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User-Generated Cocktails

Here is my latest story in the San Francisco Chronicle, December 27th 2009 edition.

Bartenders shift from lecture to nurture

Camper English, Special to The Chronicle

Friday, December 25, 2009

A common sight in the nation's speakeasy-themed bars is a list of rules about what one can and cannot do – and can and cannot order. But among a newer batch of bars, the trendiest design feature is dialogue.

"Three years ago it was OK to be rude. It used to be 'I'm not making a cosmo and you're a horrible person.' Now we say, 'I'm not making a cosmo, but I'm making you something better than a cosmo.' And if they like (the drink) they trust you for the whole night," says Erick Castro, general manager at Rickhouse in San Francisco's Financial District.

Bartenders at top cocktail spots have shifted from a lecturing mode into more of a nurturing one, and Castro says the strategy has paid off.

"The same people who used to complain that we didn't have Bud Light and Grey Goose are now our biggest customers, coming in three times a week and ordering rye Manhattans," he says.

Photo: Michael Macor / The Chronicle

Read the rest of the story here. The story centers on how bartenders are trusting consumers to trust them more, instead of focusing on lists of rules of behavior. The story namechecks Heaven's Dog, Bourbon & Branch, Rickhouse, The Alembic in San Francisco, Copa d'Oro in Santa Monica, Drink in Boston, Klee in Singapore, and door74 in Amsterdam.

Yeah, I get around.

December 26, 2009
New History on the Pisco Sour

Guillermo Toro-Lira is probably the US's leading pisco historian, devoting years' worth of study to drinks such as the Pisco Punch and Pisco Sour. The latter drink was created by Victor Morris, an American who moved to Peru with the mining trade and opened a bar. Toro-Lira got hold of the register of Morris' bar, and this revealed many truths about the history of the Pisco Sour.

For background, the Pisco Sour is a simple sour, made with pisco, lemon or lime, sugar, and often an egg white and bitters. It is no revelation, based on the traditional sour recipe, but in this case we have a good idea of its origin. Pisco is a grape brandy from Peru and traditionally distilled in pot stills and unaged, as opposed to Chilean pisco that is a latecomer, usually distilled in column stills and sometimes briefly aged.

To read Toro-Lira's recent discoveries and theories based on Morris' bar register, check out the article here.

December 22, 2009
Montego Bay, By Way of Heaven’s Dog

I can't stop thinking about the delicious drink I had during Tiki Week at Heaven's Dog. So I asked bar/general manger Erik Adkins for the recipe and he was nice enough to share.

"The Montego Bay is listed in Beachbum Berry's 'Intoxica'. He says that
it is a Don the Beachcomber Drink from the Hotel Sahara in Las Vegas
1940's."

The version they made at Heaven's Dog is this:

Montego Bay

(adapted from Beachbum Berry's Intoxica by Erik Adkins of Heaven's Dog)
1/2 oz lime
1/2 oz grapefruit
1 oz honey syrup (1 to 1 dilution with water)

2 dashes Angostura bitters
4 dashes absinthe
1/4 oz all spice dram
11/2 oz Smith & Cross Jamaican rum

Shake all ingredients and strain over crushed ice.

This is one of those drinks where Smith & Cross completely makes the drink. So funky.

December 21, 2009
Smuggler’s Cove in Pictures and Words

Smuggler's Cove, the San Francisco tiki bar by "Shoeless" Martin Cate, opens in San Francisco on Tuesday, December 8th. I got a sneak preview along with other members of the press on Thursday night. To give you an idea about the level of excitement around this bar opening, some cocktail nerds drove up from Los Angeles or flew down from Portland to witness it in person, assuming they'd see it now before it is packed for the next few months as the very enthusiastic tiki crowd swarms in.

Smuggler's Cove has a gorgeous menu featuring 80 mostly rum cocktails and will have over 200 sipping rums. There are incentives for drinking them all. Join the "Rumbustion Society" and work your way through the rum list to gain access to samples from very rare bottles. Or join the "Voyager of the Cove" club and try all the cocktails for unspecified super secret perks.

Ah, but what does it look like? Sort of like the entrance to a theme ride at Disney World. Rather than being a design theme or decor, the three-story (yet small) bar is filled with props and sets. The giant anchor that hangs menacingly over the main stairway is thankfully not made of solid metal, nor is the canon that threatens to squish the bartender. Giant rocks poke out from the walls, some sort of tribal spears adorn a wall, and rum crates are used as tables in the basement. It's like drinking on a movie set, not that I've ever done that.

