Cocktailians

Celebrating (with a) Manhattan

We don't really get into politics much here at Cocktailians, but the news tonight of Osama bin Laden's death did have me in an ebullient mood. I doubt bin Laden or al-Qaeda were big on things like drinks or any sort of libertine fun, so I thought a celebratory cocktail might be in order, and what more appropriate way to mark the occasion than with a Manhattan?

Two ounces of whiskey older than 9/11 (and al-Qaeda, for that matter) -- an ounce of 18-year-old Sazerac and an ounce of 23-year-old Red Hook Rye -- mixed up (in a "Barack Bock" mixing glass from DC's District Chophouse) with some vermouth, some Fee's Whiskey Barrel-Aged Old-Fashioned Aromatic Bitters, and a few homemade New York State cocktail cherries made a great way to toast a victory. (Too bad I didn't have one of those American-flag cocktail picks on hand to complete the drink.)

How Is This Drink Different From All Other Drinks?

I'm not Jewish. And my girlfriend is about as much of a secular Jew as it's possible to get -- she loves bacon, and she sometimes asks me questions about Judaism. (Quick! To the Internet!)

But ever since moving to New York, where there are a lot more Jews around than the Southern burgs I came from, I've been fascinated by some aspects of Jewish life, and none more so than the Seder dinner at Passover. I've not been to one -- either I haven't played my cards right or I've been stuck at work -- but I think the ritual is interesting, and I enjoy that it's a celebration open to all.

I was reading up on the traditional ingredients on the Seder plate, and thought that it'd be fun to combine a few of them into a Passover cocktail. I'm not getting nearly as elaborate as the guys at Sipping Seder (really, you should go check that link out; they've come up with really good-sounding cocktails for each element of the Seder meal) or the other restaurateurs or bar owners quoted in this Tablet article, but I did want to see if I could combine the bitter herbs (maror), which symbolize the bitterness and the suffering of the Israelites in Egypt,  and the charoset, a sweet paste that symbolizes the mortar that the Israelites used for bricks there, and put them both in a drink together. After all, balance -- of sweetness and bitterness, as well as other flavor profiles like sourness -- is one of the hallmarks of a good cocktail.

The bitter herbs were easy; it's hard to get more bitter or herbal than Fernet Branca, of course, which famously goes off the charts in both of those directions. And for the charoset? There are lots of different recipes and styles, but quoth Wikipedia: "A typical recipe from the Eastern European (or Ashkenazi) tradition would include nuts, apples, cinnamon, and sweet wine — ingredients mentioned by King Solomon in Song of Songs as recalling the attributes of the Jewish people themselves." (As an aside: Really? The Song of Songs, aka the Song of Solomon? The sexiest book in the Bible? Apparently so, as it encodes a charoset recipe in all those sensuous similes. I learned something today.) I thought about using a nut liqueur such as Frangelico or Nocino, but decided to work with what I had on hand: apple brandy, sweet wine, and cinnamon. A bit of tinkering with the proportions, and I arrived at:

Seder Ain't So

• 1 oz. apple brandy
• 3/4 oz. Muscat dessert wine
• 1/2 oz. Fernet Branca
• 1/4 oz. cinnamon syrup

Stir with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

Some notes on ingredients: For the apple brandy, I used the wonderful Clear Creek 8-year-old Eau de Vie de Pomme, though I think any good Calvados would work just fine. For the wine, I used BV Muscat de Beaulieu, which is inexpensive and not-terribly-complex, but did the job: I was after those dessert-wine notes of sweetness, raisins, and other fruit. I think any Muscat would work equally well, and possibly other dessert wines would fit the bill, though that may lead to the need for adjustments. The cinnamon syrup is available from Trader Tiki, but I used homemade: a 2:1 simple syrup in which I steeped several cinnamon sticks for four hours.

