“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?

Francesco:

• a brief history of aperativo/vermouth that you ought to know already
• originally medicinal, of course – cordiole, “strengthening the heart”
• Greek & Roman era – fermentation not controlled – mulsum (wine & honey); conditioned wine with honey & spices in clay amphorae [cf, the bars in Pompei - thanks Claire W]
• elixers developed in monasteries, walled from the Barbarians
• picked up knowledge from the Arabs
• 1250 Marco Polo returns with Eastern knowledge
• Crusades as an excuse for claiming the spice route
• Republica Marinari (Milanese)
• Campare Gaspare as an apothecary
  • for indigestion, 2 spoons Campari, 4 spoons “anything else”
  • for children’s tapeworm, 2 spoons Campari
• vermouth:
  • sweet/red/rosso – Italian
  • dry – French
• some nice photos in the slideshow [link?] of the Campari factory in Milano
• amari are:
  • alcohol
  • flavoring (botanicals & spices)
  • sweetener (well, maybe)
  • demineralized water
• the hot techniques:
  • distillation
  • percolation
• cold techniques:
  • maceration
  • infusion
• keep liqueurs in cool, dark place to avoid UV exposure & oxydation
• amaro digestivo:
  • Averna
  • fernet (not just Fernet-Branca)
  • Nonino
  • Montenegro
  • Ramazzotti
  • …
• aperativo:
  • Aperol
  • Campari
  • Cinzano (!)
  • Cynar
  • Biancasorti
  • Sancia
  • …
• cordiale  go up to 192° proof
• liquore:
  • Galliano
  • Strega
  • Carpano
  • …
• Chartreuse just across the Alps from northern Italian producers (Galliano, Carpano, Cinzano(?)), can use the same botanicals
• Further north (Holland), they used more cumin, et cetera (via spice trail)
• Luxardo cherry liquor as alternet to Heering
• “L’ora del’aperativo’ common in Italy for everyone, small snack after work and before dinner, with a drink
• Carpano had the original vermouth recipe
• Disarono influenced by almonds from Arabia [but Katie Loeb calls BS on that, and I forgot to follow up until now]
• Dimmi from Milan

… and then, ladies and gentleman, we present Mr. Danny DeVito, to stagger up to the mic, lay into us about his limoncello (which isn’t bad, but was amply aided by the herb–basil? maybe?–with which it was garnished), and then blather on about the region in which it’s produced along with a video of the region and production of the same.

Agostino:

• Starting out with a drink, L’auntico martini:
  • 10 mL L’auntico Galliano
  • 50 mL London Dry gin
  • 10 mL marsala or dry sherry
  • 3 Celio(sp?) bitter (lemon bitters, essentially)
• Galliano
  • shape of the bottle from Roman columns [Um, really?]
  • color from gold rush [what?]
  • named for Giuseppe Galliano (b. 1846)
  • Arturo Vacconi created it, 1896
  • manufactured by Maraschi e Quirici [not even checking Google on those] in Turin since 1888
  • 4 separate distillates
  • 25 herbs and spices, including lavender, sage, cardomon, cloves, [and I've written "see photos", which is a shame, since those don't exist any more, but I'm sure somebody took some]
• L’auntico Galliano
  • it will replace the existing Galliano [so get a bottle and rebalance your Italian Heather now!]
  • more vanilla notes to draw out the fruit flavors
  • [some silly drink thrown together to showcase sponsors: it has all of L'auntico Galliano, DeVito's Limoncello, and Disarono in it. If after reading all that you still want the recipe, I apparently did note it down...]
  • A serious note on the new/old Galliano: it is actually noticeably different, and I don’t dislike it… but I kind of wish they’d continue to produce both.

