One advantage I have in my career – and believe me, I thank my lucky stars every day for my good fortune in this regard – is that I travel a lot. And when I do travel, I get to visit the greatest bars in the world and spend time picking the brains of the world’s greatest bartenders.
The most recent drink to grace our cocktail list is the result of my travels.
Taking inspiration from many sources, my initial interest in bitter, sour and sweet with a distinctly tropical bent was taken directly from the ever-brilliant Giuseppe Gonzalez and his now-famous Trinidad Sour.
While I, and the rest of the world, was taken by the combination of bitter, herbal, sweet flavors, it never really struck me as a an extensible sort of drink style until I came across Andrew Bohrer’s amaro-based Mai Tai variation called the “Elena’s Virtue”. Now here was a drink with legs, and a hint of what was to come in the world of cocktails, in my humble opinion.
But what New York and Seattle do well, San Francisco often does better, and usually with a lot more Fernet Branca, and that’s the conversation I had with Josh Harris while competing in the Domaine de Canton finals in St. Maarten this spring. And after tasting his simple concoction of ginger liqueur, pineapple and Fernet Branca I knew it was time for me to get my feet wet and try my hand at the herbal tropical sour.
The result has been a smash hit at the bar, as it very much follows in the style of our restaurant bar, a reflection of the crafted European style of cooking that emerges from the kitchen on a nightly basis. In other words, earthy, sour, herbal flavors do very, very well where we work.
Put all of this together, throw in a desire to explore the dusty, neglected bottle of Drambuie, and an early morning racking one’s brain to come up with a drink name (the original intent was Brixton Club) and a star was born:
Kingston Club
1½ oz Drambuie
1½ oz pineapple juice
¾ oz lime juice
1 tsp Fernet Branca
3 dashes Angostura bitters
Shake ingredients with ice and finish with 1 oz soda water. Strain mix over fresh ice into a chilled collins glass and garnish with an orange twist.
A side project, an experiment or just a simple curiosity that turned into a delicious phenomenon that we're still serving to much delight at our bar, barrel aged cocktails explore the gentle manipulation of a drink's flavors over time. This post details the inspiration, the history and the methods behind my barrel aged cocktails.
My problem with homemade tonic water has always been a flavor profile that was too esoteric for the general audience. This recipe takes some of the positive qualities people have come to understand from commercial tonic water and updated them with fresh ingredients.
Turned off by the glop you find in the grocery store, and unable to endure another long egg and cream whipping session, I set out to build an egg nog recipe from the ground up that retained the character of the orginal formula, was easy to make in a few minutes at home or at the bar, and tasted absolutely delicious. See if you agree with the result.
One question I'm often asked is "Do you have any drink-related book recommendations?" Well, funny you should ask, I've compiled a list of the ten books every professional bartender or home mixologist should own. I keep every one of these close at hand and have read most of them several times. I suggest you do the same.
The problem with living in Oregon is the absence of little wooden shacks by the sea that sell cases of fresh ginger beer stacked on back porches. But with some readily-available ingredients, a recipe I've been revising for several years - and a few free minutes - I can easily transport myself to a little fishing boat on the ocean as I sip a Dark and Stormy made with fresh, house-made ginger beer.
It's always mojito season somewhere, so this advice is timely in your area about half the year. Wether you're making them or simply enjoying them, this advice will help you look like a pro in no time at all.
The flavors of the Richmond Gimlet are imbued with sunshine. Fresh mint mingling with the herbaceousness of gin and the tartness of lime have made this drink a Eugene classic for many years now.
You'll get a lot of snarky advice on this site about how to make a proper drink, but if you ever need to know what not to do, this is the video for you.
Not to be confused with the Spanish wine-and-fruit-based alcoholic beverage sangria, sangrita (meaning "little blood") is a traditional accompaniment to a tequila served completo; a non-alcoholic sipper that cleanses the palate between fiery doses of agave.