It's all very unreal, except for where it's not. The bar is actually packed with historic artifacts from tiki bars around the country- the the ship's wheel and Boathouse sign above the downstairs bar, vintage tiki mugs, totem polls, and other flotsam and jetsam once adorned the walls of various Trader Vic's and other bars. The three display windows at the entry level bar are mini-museums dedicated to past San Francisco tiki bars, including one where the first tiki mug was created. There is so much history in the place I'm considering asking Martin to train me as a docent to give regular tours.

So here are the pictures.

The top floor is a bamboo hut lounge where journalists take notes about the bamboo hut lounge on the top floor.

The street level bar is small and backed by endless bottles of delicious rum.

Recent LA transplant Matty Eggleston was working there on preview night.

The ceiling in this room is tall and packed with barrels, boxes, and other stuff held up with ropes and pulleys.

In the basement, Dominic Venegas works the bar.

No wait! That was a pufferfish lamp. This is Dominic Venegas working in the basement bar.

And this is the guy who built this magic playground for us, "Shoeless" Martin Cate. Congratulations Martin!

December 5, 2009
Carving Big (and clear) Ice Cubes

After much experimentation I have found one method to make big clear chunks of ice. That method is to put water in a cooler in the freezer, then chop off the top clear layer. Now the trick was to get this into useful sized cubes for glasses.

*Update 2021: A better post on cutting up clear ice is here.

Starting with the slab of ice (this one about three inches thick),

I used a heated bread knife to score the ice just about 1/8th of an inch,

Then tapped the scratch in several places with an ice pick and found it separated really easily.

And I got the whole thing chopped into long spears.

I use these really long ones in a tall glass

and scored and cut the rest of the spears into big fat cubes.

Hooray! Time for a drink.

An index of all of the ice experiments on Alcademics can be found here.

December 2, 2009
Clear Ice Blocks from the Fridge
In my ongoing experiments trying to make clear ice in the refrigerator, I first tried:
And had success with:
- Releasing Air Trapped in Ice
- Cutting Corners to Make Clear Ice
Then theorized about the pond method.

The next step was testing this pond method (trying to freeze ice from the top-down rather than outside-in). To do this, I needed an insulated container on all sides except for the top. My first attempt was with a collapsible beer cooler:

I filled it with plain tap water and let it freeze for three or four days. The container expanded as it froze so the ice was rather difficult to remove. At the end, the block still didn't completely freeze, but as we've learned in earlier experiments the last parts to freeze are where the ice gets the cloudiest. It was also cloudy toward the center but I think that's because I gave the cooler a squeeze in the fridge before it was frozen.

The next task was to cut off the cloudy parts so that only the clear ice remained. The first time I did this with a saw. This took a long time and as I learned later was probably not necessary.

But it worked!

Part Two: Just a Bit Off the Top

Since I wasted so much of this large block I wanted to try a simpler method: Freezing it from the top down and trying to just pop off the top.

Once again I filled the cooler with water and froze it, for just a couple of days this time. When I pulled it out of the freezer the water had mostly froze from the top down, though there was a light shell of ice around the shape of the cooler. Thus to get the ice out, I smashed in the sides of the cooler and pulled off the top. It was a bit easier than the entire block to remove from the cooler, but not easy per se.

This slab was about four inches thick and wonderfully clear.

The next trick would be trying to cut it down into smaller cubes. More on than in the next post.

Conclusions:
1. To make a big slab of clear ice, start with an even bigger slab of ice and cut off the rest. At least for San Francisco water, the shape of the container matters more than anything else- boiling, filtered, or distilled water.
2. My collapsible cooler isn't heavily insulated, so the water does partially freeze from the bottom and sides and a better insulator would be ideal.
To do:
1. Find a better insulated container to maximize the "pond effect" so that water only freezes from the top down.
2. Figure out how to efficiently cut the ice into big cubes.
An index of ice experiments on Alcademics can be found here.
December 1, 2009
Don’t Forget the Wild Tofurkey

When you're out shopping for your liquor-loving vegetarian guests for Thanksgiving this year, don't forget to pick up some tofu and booze to make my special Wild Tofurkey dish. It's tofu marinated in a cocktail and baked. Mmm.

November 22, 2009
Another Clue to Ice Clarity: Slow Freezing Like a Japanese Pond

The other night a friend of mine told me that she read something about clear ice, which as you may recall is a topic of interest of this blog. Naturally I forgot what she said (we were at a bar, remember) but the next day I found the following email I had sent to myself:

"Clear ice old japan sawdust"

The amazing thing is that when you put that into Google the very first story it comes up with is what I assume is the exact thing my friend was talking about. In this story on natural ice (popsicles) in Japan, a person in the story gives a quote that could prove useful.