• Originally the 7 seas were those just around southern Europe and Arabia; pre-Columbus (Adriatic, Mediterranean, Caspian, Black, Red, Aegean, and Persian — thanks Louisia W-S)
• 13th century world was just Europe, Arabia, and China; countries (cf, VOC in Low Country Libations)
• silk route both overland and water, but nobody traveled the whole route, just legs, but moved textiles, spices, and culture along the routes
• 1274 – Marco Polo was (one of the) first to travel the whole route
• 1295 – returned to Europe (but the Chinese were reluctant to see him go)
• 1312 – wrote the story of his travels down, and was initially disbelieved
• 1280-1370 – Mongolion Empire made the land silk route possible, the route broke apart when it collapsed
• 1488 – Portugal finally passed Cape Horn to replace the land route
• 1492 – Spain went westward
• 1494 – Treaty of Torbesillas split the world between Portugal, getting Brazil & east, Span got the North American coast and west
• British Empire was later to world travel, battling with France and Holland
• 1578 – Great Britain sent ships out [where?], but failed
• 1584 – GB found Roanoke (but we know how that ends)
• 1624 – GB in the Caribean
• ca 1815 – British Empire the largest out there
• Tasting: the Voyager
  • 2 oz Don Q gold rum (”top-selling rum in Puerto Rico”)
  • ½ oz Benedictine
  • ½ oz Falernum
  • ½ oz lime juice
  • 2 dashes Angostura
  • served on the rocks, with a lime wedge
• tiki drinks started in the Caribbean because fruits, etc were plentiful there, but are modified punches
• 15th century, first [modern] distillations
• Brandy, first in the 12th century, became popular in the 14th
• Romans made wine (and probably distillates as well; we rediscovered both later), but they added garlic, salt water, honey, and other things, which indicates it wasn’t necessarily great
• punch was also designed to cover less than ideal flavors
• cachaça b/n 1530 and 1550, “sugar wine”, doled out to slaves as incentive to work
  • appellation not so big a deal – just had fermented product, distilled it, it’s stronger
  • consumed at a rate of 2 gallons / person / year in Brazil
  • caipirinha is the diminuitive of caipira, which means “hill billy”
  • See also Jared Brown & Anistatia Miller’s Soul of Brasil for a history of cachaça
• pisco:
  • first wine grapes in Pisco, Peru in 1500
  • distillation technique from European brandy
  • early piscos were pomace wines
  • 1641 – Spain banned exports of pisco from the colonies because it was cutting into the native Spanish wine market
  • pisco is distilled at bottle strength (rather than diluted as most spirits), so it retains more flavor
  • aged in clay casks, rather than wooden barrells
  • originally pisco was the word for a bird, then for the people who lived in the area, then for the clay of the area, then for the spirit stored in that clay
  • Chilean pisco claims origination; they were distilling, but differently
  • originally the pisco in North America (especially San Francisco) came from Peru, but Chile took over the market; Peru’s just now getting back on its feet
  • 1928 – first printed reference [or recipe?] to a pisco sour, Victo Morris in Lima
  • Chileans leave the egg out of pisco sours
• Mescal:
  • 200 AD at least for palque, fermented sap of agave
  • distillation beagn mid 1500s (probably 1531)
  • some evidence that distillation was introduced by Filipinos in Colima & Jalisco (most say it was introduced by the Conquistadors)
    • the equipment more resembles Filipino’s than Spanish
    • the Spanish were conquerors, but the Filipinos were traders
• Some margarita origination stories I didn’t note down; “margarita” = “daisy” (and is similar, as is the Cosmo)
• Rum:
  • on ships to kill the contamination in the water
  • began with the import of molasses (and slave triangle)
  • gradually moved north from the islands
• the Mojito:
  • preceded by El Draque, 1586, named for Sir Francis Drake
  • Angel Martinez standardized the recipe in 1998
• gin:
  • based on jenever from the Netherlands in 1595 [but see also Low Country Libations]
  • British soldiers introduced to it in 1625
  • British gin still foundings:
    • 1793 Plymouth
    • 1796 Gordon’s
    • 1820 Beefeater
    • 1830 Tanqueray
  • 1751 – gin act limited and taxed production & sales
  • Pink Gin – most likely invented by the Royal Navy in order to take Angostura for seasickness
  • Gimlet, named for Thomas Gimlette; 1879 mandated consumation of limes and got it into the Merchant Shipping act (see also Lauchlin Rose production of preserved lime juice, in 1867)
• [From the QA, maybe?] There were some truly weird things during mid-millenium; yeast was unknown until Pasteur, so there was something called chicha – pineapple, apple, chewed to soften it, fermentation started with feces from guinea pigs, then add star anise to cover the odor