I should note, also, that you're on your own if you drink four cups of this cocktail, as the Passover ceremony dictates with wine. And, more seriously, no claims are made that this is kosher.

Correcting The Times, or Thirty Seconds Over Google

Below is a letter I sent to the Times yesterday (with links added for annotation and clarity):

Hello,

In the article "Bar Crawling From Boutique to Boutique" by Michael Rovner on p. E9 of today's paper, there is the statement that "the Jack Rose [is] named after a friend of the owner, Jonas Hegewisch, and made with applejack, house-made grenadine and lemon juice."

This seems dubious at best, as the Jack Rose (whose recipe is given accurately; consult CocktailDB  or any quality bar manual) is a classic drink. According to drinks historian David Wondrich's book "Imbibe!", the New York Police Gazette published a reference to the drink in 1905.

From "Imbibe!":
I spent many years believing that this drink, one of only two classic applejack cocktails. . .was named after "Bald Jack" Rose, one of the yeggs involved in the notorious 1912 Becker-Rosenthal case (in which Police Lieutenant Becker eventually went to the chair -- probably wrongly -- for hiring Rose to put out a hit on gambler "Beansy" Rosenthal.) In part, this belief was wishful thinking of the kind all mixographers indulge in. Alas, the facts say different, or at least the Police Gazette does, which is not always the same thing. In this case, however, the evidence seems pretty straightforward: According to a squib the Gazette published in 1905, "Frank J. May, better known as Jack Rose, is the inventor of a very popular cocktail by that name, which has made him famous as a mixologist." This May/Rose fellow was apparently employed at Gene Sullivan's Cafe on Pavonia Avenue in Jersey City -- and indeed, it's worth noting that applejack is the state spirit of New Jersey. A less glamorous back story, to be sure, but most likely a factual one. As for Bald Jack, according to a widely reprinted newspaper squib from the end of 1912, his notoriety put such a dent in the drink's popularity that some bartenders took to calling it a "Royal Smile" instead. Perhaps.

(You can see this in Google Books.)

There's also the theory that the name simply comes from the fact that its primary ingredient is appleJACK, and that it's rose pink in color when mixed. At any rate, I doubt it's named after a friend of a menswear shop's owner; that would be Hegewischful thinking.

Other copy-editing tics: the whiskey from Tennessee is "Jack Daniel's", not "Jack Daniels" -- the original distiller was Jack Daniel, and the brand properly includes the apostrophe. Also, the John Ashe cocktail is "finished with an Islay Mist", which is unclear. Islay Mist is a blended Scotch whisky, so I'm not sure if that means that Islay Mist is misted onto the drink with an atomizer, or floated atop the drink, or something else?

Thank you for your time and attention.

All best,
Sam Meyer
http://www.cocktailians.com

The Times' cocktail coverage tends to be pretty good (see the frequent linkage from here, f'r instance), so this was a surprise to read. I know it's a quick aside in a trend piece about retailing, bu c'mon: thirty seconds with the Google or Wikipedia would've cast doubt on their subject's claims.

Yes, Thonx.

One nice thing about wintertime is that citrus is pretty cheap. While I can't compete with the lucky-dog co-authors of this site that have lemon trees in their backyard (and they know who they are), lemons at my local grocery store are currently running about 15-20 cents each, and good juice oranges can seemingly be had for the asking.

And of course, this state of affairs is ultimately pleasing to the cocktail-head, as tons of cocktails make use of citrus in its varied forms. The plump oranges I just picked up inspired me to go in a direction I don't usually go, and led me to the Bronx (or at least its eponymous cocktail.)

The Bronx was a child of Manhattan, actually: invented at the Waldorf-Astoria (the old location, where the Empire State Building is now) by ace bartender Johnnie Solan, who lived in the Bronx and came up with the drink's name a couple days after a visit to the Bronx Zoo. A Perfect Martini -- i.e., a Martini with equal parts sweet and dry vermouth -- with the addition of orange juice, the Bronx is "clean, simple, and very, very refreshing." I agree with Wondrich, though, and think I'd like it better if it were a little less Arctic and a little more sweltering outside. Bronx, we'll meet again in June.

