If you're one of the seventy million or so critics and bloggers (or one of the nine Nielsen families) who are distraught about the hiatusizing of the sitcom Community, GOOD Magazine is here to help. And by help, I mean give you something to drink while we wait for some other NBC turd to get cancelled, so they can get the best sitcom since Arrested Development over the 88-episode threshold and into sweet, lucrative syndication.
You might want to cut back on portions for the Seven & 7, as their recipe is made to serve a few million people at a time. But the variation they call a Six Seasons And A Movie? Well, it might not be streets ahead, but it's certainly a nice Chang from the original. And the real cane sugar will make the drink really pop-POP!
Okay, I'm done. Apologies for the in-jokes, it's been a while.
We here at Cocktailians are as pleased as punch that one of our authors, one Tony Hightower, appeared on Jeopardy! this week, and downright surprised and tickled that he gave this li'l ole blog a shoutout in his chat with Alex. (Yours truly, the other co-author, was on the show some ten years ago, but didn't do nearly as well.)
I recently hopped a bus up to Providence to check out an exhibition at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. "Cocktail Culture: Ritual and Invention in American Fashion, 1920-1980" opened in mid-April and runs through the end of this month and is well worth a visit, especially if you're interested in fashion. But even if you're not -- no one who knows me or even sees me on the street would peg me as a snappy dresser -- there's enough here to warrant a trip. (I mentioned the exhibition in this space back in April, but wasn't able to get up to Rhode Island till now, and am glad I made the not-arduous-at-all trek)
The first thing you see on arriving at the exhibition's entrance is a well-edited montage of clips involving drinking in various movies. Lots of them were familiar to me, including scenes from "Auntie Mame" (passing along the old "bruise the gin" canard), "Casablanca", "The Thin Man", "Notorious", and others. But I discovered a lot more that I hadn't previously encountered, including this marvelous scene involving a jilted husband and his reactions, from Charlie Chaplin's "The Idle Class":
The clips set the scene nicely before one passes into the exhibition proper, which is arranged into nine themed sections and spans more than 220 objects drawn from the museum's own holdings and items borrowed from other museums and private collections. Cocktail attire, barware, glassware, furniture, and photographs all figure prominently, making for a nicely-balanced selection of artifacts that gives you a good sense of the culture surrounding the cocktail and how it changed over time. The museum refers to it as "the first multi-disciplinary exhibition to explore the social ritual of the cocktail hour through the lens of fashion and design", and delivers on this aim. (The exhibition's catalogue is worth picking up as well, with five meaty, detailed essays on how various factors -- from Hollywood to hats, Harlem, and postwar barware -- shaped cocktail culture and its visual expression.)
The first thing you see is the "Icons" section, which is meant to give the viewer some grounding in the basic look of the cocktail hour: glassware and shakers are presented, as is the truly iconic little black cocktail dress. (As I'd noted, I'm no fashion guy, but the 1954 Dior dress shown here is amazing in its alluring elegance; it highlights the shape of its wearer to arresting advantage, as it carves out three-dimensional space around the figure. All while remaining relatively demure!)
The elegance continues with Norman Bel Geddes' stunning Manhattan cocktail service, all sleek verticals and boxy forms: the bibulous equivalent of the RCA Building (completed a year or two before this was designed) in chrome-plated brass. This was what I coveted more than anything else in the exhibit, with its cool, unfussy Art Deco sophistication and clean lines.
Other sections covered Prohibition's pervasive influence: how it forced men and women together, did away with drinking as an all-male pastime, and mixed company as well as spirits. Prohibition also gave birth to the speakeasy, of course, which was different from pre-Prohibition saloons. The time was known as the Jazz Age, and the exhibition features several flapper dresses with their beaded fringes. (And it's neat to see actual flapper dresses and cloche hats from the Twenties, rather than inferior costume knockoffs.) Harlem's influence on cocktail culture is covered, as is the anti-Prohibition movement as shown by scarves and even needlepoint samplers -- apparently prominent members of the W.O.N.P.R. would make these to show their support for the law's repeal.
Prohibition also forced drinkers and bartenders to travel: steamship lines would advertise drinks such as the "Three Miler" or the "Twelve Mile Limit" (referencing how far offshore boozing would become legal), and bartenders such as the great Harry Craddock fled the dry shores of the United States for wetter foreign climes, resulting in the sublime (and beautiful) Savoy Cocktail Book. This section of the exhibition features lots of more casual, flowing cocktail attire, some gorgeous molded-glass Tiki stemware designed by "Trader Vic" Bergeron himself, a custom-made Japanese bar, sophisticated posters for French ocean liners, and more.