• “Low Country” means, roughly, the Benelux – “We live in the crotch of Europe.” [I've no doubt that was Philip.]
• Philip might have missed a word: “Timo’s book is about non-alcoholic children. Er…”
• modern inventions [this seemed a bit more in context at the time]:
  • penicillin
  • walk on the moon
  • the Internet
  • women in bars
• Only session with NO sponsors [but I have to presume that Philip didn't buy all the Easter Egg bottles of Old Schiedam himself... they just weren't in the room.]
• “Der Naturen Bloeme” (1269) – first reference to distilling in Europe
• juniper – “He who has cramps, cook juniper in wine; it’s good against the pain.”
• … and early distilling was precisely juniper and wine
• late 1400s, “Making Burned Wine”
  • botanicals: grains of Paradise, galangeel [what?], nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, ginger
  • served has a [health] tonic
• 1497 – Brandewijn (sp?) in Amsterdam
• 1552 – Genieve – aqua vitae
• 1582 – Kornbrandewijn – “in aroma and taste is almost the same as brandy-wine
• 1602 – Dutch East India Co., or Verenigde Oost-Indisch Co. (VOC), upon whose conquests Dune was based:
  • 50,000 employees
  • functioned as a nation (conquered states, printed their own money)
  • fueled a spending boom that got silly enough that people were paying ~10 million [whatevers] for a tulip bulb
  • Indonesia (whence Batavia Arrack)
  • rolled up in ships, offered to pay for spices/silks/goods, if the city refused to pay, they politely pointed at all the cannon on the ships
• Dutch Navy’s drink was Genever (a taste of Olde Schiedam came around here, and I’ll need to get to Europe to bring some back)
• Genever from satellite cities because distillers kept pigs, feeding them the mash, and “pigs are smelly”
• Olde Schiedam:
  • a wine-based Genever
  • single malt
  • 2/3 barley & 1/3 rye
  • Schiedam itself is a satellite city of Rotterdam
  • [I have:] “Shippem = Schiedam”
  • the only botanical is juniper
• 1621 – The Dutch West Indies Co., Geoctrajeerde W-Indische Co (GWIC), was chartered
  • founded US (New Amsterdam)
  • otherwise unsuccessful
  • granted everything west of Capitain
• The Best selling regions for Genever outside Holland are Argentina & Guadalupe
• In the movie Ray there’s a reference to Bols Genever – not product placement, he really drank it every day
• West Africa also drinks a lot of Genever; a good gift for a chief for his daughter’s hand in marriage
• “So good it’d make a Bishop kick a hole in stained glass” [Philip, of a particular Genever, the name of which I expected to pull out of a photograph of the bottle, but since the camera and laptop were both burgled...]
• 1623 – Philip Massinger’s Duke of Milan first [literary] use of Genever
• 1827 – continuous still invented – per Philip, by Robert Stein, not by Angus Coffey
• 1860 – first continuous still operating in the Netherlands
• 1862 – [something's missing here:] Wondrich’s important quote on genever 5/6 to 1 relative to gin [Is this the thing about how Jerry Thomas's recipes actually work with genever? Too little context, because they launched into what describes different classes of genever]
• Rules of genever:
  1. Terms
     • Oude (old) genever – aged or unaged whiskey with botanicals; taste shows that; softer, lower-proof (35%)
     • Jonge (young) genever is vodka with a hint of malt
     • The similarity of genever to gin is a myth; distilling with a Dutch King in England starts with lots of sugar (like genever), the process gets refined, ends up as grain neutral spirits
     • Timo: “Kettle One is about equivalent to jonge jenever”… but KO jenever is $11 (and better than the vodka) rather than $35; better as in better flavor profile
     • Jonge starts with Coluire [spelling? Hell, intelligible?] in the 1920s because of a shortage of grain post-war
     • Timo [I think]: “You can’t sell vodka in Holland.”
  2. Made in one of:
     • Holland
     • Belgium
     • Nord or Pas-de-Calais
     • Nordheim-Westfalen, DE
     • Niedersachsen, DE
  3. Must contain juniper, but it does not have to be a discernible flavor (gin, per ATF, must smell of juniper)
  4. content:
     • jonge genever is
       • 15% malt wine (whiskey)
       • 70° proof
       • max 10 grams sugar/L
     • oude genever
       • min. 15% malt wine
       • max. 70° proof
       • max 20 grams sugar/L
       • if aged, min. 1 year, in a max 700 L barrel
• Willem Kieft
  • founded American whiskey by 1644 – first distiller in US
  • he was the “utter bastard” (Philip, of course) running the US GWC
  • recalled because of how much he abused the settlers
  • … but he gave us Pennsylvania rye
  • succeeded by Peter Stouson (sp?)
• 1637 – Pieter Blower invented rum in Barbados, also under GWC
• Simon Schama’s Embarrassment of Riches covers all this very Dutch ___ India Co business.
• a history of brandy (remember, from brandewijn):
  • 1585 – fall of Antwerp
  • 1604 – 50% of distillers in Charente (now Cognac) were Dutch
  • 19 May 1972 on VOC
  • [... and I got distracted by a tasting...]
• 1724 – bitter, herb-infused genever (roughly “equivalent to MD20/20″)
• New developments:
  • yonge genever -> Ketel One vodka
  • old genever -> Bols 1830
• [My notes here on, just half a Moleskine page, are a mess of spirit types and brand names; I'll go through Philip's slide show and fill this in when I can figure out what I was trying to keep up with.]