The Bronx Cocktail

• 2 oz. gin
• 1/2 oz. sweet vermouth
• 1/2 oz. dry vermouth
• dash orange bitters
• 1 oz. orange juice

Shake and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a twist of orange peel.

The Grey Pirate

A while back, on a trip to Kalustyan's to pick up some ingredients for bitters (more on that anon), I was pleased to note that they carried some of the Trader Tiki line of syrups. Trader Tiki aka Blair Reynolds, as you'll recall from my visit to Portland, is an accessible, enthusiastic tiki maven who's on a crusade to share his love for all things rum-based to the world at large. Tiki drinks are a kingdom that I don't have a whole lot of knowledge about -- though it's certainly fun to learn -- so I decided to pick up some Don's Mix and some orgeat. The Don's Mix is a bewitching combination of cinnamon and grapefruit syrups, and seems like it could go well with lots of things, including maybe some drinks normally outside the tiki kingdom. (For instance, I could see an interesting tequila cocktail built around these flavors.) And it makes for a nice and quick rum punch, as the bottle recommends; a splash mixed with rum, lime, and perhaps orange bitters -- a modified version of the Baguio Skin from Charles Baker's Gentleman's Companion --  is fast and unbelievably refreshing.

But what to do with the orgeat? This milky-white almond- and apricot-kernel-derived syrup is an ingredient that suggests much fewer immediately obvious uses to me (aside from the truly great Mai Tai and a host of other tropical drinks, most of which I haven't tried), but the nutty flavor is rich and powerful. What to do? Enter my girlfriend Bari (who you may remember as having collaborated with me on the Japonais last year.) She used to be a barista, and said that she would often mix Torani orgeat into tea, and that customers always loved it. Eureka! I never would have thought of the combination of almonds and black tea, but it really does work.

The natural choice for an orgeat drink would be rum, of course, so I reached for my bottle of Pyrat. This rum, made by the folks who make Patrón tequila and Citronge orange liqueur, is on the sweet side but a little funky and very orangey. (They also seem to have reformulated it and moved their production, which I discovered on picking up a new bottle recently: my old bottle of it was made in Anguilla, while the new one -- which is sweeter and less complex, alas -- was made in Guyana.) So why not add more citrus to the mix and bring in Earl Grey, my favorite tea? Earl Grey is flavored with oil of bergamot (my preferred variety is actually the Stash Double Bergamot Earl Grey, since it turns the bergamot control up to 11), and it married nicely with the rum. And what goes with rum? Lime! So lime juice has gotta go into this as well.

I see from The Art of Drink that orgeat often includes orange flower water or rose water as an extra flavoring, in among the barley, almond, and apricot kernels. Trader Tiki's orgeat doesn't have this ingredient, so I wanted to add a little bit back in, on the principle we seem to be following here of "the more citrus in the glass, the better." A little trial and error and some tinkering with the proportions, and we have:

The Grey Pirate

• 2 oz. Earl Grey-infused Pyrat rum
• 1/2 oz. orgeat
• 1/2 oz. lime juice
• 3 drops orange flower water

Shake and strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

(A couple notes on ingredients and execution: I used Trader Tiki orgeat, as I've noted above, and Pyrat XO rum. I infused 8 ounces of the rum with two teabags of Stash Decaf Earl Grey tea (not wanting to add caffeine to a mixed drink that didn't really rely on it) for ten to fifteen minutes, though I probably could've used one teabag and it would've worked just as well. Also, I initially used 3/4 ounce of both the orgeat and the lime juice, but the flavor was a little intense and not as balanced. It might be good that way, however, served over crushed ice with maybe some sort of fruit or ginger-y garnish, but I like this one served up.)

