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.
We’re fortunate to have some great minds in absinthe here in the Pacific Northwest, and on Sunday a few of them came together to share their extensive knowledge with the attendees of the Great American Distiller’s Festival in a panel titled “Q&A on Northwest Absinthe”
The panel featured Gwydion Stone, founder of the educational organization The Wormwood Society and creator of the soon-to-be released Marteau absinthe, Marc Bernhard, creator of the soon-to-be released Pacifique absinthe, and Rich Phillips from Integrity Spirits, producers of the first Oregon absinthe, Trillium.
I’ve done a fair amount of reading about absinthe and tried to learn as much as possible on my own, but the panel was still informative and provided me with some great facts to fill in for the gaps in my knowledge. I’ll recap here:
Absinthe was banned in 1912 by Food Inspection Decision 147 of the USDA. It forbade the manufacture, sale or transportation of absinthe. Several events contributed to our rediscovery of absinthe:
An understanding of the term “thujone-free”, which relies on a test that comes with a 10 ppm (parts per million) margin of error.
The discovery that real, legitimate, pre-ban French and Swiss absinthes often contained less than 10 ppm.
A greater amount of interest in classic cocktails and lost ingredients, which was certainly fostered by communication between enthusiasts on the internet.
I wasn’t aware that sagebrush is a member of the same plant family as wormwood (artemesia), and that culinary sage actually contains more thujone than wormwood.
I didn’t really know where the green color present in verte absinthes came from, and now I do: after the final distillation, hyssop, lemonbalm and Roman wormwood are macerated in the absinthe to provide additional flavor and a pale green color. There was no mention of what might produce a neon blue color.
This one I knew, but I’d like to reiterate it here: The ritual of lighting a sugar cube on fire and dropping it into absinthe is inauthentic, a recent invention, and a potentially dangerous ceremony centered around the consumption of illegitimate absinthes of inferior quality. As Marc so eloquently put it, “Friends don’t let friends burn absinthe.“
The Great American Distiller’s Festival was this past weekend, and I was there on Sunday to witness some of the action with my crusty sidekick, Scott.
The first event was a seminar titled “The History of the Cocktail“, led by Robert Hess. Robert jumped right in there with a crash course on spirits, theories about the origins of mixed drinks in general, and some basic drink etymology. The team from the Teardrop Lounge mixed Old-Fashioned Whiskey Cocktails while Robert demonstrated the simplicity involved in creating this, the original cocktail and a surprisingly complex little number considering its spartan ingredient list.
Robert then jumped into a brief history of aromatized wines such as vermouth, and their popularity in cocktails in the late nineteenth century. The team whipped up a batch of very large Manhattans while the crowd braced themselves for a 1PM rye whoopin‘.
And in a perfectly logical move, Robert demonstrated how the Martini grew out of the Manhattan and proved it by passing around his interpretation of the original Martini, made with Dry Fly gin, Carpano Antica Formula vermouth, and Angostura orange bitters. The crowd swooned as they took another brunch-sized blast of 80 proof liquor.
One interesting fact about nature is that there are hundreds of near-Earth asteroids hurtling through space right now as we sit here and play on our computers. What is of particular concern, though, is that if one of those asteroids had landed on the Teardrop Lounge on Saturday, Murray Stenson would have had to teach the entire Pacific Northwest how to tend bar again.
On Saturday, the Oregon Bartenders Guild presented A Tribute to Jerry Thomas at the Teardrop Lounge in Portland, featuring David Wondrich, author of Imbibe! and contributing editor for Esquire Magazine.
Last month, I followed seven other bartenders into the Teardrop Lounge on a cold December afternoon in Portland, Oregon. The eight of us had previously spent a lot of time talking online about our common interest in craft bartending, advanced techniques, housemade ingredients and specialty spirits, but this was going to be a different sort of conversation.
We sat around a table and worked out the details of a unique concept in this country: a standalone bartender’s guild, the Oregon Bartenders Guild. Our mission is focused and simple:
To establish a collaborative community of bartenders within the state of Oregon.
Increase the overall knowledge of beer, wine, spirits and cocktail production for the betterment of their craft.
To promote awareness of the craft within the public community, through both a developed relationship with the media and an educational platform to the general populace.
To secure a congenial relationship with the OLCC, its agents and liquor companies to advance the procurement of more specialized and artisanal spirits in their portfolios.
To promote a wider, i.e., national and international recognition of Oregon’s premier mixology.
The other item on our agenda was the organization of our first event: Gin Class. And so on Sunday, January 27th, against all odds (such as a group of bartenders being able to organize anything whatsoever), we presented our first in what will become a regular series of events.
We started with a blind tasting of the four gins we were going to be working with.
First, Lee Medoff of House Spirits Distillery introduced the crowd to Oregon’s own beautiful Aviation Gin, and provided some valuable information about the process they take to produce the product. Then the Guild presented Kevin Ludwig, who talked about the history of gin and the use of gin in cocktails, while Kelley Swenson mixed up a batch of early-recipe Martinis with Plymouth gin, Carpano Antica Formula sweet vermouth, Regan’s Orange Bitters and Luxardo maraschino liqueur. Everyone sipped while Bend Distillery talked about the very unique process that defines their gins.
Next up was newcomer Twelve Bridges gin, presenting a unique Oregon product in that they infuse cucumber into the vapor stream during distillation (not unlike Hendricks gin out of Scotland). The gin smacks you across with face with a strong cucumber/melon nose, with a big, creamy mouthfeel to match. Dave Shenaut cranked out a big batch of Paul Harrington’s Jasmine cocktail while the crowd socialized.
To bring it all home, we brought out heavy-hitter Kevin Ludwig to present an original gin creation, the OBG #1, featuring Aviation gin, St. Germain elderflower liqueur, and Kevin’s own green walnut nocino, which was rich and oily, with heavy cardamom and cumin notes.
Many thanks to everyone who helped out and attended our inaugural event. You can visit the Oregon Bartender’s Guild website here, or pop in at our new forum here.
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