Inline in my notes, but separated here, are some of the spirits we tasted (that Philip will be glad to remind you that you can’t get in the US) and were not lost to the loss of the camera:

• Els la Vera – 4-5 grams of sugar/L, from Maastricht Lindbergh; similar to absinthe, malt cane(?); botanicals grow only in volcanic soil (replicated by Bols)
• hand-grated mandarin orange-infused Old Schiedam Mandayner(sp?)
• Dutch wine, Apostelhoeve (first written proof of which is 871)
• Rutte (aged) Paradyswijn

As with all of Philip’s presentations, this one is available on slideshare.net.

Xavier opened up by talking about punch:

• Punch was brought back from India to England by sailors in the 17th century.
• The name comes from “paantsch”, which means “five”, referring to the five ingredients: spirit, sugar, lemon, water, and spice.
• In 1694, Edward Russel, First Lord of the Admiralty, took the record for the largest punch: it was in a fountain. It was 8-10 thousand gallons containing brandy and Malage wine.
• The party ended when the punch ran out… a week later.
• Moving onto Dickens, 1812-1870.
• “Charles Dickens drank a lot of gin. He drank a lot of punch.”
• At his death, there were found in Dickens’s cellar 185 (12-bottle) cases of wine, 25 cases of champagne, 844 bottles of port, [and a longer list I couldn't keep up with]
• Recommends Convivial Dickens by Edward Hewett and William F. Axton and Drinking with Dickens by Cedric Dickens, in one of which [I've forgotten] resides a good Hot Gin Punch recipe.
• In gin houses of the 1800s people were drinking to get drunk, and there was lots of punch. The bartenders were “pretty ladies” because customers were sailors.
• [A few minutes of searching hasn't told me what this note meant, so I'll just transcribe it verbatim:] 202o.net (?) [definitely not the right site] quote from SM – probably Samuel Mathers [the occultist...?]
• Back to punches… nutmeg was used in most of them.
• Punch was drunk at all hours of the day
• White Congo punch recipe:
  • 8 L Hendrick’s gin
  • 2 bottles maraschino
  • 4-6 L vanilla ice cream
  • grated nutmeg
• From Xavier’s experience, a bathtub of punch servers 250-400 people for ~6 hours
• I then have: “Nick Strangeway recipe” — he’s a bartender in London, maybe the above is his? Maybe something else I wanted to track down is?

