“The dry gin martini is the shortest distance between two points.” – Dave Wondrich

“If you can’t look cool stirring, your drink won’t have any deliciousness.” – Thomas Waugh

“… as long as that shit ice is consistently shit.” – Dave Arnold

“Never trust a skinny chef or a sober bartender.” – Danny Valdez

“You should have your own rockstar in mind [when tending bar].” – Dushan Zaric

“The government is not in the liquor or wine business.” – France, when asked by the US to police St. Pierre et Michelon during Prohibition [Somebody needs to tell the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania about that...]

“Martinis are like women’s breasts: they should be round and smooth. One is too few, three is too many.” – Henrik Hammer, Geranium Gin

“We’ve got a Dutchman, a South African, and a Dane: if we were any more laid back, we’d be horizontal.” – Andrew Nichols, of door74, presenting with Henrik Hammer and Timo Janse

Total distance: 1223 miles

Average speed: 71.94 mph

Top speed: 119 mph (fwiw, that’s the max at red-line on a flat surface that the 2010 Dodge Charger SXT, 3.5L V6, has to give… I did give it another quarter mile to nurse any little bit more out; measured via GPS, not analog speedo).

Pictures: http://eclipsed.net/~gr/Pictures/Crescent_Run-2010/

More words: http://forums.f1weekly.com/showthread.php?tid=4769

Although I’ve some experience in this particular sort of rodeo, I’m no Alex Roy… especially including my not owning one, never mind several, BMW E90 M3s… or any car at all. I was happy to help flog a good friend’s ‘97 VW GTi from Long Island City to Detroit nearly a year ago, but I donated my very own ‘98 VW Jetta for the benefit of my local public radio station over a year ago, so I’m looking at the “rent a car for a week” market, and I’m seeing a lot of vehicles I don’t really want to drive for five minutes, let alone 1250 miles.

Said vehicles hit the opposite ends of the relevant bell curve: I’ve no more or less interest in a Pontiac G60 or a Ford Fusion than I do in Bentley Continental or a Lambo Murciélago: I’m going to hate every second of driving any of those over the roads that get me to NOLA in a timely manner, and, as many laughs as I’d get rolling along Rampart in a Lambo, the shiny ones aren’t worth the cost of my having to replace every single leaf spring in the damn thing.

Somewhere in there, there’s a middle ground. Surely, there exists someone in the vague Philadelphia neighborhood who will rent me a late ’90s BMW M3, Audi RS4/6, or at least a Japanese sedan of recent vintage with something resembling a manual shift.

(Please don’t make me lean on a friend to let me borrow his family’s mid-’60s Facel Vega II. Never mind the irony’s being rather too sharp, I probably can’t get my head around asking to borrow a car worth six figures.)

Help?

http://usbg-pa.org/

Thoughts?

Regrettably, I’m ignorant of the ways to go about offsetting the start date or the presentation method when embedding a Google calendar. You definitely want that in at least weekly, if not daily, view, and you want to bounce forward (or backward, although I’m not sure why you’d come to this later and need to do that) to 14 May or so.

Farmer Brown
The restaurant/bar attached to my hotel, which sources its food from local farms, preferring those run by non-white farmers. It actually has a pretty interesting cocktail program, and tonight’s bartender, Daniel, did a good job, but somebody needs to introduce them to the double-strain, or at least using a strainer at all.

Swig
Definitely a good selection, but they were mobbed by a very mixed (pick your metric: racial, gender, gender-preference, socio-economic: all apply) group while I was there. One part of that group was there for the live blues (which was very good), to which they were dancing, and the other part was stripey shirt boys clearly more irritated by the gender imbalance (heavily hetero male, meaning Them) than I (there to sample the cocktail menu) was. My Gin Gin Mule, listed on the menu with Martin Miller’s but poured with Tanqueray, was obviously rushed by the circumstances, so I’ll have to come back on a slower night.

Rye
I can’t say enough good things. Hannah’d previously given me the ingredients, but not the proportions, for their Dogpatch, and I tried it with what I thought made sense and found it too dark and heavy, but the genuine article is much better than my guestimate was. I dealt mostly with Lauren (who may or may not remember the Attention and Red Hook after I taught them to her), who seems a bit unsure of herself unnecessarily, didn’t catch the name of the senior bartender on duty, met Marco (formerly of Clock Bar, now consulting, so far as I could gather) and Erick (Bourbon & Branch and (?) Rickhouse), each on my side of the bar, each probably turning up for the Cocktail Classic, and had a pleasant chat. I’ll be back, especially as it’s stumbling distance from the hotel.

2 oz rye (I used Old Overholt)
¾ oz Averna amaro
¾ oz Cinzano bianco (note: not dry, the sweet, white type of vermouth)

Stir in a mixing glass on ice, strain over cubes in a Collins, top with soda, garnish with a flamed orange peel (and discard the peel).

Summer Herb Bouquet
I’ve had Aperol cocktails on the back of my mind since I was asked about them not terribly long ago. That, combined with leftover freshly-squeezed orange juice from this past weekend’s party and a curiosity to play with basil flowers as a garnish begot this. I think there’s too much Aperol in this recipe (drop it to ¾ oz, but that may require an adjustment of either the gin or the St. Germain, and I haven’t remade it yet), but it’s on the verge of being a lovely summer drink.

1½ oz Hayman’s Old Tom gin (if you don’t have Old Tom, use 1¼ oz of a plymouth-style—including Plymouth brand—gin and ¼ oz simple syrup)
½ oz fresh orange juice
½ oz St. Germain
2 dashes aromatic bitters (I used Bitter Truth, Angostura might actually be better)
2 leaves fresh basil (I used the cinnamon basil from my back yard, same for the flowers below, but I expect any variety will work, if slightly differently)

Shake all of the above on ice, double-strain (the second strainer should be mesh, not just a julep: it’s catching the herb bits) into a Collins glass filled with crushed ice, garnish with a couple of basil flowers.

Attention

As before, but this time with basil flowers as a garnish. (Guess why those were floating around…)

Old Fashioned
Jacob Briars and Sebastian Reaburn have a lot to say about the proper ways to make an Old Fashioned. This isn’t their way, it’s my way.

3 oz Rittenhouse 100 Rye
1 sugar cube
liberal dashes Angostura bitters

Drop the sugar cube in a mixing glass, soak it with Angostura bitters, add one barspoon room temperature to warm water, muddle the sugar cube into the bitters. Add the rye, fill the glass halfway with ice, and stir assertively but not aggressively for at least 90 seconds. Strain (use a julep, please) into an Old Fashioned glass with a couple of good ice cubes in it. Garnish with a lemon twist.

Toronto
I learned this at Deep Ellum (the bar in Boston with the US East Coast’s best Manhattan variation list, rather than the city in Texas for which the former is named), and I’m pretty sure what I do is closer to what I had there than Jamie Boudreau’s recipe of the same name, which has both too much sugar and too little Fernet for my palate.

3 oz Old Overholt Rye
1 oz Fernet-Branca

Stir on ice, strain into a chilled cocktail glass, garnish with a smacked mint leaf (I used spearmint from the back yard, but any old thing will do, the larger the leaf the better—I picked the one pictured here without light).

For most practical purposes, this means you can buy beer, but neither wine nor spirits, but several enterprising spirits vendors are chasing this market with diluted spirits. Here are several on a grocery store shelf. (There are also whiskeys and gins.)