Mixoloseum Night @ Elixir

I hosted a cocktail blogger group tonight at Elixir for a weekly live event they do called Thursday Night Drinks at Mixoloseum.com. The featured product was Square One Botanical and I set up a whole cornucopia of cocktail ingredients and tools for people to play with. Bloggers around the country are all logged into the same chat room and they are all playing with the same product in order to see what they can come up with. Here are mine:

BOTAWNICA
1.5oz SQ1 Botanical
.5oz Warres Optima 10yr Tawny Port
.5oz lemon juice
.5oz lemon verbena syrup
shaken and up

YUZU ROSE SOUR
2OZ SQ1 Botanical
.75oz yuzu juice
.5oz Sonoma Syrups Lavender
.5oz Sense Rose nectar
1oz egg white
2 dashes angostura orange bitters
Shake and serve up with a rose petal garnish

The Flower Stalk
1.5oz SQ1 Botanical
1oz J. Witty Chamomile Liqueur
.25 oz Sonoma Syrups Lavender
1oz Grapefruit juice
.75oz Bundaberg Ginger Beer
shake the first four and strain tall and over, top with ginger beer and stir lightly.

Rita's Sister
1.5oz SQ1 Botanical
1oz Canton Ginger
.5oz lime juice
.5oz agave nectar
Shaken and over

I know that a lot of those ingredients are hard to find, but try the Rita's Sister. Wish I had time to make more but we had Cocktail Club going on in the bar at the same time and 20 other things to juggle. Thanks to all who came out and made great cocktails. Check it all out @mixoloseum on Twitter. Until the next...

A Pear of Roses Cocktail

I'm preparing 150 of these for the CUESA Sunday Supper tonight. Come join us!

A Pear of Roses
1.5oz Square One Botanical
.5oz Lemon Juice (Meyer when possible)
3 inches of Rosemary leaves
1oz of pear juice
.5oz Sonoma Syrups lavender syrup

Strip 3 inches of rosemary leaves into a mixing glass and muddle lightly. Add the remaining ingredients and fill with ice. Shake well and double strain up. Garnish with a rosemary sprig pulled through a Meyer Lemon wheel floating in the cocktail.

Mixologist’s Notes
If Meyer Lemons are out f season, use a splash of orange juice (or a barspoon) in addition to the .5 oz of lemon.

Gardening gets press

So my little gardening adventure has attracted a little press. Good article from our friendly neighborhood cocktail writer, Camper English. There have been some other articles recently in those NY rags about NYC bartenders gardening and of course they make very little mention about what's going out here where we can and have been doing those for a while. But I digress...

Have a good read...I have to go trim my basil...

Gardening Update

Wooooow! 2 posts, 2 days. Not bad.
The pic to the left is none other than Marko Karakasevic digging up a Wormwood plant for me to bring home from the grounds of Domaine Charbay. That's right, Marko. Dig it. The one on the right is an older wormwood plant of his (what it looks like when it grows nice and tall). I mixed up a few cocktails that night and muddled some wormwood with some pineapple, lime juice, agave nectar and Charbay Tequila. when I muddled the wormwood with the pineapple, Marko noticed that it oddly smelled like a strawberry, so we called the cocktail the Spring Hill Mountain Strawberry. Try it!

I'm in this gardening frenzy, so I went and spent another $150 today at the garden center. Additions: 2 more wine barrels for my blueberry bushes and meyer lemon tree (1 each, duh), hot and spicy oregano (wait until I put that in a cocktail!), stevia, epazote, pineapple mint, more spearmint and peppermint, lemon grass and some citrus tree food. I learned that the holes in most of my leaves are from caterpillars that are plaguing everyone. According to my new best gardening buddy, Abbey (at Flowercraft Garden Center, 550 Bayshore), the little buggers are getting worse with global warming every year. I learned how to look for Aphids and kill them and few tips about watering. Turns out Abbey is an avid cocktailian and is psyched to learn of my little project. She was full of ideas. She uses the flowers of African Blue Basil in her own vodka martinis, which she loves with the original formula of Noilly Prat French Vermouth. Nice one, Abbey!

Let's try this again

I have been shite at this trying to keep up with the writing stuff, but I'll give it a try again for shits and giggles. Maybe it is the approach of trying to write too much. We'll try a shorter version.