Charlotte (much of what follows are snippets of quotes I intended to look up and flesh out after I was home; I’m not doing that yet so that I can get through the rest of the week, but you should be able to find them too):

• Montgomery Martini, for British General Montgomery who refused to fight in WWII without overwhelming odds, like 15-1 – proportions for this cocktail.
• Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms – “One day, when I was in bed with jaundice…”, great volumes of Kummel; nurse finding protagonist with a huge quantity of empty bottles
• PG Woodhouse, Cocktail Times – “corkscrews are straight and a spiral staircase is the shortest line between two points”; “never trust a man with a thin, black moustache”; “lopping up martinis like a vacuum cleaner”
• Dorothy Parker – “I like to have a Martini, two at the very most; three, I’m under the table, four I’m under my host!”
• Barnaby Conrad III quote re: Martini [perhaps in here?]
• Sue Grafton, “B” is for Burglar – [When one character enjoys the first sip of a Martini:] “I can leave the room if you’d like to be alone with that.”
• Bernard Devoto, The Hour (which is rather impressively out of print) – “There are only two cocktails”, a slug of whiskey and the Martini; “cocktails are cold!”; includes a Martini batching recipe to get it to the right temperature:
  • fill a pitcher with ice
  • let it chill
  • dump the melt
  • refill with ice
  • mix Martini at your proportions in the pitcher on the ice
• The Hour is, of course, the source for the “violet hour” turn of phrase (and Chicago bar’s name)

Jim, dressed in a full-body roach costume, begins by…:

• … reciting the introductory paragaphs of Kafka’s Metamorphosis (with Charlotte providing the voice of Mother), asserting, after a round of applause, that it was the quintissential morning after.
• Isaiah 5:11 – “Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning, that they may follow strong drink; that continue until night, till wine inflame them!”
• Lord Byron, Don Juan – “And the small ripple…”, “wine and women, mirth and laughter, soda and water for the morning after”
• Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat – “Two gallons of wine…”
• Baudelaire: “Get drunk. One must always be drunk…” (An alternate translation.)
• James Wring (1927-1980), Two Hangovers

Angus:

• owns 700-800 cocktail books
• Ogden Nash: “Parsely is ghastly”; “Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.”; [not sure the context for:] martini, old-fashioned, mint julep, etc.
• Flemming, Thunderball – bad things for a cocktail: cherry; celery; olive, “the testicle of the devil”
• Noah S. “Soggy” Sweat – “I can’t drink bourbon any more, it makes me a bit feisty.” – from (?) first speech on legalization of liquor
• Gary Regan – “Sexiest bit of cocktail writing I’ve ever read” (Angus) – Gary’s description of making an old-fashioned (location?)
• Toby Cecchini, Cosmopolitan – day in the life of (the departed) Passerby; of “bar chefs”: “bruisingly expensive”
• Hayward Buel, Cocktail – 500 pages long, everything in the movie happens in the first 75 pages; “bad choices, bad women, and bad drugs”; includes a (good?) zombie recipe
• Art Hopper’s Drinking School – “Their problem, obviously, is they don’t drink enough.”
• [I have a feeling that Charlotte stepped back into things here, but it's not in my notes... maybe it's just because I've seen he read this passage in a video.] George Augustus Sala: “The Barkeep and his assistants possess the agility of acrobats and the prestidigitative skill of magicians. They are all bottle-conjurors. They toss the drinks about; they throw brimful glasses over their heads; they shake the saccharine, glacial, and alcoholic ingredients in long tin tubes; they scourge eggs and cream into a froth; they send bumpers shooting from one end of the bar to the other without spilling a drop; they give change, talk politics, tell quaint anecdotes, swear strange oaths, smoke, chew, and expectorate with astonishing celerity and dexterity. I should like to be a bar-keeper, if I were clever enough.” – final line on conference ID lanyard
• Gary Regan – “Who can refuse … green-eyed Chartreuse …”

A history course about the evolution, if not the creation, of the cocktail in early New Orleans, led by Phil Greene, Ted Haigh, Lorin Gaudin, and Jay Hendrickson.