Cocktails At 35,000 Feet

Being away from a quality bar -- whether a cocktailian boîte or your own home -- doesn't mean you can't have a well-crafted drink. For instance, most airlines will sell you a miniature liquor bottle and a mixer, and it's not hard at all to enjoy a rum and Coke, a gin and tonic, a Bloody Mary, a whiskey and soda, et cetera. But what if you want to move beyond the highball kingdom? It's not too hard to make yourself a good drink while aloft, provided you do a little prep.

I brought along a small kit with lemon wedges, Carpano Antica Formula sweet vermouth, Angostura bitters, an orange wheel, some homemade cocktail cherries, and an orange twist. I packed the citrus in individual zip-type plastic bags (pill-size and snack-size) and put the liquids in 12ml bottles from Muji. (The 1/8 oz. Tabasco bottles would work here, as would any kind of small vial-type bottle. I was just trying to keep everything below the 3oz. TSA limit.) This kit let me easily throw together a Tom Collins, an Old-Fashioned, and a Manhattan -- just cadge cups, ice, seltzer, and sugar from your friendly flight attendant (mine was greatly intrigued when she saw me shaking up the Tom Collins) and you're all set. A coffee cup set in a beverage cup made a pretty decent imitation of a Boston shaker, chopsticks from the airport Panda Express franchise did double duty as a muddler and a stirring spoon, and you can strain using two cups (Careful of the turbulence, now.)

You don't have to limit yourself to these three drinks, of course; Rob Roys and Whiskey Sours are easy with this particular kit as well. Substitute in some dry vermouth for sweet, and maybe add some orange bitters, and you can do Algonquins and Martinis. Orange bitters will also work in a Rob Roy. Bring along some lime wedges, and make Cuba Libres, Daiquiris, Gimlets, Moscow Mules, et cetera.

The key is not to think of it as an airplane; think of it as a very exclusive cocktail lounge that moves at 600 miles an hour, has its very own pair of designated drivers up front, and whose bouncers make you take off your shoes.

(Many thanks to Bari Dulberg for the camera work and to Damon Dyer for the conversation that suggested this topic.)

Drinko de Mayo

Yes, it's May 5th today, so that means that for the past few weeks your hosts here at Cocktailians have been bombarded with press releases for seasonal drinks. Some holidays have natural cocktail themes -- Irish whiskey for St. Patrick's Day, et cetera -- but others don't. (You should see some of the more inane ones we get, like the red-and-blue Fourth of July cocktail with white fondant-icing cut-out stars oozing down the side of the cocktail glass, or the tragically misguided attempt at a St. Patrick's Day cocktail from a French vermouth concern, or the innumerable red and blue cocktails sent to us just before the last election.)

Cinco de Mayo works well, though -- it's a celebratory holiday that's pretty much an excuse for Americans to celebrate Mexican culture. (did you know that it commemorates the date of the Battle of Puebla, and is pretty much only celebrated around Puebla in Mexico? I'd thought it was Mexican Independence Day till I looked it up...turns out that's September 16th. Knowing is half the battle.) And the natural way to celebrate is with tequila and other mezcals -- definitely a subject worthy of attention and future research.

The obvious and classic drink to use is the Margarita, of course -- it's hard to improve on a classic New Orleans Sour family drink (as Gary Regan classifies it in The Joy of Mixology, New Orleans Sours are made up of a base spirit, lemon or lime juice, and an orange-flavored liqueur like triple sec or curacao. The Sidecar, Cosmopolitan, and Corpse Reviver No. 2 all fit into this category.) And I like the classic proportions of 3:2:1:

Margarita

1 1/2 oz. white tequila

1 oz. Cointreau

1/2 oz. fresh-squeezed lime juice

Shake and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. (Salt rim optional -- I don't like it, but some do. I'll sometimes toss a tiny pinch of kosher salt into the shaker in lieu of the salt rim. An ever-so-tiny pinch of salt can work well with Martinis too, by the by.)