Masao Yoshiara, the fourth-generation president of the company, said: "In Nikko, the daily lowest temperature in winter averages around minus 10 C, ideal for making crystal-clear ice.

"If it's colder than that, ice can be made quickly but it is not solid enough. Here, ice grows 1 centimeter thicker a day. When ice becomes about 15 centimeters thick over half a month, we cut out ice blocks. If an ice block is thicker than that, it contains cracks."

Minus 10 degrees Celsius is 14 degrees Fahrenheit. I don't know the temperature of my home freezer, but it's worth investing in a thermometer to find out. Perhaps slow freezing equals clearer ice.

The other factor we'll have to consider about pond ice is that the bottom never freezes. Thus the air that is a major factor in cloudy ice is still in the warmer water below the surface layer of the ice.

This is another strategy I've been considering in attempting to get clear ice in the freezer: if I place a good insulator at the bottom and sides of the water container that doesn't cool down nearly as fast as the water (for example a super thick glass bowl, or a pan of ice that sits on a stone surface), will that cause all the air in the water to migrate to the bottom and freeze last?

This reading inspires a lot more ice experiments to come. I'm glad I emailed myself from the bar.

An index of ice experiments on Alcademics can be found here.

November 19, 2009
Does Freezing Water in Layers Make Clear Ice?
Here's a new edition in my ongoing ice experiments. So far, there experiments have been:
With successes in:
- Releasing Air Trapped in Ice
- Cutting Corners to Make Clear Ice
So far my conclusions have been that (at least with my San Francisco water), temperature and filtering have less of an effect than trapped air that migrates to the center of the freezing cube. Thus I am trying to minimize this effect.

In this experiment I froze ice in layers in small lasagna pans to see if we had a maximized surface area, hopefully no air would get trapped in the ice and form cloudy parts. Apparently some commercial ice machines such as Kold Draft spray an upside-down mist of water in layers, so this would be the home approximation of that.

I tried this experiments with tiny layers, medium layers, and large layers in the same sized pan, the difference being that I added more water per layer. I let the water freeze before adding another layer.

As you can see, none of the layers turned out clear:

(Tiny layers, medium layers, and large layers left to right.)

The small sized layers were made only adding a couple of ounces of water at a time, so I can't get much smaller layers than these unless I use a spray bottle.

We'll have to call this one a failure. Freezing water in layers does not appear to make clear ice, just ice with smaller layers of trapped air.

Below is a closeup of the layers for your ice ogling enjoyment.

An index of all of the ice experiments on Alcademics can be found here.
November 19, 2009
Passing the B.A.R.
This past fall I took the B.A.R., Beverage Alcohol Resource, five-day course in New York. The course has two levels- "Ready" and "Certified", with the only difference in the number of drinks one has to make within a certain time on the practical bartending exam. The course ran for about 12 hours each day for the first four days, with nearly a full day of testing on the last day. It was a real butt-kicker.

People seemed to come away with different impressions of the course, but what stuck out most to me was what you need to know not just to pass the class, but to say that you're at an expert level in the industry. It's a lot. You need to know:
1. The science and history of fermentation and distillation from the dawn of time
2. The history, ingredients, geography, and practical and legal production rules for every major category of spirits
3. The entire history of bartending and individual history and timelines of dozens of important cocktails
4. How to blind taste and identify spirits, quality of distillation, barrel type and age, and other production parameters, down to individual brands and bottlings
5. How to balance drinks, mix drinks, make them fast and of the highest quality possible while providing top quality customer service
6. How to create new drinks and tweak existing ones based on different mixological strategies
7. How to blind taste and critique cocktails
I took 76 pages of notes in those four days, after having read and studied the textbook, attended dozens on lectures by the instructors, read zillions of books, and passed the BAR Smarts course before the course. We sampled a few hundred spirits blind, I practiced bartending until my shoulder ached from shaking, and still tried to find time to study each night before passing out.

I decided to attempt the BAR Ready certification, thinking that I knew so much about the history and production rules of spirits that I wouldn't have to even study for that part of the test. (Boy was I wrong about that.) Luckily if you don't make all your drinks in time to be BAR Ready you can still pass BAR Certified. And I did, which is awesome.

My takeaway from the course is not just the new information and skill set gained during the week, but knowing what it takes to stay on top of things going forward: A great and constant amount of work tasting, testing, practicing, learning, and reviewing what you think you already know.
November 16, 2009