Phil, with some history about pharmacists, bitters, and Peychaud:

• America’s first licensed pharmacist was Louis Dufillo, granted a license by the Cabildo at 628 Toluse in 1803, moved to 514 Chartres in 1814.
• (photographs of various early bitters bottles, more at the Museum of the American Cocktail)
• Hostetters bitters were a popular brand early on
• Peychaud (Phil’s ancestor) credited with creating the cocktail – bitters, brandy, sugar, and water in a coquetier (an egg cup)… (gr: although opinions differ on whether he was first and on whether that’s the etymology of the word)
• Peychaud came to NOLA during the insurrection in Saint-Domingue, while his sister went to Paris
• Stoughton’s bitters was already in common use, but we haven’t any idea as to its recipe now
• Peychaud’s opened a pharmacy with his sister (who he tracked down in France and had brought to NOLA) ~ 1838 at 437 Rue Royale (now the antique gun, sword, and coin shop)
• Peychaud ran many competative advertisements, referencing his bitters’ use in the Sazerac Bar
• 6 May 1806: newspaper article in the Columbian making fun of a lost election uses the word “cocktail”
• Peychaud’s obituary on 30 July 1883 states that he was 80 years old at death, making it rather unlikely that his egg cup was the source of the name
• Phil presents a Sazerac (spinning the glass to wash it with absinthe… while wearing a rain poncho to avoid staining his suit):
  • chill 2 rocks glasses
  • In the first:
    • 1 splash simple syrup (gr: or a raw sugar cube)
    • 2 dashes Peychaud’s bitters
    • mix these, fill the glass with ice
    • add 2 oz Sazerac rye (or, traditionally, brandy or cognac)
    • stir
  • In the other:
    • 1 teaspoon Herbsaint (gr: or absinthe)
    • spin the glass in the air
  • strain glass 1 into glass 2
  • garnish with lemon rind

Ted, with some history of the cocktail’s content and references in the press:

• Originally a cocktail was:
  1. Consumed in the morning (not “just”, but “also”).
  2. (Just about anything that) included bitters.
• At the time, adding bitters to liquor was as shocking as adding Pepto-Bismal to beer would be today: anyone who’d do that was a reprobate.
• Practice probably from the British brandy & bitters, used to warm up in a clammy climate
• Those “snake oil salesmen” in old westerns and histories were essentially selling (something like) bitters, whiskey adulterated with various elements, but some were poisonous.
• This resulted in the Pure Food & Drug Act.
• Everyone began to believe that bitters, as medicine, was a scam, cocktails became the only legitimate use.
• By the 1830s, newspaper journalists, “a bunch of alcoholics” (Ted’s words), were writing positively about cocktails.
• Ted has six bitters recipes from the era and is happy to share. (I’ve emailed him, I’ll repost here if/when I hear back. One of the TalesBlog people was there and suggested she’d post the recipes, but maybe she didn’t connect with Ted.)
• There were three references to cocktails [in newspapers, I think] in the early 1800s, all are insults: how do we know that they’re an accurate representation of society’s view?
• Someone (missed the name) published a genus of cocktails (I definitely missed some of these):
  • gum ticklers:
    • glass of gin
    • dram of bitters
    • …
  • flem cutters
    • mint julep
    • [illegible -- yes, in my own notes, shut up]
    • …
  • gall breakers:
    • grog
    • flip
    • samson (stewed rum & cider)
    • toddy
    • bishop
    • doctor
    • cocktail: rum & honey
• Stemming from that last listing of a cocktail including rum and honey, Ted presents a cocktail he’d previously called the Hogarth, but is renaming the Croswell [gr: I think that's the name of the editor of Balance and Columbian Repository who defined the cocktail as the oft-quoted "stimulating liquor composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters", but I'm not positive] including just rum, honey… and bitters of course.
• [I can't figure out whether this was an aside at the time or me jumping forward and back in my notes to fill in gaps, but:] At the time, acid phosphates in a solution were thought to be good for the brain. They were used for cocktails, but that stuff doesn’t exist any longer. Ostensibly, they made a drink dry “like a good Barolo”.
• Jamaica ginger (”Jake”), intended as an anti-spasmodic medication, was used in cocktails as well.
• During Prohibition, one company produced a tainted, lousy Jake, damaged the nervous system, “Jake leg”.
• Note that most bathtub distillates were more like rum than like gin.
• Instead of separating out the tails, as professional distillers do, moonshiners just used the whole distilling output (heart & tails), and then add as much as a whole bottle of Jake to cover the taste.
• Now then, the Croswell:
  • 2 pts Van Ousten Batavia Arack
  • 2 pts Clement VSOP Agricole
  • 2 pts “Rhum [M?]agrido” (spelling?) – Ted says that this can be replicated decently with 1 pt Angostura 1919 Rum and 1 pt 10 Cane Rum.
  • 1 dash Angostura bitters
  • 1 dash Fee’s Barrel-Aged Bitters
  • 2 tspns honey syrup

