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Tonight and tomorrow afternoon I’ll be at the Superdome with The Roosevelt assembling sazeracs. Come out and play.

Em and I will be on WIST AM 690 New Orleans, tomorrow 4/18 at 10 am CST. You can listen to their stream if you’re not in the area at http://www.wistradio.com/page.php?page_id=8069. I’ll be talking about, you guessed it, liquor.

Ride the wave children. Love the experience of water. Realize that quicksand can only win if you try to fight by rules. Move when you should, do not move when you should not. Experience being humbled. Do not make yourself so. Trying to be humble when always is unnecessary and is the morale version of tensing before a car crash. Always allow yourself to learn. Opening up those tunnels will lead to surprise and delight when things are ready to present themselves to you. Don’t live by anyone’s rules, especially not your own. Live in a home without walls, just one with wonderful friends. Speak to everyone that is ready to listen. Be not wasteful with those who aren’t. Take back things that have been stolen from you. Live inside your thermos and clank around your lunchbox. Love the child. Always.

Something for this month’s USBG meeting. Name and pictures and whatnot to come later.

1/2 oz Lemonhart Demarara 151
3/4 oz Amsterdam Gin
1/4 oz Suze
1/4 oz Martini And Rossi Bianco

Stir and strain into a cocktail glass.

This swirling pot of delicious comes to you care of my muse. I don’t have a great deal to say about it other than it is an amazing concoction that uses warm La Fée Bohemian absinth.

Uphill Climb

1 1/2 oz of La Fée Bohemian

1/4 oz of R. Jelinek fernet

1/2 oz of Marie Brizard Apry

4 oz of boiling water

1/4 tsp of oregano

3/4 tsp of sugar

1/4 oz of whole milk

Steep oregano in the first four ingredients for approximately 1 minute. Remove oregano, add sugar, then milk. Stir and serve in a teacup.

Photography by Emily W. Kincke.

Here’s a little something I put together for a Glazer’s event tonight featuring Jim Beam Bourbon:

Gold Rush

1 1/2 oz Jim Beam Bourbon

1/2 oz Herbsaint

1/2 oz Marie Brizard Orange Curacao

1/4 oz Pineapple Juice

Shake and Strain into a cocktail glass.

Photography by Emily W. Kincke.

For a new method, this wondrous bowl was created by basing the flavor around orgeat and falernum. Also, it gave me a use for my orange tincture (made by half filling a jar with orange peel and then filling completely with vodka). It’s my first punch actually, and it’s damn tasty.

Toccata

1/2 oz of orgeat syrup

1/2 oz falernum

1 oz of Barsol acholado pisco

1 oz of Gordon’s gin

1 oz of Gosling’s black seal rum

1 oz of lemon juice

1/4 oz of orange tincture

Shake with crushed ice for a good bit, pour into a large glass. Float 1/4 oz of 151 Demarara rum, drink with a straw.

Photography by Emily W. Kincke.

Let me preface this post with saying that I thought it pretty well impossible for me not to enjoy a spirit. I found two recently that damn near nauseate me. And no, these aren’t rot-gut whiskies or anything. These are “quality” spirits, and priced as such. The Bái Jiǔ from Baojing runs about $35 a fifth and the Juniper Green gin ranges, but I paid about $27 for a fifth of it.

Bái Jiǔ is an asian spirit that, in the case of this particular brand, is “filtered through 168 carats of diamonds for pristine taste and for good fortune.” Gord. I don’t care if its filtered through Mother Theresa’s panties as long as it doesn’t taste as horrendous as this mess of crap did. Its become somewhat of a feigned threat in our house as a punishment during drinking games. The Bái Jiǔ was actaully the more pleasing of the two, because I had no preconceptions of what it would taste like.

Juniper Green’s “london dry gin” is nothing of the sort. The thing that was most dissappointing about it was that I had been looking forward to trying this spirit for about two years and just never got my hands on it. It tastes like a rancid clear malt whisky with some pine and other oddities in it. It almost felt like it could be something like a jonge genever, but it doesn’t even have a pleasant taste to it. Juniper Green is uneven on the palate and honestly, the only way I was able to use it was to make a punch out of it so the “flavor” wasn’t so prevalent.

Don’t buy these. I’m not saying this to intrigue you or challenge you into buying them. Don’t. They’re horrible.

So, on the topic of mixing drinks, many people are realizing that big cubes work exceptionally well (harkening back to the bartender’s tools of old…you know, the icepick and whatnot). I’ve already mentioned the Tovolo trays in the past, but you may notice in the photograph above that one cube is infinitely more pleasing to the eye than the other. The way to get your cubes to look like the one on the left is to…ready for it? Boil them. So, if you can afford a Kold Draft machine, you really don’t need to read this post, but if you tend bar at home, grab youse some Tovolo trays (just so y’all know, the blue trays are straight walled and the purple ones are textured) and boil up some water.

Another point of note is that I use (and recommend that you do as well) distilled water. More on that later.

Photography by Emily W. Kincke.