Hello drink hounds! Just in case you’ve missed my monthly Seattle magazine Bar Hop column lately, here are some handy links to the bars I’ve profiled after much research (it’s all for you, I hope you understand):
• Bait Shop (Capitol Hill)
• Ground Control/Brass Tacks (Georgetown)
• Mutiny Hall (Roosevelt)
Hello friends and neighbors near and far – it’s that time again, where I point you towards the posts I’ve written for the rad Seattle magazine, just in case you missed any of them. Remember: even if they’re specific for an event that’s passed (or in the past, like Arbor Day), the drinks contained within the articles still taste good. Without further ado:
• Four Cocktails Perfect for a Crowd
• A Speakeasy on Wheels and Other Spirit Release and Distillery News
• Thirsty? Drink Seattle App Finds the Best Bars Close to You
• Skip the Blender: 3 On-the-Rocks Margaritas to Make Now for Cinco de Mayo
• 4 Poetic Cocktails for National Poetry Month
• 3 Organic Cocktails for Earth Day
• Cocktail Recipe: Summer in Madagascar
• Five Virgin Cocktail Recipes
As anyone knows, a week on this blog equals, usually, three posts (sue me if that seems wrong—my lawyers are at the bar). Which means, sadly, Shot Week is already coming to an end. Be sure you read Shot Week Day 1 and Shot Week Day 2 to get the full story. But the basics are thus: cocktail genius and genuinely nice fella Andrew Bohrer has a delicious new book out, called The Best Shots You’ve Never Tried. It’s bringing the idea of the shot, a shorter drink, to a higher plateau. Instead of shots thrown down the throat rapidly so-as to avoid tasting them, the shots in his book are ones to savor and share. So, quit pussyfooting around—buy the book. If Shot Week so far wasn’t enough to sway you, check out the below recipe for the diabolical Diablita, which you should consume rapidly to ensure the devil doesn’t enter your mouth.
Diablita
1 ounce reposado tequila
.25 ounce crème de cassis
.25 ounce lime juice
2 ounces ginger beer
1. Pour ingredients into a shot glass and slam.
If you didn’t read Shot Week, Day 1, then go do that now, so you know where I (and the shots) am coming from. In short, from Andrew Bohrer’s bubbly new book The Best Shots You’ve Never Tried, but go get the full backstory in the below post—I’ll wait.
Great, now that we’re all on the same shot page (so to speak), I’m going jump right into Shot Week’s second shot, one with history and cooking. But hey, to give you a better feel for the book’s personality—which is wonderful—I’m gonna back out of the way and let Andrew talk, via the headnote from the book:
“The Carthusian Shrub
Plums and cocktails don’t really mix. Even the ripest plums must be mashed into oblivion to get any play into a cocktail. The Carthusian Shrub takes fresh plums and roasts out their sweet juices into, well, a shrub. What is a shrub? A type of colonial era, prebottled cocktail consisting of cooked fruit and vinegar. It may sound crazy, but this type of boozy gastrique was a mainstay of drinking culture long before the cocktail was invented.”
Makes 2 Shots
1 de-stoned plum
2 ounces Green Chartreuse
1 ounce water
.25 ounce balsamic vinegar
1. Preheat oven to 350 ° F.
2. Cover the de-stoned plum with Green Chartreuse, water, and balsamic vinegar in a roasting pan.
3. Roast uncovered for 30 minutes.
4 . Allow mixture to cool and strain into a separate vessel.
5. Serve in 1½-ounce shots.
6. Enjoy eating the roasted plum.
Wait, before you start, let me say that I know what you’re going to say. “Shot?” you would have said if I hadn’t stopped you, “aren’t shots just something you throw down to ingest quickly, not worrying about the taste just the result?” Luckily, I stopped you, cause you would have been 100% wrong.
