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.
After waiting for the initial line to die down… oh, wait. We didn’t wait in line. Some people thought they’d just go to the end of the line, two blocks away, and wait to be let into the show. My associates and I? We just weasled our way up in front and were among the first fifty people in there.
It’s a weird scene. There are serious people who attend this sort of event to network with other professionals and learn about new trade items. And then there are people who are there to party and get drunk on free samples. I took the high road and tried to learn as much as I possibly could in the short time that I was there. So I skipped over a lot of the booths. Like the one Malibu Rum set up and had fronted by this guy in the banana suit:
And of course there’s a lot of this business everywhere:
But there’s also a lot of good product tables, and I’m going to show you some of the best ones I found.
I’m waiting for them to open the doors to the show, as hundreds upon hundreds of people line up outside in the lobby.
Coming up next, I’ve got tons of product reviews from inside the show, and a mixology competition with our friends Sean Bigley, Darren West and Zoltan Andahazy.
9:30 in the morning is a cruel time to try to get 500 bartenders together in the same room, especially in Las Vegas. But the turnout was great nonetheless for two of mixology’s living legends, Dale DeGroff and Tony Abou-Ganim.
They started out with a short video presentation hosted by Tony about the bar chef movement. He first interviewed Julie Reiner of the Flatiron Lounge, a bartender known for her brilliant cocktail menu consisting of subtle twists on the classics.
Next up in the video was William L. Hamilton of the New York Times, who talked about the disparity between the progressive food movement we’ve seen in this country over the past thirty years and the state of bartending today. I’ve often been confused, during my travels in fine dining, as to why people will demand local, fresh organic ingredients in their food, yet settle for neon-colored sugar water as accompaniments to their meal. This presentation was beginning to strike a chord with me.
We then were introduced to the bar chefs at Employees Only, a lounge in New York City, just to hammer home the idea that the newest trend in bartending is the idea of “the chef of the bar”.
Tony began his talk with a quote from Mark Twain’s ‘Roughing It’ from 1872:
In Nevada, for a time, the lawyer, the editor, the banker, the chief desperado, the chief gambler, and the saloon-keeper occupied the same level of society, and it was the highest.
At some point, Tony informed us, something changed. He asked the crowd if we knew that that turning point was.
I answered, “Prohibition”.
Now, I won’t regale you with my feelings about the state of bartending today and the long-term effects that Prohibition had, but (and you knew this was coming) I want everyone in this country to give some thought to Repeal Day.
Tony went on to give us point after point as to why the bar chef movement is, and should be, gaining ground in this country. My favorite point of his was this: if a kitchen took such a lackadaisical approach to its food as most bartenders take to their creations, that restaurant would be closed in a week. Yet, somehow, customers are willing to put up with this sort of passionless approach to bars.
Tony then introduced his mentor, Dale DeGroff. Dale continued on the bar chef/mixologist theme by outlining in a very simple fashion just how easy it is for a bar to take a few extra steps and begin putting out high-quality cocktails. He even went so far as to state that using fresh juices in place of low-quality pre-mix can actually be cheaper – in addition to tasting better.
It was a great talk, and I left feeling like I was part of a larger community. Tony and Dale’s philosophies are so in line with my personal approach to running a bar that the resonation I felt when I left gave me a new sense of resolve. I even got to meet Tony later.
If you happen to find yourself in Eugene tomorrow night, stop on in at El Vaquero. The drinks and service are going to be even better than usual.
My night tonight was the best so far. No strip clubs, no chicken wings, just a big group of real cocktail enthusiasts and three amazing locations.
I started my night at the Wynn hotel in a private suite fifty floors above the city, drinking Sagatiba Pura. It’s a brand-new cachaça here in the States, and I was honored to have received an invite to be one of the first to try it.
It’s a multi-distilled product, so the taste is clean and smooth, without the fire you’ll find in traditional cachaças.
I met up with Sean and Lisa Bigley, and we toured the innovative cocktail menu together. They introduced me to Jacques Bezuidenhout, a mixologist for Partida tequila and his girlfriend Gabrielle, a server at the fabulous Bourbon and Branch in San Francisco.
Once the party was over and the bar was closed, the five of us headed out for tapas at Firefly for some much-needed nourishment.
It was then decided that we all should head over to Sean’s bar, the Fontana at the Bellagio (see last night’s drunken entry) to hassle Darren West for Frenet Branca and Calvados Sidecars.
We were treated to an up-close view of the fountain show from the little patio off the back of Fontana.
Things took a six-degrees-of-separation turn when a couple of kids showed up to meet Sean to talk about the mixology competition tomorrow. The aspiring mixology contestant, named Zole Andahazy, lives in my hometown of Monterey, California and tends bar at the Bernardus Lodge – home of some of my favorite wines. Since I grew up about 5 miles from where they live now, and was there for dinner with my parents not a month ago, we had plenty to talk about.
The six-degree-ism came into play when Zole and I discovered that we had both tended bar at Marché Restaurant in Eugene. Small world, huh?
As the night wore on, Dale DeGroff stopped by to say hello, and I finally had the opportunity to thank him in person for the kind support he lent last December for Repeal Day. I’m going to listen to his keynote address tomorrow morning before the bar show, so look for some coverage of the whole day!
My friend Jimmy of Jimmy’s Cocktail Hour (see links at right) sent me to the Bellagio to find Darren West, but he’s not working at the Petrossian tonight. I’m going to finish the most incredible Negroni in the world and continue my search. Stand by!
Well, it didn’t work out. Go figure, I’m not much of a gambler. To tell you the truth, I don’t gamble at all. Ever. Personally, I’d rather spend a hundred on a bottle of wine.
Just took a little walk through the neighborhood, stopped in at the dueling piano bar at New York, New York (lame) and then popped in at Centrifuge in the MGM Grand. Great bar, amazing bartenders, superlative service. I was a happy man.
Now I’m about to take a disco nap before I meet up with my esteemed liquor dispensers for dinner. I promise I’ll have some pictures soon!
I haven’t been to Las Vegas in six years, and I’ve never flown on Southwest Airlines. Although the cattle-call seating arrangements that this airline favors are less than, uh, favorable, the good vibrations are palpable. Maybe it’s because I’m surrounded by the fun-loving staff of an Oregon City liquor store, or maybe it’s because everyone on the plane is on vacation, but the air is light and I’m getting excited.
Next up, I check in to the Tropicana, put a hundred on black, and settle in for a little nap. Stay tuned, and thanks for reading.
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 [...]