The world of booze can be mystifying to people that don't work in bars or around alcohol all the time. I hear a lot of assumptions about the industry I'm in that are - much like 90% of what you hear in bars - completely false. Here are a few you've probably heard yourself.
The traditional garnish for a Pisco Sour is a couple of drops of bitters in the foam, but I've never been particularly impressed with the way these few paltry drops of bitters sat in their little egg-white mattress and didn't play along with the rest of the drink. I envisioned a Pisco Sour with a uniformly-distributed bitters-scorched foam: slightly crisp as the fire burnt the sugars, and slightly warm as the foam insulated the rest of the frosty cocktail from the heat. A pisco creme brulée in a glass!
I get so many visitors looking for tips on how to write a bartending resume that I thought I should finally post a tutorial on how to write your own. Click the headline to read more.
I always love showing up to a party with a gallon jug of pre-mixed margaritas, so I've decided to share my recipe. This margarita recipe is the perfect blend of strong, sweet, and sour. But be warned: this recipe packs a serious punch.
There isn't much I can say about this video that hasn't been said already. If you've read anything I've written about cocktails, you'll understand why this video symbolizes everything wrong with the state of bartending in America today. Watch and learn, but be warned: this one isn't for the feint of heart.
About Me
My name is Jeff Morgenthaler and I'm the head bartender at Clyde Common in Portland, Oregon.
I've been tending bar since 1996 and writing about it since 2004. Mixing drinks has become something of a passion for me in recent years, and I strive to elevate the experience of having a drink from something mundane to something more culinary.
The writing I do here is intended as a work in progress. My recipes are like my opinions: they are constantly being revised and refined as I work them through my mind and my fingers. Comments and participation are encouraged, so please don't feel the need to tread lightly here.
I grew up in California in the 1970s and 1980s. I never really understood water when I was growing up. Water was in the ocean, but you couldn’t drink it because it was too salty. There was water in the garden hose, but that was for hooking up to a sprinkler and playing in. My mother would take water from the tap, but then mix it with instant lemonade powder, or Kool-Aid or something like that. Water wasn’t really something you drank on its own.
It wasn’t until the bottled water craze hit in the late 1980s that I ever considered drinking water – plain water. Because, when you opened up that kitchen faucet in California, you got a nice cold glass of liquid that you couldn’t see through. Liquid that wasn’t colorless, and very possibly might have had little bits of toilet paper floating in it. It didn’t look like something you’d want to put in your mouth.
One of the first times I visited Europe, I found myself in Zurich, Switzerland – dying for a glass of water after a long climb up a hill to the hostel I was staying in. Against my better Californian judgement I poured a glass from the tap and to my surprise found it more than drinkable – it was quite delicious. I remember coming home and telling everyone that would listen that the most incredible thing I saw while there was that you could actually drink the water in Switzerland from the tap! I’ve since moved to Oregon, where the water is pretty good and we all drink it from the tap with only the mildest of reservations.
I’m really not a fan of cheesy marketing gimmicks and am always a pretty skeptical guy, especially considering I work in the drinks trade. So when I met the people from Martin Miller’s Gin in New Orleans this summer, my cynical side kicked in and I told them I loved the gin but wasn’t buying the whole Icelandic water bit on the back of the bottle. Later they invited me to come to Iceland and drink a glass of water with them.
And I found that Icelandic water really is pretty incredible. Apparently the closest you’ll find to the original recipe of two parts hydrogen to one part oxygen, there is something along the lines of 5 parts per million other stuff in there with the H and the O. I drank it in my coffee in the morning, I filled bottles from the tap and took it on excursions with me during the day, and guzzled it at night with dinner to stay hydrated after all those Martinis. I even sat in it while snowmobiling.
They took me to the site of their spring, where the water flows out of the mountains and into an aquifer, which is then pumped (note the little shed) to the bottling plant in Borgarnes. And then the gin is shipped to the US and the UK, which is where the story of Martin Miller’s gin ends.