To start with for today, I am going to publish the updated list of stuff growing in my new garden, which I have dubbed, in honor of a great bartender and friend who we all tragically lost this year, "Gregor's Garden". Here's what's growing now:

Gregor’s Garden
(photo above is from 8/3/09)
As of August 19th, 2009

Sweet basil
African blue basil
Thai basil
Lemon Basil
Basil Mint
Kentucky General Mint
Apple Mint
Spearmint
Texas Tarragon
Greek Mountain Oregano
Chives
Lemon verbena
Provence Lavender
Goodwin Creek Lavender
Tuscan Rosemary
Kits Pink Rosemary
Thyme
English Thyme
Thyme (with yellowish leaves – type unknown)
Sage
Pineapple Sage
Early Girl Tomatoes
Pink Brandywine Tomatoes
Tomatillo
Red Bell Pepper
Bolivian Rainbow Chiles
Rhubarb
An unknown chile
Sorel
Mixed lettuces
Espadin agave
Wormwood
Rose Geranium
Syrah grape
Granache Blanc grape
Grenache Noir grape
Vermentino Grape
Eureka Lemon tree
Kumquat Tree
Meyer Lemon tree
Blueberry bushes

Special thanks to Marko for the Wormwood and Rose Geranium from the Charbay compound and to my lovely girlfriend Angie for tolerating me turning my convertible into a pickup on our trip to Napa. I plan to add more plants soon and am learning on a regular basis about light, water, bugs, growing seasons and more. The idea is to be chock full of stuff I can use in cocktails at Elixir. Fun stuff, tiring and expensive. Hopefully some of you will reap the benefits soon!

The Week Ahead

I have a ton events this month and this week starts it all off:

Monday - 3pm, I'm making blueberry "mocktails" on ABC-TV's "View from the Bay" with Janelle Wang and Spenser Christian 4:30pm - I'll join our monthly USBG Meeting, featuring Right Gin and Kubler Absinthe 8pm - over to Cantina for Thad Vogler's benefit and then 9:30 off to the airport for a redeye to NYC.

Tuesday - arrival and prep for my gig pouring and teach at The Astor Center. I'll be joined by my friend and NYC Cocktail Ambassador Jonathan Pogash where we'll be pouring Square One Cocktails and I'll be teaching seminars in "Farmers Market Cocktails" and "A Cornucopia of Cucumber Cocktails" Come join me by clicking here!


Wednesday - It's off to Washington DC to make drinks at the Poste Brasserie for a Trust for Public Land benefit with Kimpton Hotels From 6pm to 8pm LATER THAT NIGHT - join me at Bar Pilar for a late night industry happy hour with Square One Cocktails (10ish on)

Thursday - 6:30pm to 8:30pm I'll be at the FRESHFARM Markets culinary and cocktail event at the United States Botanical Gardens. Get you tix here.

Friday I'm on my way home to pack and prep for Tales of the Cocktail the following week. Oh what a month! Please join me...

Radio Free Cocktails

Yesterday morning I got a phone call from KQED radio with a request for a little chat about cocktails and "the cocktail renaissance". We spoke for about 10 minutes and I thought that was the interview. I figured they'd use some of what I said in reference to some other people's perspectives on cocktails. Then I was asked to come down to the studio the next morning for the segment. I didn't think too much of it and said ok.

The last time I was on the radio (a few weeks ago), I got all prepared for this live segment on a cooking show. They told me that they wanted to talk about my career and how I got to what I am doing today (what was that again?). I called in, was introduced and was asked to describe my background and career. Since I thought that was exactly the topic, I went on a little too extensively and before I knew it, I was being cut off. I was on the phone a bit befuddled when the host came back on and said it was over. Opps. I guess I thought it was going to be longer than the 6 or 7 minutes (I was never told how long it would be, so that was my error). I left that with a lesson learned on radio shows: be brief and specific.

So when this thing got kicked off, it was apparent that I was there for a full hour show and was going to be in a conversation with a relative cocktail novice as a host and two of the most knowledgeable men in the business. It was a great set up for asking pointed questions that the wide reach audience of NPR would really get into. And they did.

The hour was thoroughly enjoyable and except for the thousands of miles between us, I felt like I was sitting in the same room with Dale and Doc, just shooting the shit with people who were honestly interested in what it is we each do. The only thing that was missing, as I said in an email to Dale and Doc later in the day...was a cocktail. But we'll be sharing some soon in New Orleans...talking to more people about the lucky lives we lead, sharing cocktails with the world. Click here to hear it. (You'll need about 55 minutes to hear the whole thing and you can download it as an mp3.)