It seems to be a trend lately to use agave nectar as a sweetener in this drink, and while I like the poetic nature of having agave supply both the base spirit and the sweetener, it's hard for me to move away from the wonderful orange flavor of Cointreau -- which is plenty sweet on its own.

Throwing a party? Jeffrey Morgenthaler has a good recipe for Margaritas by the Gallon -- I keep meaning to throw this together for a big shindig sometime.

Also, the good folks at Herradura sent over an interesting variation that they call the "Cincorita": a Margarita with a Chambord float on top -- just a half-ounce of the stuff, 'cause its flavor can kind of take over any drink. Looks nice, too. I'm not sure I'd go with the lime garnish (though it also looks nice) -- a good Margarita, more than most other drinks, is the effect of perfectly-balanced citrus/liqueur/base spirit alchemy, and I'd be worried that a lime wedge would tempt people to squeeze it in the drink, which would screw up the proportions. Maybe just a lime twist or curl instead?

There are other celebrations of the day: Astor Center is throwing an Agavefest that looks like fun (drat that my day job is in actuality an evening job, so I'll be slaving over a hot Mac while this is in session.) 

And I might not be able to look at this till I get back from work, but I also see that Cointreau is premiering the first installment today of a three-part short film about the backstories behind various Cointreau cocktails. The film stars burlesque queen Dita von Teese, who stars as socialite Margarita Sames, who supposedly came up with her eponymous cocktail in Acapulco in 1948. (This is just one of the five origin stories for the drink that Gary Regan has identified...but it was also substantiated by a 1991 article in Texas Monthly.) Actually, when I look at the press release in a bit more detail, it states "In a departure from her burlesque performances, Dita keeps her clothes on for Cointreau in this new video." Bummer.

You will note, of course, that I have avoided all mentions of "margarita mix" or frozen Margaritas up until now. This is entirely intentional. (Frozen Margaritas can be fun, but are better left to a bar with an industrial-strength blender. Pre-made "margarita mix" isn't worth it; stick to the good stuff, and it's not like limes are hard to squeeze. And good liqueur and fresh-squeezed lime juice beat artificial colors, sugar, and citric-acid powder any day.)

MxMo Submission: The Star Cocktail

This Mixology Monday was a tough one for me -- not because it was difficult to create a new cocktail, or find a sufficiently interesting drink to write about, but rather because the theme was so goshdarned big. How could I narrow it down to just one drink, when there are so many wonderful cocktails out there containing vermouth? The first cocktail I really enjoyed was a Manhattan, after all, and the category is wide open. As I mentioned in the announcement post, the aromatized-wine family covers vermouth, quinquina like Dubonnet and Lillet, aperitif wines, and lots more.

I initially considered a "Vermouth Cocktail", which dates all the way back to 1869 and consists of simply a couple ounces of sweet vermouth, a tiny bit of ice, and a twist. (There's also the "Fancy Vermouth Cocktail", from the 1887 edition of Jerry Thomas's How to Mix Drinks, which adds a couple dashes of Angostura bitters and a teaspoon of Maraschino, and changes the garnish to a lemon wheel.) Straight vermouth makes an excellent aperitif, whetting the appetite with its wonderful combination of sweetness, spice, and slight bitterness, and preparing the palate for savory delights to come. Dry vermouth on the rocks is a great summer drink, too, and the light herbaceousness can be very refreshing. As Chuck Taggart points out, Lillet on the rocks with a slice of orange "is the favorite drink of one Dr. Hannibal Lecter", and it's good with a flamed orange peel as well.

