandies, citrus infusions, bitters, kümmel, pastis, absinthes, monastic liqueurs, genevers, vodkas (flavored with bison grass, tormentil, tobacco, birch buds, spruce, and more), spiced rums, cream liqueurs, spirits spiked with beans and nuts, shrubbs, and—for you tiki fans—Hawaiian okolehao. Hell, he’s even got mesquite mash. And mastic liqueur. Laudanum. Crazy shit with alkermes, cochineal, and ants. So many more culled from sources spanning centuries and continents.

The recipes have been scaled to standardized 1- or 4-liter batches. Many readers—perhaps especially those with little experience, or patience with, interpreting older recipes—will find this a great convenience since such recipes often call for outdated or uncertain measurements [hands, drachms, “enough,” two bottles (what size?), until it becomes a stiff paste, etc.]. By presenting the recipes in liters and grams, Wal skillfully works around the uncertainties a novice might encounter.

Readers with a tenacious historical or bibliographic bent, however, will regret that the book does not present original recipes alongside the adaptations nor does it cite each recipe’s source. This redaction—understandable given the book’s space restrictions—nevertheless is frustrating because original recipes contain valuable clues about techniques, procedures, purposes, and sometimes even reasons why mixtures were made at certain times and not others.

An 1890 falernum recipe, for instance, calls for milk, presumably cow’s. Milk? Really? See, that’s interesting in and of itself. I trust Wal, but want to learn about its role from the original. Was it a fining, maybe? Combined with lime juice, allowed to settle, then racked and strained, that may just work, but modern versions from the cocktail crowd and rum enthusiasts don’t use it. A citation would give enough information to start a library hunt in earnest. Ah, well. Second edition perhaps.

Regardless, Cordial Waters is a delight. Those who want to learn more no doubt will latch onto innumerable nuggets of insight larding the book. Buried in notes for a rosa-solis recipe, for example, is mention of a 1609 recipe that calls for Brasilwood boiled in rosewater to create a red color. What New York or San Francisco bartender is doing that? Also noted is that drying celandine (Chelidonium majus) reduces its toxicity and that adding 0.1 gram of silver nitrate/liter prior to redistilling causes hydrogen cyanide in stone fruit spirits to precipitate as insoluble silver cyanide. These are good things to know.

It’s not all fancy, outrageous, or outré concoctions. There are plenty of recipes that can be made with little more than store-bought vodka and fresh herbs or spices. Knowing something about cocktails and liquor, though, would be a great help in understanding procedures and, occasionally, when to veer from directions.

Of particular use is an appendix explaining the Pearson Square. Homebrewers and winemakers are familiar with this handy diagram that allows mixers to calculate quickly the amounts of two liquids required to fortify or dilute alcoholic beverages. Several examples (including one suggesting that Pavliuchuk likes his martinis 7:1) show in clear detail how to make simple calculations using the square.

Who should buy it? Every hobbyist distiller. Who else? Bartenders, cocktail enthusiasts, drinks historians, botanists, ethnopharmacologists—anyone who enjoys making cordials and liqueurs. Certainly anyone with a still will find inspiration here. In these tight times, and with the long-overdue ascendancy of cocktail culture, that’s a lot of people.

Who else should buy it? You.

Do so here.

Goes well with:

• Moonshine! ~ my own novice's guide to distilling. Publisher's Weekly calls it "the last book one will ever need on the art of in-house hooch." Perfect for Father's Day.
  
• The Compleat Distiller ~ Mike Nixon and Mike McCaw's treatise on the science of making spirits, a classic among modern hobbyist distillers.
  
• Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails ~ Ted Haigh's erudite profile of cocktails fallen into obscurity and now enjoying a renaissance. Second edition is forthcoming.

Volodimir Pavliuchuk (2008)
Cordial Waters: A Compleat Guide to Ardent Spirits of the World
152 pages, paperback.
Published by The Amphora Society
Pakuranga, New Zealand
$25


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Meet the Maker Ticket Lottery Winners

It's been a long and boozy day.

The American Distilling Institute's brandy conference kicked off this evening with a reception hosted by the generous Fritz Maytag of Anchor. There was no sampling of his whiskeys or gins, but a tour of the brewery (with stills, naturally) and plenty of beer, sausage, and Maytag blue cheese. Before that, ADI ran a juried brandy competition with guest judges behind closed doors at St. George Spirits in Alameda. I stopped by to talk to the judges and ended up washing glasses and pouring snifter after snifter of brandies with John Couchot of Rogue Spirits. Some true beauties, some that needed work, but what a delight to have hundreds of bottles of American brandies right on the bar in front of me. One could make enough sidecars for a year.

Most brandies there—as well as whiskeys, gins, absinthes, and others—will be available for sampling at Sunday's Meet the Maker event at the distillery. Let's see, let's see...Was I supposed to do something to prepare for that?

Oh yes! Time to announce the winners of the ticket lottery for admission to Sunday's event. Thanks for everyone who emailed—an overwhelming response for such short notice, far more than expected and I'm only sorry that I don't have more passes to hand out. From a random drawing of names, and in the order picked, the passes go to...

1. Jason Beck, San Francisco
2. Neal Aronowitz, Portland, Oregon
3. Sherman Owen, Shepherdsville, Kentucky
4. Ted Weinstein, San Francisco
   

Neal and Sherman, I know you'll be at St. George Saturday. Track me down and I'll hand you your golden tickets in person. Jason and Ted ~ If you're around for the conference, find me tomorrow. Otherwise, I'll leave them with your name with the admissions folks Sunday.

Good night, good night, everyone.

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Meet the Maker Ticket Lottery

[Edit: winners have been announced and the lottery is closed. Thanks to all who entered!] I’m giving away admission tickets and one of them may just have your name on it.

This Sunday, the American Distilling Institute is holding Meet the Maker at St. George Spirits/Hangar One in Alameda, CA, just outside San Francisco. While the theme of this year’s ADI conference is brandy, Sunday is not just about fruit spirits—the men and women who actually make brandy will be on hand to pour samples of other wares such as whiskey, gin, absinthe, and more. They’ll be happy to walk you through their products and answer your questions.

I’ll be there. Will you? Well, just maybe you will. See, I’ve got five tickets to the event and that’s four more than I need. So I’m holding a lottery to give away the spares. Here’s the deal: Email me by 5pm (San Francisco time) this Friday, April 3rd to put your name into a lottery for one of the spares. I’ll conduct a random lottery to determine the winners and post the results here on the Whiskey Forge later that day. Come Sunday, I’ll leave the tickets (each a $40 value) for you in an envelope with your name at the admissions desk.

Details

• Who: You
• What: Meet the Maker
• Where: St. George Spirits, 2601 Monarch St, Alameda, CA 94501
• When: Sunday, April 5th, 2-5pm
• Cost: $40 (unless you score one of the Whiskey Forge free passes)

How to Enter the Lottery

• Email me: [moonshinearchives (at) gmail (dot) com] by 5pm PST this Friday, April 3rd. No entries will be accepted after this.
  
• Include (1) your name, (2) preferred email address, (3) city and state and (4) telephone number
• Please, if you can't make it, pass on this lottery so that folks actually in and around San Francisco can attend and the tickets don't go to waste.
• Winners will be notified by email and posted here.
  

If you don’t want to take chances and be certain to get admission, you can purchase tickets here or buy them at the door the day of the event.

See you there!