Lorin Gaudin, mostly covering the impact of the Ursilines sisters on pharmacy:

• Pharmacy laws first came from New Orleans.
• The first (non-licensed) pharmacist was a sister from the Ursilines convent who practiced herbal healing – Sister Frances Xavier (year?)
• Ostensibly Sister FX published a list of herbs she used and their applications, but if the convent still has it, they aren’t sharing.
• Two local chefs, Scott Boswell and [missed it...] tend the garden now in the convent now, which contains mostly parsley, chervil, etcetera (which it likely also had then)
• Picayune Creole Cookbook, 1901, includes a list of palliative herbs: time, sage, rosemary, mint, dandelion
• The convent’s still there at Governor Nichols & Ursilines, old[est?] building in New Orleans, with a 267-year-old stairwell; it survived the fire of 1787.
• Another product of the pharmacists of the time (who Lorin notes tended to call themselves “druggists”, rather than “pharmacists”) developed was nectar syrup [cf, Orgeat, Falernum]
• A modern example: CoolBrew

Jay, presenting a history of Herbsaint:

• J. Marion Legendre created Herbsaint after absinthe was banned in 1912 at the drug store his father had started at 124 Bourbon St.
• During WWI, Legendre had a drink similar to absinthe.
• During Prohibition, Legendre’s drug store had the US’s highest volume license to distribute “prescription acohol”.
• In December 1933, he launched Legendre Absinthe, with distilling license number 48 (because he was completely ready to roll, having been doing this throughout Prohibition)
• An early competitor was Jung & Wulff; both they and Legendre advertising absinthe
• “Modern Pernod–nasty stuff, I can’t tolerate it, …”
• FACA stopped Legendre and Jung & Wulff from manufacturing their absinthes (which weren’t, really, but the name was scary)
• Legendre simply changed the name to Herbsaint; Herbe Sainte is the French/Creole name for wormwood (literally “sacred herb”)
• Note from Lorin: the Ursilines also referred to all of their herbs as sacred.
• Herbsaint trademarked on 1 March 1934
• The early advertising for Herbsaint stands out, includes pictures of the bottle, and assures the public that it’s not that horrible absinthe stuff. Advertising created by William B. Wisdom and included very complex graphics for ads of the time.
• Legendre had Tulane analyze his product to validate that it wasn’t poison.
• Also sold “Old New Orleans” (in the style of Peychaud’s) and orange bitters [slides with photos of the bottles; not sure whether this slide show's up online -- anybody?]
• … and also premixed bottled cocktails
• and “minis”, to sample the product

Because it was led by Melkon Khosrovian, who co-founded Modern Spirits and the TRU organic spirit line (I love the latter’s gin, which is more his wife, Litty Mathew, pictured there), I was looking forward to this one. There is some good stuff here, but the presentation’s a bit flat as compared with some of the other seminars. Oh well, it’s still interesting content.

• Modern Spirits creates “artisan” vodkas, consults on infusion/spirit food pairings
• Discussing:
  • where flavor comes from,
  • expansion rate of spirits,
  • and spirits & food pairings
• Flavor
  • comes from:
    • fermented material
    • oils, extracts, etc.
    • wood from the storage barrel
  • as an example, rose petal vodka
    • discussed with a parfumerie, who synthesis of just the odor; using the whole plant for vodka because spirits are not just odor
    • chefs were pairing this vodka with oysters and they didn’t understand why; parfumerie explained that the various vegetal and salty flavors and odors in the rose petal match with oysters because they have the same mix
  • another rundown on the modern understanding of taste that Sebastian Reaburn gave earlier, but including “fat” rather than “smoke”
  • Lemonine is the odor in citrus (I guess I just wrote this down to remember it?)
  • Methods for extracting essence from an orange, ranging from more complex and less intense at the top to less complex and more intense at the bottom:
    • maceration
    • essences, extractions, distallates
    • synthetic (eg, perfumes)
  • The keys to layering liquors in a dirnk are complexity and intensity.
  • Tasting: comparing TRU2 (macerated) gin against Blue Coat (distilled) gin; both are good, but trying to do different things (also, kind of unfair, since TRU2 has twice as many botanicals, but who’s counting)
  • Next was a Bronx cocktail, made with both TRU2 and Blue Coat, to demonstrate how the flavors present themselves across tasting the drink because of their different flavor profiles, best represented with a recreation of Melkon’’s diagram:
    
