COCKTAIL, GINGER ALE, FIVE CENTS A GLASS

There is a new cocktail movement afoot in America. Buy me a drink and I'll tell you about it. Ambitious bartenders are hearkening back to a bygone era, resurrecting forgotten recipes, shunning mixes in favor of fresh fruits, developing creative cocktails, and even making their own bitters. What is this--another yuppie obsession with some imaginary past (see "swing dancing," see "Sinatra," see "cigars"), still mining the ore of Rat Pack, Mad Men culture? Well, yes and no.

According to the New York Times (December 2, 2008) it's not just a fad; it's a movement. There are many new types of bartenders--mixologists-- vying for your attention. Belly up to the bar, and have a look-see.

There are Pre-repeal Revivalists, such as Julie Reiner of The Flatiron Lounge in New York (in the video above), who go back to gaslights and garters and classic, long forgotten drinks from pre-Prohibition days.

“I moved to New York and started managing a lounge in the West Village,” she says to Nightclub & Bar Magazine. “At the time, it was called C3, and I started putting out seasonal cocktail menus. I was kind of just entertaining myself...The next thing I knew, I was on the front page of the New York Times Dining section.”

Julie Reiner mixing drinks at The Flatiron Lounge in New York

Reiner cut up Granny Smith apples and let them steep in vodka for three weeks. The press jumped on her Apple Tini and similar "infusions." In 2003, Reiner and five partners opened Flatiron Lounge, one of New York’s first venues bringing culinary to the cocktail. The Flatiron (37 West 19th Street, 212-727-7741)–– a space whose ancestral patronage included members of the Rat Pack –– combines a 1920s ambiance and Reiner’s seasonally inspired cocktails. It might be the flagship for the revivalist cocktail movement. For some of Julie's drink recipes, click here.

There are others. The Neo-Classicists update the classic cocktails--just slightly--with fusions; the Farm-to-Glass Movement mix artisinal cocktails with seasonal fruits and herbs, such as persimmons and anise; and the Liquid Locavores, such as distiller Christian Krogstad of House Spirits in Portland, who fashion a drink around local spirits (there are nine craft distilleries operate within the city). House Spirits makes the excellent Aviation Gin, among other things.


House Spirits co-owners Christan Korgstad (left) and Jeff Medoff, craft distilling in PDX

"Our competition isn't local," Medoff told Willamette Week. "We all want to brand Oregon. The more the merrier. We're after Ketel One and Grey Goose."

"Portland was a culinary wasteland," says Stephen McCarthy, proprietor of Portland's Clear Creek Distillery, speaking recently with Distinctly Northwest. When he was a student at Reed College a few decades ago there were no good restaurants, he says. No coffee shops worthy of noting. There were no wineries, no breweries. A culinary wasteland indeed. "Now it's like Paris!"

We wouldn't go that far, but anyone can attest who has eaten at (or even read the write-ups of) Le Pigeon--or devoured the sticky-sweet Thai street food at Pok Pok/Whiskey Soda Lounge, Portland is a serious "foodie" town. The drinks go with the territory. At Pok Pok, you might get a muddled kaffir lime gin and tonic, a lime and palm sugar whiskey sour, or--like me--an Aviator, a martini made with House Spirits' fine Aviation gin.

Get drinks and wings at Pok Pok/Whiskey Soda Lounge -3226 SE Division St, Portland, 503-232-1387

What else is out there? There are the Home Brewers, who make their own bitters, and fortified wines, and are centered around Tenzing Momo in Seattle, a shop that specializes in teas, and exotic dried herbs. There are Minimalists, who might change a single ingredient in a cocktail and explore the mutations; Molecular Mixologists, who mix "progressive cocktails" with scientific methods and might produce a solid, edible cocktail; Faux Tropicalists, who mix Singapore Slings and Mai Tais like your dad drank at Trader Vics. Check out the Luau in Seattle, and drink from a coconut.

Of course, you can still make your own drinks at home. Here, mixologist Allen Katz tells you how to make the perfect Martini:

DRUNK HISTORY

New Year's Eve is a drinking holiday, let's face it. We drink and look back at the year and succumb to weepy sentimentality or forced hilarity--sometimes in the middle of the same sentence. The trouble is, every bar in town is packed with amateurs. People who have no business drinking feel obligated to celebrate the passing of the year with copious amounts of booze. You can see them a mile away. Twenty-two year olds clutching their IDs, ordering sucker drinks with naughty names, getting all lizard-eyed and nauseous, calling each other "dude!"


Hey, is that you? Stay home. Keep the roads clear. It's even cheaper drinking at home, and you can mix your own Screaming Orgasms, Fuzzy Navels, and Flaming Velvet Buttcheeks. Stay home and drink and dial. It's easy. Drink and feel sorry for yourself and call up old friends. Drink and dial, you pathetic loser. Or better yet, drink and email. Take the cowardly path, the walk of shame. Better yet, drink and pass out in front of the TV while watching Dick Clark's Rockin' New Year's Eve. That is just too sad. Dick Clark is as old as Methuselah and he looks exactly the same as he ever did so he probably made a deal with the devil or he has a portrait of himself growing old in the cellar. Anyway, pass out pondering such heavy thoughts while watching Dick Clark and some shitty eighties band of fat guys in skinny neckties but be sure you place the bucket near your head before you nod off.