You don't have to be a cannibal to enjoy Lillet, though -- this is one of my very favorite ingredients, with its sweet citrus flavor tempered with herbs and its slightly viscous, ice-cube-coating texture. It's essential, of course in what I'd probably pick as my favorite cocktail, the Corpse Reviver No. 2 (you'd most likely have to hold a gun to my head to get me to pick a favorite cocktail, but if you did, I'd probably go for this one.) Lillet also figures prominently in the Corpse Reviver No. 2's cousin, the Twentieth Century. Invented about forty years later (and named for the famed and equally elegant express train from New York to Chicago), the Twentieth Century is an amazing drink best described by Ted "Dr. Cocktail" Haigh in Vintage Spirits & Forgotten Cocktails as going down "like light, zingy lemonade, but in the aftertaste there is an ethereal sense of chocolate." In Chuck's post here about the Twentieth Century, he asks "Is it too early to create a Twenty-First Century Cocktail?" Not at all, and as I discovered in a visit to the Pegu Club a while back, there already is one. Invented by Jim Meehan of PDT, it's a wonderful balance of tequila, crème de cacao, lemon, and Pernod...but since it doesn't have an aromatized wine in it, it doesn't work for this post. (There's also a Nineteenth-Century Cocktail, invented by Brian Miller of Death & Co. and shown to me by St. John Frizell -- it's bourbon, Lillet Rouge (not the usual Lillet Blanc), lemon, and crème de cacao.)

As David Wondrich notes in his book Imbibe, the introduction of the Manhattan really got the vermouth revolution going, and bartenders around the turn of the century used it in almost everything. In the April 2009 issue of Esquire, Wondrich offers a great formula for inventing new cocktails: two ounces of base spirit, an ounce of a fortified wine, a teaspoon of liqueur, and a couple of dashes of bitters. This formula's easily as useful as the classic 2:1:1 or 3:2:1 ratios of spirit:liqueur:citrus for making Sours sweetened with liqueurs -- and note that fortified-wine recommendation!

I considered a few other cocktails, which I'm noting here because I want to get around to trying them: Dr. Cocktail's CEO Cocktail and Gary Regan's Delmarva Cocktail No. 2 (itself a variation on an original from Dr. Cocktail.) Also, if I ever want to crack open the Noilly Ambre that was a very, very generous gift from the estimable Jay Hepburn, the Amber Room looks fascinating as well.

But for today, I wanted to go farther back, and try a cocktail that was briefly in vogue in 1895. I have a bottle of Laird's Bonded Apple Brandy (which goes into their applejack, which is a blended product with water and neutral grain spirits), and while I do love the Jack Rose, the prospect of another cocktail using Laird's was too good to pass up. 

Star Cocktail

• 1 1/2 oz. apple brandy
• 1 1/2 oz. sweet vermouth (I used Punt E Mes, for maximum cider-y spice)
• 3 dashes Angostura bitters
• 1/2 teaspoon gum syrup (which I omitted, at Wondrich's suggestion)

Stir, strain into a chilled cocktail glass, and serve with a twist.

This is an interesting taste -- at first the vermouth's bittersweet spiciness is reminiscent of a Manhattan, but the apple brandy's mellow flavor is different from rye's peppery bite. And, of course, the bitters tie it all together. Angostura is good in this one, but I think I might try the Fee's Whiskey-Barrel-Aged Old Fashioned bitters in this next time.

September (scratch that -- Anytime) is Julep Time

I realize that it’s no longer summer -- the autumnal equinox has come and gone, regardless of the weather -- but I’m clinging to the memory of warmer climes. This stance is chiefly due to my recent acquisition of a vintage electric ice crusher. This streamlined (I think early-to-mid-’60s) Rival Ice-O-Matic is built like a tank, pulverizes whatever I can throw at it, and cost me the princely sum of eleven bucks on eBay:

Why did I want this? Well, Imbibe magazine ran a good-looking comparison of several ice crushers in the July/August issue, and this one from KegWorks looked like a good choice (heaven knows I don’t have any counter space to spare in my cramped kitchen), but the testimonials on eGullet and the Chanticleer Society for the Ice-O-Matic piqued my interest.