Well, maybe not 100%, as you, like me, may have grown up throwing down cheap tequila and gawd-awful mixes in shot glasses, and so may have been trained to think about “shots” a certain way. But shots can be wonderful: smaller packages of lovingly mixed together drinks. These shots are ideal for when you want a quick taste, for when you want to send a little special drink to that little special someone, for when you just need a rapid fling with a drink and not a full on affair, and for many other situations. More well-thought-out shots are showing on many snazzy bar menus, but the trend of better shots has really been kicked off by the new book The Best Shots You’ve Never Tried, by Andrew Bohrer.
Full disclosure: I know Andrew Bohrer (as anyone—meaning: you—who has read this blog for a while knows). I’ve had some of his drinks in my books and am a fan, as you should be, of his cuddly-curmudgeon cocktail-and-bar blog Cask Strength. But even if I wouldn’t recognize him even if I was sitting next to him at the bar, I’d still suggest picking up his new shots book cause it’s packed with great drinks, great charm, great booze history, and great drinks (said twice cause it matters most). I’m gonna highlight a few drinks from the book this week to prove my point, starting with the below number, The Wing Beneath My Wings, which will positively make you sing.
Wind Beneath My Wings
1 ounce single malt Scotch
.5 ounce Pedro Ximénez sherry
1 lemon twist
1. Stir and strain into a shot glass.
2. Garnish with a lemon twist. Makes one shot.
All shot week recipes and photos are excerpted from The Best Shots You’ve Never Tried: 100+ Intoxicating Oddities You’ll Actually Want to Put Down by Andrew Bohrer (August 2012, F+W Media).
It’s that time again Seattle bar lovers (or those lucky folks getting ready to visit the lovely city of Seattle, the Emerald City, Jet City, and known to many as Awesome-Bar-City). The time where I put my recent Seattle Magazine Bar Hop columns (like in Bar Hop posts past) in an easy-to-read bulleted format, so you can catch up on what bars I’ve been drinking at lately, what I said about said bars, and why you should probably go visit these bars soon.
• Vessel (in Downtown)
• Saint John’s Bar and Eatery (in Capitol Hill)
• Macleod’s Scottish Pub (in Ballard)
• The Gerald (in Ballard)
Let your drinking commence.
It’s summertime (still—honest) and the living is wine cocktails-y. At least it should be cause wine cocktail are refreshing, and un-snooty, and fun, and delicious, and all that. And recently, as if me saying it aloud and in digital form wasn’t enough, I did a little interview with Woman’s World magazine, so it’s in print. And print is forever. So, pick up the most recent issue of said magazine. I also have the page with me here below (but the whole issue is fun, naturally), which has some wine cocktails talk, two recipes from the book Wine Cocktails, notes about how wine and wine cocktails are healthy (including protecting breasts, which I’m all for and which is just another reason why cocktails are the definition of awesome), and something about Ladybug Bling–which can’t be bad. So, read up:
Who wouldn’t want to make their day or summer or life better (or gooder)? I mean, even if you’re walking on sunshine, walking on sunshine with a good drink is going to make it a more memorable experience (provided you don’t have too many and slip off the sunshine. But I digress). Which, if you follow along to a logical conclusion, means that every life could be better (or gooder). But how, you may ask me, how can that be possible? Well, one way to start might be with the Good Life Report. Just look at the name—it implies a life that’s good. Now, to take it up a notch, I’m gonna suggest that you look at two pieces I recently had in said Good Life Report: A Somewhat Sicilian Summer Cocktail Star and Give the Imbibable Power to the People. Both contain tasty drink recipes and words of making-life-better wisdom. Okay, that last bit is probably BS, but hey, at least the drinks are tasty, and could probably get you walking on sunshine. That’s enough of a thing to get you over there reading them, right? Right!
The Man Behind the Evening's Plans
A.J. Rathbun is a freelance food and entertainment writer, poet and author, a frequent guest on the Everyday Food program (Martha Stewart Living/Sirius satellite radio), and is a contributor to culinary & entertainment magazines such as Every Day with Rachael Ray, The Food Network Magazine, Real Simple, Wine Enthusiast, and many others. Of course, there's so much more to it than that...
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