• Expansion
  • all alcohols dissipate at different rates
  • this matters because you can alter the base spirit to change the character (bold v. mellow) of a drink
  • tasting a tea-infused vodka, the tea prickles all of the mouth because of its tannins with just wheat vodka; reformulated with potato & wheat to redistribute the taste, but they’re “not sure” why it works
  • some bases are more (potato) or less (wheat) powerful
  • flavors within vodka:
    • grape – middle of the tongue, expands slightly
    • cane – expands over the tongue further
    • potato – covers the whole tongue
    • corn – over the full palate
  • wheat or rye – almost the same as above, wheat is more pepery, most expansive flavor
  • there was a nice chart on which of the above flavors are used in which spirits (vodka, liqueurs, gin, whiskey, rum, brandy; descending variety of source flavors), but I couldn’t copy it down quickly enough
  • In a Sazerac, there’s a sliding scale from mellow to bold with the relative quantities of cognac to rye.
• Food pairings:
  • Melkon’s fiancé (Litty, of TRU) hated vodka/spirits (preferred wine), but his family always drank spirits with food; he got her interested through vodka infusions
  • She said “Oh, the food tastes different with liquor!” -but she could just taste it better, in Melkon’s opinion
  • Restaurants in the US are moving to small plates, meaning we need something as a palate cleanser between tastes.
  • It’s challenging to pair mixed drinks with dishes, as both are complex mixtures of flavors.
  • “Dishes are getting bolder.”
  • Small plates are worldlier, molecular, richer, bravier, and spicier.
  • Cocktails address this change because they provide a wider array of flavors and serve as palate cleansers
  • Chefs like this because they don’t have to cook to a specific wine taste profile, cocktails can be modified to match the food.
  • Old thinking: wines cleanse the palate and cocktails dull it.
  • This is scientfically wrong: sommeliers claim acidic wine cleans, but that’s also not true; wine instills its own tastes.
  • Explanation is a hydrophobic reaction:
    • Wines are acidic, so they cover the fats on the tongue, but don’t mix with them, but just wash away when you swallow.
    • Cocktails are higher proof and absorb fat and wash it off the tastebuds.
  • Foods that we generally eat are 5% to 45% fat (ranging from grilled chicken to bacon or foie gras).
  • These should be paired with cocktails that are 20% to 45% ABV
  • On that scale, the proof ranges from 4x the fat to 1x.
  • The fat-o-meter (what percentage fat various foods are):
    

    foie gras	44%
    bacon	42%
    chorizo	38%
    smoked gouda	32%
    roast duck	28%
    goat cheese	21%
    porterhouse steak	19%
    lamb shank	19%
    carrot cake	18%
    tuna belly	13%
    fried chicken	9%
    grilled chicken	5%

  • An example pairing: lamb au poivre& bleu cheese with a veal demi glace and roast sage(flavorful & fatty) with black truffle vodka (high proof) – enough flavor in the cocktail to match, strong enough to cleans
  • Pairing tasting: cheesecake with lemon vodka and also a diluted lemon vodka: higher proof is a better match, and the more diluted vodka tastes boozier (because it’s absorbed less fat).
• Q&A tidbits:
  • It doesn’t really work to pair salad with cocktails, because there’s very little fat content to work with.
  • It’s better to use distilled water in cocktails and for bringing the proof of infusions & macerations down because it forms a better ionic bond with the spirit and the flavors, which leads to: Consider adding a filter on your Kold Draft machine’s input side.
  • Mixing flavors with alcohol produces more pronounced flavors because the alcohol evaporates in your mouth, carrying the flavors. Mixing flavors with water softens them.