It’s simple, really. It’s amazing gin made by a brilliant distiller, cut with really excellent water, and sold by some really good people. Not a bad way to spend a week.
I lived in alaska for about 15 years, and if I’m not mistaken, Anchorage had the cleanest tap water of any municipality in North America, so I understand the value of clean water.
That said, I think this is still just marketing. For the price of shipping their gin round trip to Iceland, they could take water from the London sewer system and via reverse osmosis and various other filtration and distillation methods, bring it to a contaminant level of about 5 parts per trillion and use it to cut their gin. Thats about the purity level of the water steam plants use to generate electricity. (It’s cheaper to purify the water before boiling it off than clean the scaling that develops on the walls of the boilers if you don’t.)
But, maybe Martin Miller wants to fly me to Iceland to convince me I’m wrong.
18 Sep 2008 at 3:50 AM 2. Donny
I grew up in a small mountainside town in Australia where the air and water were extremely pure. Now I live in a majopr European city and boy can you tell the difference…I don’t think i will ever get used to that chlorine taste and chalky mouthfeel.
How many other brands market on the pureness of their water???? I know 42 Below Vodka does.
I have to say: the worst experience I had so far was at TOC in New Orleans.
The tap/gun/ice cube water (you can’t really avoid it if you want a chilled drink) in New Orleans is so full of chloride taste, that I went for beer rather than cocktails at the end of that week.
TOC was having Gin & Chlorid instead of Gin & Tonic. I was happy there was some Fever Tree around…
The best tap water I’ve come across was in Vienna, Austria (ca. 1,5 million inhabitants). They have an aquifer pipe system that collects water from 7 springs in the Styrian mountains and channels it over a couple of hundred miles right into the city.
Iceland definitely has one of the least polluted environments. I remember doing a rafting trip there, where our guides stopped at a hot spring. They brought out some chocolate powder and served us hot chocolate with the water, that was coming right off the ground. It was amazing. Probably something you should have had on the glacier, Jeffrey.
rhesuspieces00 – I suppose it would be marketing, if your idea of marketing is not saying “Made from sanitized London sewer water.” One other benefit of bottling in Iceland, I learned, is that they are able to ship to both the United States and the United Kingdom from a central mid-Atlantic location. So I don’t think it’s all hooey.
Keith – Thanks, man. It was a fun and educational trip for me. I wish you could have been there.
But I am also sceptical!
Shipping water for a spirit increases massively the carbon footprint! In times like that, we should think about not to do so!
I also grown up with clean water [actually I grown up in a small town in the German alps] – and of course I see the big gap between pristine water like that and the Californian brew, which you were grown up with. But if we are not carefully, we will nowhere have any drinkable water; some of our cities will be flooded; some areas will be envir. desertificated – I try to avoid what ever I can to trade in good sounding marketing for a better future…
I may be confused, but got the distinct impression Miller wasn’t shipping water anywhere, but rather shipping distillate to Iceland and then shipping gin to their markets, just as any other distillery does with their product.
And, Jeffrey, I drink Portland tap water every day with no trepidation at all. Bull Run water is some of the cleanest (and softest) water available.
Who knew being a bartender would give one such great traveling opportunities?!
I should have listened to Mom–yes my mother told me to be a bartender, I didn’t listen.
I absolutely hate it when someone sends me a box full of sex toys in the mail. Sure, it might sound like fun to some of you (you know who you are), but receiving a big box of free sex is much more trouble than it’s worth. Believe me. So I get a [...]
17 Sep 2008 at 11:27 AM 1. rhesuspieces00
I lived in alaska for about 15 years, and if I’m not mistaken, Anchorage had the cleanest tap water of any municipality in North America, so I understand the value of clean water.
