Cocktails: California Gimlet With Lemon Verbena Vodka

By West Village Bill

I made Lemon Verbena Vodka this past weekend by steeping one bunch of lemon verbena from the farmers market in a bottle of 360 Vodka. And this week, I've been making California Gimlets for Tony and myself. And now his new pet nickname for me is Gimlet. Aw.

The lemon verbena sat in the vodka for three days. I maybe could have left it in a few days longer. It's verbeny but not terribly strongly so. The next time I make it, I'll leave it in for a week. And I'll break up the leaves and stems smaller so they'll come right out of the bottle along with the vodka. This time, I ended up fishing out the large bits of herb with a bent paper clip before I poured the vodka back in.

Dale DeGroff calls the type of gimlet I made a California Gimlet because it's made with fresh lime juice rather than Rose's lime juice, which is what bars are likely to use in a gimlet.

When I was visiting my buds Dan and Paul in Cape May a couple of weekends ago, Paul whipped us up some cocktails that Saturday night with what he found lying around the trailer (besides me): Rose's lime juice, vodka and amaretto. I'd write the recipe here, but he doesn't remember the proportions of the ingredients, which made for a fun combo. He dubbed the drink Fun With Fags, or the FWF for short.

Cocktails: The Main Squeeze Revisited

By Brooklyn Bill

I've tweaked my recipe for the Main Squeeze since I wrote about it in February. Specifically, I've added a dash of bitters to make it less sweet and a little more sophisticated.

My buddy Bob likes his MS a little fizzier, so I put 2 ounces of club soda in his. I'm not overly fond of fizziness,* and my friend Jen, Bob's wife, thinks it's fizzy enough without the extra club soda, so I use only 1 ounce in our MSes. Bob says the extra soda makes him less likely to drink it really fast. He's still usually the first one done, though. :-)

Here's my revised recipe, with a few footnotes, for extra cocktail nerdiness!

Main Squeeze

2 oz. St-Germain
2 oz. orange juice,** preferably fresh squeezed
1 dash,*** bitters****
1 oz. club soda

Shake the first three ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Pour, unstrained, into a rocks glass. Add the club soda. Garnish with an orange slice, if desired.

*I'm very fond of fuzziness.
**I bet it'd also be delicious with tangerine juice, which was in my original, discarded-for-being-too-complex recipe.
***Per cocktail guru Dale DeGroff, a dash is six drops.
****I used Urban Moonshine Original Bitters, which is flavored with dandelion, angelica, burdock, and orange peel, among other ingredients.

Cocktails: St-Germain and the Main Squeeze

By Brooklyn Bill

The latest cocktail ingredient I've been playing around with is St-Germain, an incredibly delicious and wonderfully aromatic French liqueur made from elderflowers. It's captivating, beautiful, and elegant—and the perfect combination of fruity, floral, and sweet.

St-Germain is tasty enough on its own, but I had visions of combining it with flavors of orange and honey into a stellar cocktail I had planned to call the Orange Blossom. But that name has been taken. And taken. And taken.

The first version of my cocktail went thusly:

2 oz. St-Germain
2 oz. Cointreau*
2 oz. fresh-squeezed tangerine juice
1 oz. honey syrup**
Club soda

Shake the first four ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Strain into a 12-ounce glass filled with ice cubes. Top off with a splash of club soda. Garnish with an orange or tangerine slice, if desired.

Cocktails: The Scorpio and the Eighth Sign

By Brooklyn Bill

The other day, while going through some old magazines, I found an intriguing cocktail recipe in the November issue of Martha Stewart Living that I was eager to try. The drink is called the Scorpio and consists of sloe gin and ginger ale shaken up with some grated fresh ginger and lemon juice. Since I never have soda in the fridge, I figured I'd pump up the amount of fresh ginger and add simple syrup and seltzer water to approximate the taste and fizz of the ginger ale.

Then I got a better idea. Sloe gin tastes like cherry, and I love the combination of cherry and pomegranate, so I ditched the ginger ale in favor of pomegranate juice. And it was delicious.

I was going to name the drink the Virgo, after my astrological sign, but then I saw that MSL has been doing this Zodiac cocktail thing every month since November and so is bound to create a Virgo for the September issue. So I hereby christen my Scorpio variation the Eighth Sign, after Scorpio's position within the Zodiac.

Drinking in the New Year

Posted by Brooklyn Bill

Toward the end of '09, I did a lot of thinking about drinking. Pretty much the whole goddamn decade was one long reason to get plastered, if you were paying attention to current events. But I started focusing on, specifically, cocktail drinking late this year because of an article about making proper drinks for a party that I edited for the magazine where I work.*

Then I saw The Essential Cocktail by Dale DeGroff in a Papyrus store and bought it on impulse, though it was an impulse purchase backed with the knowledge—gained from the wine and spirits columnist for the magazine—that DeGroff is pretty much the person you'd want to learn about cocktails from. And I've been having lots of fun reading it and taking in the drink-porn photos.

For Christmas, at my request, my sister and her family gave me a sleek and sexy cocktail shaker, a jigger, and a cocktail spoon that doubles as an ice chopper.

Now all I need is some booze! And some recommendations. I've been on a kick for gin and tonics lately** but I'm eager to branch out. What cocktails do you make at home or request at a bar that I should try? I'm also curious about which brands of liquor you think are best and which expensive ones aren't worth the extra coin.

*In the interest of keeping my working and blogging lives separate, I'm not going to link to the story here. If you're curious to read it, shoot me an e-mail and I'll send you the link.

**That's the result of another article I edited by that columnist about new ways to spruce up the classic G&T. I'm obviously highly impressionable when it comes to what I drink. :-)