Other sections address wartime austerity, with its rationing of materials, and postwar prosperity, which set the style for how we experience the culture of drinking. As the exhibition materials point out, "cocktail culture as we have come to understand or visually interpret it today originated during this postwar period; the cocktail dress, combining the elegance of evening wear with the informality of the day dress, is the iconic look of this period and continues to define style to the present day." The exhibition continues tracing the history of cocktail fashion from the Fifties to the late Seventies, looking at crazy accessories, casual backyard get-togethers with their Modernist tone, and even clubwear.
I especially enjoyed the Eclipse glassware shown above, designed by industrial designer Russel Wright in 1957. They're fun, yet classy, and emblematic of the "New Casual" approach to the cocktail hour that emerged in the Fifties. By 1951, 70 percent of alcohol bought was consumed at home, according to a contemporary account by Walter Browden in Crockery and Glass Journal. The suburban cocktail party, scene of most drinking, emphasized the pursuit of leisure and fun (as seen in these1950sexhibits at the Museum of the American Cocktail in New Orleans, and see also the profusion of cocktail shakers bearing drink recipes, which emphasized to the suburban crowd how easy it could be to make a quality drink.) Russel Wright, together with his wife Mary, even wrote a book about casual living and home entertaining during the increasingly mechanized times. 1950's Guide to Easier Living (here's a nice article about it in the Times from last year), in the words of "Cocktail Culture" catalogue contributor Kristina Wilson, was "modeled on the decorating and etiquette manuals that had proliferated in the interwar years, [and] argued for a new approach to home life. . .an emphatic modernist respect for systems and efficiencies dominated the Guide to Easier Living. . .Not only was the atmosphere of the Wrights' efficient household more casual than previous generations might have aspired to, but it emphasized to the hostess and host the possibility of well-deserved relaxation." The exhibition even includes Hawaiian and other casual sport shirts -- one emblazoned with grills and other barbecue implements -- to underline this theme.
In short, this exhibition is well worth checking out, especially if you're interested in the clothing and fashion angle of the story of cocktails. (I understand that this was a fashion-focused event, and the non-clothing artifacts were very well-chosen indeed. However, I'd have liked to have seen even more items showing changing product design and marketing over the years. Perhaps bottle designs, advertising graphic design and other commercial art, and more glassware and barware would have fit in well.) The catalogue will serve as a useful reference and is a worthy addition to my cocktail library. And I even picked up some cocktail-themed encaustic pieces by Dorothy Imagire at the museum gift shop. (I also fell in love with this painting by Gregory Poulin, but couldn't quite afford it.) They'll go nicely over my home bar.
(Photos, except for the first one showing the exhibition's name, are all courtesy of the Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. Thanks to the RISD Museum's Lani Stack for her assistance.)
Shortly after the tiki-themed cocktail lounge Painkiller opened its doors on the Lower East Side of Manhattan this May, a man walked into the bar and threatened to issue a cease and desist order. Pusser's, which distills a Navy-proof rum in the British Virgin Islands, trademarked the recipe for a Painkiller cocktail back in 1989. The man claimed that Painkiller's owners, Giuseppe Gonzalez and Richard Boccato, had no right to the name of the bar or its namesake cocktail, which they like to make with rums from Martinique and Jamaica. He was promptly sent packing.
As well he should have been. As it turned out, they didn't trademark the recipe (see my earlier post for some analysis on whether that is or isn't actually doable. I don't think you actually can, and I certainly don't think it's a good idea, for reasons I outline there.)
Pusser's has a relatively recent history, though their principal product is a recreation of high-strength blended rum issued to sailors by the Royal Navy since 1678. So what exactly did Pusser's trademark? It's hard to link to their search results, but if you go over to TESS, the US Patent and Trademark Office's electronic system, you'll see that among other results for "Painkiller" (such as trademarks for "gymnastic and sporting articles", clothing, and "entertainment and education computer game software", bicycles, and medication...all of which are trademarked by entities other than Pusser's), there are live trademarks owned by Pusser's for "advertising services" (for "National Pusser's Painkiller Day"), "restaurant and bar services", "non-alcoholic mixed fruit juices", and "alcoholic fruit drinks with fruit juices and cream of coconut and coconut juice."
It's way too hot in New York City, so cool off with a mint julep or some other concoction involving lots and lots of ice. And go read about cocktails while you do! Here's what's caught my eye on the Interwebs lately:
A food truck with a liquor license! (Seriously, I've thought that a cocktail truck would be the way to go. Stupid unsexy laws...);
Sam Sifton tells us that the Diner's Journal official Drink of the Summer is the fizzy Dark 'n' Stormy variation the Unstrung Harp. Sounds tasty indeed;
this is kind of off the radar of this blog in so many ways, but the sheer ballsiness in committing to a bad idea kind of won me over: pairing wines with McDonald's menu items;
It's not May flowers as much as May showers, if I look out the window at Cocktailians HQ -- remembering to move the bottles on the windowsill full of various infusions -- but it seems as good a time as any to check in.
