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The Third Annual Tales of the Cocktail Swag Awards

It's that time of year again, the time for the Tales of the Cocktail Swag Awards!

View the winners from 2007 here and the 2008 Swag Awards here.

This year instead of a gift bag there was a swag room at Tales, so you took a bag and walked around and filled it up with items of interest. My items of interest became clear during this exchange in the elevator of the hotel immediately afterward.

Stranger, looking at my sack o' swag: "You know San Francisco's in the house when you see somebody with a bag of Fernet."

He was mistaken- I only had about 10 minis of Fernet on top of the bag. I also filled with the bag with other minis, making up the majority of my swag.

And to add to what I am now calling a collection, a few more muddlers.

I also was given four different cocktail shakers and managed to give three of them away before I got on the plane.

Most of best swag came from the cocktail bloggers' conference held the two days before Tales though. I got a full set (minus the new Bittermen's Bitters) set of The Bitter Truth cocktail bitters,

as well as a nice set of Rosle garnish tools.

But the best was a tiki mug- in the shape of Magnum, P.I. from Tiki Farm!

However, as the Drink.Write 2009 conference was a private event, even the best mug cannot be declared the winner.

But what can? Find out after the jump…

(more…)

July 17, 2009
Drinks to Match the Dress

San Francisco bartender pairs cocktail with cocktail dress

Camper English, Special to The Chronicle

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Many cocktail contests now require bartenders to pair drinks with meals or invent them on the spot with a secret ingredient, but a recent competition challenged mixologists around the world with a new pairing: cocktails with cocktail dresses.

Jacqueline Patterson, a bartender at Heaven's Dog in San Francisco, was the winning bartender from the United States. Accessorize 2009 was sponsored by Cherry Heering, a liqueur that the brand owners call an "accessory" in cocktails such as the Singapore Sling.

Read the rest of my latest story in the San Francisco Chronicle here.

July 14, 2009
History of the El Diablo Cocktail in Trader Vic’s Books

I was trying to find the first reference to the El Diablo cocktail recently.

Mexican El Diablo

1/2 lime

1 ounce tequila

1/2 crème de cassis

Ginger Ale

Squeeze lime juice into a 10-ounce glass; drop in spent shell. Add ice cubes, tequila, and crème de cassis. Fill glass with ginger ale.

Searching the web, the earliest reference I read to it was from Trader Vic's books of 1946 and 1947.

I asked tiki expert Martin Cate, who has these books, if he knew if the drink was a Trader Vic original. After his research it's still not entirely clear, but the research is interesting in itself.

Martin says:

IT IS in the 1946 TV Book of Food and Drink- It is
called a "Mexican El Diablo" and it IS singled out as an original
cocktail.

IT IS in the 1947 TV Bartender's Guide again as a
"Mexican El Diablo", but does not declare it an original- although that book
does not specify.

It's not in the TV Kitchen Kibitzer
1952

IT IS in the TV Pacific Island Cookbook of
1968, but now called "El Diablo" only

IT IS in the TV Bartender Guide Revised 1972 as an
"El Diablo", but does not say it's his. This edition DOES call out
original drinks.

Thanks Martin!

If anyone finds an earlier reference to the El Diablo or Mexican El Diablo, please let me know.

June 27, 2009
Rickhouse: A First Look

Yesterday I stopped in to Rickhouse, the new bar by the folks from Bourbon & Branch, Swig, Anu, and the liquor store Cask.

The bar is located at 246 Kearny Street at the site of the long-time gay bar Ginger's Trois. (I believe Anu was built where Ginger's Too was once located.) Ginger's was a small space with a sunken bar and a tiny seating area in the back, all with a unique art deco design.

Rickhouse couldn't be more different. They completely remodeled the space and annexed the old storage room and some unused restrooms in the back. Now you enter on a long vertical room with a bar running down one side. In the back of the front room is a small balcony beneath a newly-installed skylight that apparently gets direct overhead light for just an hour or so per day. The balcony is open on either side, facing the front and back rooms.

The back room is situated like a "T" to the front room, and can be partitioned off with large sliding wood doors. The bar for this room is on the back left, and it smaller than the one in the front.

When the space is open, there will be low seats and small tables throughout both rooms and the balcony. However, unlike B&B there will not be reserved seating. (There will be cocktail servers though to take the crush off the front bar.) The furniture is all pretty mobile, so depending on the number of people and the time of the day, they'll move the furniture around to accommodate everyone.

The walls, ceilings, and floors are all made of wood. I think it's nearly all reclaimed wood- most of it from barrel staves used in layers on the ceiling (similar to the ceiling at Cask), some of it from a construction project next door, and some from a former nunnery where they distilled whiskey during prohibition. Former bourbon barrels are also used as decoration in the space, and the chandeliers are made from the metal bands that bind barrels together. One exposed brick wall opposite the front bar apparently has some of the char left from the 1906 fire.

The cocktail menu I've been asked not to say too much about just yet, but it has very little overlap with the drink menu from Bourbon & Branch.

The bar is not yet open to the public and won't be fully open for about three weeks after they finish final construction touches, then allow a healthy soft-opening period for the bartenders and servers to become familiar with the new menu.

Rickhouse is looking really, really good.