And, of course, now that I find myself the beneficiary of a steady supply of crushed ice, the natural next move is to break out the julep cups and go searching for fresh mint. And while a good mint julep may go down easiest during a sticky Southern summer, I can attest that it’s almost as winsome in a Queens September.

There are so many ways to make a julep; entire books have been written about the variations. PDT has a great maple-syrup one on the menu, and David Wondrich makes an interesting-sounding mint julep with Cognac and a float of dark rum (adding rye for a "Prescription Julep.") However, ever since visiting Chris McMillian's Bar UnCommon in New Orleans’ Renaissance Pere Marquette Hotel, where a julep is as much a performance as a cocktail, I feel like I’m cheating if I don’t adhere to Chris’s recipe. Peach syrup is head and shoulders above plain simple syrup in this drink, and sometimes I augment it with a judicious dash of peach bitters…but this is above all a showcase for quality bourbon. Break out the good stuff (McMillian uses Maker’s Mark, but any quality expression will work just fine. I’ve used Woodford Reserve to great effect, but currently favor Buffalo Trace.)

"Sip it and dream, it is a dream itself. No other land can give so sweet a solace for your cares; no other liquor soothes you so in melancholy days. Sip it and say there is no solace for the soul, no tonic for the body like Old Bourbon whiskey."

Cheers.

Summertime is Gimlet Time

I don't know where you're reading this from, but here, it's hot. I'm surrounded by a thick blanket of steamy heat, the kind that brings out atavistic instincts in Southerners like me; I feel driven to seek out a verandah (and possibly a ceiling fan) and sip iced tea and endeavor to move as little as possible.

Alas, my ancient yearnings must (once again) be denied, as not only do I have to work for a living (with all the wearing-of-pants that that implies), I live in New York City, where items such as verandahs are in short supply.

However, I have a cocktail shaker and, assuming I remember to fill the trays, plenty of ice. As Embury said, cocktails "must be well-iced," ensuring an appropriately frigid sip to cool the throat and bring the rest of the corpus to a more reasonable temperature.

The lethargy brought on by summer's heat means that I don't tend to want to fuss too much. I love me a Corpse Reviver No. 2, but when I've gotten home from a long day and have been packed in a subway car and am feeling parched and gummy, I want something a little less painstaking. I've been subsisting on cooling drinks that are relatively simple, but nonetheless refreshing. The Americano. The Old-Fashioned. The Jack Rose. And, what I made for myself yesterday evening after I arrived home, kissed the best gal, and showered off the stickiness: the Gimlet.

Raymond Chandler's take on the Gimlet from The Long Goodbye is of course well-known and deserves to be quoted here:

We sat in the corner bar at Victor's and drank gimlets. "They don't know how to make them here," he said. "What they call a gimlet is just some lime or lemon juice and gin with a dash of sugar and bitters. A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose's Lime Juice and nothing else. It beats martinis hollow."

It truly is hard to beat the combination of gin and lime, though Chandler's proportions aren't quite to my taste; they can lead to a sticky-sweet drink, and isn't banishing stickiness the whole point of this exercise? We need something appealingly incisive -- like the drink's namesake -- to cut through the goo.

Now, I've noticed a few bars in Manhattan that tout their Gimlets made with nothing but gin and fresh lime juice. Far be it from me to decry any barkeep who squeezes their own citrus, but fresh lime juice in a Gimlet is a little spiky and too acidic for my tastes. So, I prefer it with a combination of Rose's and fresh. I tend to have to tinker with the proportions, given the acidity of the limes, but here's what I've been enjoying:

The Gimlet

• 2 oz. gin (I used Hendrick's)
• 1 oz. Rose's Lime Juice
• 1/2 oz. fresh-squeezed lime juice

Shake and strain into a chilled cocktail glass, and garnish with a lime wheel, borage flower, or something equally appealing.