The winners of Saveur.com's Best Food Blogs Awards have been announced, and DrinkDogma takes the Best Cocktail Blog award. Huge congratulations to Bobby and the Anvil/DrinkDogma team for their good-looking, solidly-written, well-photographed site. I'm humbled and honored that Cocktailians was nominated, especially in such august company, and everyone that voted for us has my utmost thanks. All of my fellow nominees do quality work, and you should check them out -- Alcademics, Kaiser Penguin, Jeffrey Morgenthaler, and Cask Strength. (Shame on me; I hadn't been familiar with Cask Strength until his nomination. Andrew Bohrer's a hilarious, passionate writer, and I'm pleased to add him to the blogroll. (To my further shame: I need to update the blogroll one of these months.))
Here's what else has been catching my eye on my traipses around the interwebs of late:
Are you familiar with "wiking"? The combination of wine-tasting and hiking is apparently big. (Next up, if I can figure out how to keep everything cold, is my company which will outfit and lead people on "walktails.")
Can cocktails improve your complexion? Frank Bruni investigates. (I'm glad he did and not me, as Provocateur sounds like a perfectly horrid place...part and parcel of why Team Cocktailians tends to avoid the meatpacking district.) One would think that if booze really makes one's skin better, Bompas & Parr's 2009 experiment with alcoholic gin mist would've tightened wrinkles all over SoHo;
Does the "perfect bourbon" exist? Buffalo Trace thinks so, and is trying to narrow down exactly what that might be;
“There are two types of wine essentially, and everybody knows this. There’s the one where you drink it and go, "Mmmm, well that’s ok, can we get eight of those please, give us eight of those." There’s the other one, you know, where you go "Ga…bt…Jesus, WHAT is that?"
But with spirits, 'tain't always that easy. There are lots of different kinds of spirits, distilled from many different things, and the range of flavors is enormous. And there’s been an explosion in the spirits market lately, what with the renewed interest in cocktails: there are more vodkas, rums, gins, whiskeys, than ever. So how are you supposed to figure out what’s what? To separate the plonk from the good stuff? And would the same spirit work in very different cocktails?
To address these kinds of questions, there are various judging panels and organizations that have sprung up to rate spirits, kind of the modern equivalent of the gold medals awarded by expositions of yore – the Stolichnaya vodka and Angostura bitters bottles bear these medals proudly, for instance. And the Ultimate Beverage Challenge, which invited me to drop by their cocktail judging recently, is attempting to go one better. Not only are they identifying what they say are the best examples of various spirits – they’re trying each of the spirits in classic cocktails to see which one comes out on top. As David Wondrich told me, the same tequila might not work as well in a Paloma or a Tequila Sunrise as in a Margarita. So, it was the judges' task to taste them all. (Wondrich also noted, a touch wearily, that they'd tasted twenty Palomas so far that day -- the second of three days of judging -- and that they'd been going since 10am.)
And, this year brought another changeup: not only was the UCC evaluating spirits on their own, and spirits in various classic cocktails, but this year they also added signature cocktails: recipes that a liquor brand presented to showcase their own spirits. These were judged head-to-head on the basis of which recipes were most appealing and tasted best, but obviously they weren't going to try, say, Old Raj gin in a cocktail specifying Hendrick's.
When I walked into the judging room, the cocktail dork in me was impressed by the star caliber of the judges: the owners and managers of some of the best bars in the country were there, as well as spirits writers, beverage consultants, and other exponents of the mixological art. (DeGroff! Saunders! Sharpe! Bezuidenhout! Meehan! Tello! Hess! Wondrich! Reiner! Regan! Shine! Pacult! All of whom looked as fresh as daisies, and most of whom I'd seen not-terribly-long before at the Bulleit Rye launch the previous night!) Several tasting panels huddled around bars where bartenders turned out several identical drinks from standardized recipes. (Because it’s a double-blind competition, the bartenders were mixing from numbered carafes, not labeled bottles.)
Well, what a lovely suprise that was! I went to Vermont for a few days (reviews of maple bitters and maple liqueur TK), and return to find that Cocktailians has been named one of six finalists in the Best Cocktail Blog category of Saveur.com's Best Food Blog Awards.
However, I'd be lyin' if I didn't say that I hope you come right back and vote for Cocktailians. Voting's open till May 12, and I'd love it if we had your support. Thank you!