That said, I think this is still just marketing. For the price of shipping their gin round trip to Iceland, they could take water from the London sewer system and via reverse osmosis and various other filtration and distillation methods, bring it to a contaminant level of about 5 parts per trillion and use it to cut their gin. Thats about the purity level of the water steam plants use to generate electricity. (It’s cheaper to purify the water before boiling it off than clean the scaling that develops on the walls of the boilers if you don’t.)
But, maybe Martin Miller wants to fly me to Iceland to convince me I’m wrong.
18 Sep 2008 at 3:50 AM 2. Donny
I grew up in a small mountainside town in Australia where the air and water were extremely pure. Now I live in a majopr European city and boy can you tell the difference…I don’t think i will ever get used to that chlorine taste and chalky mouthfeel.
How many other brands market on the pureness of their water???? I know 42 Below Vodka does.
18 Sep 2008 at 8:17 AM 3. Mixology
@Donny Sounds very much like London.
I have to say: the worst experience I had so far was at TOC in New Orleans.
The tap/gun/ice cube water (you can’t really avoid it if you want a chilled drink) in New Orleans is so full of chloride taste, that I went for beer rather than cocktails at the end of that week.
TOC was having Gin & Chlorid instead of Gin & Tonic. I was happy there was some Fever Tree around…
The best tap water I’ve come across was in Vienna, Austria (ca. 1,5 million inhabitants). They have an aquifer pipe system that collects water from 7 springs in the Styrian mountains and channels it over a couple of hundred miles right into the city.
Iceland definitely has one of the least polluted environments. I remember doing a rafting trip there, where our guides stopped at a hot spring. They brought out some chocolate powder and served us hot chocolate with the water, that was coming right off the ground. It was amazing. Probably something you should have had on the glacier, Jeffrey.
I got this in a newsletter today the way:
http://www.tapdny.com/
Purified tap water from NYC.
18 Sep 2008 at 10:30 AM 4. keith waldbauer
Great series of posts, Jeffrey… great writing, great photography…. and by the sounds of it, a great time. I’m a pretty ‘effin jealous barkeep.
18 Sep 2008 at 12:30 PM 5. Jeffrey Morgenthaler
rhesuspieces00 – I suppose it would be marketing, if your idea of marketing is not saying “Made from sanitized London sewer water.” One other benefit of bottling in Iceland, I learned, is that they are able to ship to both the United States and the United Kingdom from a central mid-Atlantic location. So I don’t think it’s all hooey.
Keith – Thanks, man. It was a fun and educational trip for me. I wish you could have been there.
18 Sep 2008 at 2:52 PM 6. Dominik MJ - opinionated alchemist
Great write up, Jeffrey!
But I am also sceptical!
Shipping water for a spirit increases massively the carbon footprint! In times like that, we should think about not to do so!
I also grown up with clean water [actually I grown up in a small town in the German alps] – and of course I see the big gap between pristine water like that and the Californian brew, which you were grown up with. But if we are not carefully, we will nowhere have any drinkable water; some of our cities will be flooded; some areas will be envir. desertificated – I try to avoid what ever I can to trade in good sounding marketing for a better future…
19 Sep 2008 at 8:34 AM 7. Jeff Frane
I may be confused, but got the distinct impression Miller wasn’t shipping water anywhere, but rather shipping distillate to Iceland and then shipping gin to their markets, just as any other distillery does with their product.
And, Jeffrey, I drink Portland tap water every day with no trepidation at all. Bull Run water is some of the cleanest (and softest) water available.
19 Sep 2008 at 9:24 AM 8. Jeffrey Morgenthaler
It’s true, it’s only the distillate that is being shipped to Iceland, then cut with water.
22 Sep 2008 at 9:51 AM 9. Dina
Who knew being a bartender would give one such great traveling opportunities?!
I should have listened to Mom–yes my mother told me to be a bartender, I didn’t listen.
Jeff, thanks for sharing your fun with us.
22 Sep 2008 at 11:17 AM 10. Jeffrey Morgenthaler
Thanks, Dina! It’s been a very good year so far.