June 26, 2009
A Camper Cocktail

SeanMike over at Scofflaw's Den is making cocktails for mixologists, bloggers, and other folks, and naming them for those people.

And now he's made one named The Camper, made with blanco tequila, grenadine, lemon juice, pineapple grapefruit soda, and Peychaud's bitters. Sounds tasty- I can't wait to try me.

June 16, 2009
The Intercontinental Cocktails of Charles H. Baker

I wrote a story in this weekend's San Francisco Chronicle about Charles H. Baker's cocktails and their popularity, centering around the program at Heaven's Dog in San Francisco.

"A hazy memory of a night in Havana during the unpleasantnesses of
1933, when each swallow was punctuated with bombs going off on the
Prado…"

This line by Charles H. Baker Jr. introduces not an account of Cuban
rebellion but the cocktail Remember the Maine, which he was drinking
there while it took place. Baker wrote about drinks from his travels
around the world in the early 1900s, mostly during Prohibition, when
the drinking in the United States wasn't legal – or very good.

Other drinks in Baker's two-volume "The Gentleman's Companion" are
introduced from such ports of call as Beijing, Monte Carlo and Bombay
(now Mumbai), ripe with mentions of princes, peacocks, cruises up the
Nile and hanging out with Hemingway.

Bartenders in particular have latched on to Baker as a patron saint
of good living, and his cocktails and quotes from his writings are both
appearing on drink menus.

"I've always thought that when you have a drink there's so much that
comes with it: your friends, who you're with, the time of the day,"
says Erik Adkins, general manager of Heaven's Dog in SoMa. "And (Baker)
captured all that.."

But for all the excitement about Baker's cocktails, they share an unfortunate common trait.

"I think the recipes mostly need a lot of work," says Adkins.

read the rest of the story here.

In the story I also mentioned the forthcoming coffee/cocktail bar Fort Defiance, in Brooklyn, that should be opening later this month. But that's not the only bar to put Baker back on the menu:

The Brooklyn bar Clover Club dedicated a small section of the menu to what owner Julie Reiner says are Baker’s best cocktails this winter, including the Remember the Maine.

In Portland, Ore., the bar Beaker and Flask, named for the subtitle of one volume of “Gentleman’s Companion,” is set to open. Owner Kevin Ludwig says he’ll be featuring Baker drinks on the menu, though not exclusively.

In Amsterdam, speakeasy-style bar door 74 recently offered several pages of Baker drinks, with the menu letterhead mimicking the Baker’s own.

Baker's globe-hopping cocktail book is now helping those cocktails hop back around the world.

June 8, 2009
Alcohol Abstinence Education

Recently in the news, a 16 year old kid apparently died of excessive alcohol consumption at a party. (The autopsy is not complete, could have been other things in his system.) First the police locked up the party host who threw the event while his parents were away. Now they're trying to find who purchased the alcohol to prosecute that person as well.

While I agree the alcohol-purchasing person should probably be fined, chances are he or she will be charged with involuntary manslaughter or something else awful. Personal responsibility be damned, let's blame someone else.

I think that the current state of alcohol education encourages binge drinking, and is the equivalent of abstinence-only education for sex. It doesn't work because it creates an all-or-nothing model of a pleasant act. After you turn 21, or after you get married, booze and sex is awesome! Before, you are not allowed to even learn about it. It's great, but we can't tell you anything about it.

I am particularly perturbed by alcohol brand websites. All of them require you to enter your birth date or click to prove you're 21 years of age. That means in order to learn about, say, the history of a brand or person behind a brand, you need to be old enough to drink alcohol. Why? These sites already promote responsible drinking within the site- it's not like you click through and they instruct you how to drive a car with a six-pack in your lap. And how would reading drink recipes on these sites encourage underage drinking? I can read about how to drive a backhoe, but since nobody will give me a backhoe there's no danger of me scooping irresponsibly.

I understand that these age restricted sites and alcohol abstinence education in general are what everyone has to do to avoid being sued. (Websites are basically ads for the brand, and ads showing people having fun with the addition of alcohol are against the current industry advertising policy.) But I also think that these policies prevent people from learning about alcohol and its role in history and culture- things that would make it seem a lot less glamorous and exotic.

May 28, 2009
San Francisco Cocktails, Past and Present

It's unusual for me to miss days of blogging, but I've been busy writing up some stuff for SF Cocktail Week. Check out these pieces I wrote and let me know if I'm missing anything big (or am completely full of beans).

San Francisco's Historic Cocktails and Barbary Coast Saloons

Connecting the Past to the Present: Modern Cocktails in San Francisco

May 8, 2009
Alcademics in India

Alcademics was mentioned in The Telegraph, a newspaper in Calcutta, India, in a big story on cocktail blogging. Also mentioned were CocktailChronicles, TheLiquidMuse, KaiserPenguin, SpiritsAndCocktails, MyAchingHead, IntoxicatedZodiac, and Cocktailians.

The global takeover continues!

April 25, 2009
Alcademics En Espanol

The Alcademics global onslaught continues! This time the site has been mentioned in the Spanish magazine Vinos y Restaurantes.

My Spanish translation skills aren't what they used to be, but I'm pretty sure it says, "Alcademics is the most awesome cocktail blog in the universe, and everyone knows it."

April 24, 2009