"Drunk History" is a video that has worked it's way around the web. This poor drunk has a story to tell, and he does pretty well with the help of Michael Cera, the star of Juno and practically every other movie this year. Watch and learn something.

Cheers!

THE PERFECT MARTINI

Bourbon and Scotch are great drinks for the winter months, but the seasons are changing and it's eighty degrees outside and I'm drinking a martini. It's perfect. I love a good vodka martini, don't get me wrong, but this is classic gin and it couldn't be better. Despite huge ad campaigns, vodkas tend to be similar, since they're basically pure distilled alcohol, whereas gins vary widely because they're made with juniper berries and a variety of botanicals. Take this Bombay Sapphire. The flavoring comes from ten different ingredients: almond, lemon peel, licorice, juniper berries, orris root, angelica, coriander, cassia, cubeb, and grains of paradise.

Gin was invented by Franciscus Sylvius, a doctor in the Netherlands in the 17th century. It was originally sold to treat medical problems such as gout, gallstones, and lumbago. Jenever, Genever, or Dutch Gin, was different than what we drink today. It was made in a single pot, and tasted much stronger. When William of Orange ascended the British throne, he brought along a love of gin. Soon there was six times as much gin as beer in London. London Dry gin, made from a single column still, gained a wide popularity, especially with the poor, since it was cheap to produce. Soon there would be gin blossoms, gin rummy, and bathtub gin.

London Dry gin bottle, 1800s

As you know, the Brits drank gin and tonics to stave off malaria in their far-flung empire, hence the allusion to Bombay in this drink I'm sipping, though the Bombay Sapphire brand was actually launched in 1987. Even so, it's crisp, cold, and aromatic. I'm not complaining.

As for the martini, the New York Times says it was invented in 1912 by Signor Martini di Arma di Taggia, bartender at New York's Knickerbocker Hotel. Some say there are earlier published reports of the drink.

According to Wikipedia, real martini drinkers drank it dry. The drier the better. The classic drink calls for a five-to-one ratio of gin to dry vermouth, but for some that wasn't dry enough. Winston Churchill chose to skip the vermouth completely, saying that the perfect martini involved pouring a glass full of cold gin and looking at a bottle of vermouth. General George Patton suggested pointing the gin bottle in the general direction of Italy. Alfred Hitchcock called for five parts gin and "a quick glance at a bottle of vermouth." Hemingway liked to order a "Montgomery", which was a martini mixed at a 15:1 gin-to-vermouth ratio (these supposedly being the odds Field Marshall Montgomery wanted to have before going into battle). That's dry.

With the advent of lounge culture nostalgia, martinis are big again. Maybe it's the cool glass. Maybe it's Shagg. In the 1990s, vodka martinis surpassed gin martinis in popularity. Nowadays you can order martinis -- or concoctions masquerading as martinis -- made with everything from chocolate to apples to bananas. Tini Bigs, a martini bar in Seattle, serves a "Smore," which is a chocolate martini with crushed graham cracker on the rim. I kid you not. That's no longer a martini. That is something vile and pernicious.

Anyway, for a cool summer drink when you're tired of beer and gin and tonics, try a martini. Or a Montgomery! Salute!

''I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.'' - Hunter S. Thompson.

BOOTLEG WHISKEY

Robert Mitchum in "Thunder Road," as an outlaw running bootleg whiskey in a fast '57 Ford Fairlane. Mitchum also wrote and sang the song. I've always been a fan of Mitchum and his sleepy anti-heroes that were doomed from the start. He managed to live outside the law, and still be honest. Unless, of course, he was playing the villain, which he did so well in "Night of the Hunter" and the original "Cape Fear." (Speaking of prohibition, Mitchum was also busted for pot in 1948 and served time in jail. Pot prohibition still hasn't been repealed, but that's another story.) I've painted Robert Mitchum several times, and here he contemplates a ring, as well as his own uncertain future.


In 1932, the Democratic Party platform included a plank to repeal Prohibition, and Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt ran for president promising a repeal. In 1933, the state conventions ratified the Twenty-first Amendment, and liquor was legal once again. Suddenly bootleggers were out, and whiskey was back in business. Big business. Nowadays giant corporations make and market the vast majority of booze, but you can still find good, small-batch, artisan distilled whiskeys. And you no longer have to hide it from the cops.

You've got to hand it to moonshiners who tended stills during our stupid governmental ban on liquor. While creepy Christian moralists like Carrie Nation and the teetotalers in the Temperance Union railed against demon rum, these bootleggers made whiskey and sold it to people who felt like having a drink. One of those small-batch, artisan distillers was my own grandfather. It was a stupid law, and my grandpa was anything but stupid. Of course, we've still got creepy Christian fundamentalists telling people what to do, but they lost this battle once and for all. I'll drink to that.

Here's a short history of whiskey making in America:


Here the Grateful Dead perform "Brown-Eyed Women," a bootlegging song, in March of 1986: