cocktail review no. 78 - Aberfoyle

One of the things I picked up from my parents' house before I came down to Vegas was my old box of booze. During the first six months of 2008, when I lived in my folks' basement in Wyoming after graduating college and fruitlessly scoured cyberspace for journalism work, I took an interest in cocktails. My folks were wont to have a martini every night before dinner. Their liquor selection consisted solely of a fifth of Bombay Sapphire and some Martini & Rossi. After thumbing through The Bartender's Bible by Gary Regan (which to this day is my go-to guide on mixology), I found my parents' stocks to be inadequate. So over the course of six months I laded their liquor cabinet with rum (light and dark), tequila, vodka, bourbon, Scotch, rye, and every liqueur or cordial you could name. My folks, having no use for this stuff after I moved out, boxed it all up. I retrieved it from their new house in Sacramento last week and drove it, rattling and clinking, down Highway 95 to Las Vegas. The gin, tequila, and whiskies were long gone; only two bottles of hard liquor remain to my name, some Ugly Dog Vodka and Ugly Dog Rum. (My parents acquired it thanks to my grandparents, who had recently moved to Chelsea, Michigan, the home of the Ugly Dog Distillery.)

So here I am. It's the second Saturday I've been home. I had a few beers with my dad in San Francisco and some Kraken Black Spiced Rum at a dinner party with an old friend in Las Vegas proper...that's it. No cocktails. I was dying for a good belt of something. So I reached for The Bartender's Bible, flipped to the section on vodka, and what's the first drink I see?

This one:

• 1½ ounces vodka
• 1 ounce Drambuie

Pour both ingredients into a rocks glass half-filled with ice cubes. Stir well. 

Let's get one thing straight: Drambuie. It's honeyed Scotch liqueur, in case you haven't read any of my other cocktail reviews. And I love it. It's one of my favorite liqueurs in the world...or it was, before some wingnut decided to change the recipe. The bottle now looks like this: 

In the good old days, though, it looked like this: 

Culturally South Korea is a little behind the U.S., and matters booze-related are no exception. As the bottles of Drambuie made to the old recipe vanished from American shelves, a few holdouts remained on South Korean ones, and that's where I found mine. I think the new Drambuie tastes like cough syrup. I even did a video taste-test to that effect. I don't know where it's gone, otherwise I'd post it for your edification. 

Anyway, if you're going to make the Aberfoyle or any other Drambuie highball, make sure you've got the old recipe in the old bottle, not the new one. Yuck. The original recipe is (always) better.

What does the Aberfoyle taste like? Shockingly good. Vodka being a necklace of negatives, it absorbs and accentuates flavors, and with Drambuie there's plenty to accentuate: malt whisky, honey, herbs, and spices. One of my other favorite highballs is the rusty nail, wherein the Scotch and Drambuie really play off of each other; but with the Aberfoyle, the vodka sits back and lets the Drambuie shine. Consider the Aberfoyle a milder version of the rusty nail, but be warned: it packs a punch. There are no mitigating factors here. This drink has only two ingredients, and both are alcoholic...and the highball itself goes down smooth as butter. Mind you don't overdo it. 

Until next time... 

Angkor Wat and environs

I won't say much about the bus ride from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap. It was long and dull. I wanted to take the speedboat up the Tonlé Sap Lake, but my timing was bad—the water wasn't high enough. Even during the peak season there's still a good chance of running aground, I was told. So I gave it up, bought a bus ticket and spent a rather dull six hours in transit. 

I stayed at the King Boutique Hotel in Siem Reap. I later found out that "boutique hotel" is a slightly more upscale and discreet version of a love motel in Southeast Asia. That explains the starkness of my room. No decorations, no paintings, no wallpaper, nothing. Just a bed, a bathroom, a nicked, gouged wooden wardrobe painted all in black, and four white walls. 

Anyway, I didn't come here to tell you that. I came here to tell you about Angkor Wat. 

It's laughably easy to get around in Siem Reap, folks: fifteen dollars to hire a tuk-tuk for the day, and they'll take you anywhere. You can tour the great ruins of the ancient Khmer capital of Angkor on either a full-day (large circle) tour or the half-day (small circle) one. I did the small circle, starting with Angkor Wat itself. 

Let me explain something: "wat" means "temple." "Angkor" means "city," so Angkor Wat is literally "city temple." I know what you're thinking: Why did the ancient Cambodians live in a city named "City"? Beats me. Maybe because the names "Dikshit" and "Long Dong" were already taken. 

My tuk-tuk driver was named Yot. He pronounced it "yutz," and I labored hard to avoid stigmatizing him on that basis. His English was barely comprehensible, but fortunately he was a man of few words. He had a sneaky, shifty air about him that I didn't like. Nonetheless he was capable and patient, and drove me around Angkor Wat, the Bayon, and Ta Prohm with a brief stop for lunch in between. We established a routine: he'd drive me to a locale, I'd hop out and arrange a time to meet up with him, and he'd go park in the shade and unstring his hammock for a nap. I'd wander about the jungle-clad temples, gawping like a moron, for 45 minutes or so, and then off we'd go again. In this way I saw the Bayon...

...and Ta Prohm, the so-called "Tomb Raider temple," because it had the grievous misfortune of having an Angelina Jolie movie made there. 

This place was far prettier and more astounding than Angkor Wat. 

I was told that I'd feel like Indiana Jones walking around Ta Prohm, and boy, did I ever. 

I have no idea who this guy is, but his girlfriend was standing right next to me, taking his picture. 

It was after we got back to Siem Reap that Yot lived up to his unfortunate name. I got out of his tuk-tuk and turned to find him standing there, hand held out. I forked over his fifteen smacks, but he remained where he was, palm-up. 

"Tip, please," he said. 

The nerve of this character, I thought. 

"We agreed on a flat rate," I told him. You yutz, I added in my head. 

"Tip," he insisted. "Twenty dollars."

To this day I'm not sure whether Yot was asking me for five U.S. dollars, which would have brought his total fee to twenty, or for a further frickin' twenty bucks, a 133% bonus. Either way, I was incensed. I told him, as politely as I knew how, to go take a flying leap on a rolling doughnut.

I felt an acute need for another human's company (and a chronic need for a beer), so I walked from my hotel to the Old Market and Pub Street. I was bitterly disappointed with both: nothing but crappy souvenirs in the former and overpriced, foreign-themed cocktail bars full of phonies in the latter. I bought the most masculine-looking notebook I could find (my previous journal being filled to capacity) and went home to catch some bad Asian dramas and a little shuteye before I bugged out for Thailand in the morning. 

Ho Chi Minh City, day three

By prior agreement, nobody in our little clique stirred before noon. We recuperated separately at our respective rooms and convened at 12:30 to revisit the Hungry Pig for some more of their cracking bacon sandwiches. They weren't chintzy with the HP Sauce this time around, either. I went the whole hog, so to speak, and got a fried egg on mine this time. 

Then we split up for the day. Jeff went off with Adam for a foodie crawl across Saigon's underbelly while Jenn and I caught a cab to Notre Dame. 

I also managed to sneak into the big colonial post office and send off some postcards to friends and family. 

I was in a bad way. My cheap Airwalk flip-flops were already three months old by the time I took them on this trip, and all the tread had been worn off the soles. This left me with zero traction on the rain-slicked Saigon sidewalks. I was slipping and sliding all over the place. I came damn near to breaking a leg (or a neck) half a dozen times. It was as if every inch of the ubiquitous square-cut cement tiles with which sidewalks in Southeast Asia are paved was covered with black ice. I prayed to Our Lady of Surface Tension to save my hide as Jenn and I marched to the national history museum, shabby but informative. 

We had a nice nap and then met with Jeff and Adam at 5:30. Jeff clung to the back of Adam's sleek black scooter like a terrified limpet. We caught a cab to the Bitexco Financial Tower, rode an express elevator to the 52nd floor, and drank Manhattans and Long Island iced teas for 290,000 VND apiece (fifteen U.S. dollars!).

The invisible sun sank down behind the murky overcast and Uncle Ho's damp, water-stained namesake city grew dark. The high-rises and spiderweb streets lit up and Saigon was suddenly indistinguishable from any other 21st-century metropolis. Jeff, Jenn, and Adam schmoozed about how fun the place was, but as I sat there with them and stared out the rain-streaked window, I felt nothing but disgust. I was fed up with the garbage piles in the streets, the homicidal scooter drivers, the persistent hawkers, the mawkish artificiality of modernized Asian culture, the pervading sense of cultural smugness about the outcome of an old war, and a thousand other things. I wasn't ready to part company with my pals just yet, but I was eager to get on with my trip and get out of this benighted country. 

I did get a consolation prize that evening, though. Stacey showed up with a friend, Danielle, and we all got a cab to May, a very upscale restaurant in Ward Dakao, District 1. We walked through a dark alley for a few dozen meters until the imposing facade of a restored colonial villa emerged seductively from behind a veil of arica palms like a forgotten but welcoming mistress. Smiling, skinny waiters in light cotton shirts ushered us inside, past the steamy kitchen with its enormous glass windows and up a narrow mahogany staircase to a parlor-like dining room decorated in the vintage French style. Billing itself as one of the healthiest and tastiest restaurants in Ho Chi Minh City ("NO MSG!" screamed the mission statement on the menu's first page), May employs top-shelf ingredients and French-trained chefs to craft a staggering array of delectable fusion dishes. I had the chicken soup, the stuffed squid, the prawns in tamarind sauce, and even a dollop of choco-coffee ice cream. The portion sizes were generous and yet my end of the bill came to just 260,000 dong, not quite $15—the price of a single cocktail on the 52nd floor of the Bitexco Financial Tower. 

After that scrumptious meal (in fine company) there was nothing to do but go back to Green Suites and pack up my things. I'd be leaving on the bus for Phnom Penh the next day at eight o'clock sharp. During our Skype chat that evening, Miss H and I came to a rather momentous decision—one whose repercussions I feel even as I sit here typing this post. We agreed that she would quit her job at Gangnam SLP and return home to the Mojave, while I would stay in Korea only as long as it would take to finish up the fall semester at Sejong University. My thoughts that night were full of the task ahead. As I noted in my journal, "I need to find a place to live..."

Ha-ha. Wait until I tell you about how all that fell out. But it'll have to wait until this travel tale is done. Next up: the first Cambodia post. 

revamping the vlog

As you (should) already know, I'm a blogger. What some of you may not know is that I attempted, for a embarrassingly short while, to keep a vlog as well. I've linked to it a couple of times, but I try to avoid saying too much about it, because it's incomplete and poorly-kept, with overlong and badly-edited videos. It's as underdone as chicken tenders at Chili's. 

Well. 

I'd like to change that. 

I need a decent microphone and some updated video-editing skills. But once I master those, I'm going to revamp that blog of mine. 

How?

Well, since I already cover everything related to travel, cocktails, flying, and writing on this here blog, I'm going to take a different route with my YouTube channel. Oh, of course I'll put up interesting travel videos (should be plenty of those coming from Southeast Asia). Once I move back to the USA, I'll also set up a camera in the kitchen and start making video cocktail reviews instead of just text. (Perhaps once I reach Cocktail Review No. 85 or 90 or 100, whenever that may be.) And when I get back stateside I'll resume my flying career, too: specifically my quest for a single-engine commercial pilot ticket with instrument, floatplane, taildragger, and high-performance ratings. I'm sure that'll make for some interesting video fodder too. I may even need to get a GoPro...

But all that's in the future. For now, while I'm here in Korea, I can definitely do better with the vlog. 

I've been watching a lot of vlogs on YouTube lately (specifically the QiRanger, KWOW, and HowTheWorldWorks), and I love 'em to death. Here are some things that they all do well:

• they supplement their speech with text, music, and hi-def images, artfully edited into the video as a whole
• they talk about pertinent, up-to-date, and interesting subjects
• their bedside manner is engaging and fun, and their speech is practiced, fluent, and clear

I can do all that stuff, easy. Might be a little rough once I first start out, but I'll get into the swing of it. 

So what kind of topics will I talk about, then?

Something that people keep telling me I'm great at discussing in an interesting, meaningful way: history and wordplay. 

Once per week, I'm thinking, I'll do an installment called 5-Minute History, where I'll talk about some obscure and little-known topic that nonetheless had far-reaching consequences on our civilization and society. As the title suggests, these videos will be about five minutes in length. 

On certain days of the week, I'll have shorter and supplementary columns: Slang Saturdays (wherein I discuss the origin of an idiom or colloquialism) and Word Wednesdays (wherein I discuss the etymology, cultural significance, and historical context of English words). In short, I am going to create a whole new world for me and others to play around in online. And maybe learn something along the way. 

Sound boring? It won't be, trust me. 

I'm not sure when all of this will get started. My first order of business is to create a neat channel trailer for this vlog and inform everyone of its revitalization. I need to get familiar with video editing and figure out how to insert music, voice-overs, images, video clips, and so on. But you guys here on the Sententious Vaunter will be the first to know when the new-and-improved Vaunter-vlog starts up. And who knows? This might be a nice segue into the world of radio, something I do on the side that could get me hired one day. 

Stay tuned, vlogsphere. Ex Post Facto is going to get a whole lot sexier. 

Nope, even sexier than that. 

cocktail review no. 77 - Paleo Margarita

I don't know whether you guys are into the Paleo diet or not, but this is something my mum ran across in one of her cookbooks and forwarded to me when I called to remind my parents what my voice sounds like on Father's Day. We're getting close to the dog days of summer over here in K-Land and the days have turned still, sultry, and moist. Now's the time to start trotting out the cold, refreshing highballs with light-colored liquors, fruity liqueurs, and citrus juices: the Moscow Mule, the Gimlet, the Bullfrog and the Cactus Bite. All are cool and delicious, but they have one major drawback—they're all sickeningly sweet. If you're like me and you're tired of swallowing eight tablespoons of sugar in your Piña Colada, your Zombie, your Tidal Wave, or your Planter's Punch, then get with the program and have a Paleo cocktail. This one. 

•  squeeze the juice from half a lime into the bottom of a rocks glass
•  add 2 shots of tequila and a measure of club soda
•  pour the mixture into cocktail glass and sip it slowly

I'll tell you what my parents told me: do not judge this drink on the first glass. Have one on Friday night and another on Saturday night and then pass judgment. Why? Well, as you may be able to tell from the ingredients, this tipple is tart. Lip-puckeringly, tongue-stingingly, tooth-burningly, uvula-curdlingly sour. There's not an atom of sugar in it. It's kind of like the rickey cocktail, but with a higher proportion of citrus juice and less club soda. Most drinks with lime or lemon juice have some kind of sweet additive to balance the sourness out (like the Sidecar, for example). Not so with this libation. It'll make your scalp crawl. 

But as you nurse your second glass, sitting and sweating on your porch or veranda or balcony and watching the sinking sun and the reddening clouds while the gnats buzz about your ears and the day's oppressive heat begins to abdicate its tyrannical reign, you'll start liking this drink. It's got everything you need: the spicy heat of tequila, the pleasant fizz of club soda, and the nostril-wrinkling nip of lime. Perfect for relaxing after a long day's exertions or swapping war stories with the boys at the cabana. 

Or impressing the discerning Paleolithic woman. 

30 Days to a Better Man, Day 9: take a woman on a date

The title's a bit deceptive. As the rules on The Art of Manliness state, today's the day you should ask a woman out. You still have 72 hours or so to plan a kick-ass date.

As with several of these challenges, you have options depending on your situation. If you're a single guy, this is your chance to pull yourself out of the rut: you know, get out there and actually start dating (or maybe just wrench yourself free of the friend zone). If you're in a committed relationship, this is a welcome opportunity to put some spark back into it. I tell you what: living in a tiny studio apartment with your significant other is a real romance-killer. I don't care what you say. You could be living with Joan of Arc and after six months you'd start to get ticked off at the way she talks to invisible people. I, for one, relish the notion of getting out of this sardine can and into the real world with Miss H, there to rediscover why we fell in love in the first place.

Mission accomplished. I asked her out, and I now have some reservations to make. We resolved some time ago to make more frequent trips to Itaewon, Seoul's foreigner district. It's laden with loads of Western food markets and international cuisine options, from Bulgarian to Paraguayan to South African. I reckon I'll take her to Chef Meili's, an Austrian place within spitting distance of the subway station. Owned and operated by a genuine, classically-trained Austrian chef (whose surname is Meilinger), the joint is renowned for its delectable dishes, particularly its meats and desserts. Meat and dessert are two things Miss H and I scarcely eat anymore, thanks to cultural, dietary and budget constraints. It'll be nice to let our hair down a bit. I reckon we'll have ourselves a nice feed at Meili's and then slide a couple doors down to Gecko's and knock back a few frou-frou shooters. We'll talk and chat and sparkle like the old days, and then slide home for a movie and some hot cocoa. I'll report back to you after the actual date has taken place.

Does that sound like fun, ladies? 

home brewing in Korea

Here it is, the long-awaited home brewing post. You'll probably wish I'd included more pictures, but those pictures, when we remembered to actually pause and take them, were either full of screw-ups and mistakes or could give away our secrets. So I'll include one or two and you can use your imagination to fill in the rest, like you would with one of Hunter S. Thompson's columns. (I finally got around to reading The Great Shark Hunt: Gonzo Papers, Vol. 1, a compendium of Thompson's essays from the mid '50s to the late '70s. Solid gold.)

And so, to business.

Joseph (previously known as Mr. JA on this blog) is a fellow I work with at Sejong University. For anybody who's close to us, or just anyone who lives on this island of a peninsula, it won't be hard to figure out who he is. Brant (also called Mr. BP) is a little more tricky to pin down, but that's how he would like it. How we came together isn't important. It was a baseball game or a horse race or some other venial sin. There was lots of beer involved. The topic of conversation turned, as it so often does, to the outright shittiness of Korean beer and ways of remedying it. (Not Hite D Dry Finish, nor even the Queen's Ale, can rise above cloying mediocrity.)

Well, as the beers disappeared and the innings (or heats or whatever) wore on, the talk got crazy. We started thinking about home brewing ourselves. A year ago this would have been absurd. We'd've had to MacGyver a brewing kit together from whatever junk we could salvage from the foulest alleys and byways in Itaewon, and heaven knows what we would have used for sanitizing—a bucket of cheap off-brand Purell?

Fortunately, we no longer live in such a benighted state. Korean expats who feel the need to rustle up a better brand of brew now have hope: Seoul Homebrew, located just across from the Wolfhound on Bogwang-ro 59-gil in Itaewon. A harrowing trip down two flights of narrow stairs leads you to a tiny concrete-floored chamber, which looks for all the world like a garage with no door. Wooden shelves line the walls, displaying plastic hydrometers, hoses, siphons, rubber bungs, carboys, air locks and beer buckets. Tubs of grains and hops are stacked neatly against the walls, giving the room the aroma of a small-time feed store. Stark yellow lighting comes from bulbs inexplicably stuck on the end of faucets embedded in the walls. A grain grinder, an industrial sink, and a storeroom filled with white grain sacks completes the scene.

Joseph, Brant and I, having hashed out the basic kit we would need to start, betook ourselves to this mystical place and stocked up. At first, we bought a single kit, consisting of a beer bucket (spigot included), an air lock, a hydrometer, and a laser thermometer; this was kept at Joshua's residence over in Yangcheon-gu, southwest of the Han River. Since then, both Brant—who lives in the Gangnam area—and I have acquired our own sets of buckets, hydrometers, measuring cups, air locks, grain bags, stock pots, and bottles. Especially bottles. We need at least 30 for each batch, and that takes a lot of drinking.

But I digress.

Let me take you through the process quickly so what I have to say next will make sense.

There are two ways we brew beer. The first uses malt extract. After thoroughly sanitizing our beer bucket, hydrometer, tools, pots, and spoons, we boil water. We dump in some dry or liquid malt extract, stir, cook the resultant mixture (known as wort) for an hour, add in some other kinds of malt extract at the thirty-minute mark if needs be, and then begin part two of the process.

The second species of home-brewed beer is partial mash brew. The process is similar to malt extract brews, only this time, real hops and/or grains are put into porous bags and steeped in the wort as it's cooked. This adds extra flavor and kick, though it does complicate things a bit. 

We then dump the hot wort into the fermenting vessel—in our case, a beer bucket. We add a few more gallons of water to cool the wort down, pitch the yeast, add it to the bucket, fill up the air lock with sanitizer, stick it on the lid, put the lid on the bucket and let the whole shebang sit for anywhere from five days to two weeks.

After the fermentation period is over, we bottle. We add sugars to the fermenting brew. The yeast will eat the sugars and excrete gas, making the happy bubbles we like to see in our beer glasses. After the sugar's added, the bottling process is fairly straightforward. We fill up our sanitized bottles, cap them with a capping tool and set them in some dark, lukewarm place for another two weeks. After that, they're ready to drink (after being properly chilled, of course).   

Our first batch, done at Joseph's sunny, airy apartment in the Yangcheon District, turned out largely as expected: flat and tart. It was supposed to be a nut brown ale. We tried the same recipe again with the second batch; my bottles received carbonation when the requisite two weeks were over, 'cause I screwed all my caps down real tight. The brew was still unsatisfactory, however. Our third batch, intended to be a partial mash Irish red ale, was a failure—or so we thought. We opened it up and our nostrils were assailed by a hair-curling bitterness. There was also quite a lot of sediment in the bottom of the bucket. Certain that the brew had somehow acquired a fatal bacterial infection, we dumped it. Sanitizing your equipment thoroughly is imperative. Otherwise, bacteria will elbow the yeast aside and devour the sugars, creating acid instead of alcohol and irrevocably ruining the brew.

But perhaps not as irrevocably as we thought. The guys at Seoul Homebrew later told us that we should have bottled anyway. Oftentimes a brew will smell bitter and be full of sediment but still be A-OK. Stung by the knowledge that we may have chucked a perfectly fine Irish red ale (and ₩60,000 apiece) down the john, Joseph, Brant and I rolled up our sleeves. We pulled out all the stops for our next brew: a chocolate porter. That one has been bottled. This is the first time we've used glass bottles...things really feel legit now. Nine of those bottles are sitting on the lower level of my jerry-built kitchen shelving unit. They'll be ready to drink come Tuesday night.

On Friday evening, the boys came over to my place to inaugurate my own set of brewing supplies. It was the first time we'd ever brewed at my apartment. Miss H and I busted our humps to clean the place up and make it presentable (and open enough for three grown men to work). We just about managed it. The brewing process came off more smoothly than ever before, apart from a forgotten air lock left at Brant's apartment in Gangnam. This time around we brewed an IPA, somewhere between an extract and a partial mash. We used two different kinds of hops, as per the instructions. To add some holiday zest to the beer we also steeped some fresh-cut ginger in the wort for 20 minutes. It refused to cool down, preventing us from adding the yeast. So Brant and I stuck the bucket on a footstool in my bathroom and rigged up the shower head so that it would spray cold water on the bottom of the bucket. It worked like a charm. There are genuine wort coolers you can buy for your home brews, but who needs 'em? Just use your shower.

That weird red dot on the side is Brant taking a temperature reading with the laser thermometer.

The beer bucket is still sitting on that footstool. It's now under our desk. The sanitizer in the air lock is bubbling away contentedly as the fermentation process moves along. I check the temperature once every 12 hours or so. I'm trying not to be paranoid or obsessive or manic. I got the used hops out of the house as quickly as possible so the smell wouldn't upset Miss H, and thoroughly washed and put away all the supplies. I can't wait to taste it.

And that's how I got into home brewing in Korea. Yet another reason it's so good to be alive.

Feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions. 

cocktail review no. 76 - Arnold Palmer

Palmer in 1953, while serving in the U.S. Coast Guard.

Two quick notes before we begin:

(1) This beverage is also referred to as a "Half-and-Half" in some areas, particularly the American South.

(2) Yes, it's nonalcoholic. Do I care? Not a whit.

Arnold Daniel Palmer (born Sep. 10, 1929) is an American professional golfer, widely regarded as one of the greatest ever to grace the greens. He won seven major championships: the Masters in 1958, 1960, 1962, and 1964; the U.S. Open in 1960; and the Open Championship in 1961 and 1962. The golden years were 1960-1963, when he won 29 PGA Tour events. He built up a huge fan base (known as "Arnie's Army"), won Sports Illustrated magazine's "Sportsman of the Year" award in 1960, and became the first man to reach one million dollars in career earnings (on the 1967 PGA Tour).

I'm frankly surprised that the golf-obsessed Koreans don't know the dude's name.

The nonalcoholic cocktail that came to be named after him was something Palmer himself liked to drink at home. In 1960—the year he won most of the awards listed above—he was playing in the U.S. Open at the Cherry Hills Country Club in Denver, Colorado, and he ordered the drink at the bar. A nearby woman overheard him, and ordered "that Palmer drink." A legend was born.

Here's the recipe:

• 5 ounces tea
• 5 ounces lemonade

Combine the ingredients in a highball glass filled with ice.

I tell you, nothing makes a better after-workout drink than this, except for perhaps a bottle of Gatorade. It's cool, refreshing, sweet (but not sickeningly so) and the tea gives it just the right amount of kick. That goes double if you use one of the strong grain teas they have over here in Korea, or heotgae cha—tea made from the fruit of the Oriental raisin tree. (Heotgae, incidentally, was approved by the Korean FDA as a hangover cure, so...maybe a heotgae Arnold Palmer would be better than a Bloody Mary on a Sunday morning.)

It makes a pretty good NaNoWriMo drink, too. Doesn't muddle your thinking; in fact, I'd allege that it does the opposite. Makes you think like a champ.

As always, I invite you to try it yourself if you don't believe me. Low calories, fine taste, re-hydrating, and best of all...no hangover in the morning.

Sometimes that's rather nice, isn't it?

cocktail review no. 75 - Black Devil Martini

Happy Halloween!

How fortunate that Samhain falls on a Thursday (my cocktail-reviewing day) this year. And with the time difference, this review'll show up on your computer screen in the morning, and you'll have time to rush out and buy the ingredients before your big evening spooktacular.

Here's the recipe. It's real simple:

• 2 ounces dark rum
• ½ ounce dry vermouth
• 2 black olives
• orange sugar

Stir and strain into a chilled martini glass that has been rimmed with the orange sugar, then garnish with the black olives. 

photo by Steve Murello

Let me be clear: I did NOT get this recipe from The Bartender's Bible. It's from Home & Garden Television, actually. I'm no fan of the idiot box, but if something made HGTV's website, then theoretically it must be good, right? (Or popular at the very least.)

That being said, I wasn't too sure about using dry vermouth in this drink. It's Halloween. Drinks are supposed to be sweet. Rum is sweet. Why sour a drink with dry vermouth when you could add sweet vermouth and have basically a rum Manhattan? With orange sugar 'round the rim of the glass? That sounded mighty nice to me. (I added a photo so you could get the idea.)

But I got my comeuppance. HGTV is on top of things. This is where that orange sugar comes in. That's right, folks: just as the salt around the rim of a good margarita really makes the difference, the sugar in this cocktail isn't just window-dressing. It actually serves a purpose: to temper the dryness of the vermouth with a bit of sweetness. And it works. As long as you take a nip of orange stuff with every sip, you'll be just fine. The smoky dark rum will be rounded out by tannins and botanicals, which are then balanced by the sugar. The olives at the end make the perfect dessert. Using sweet vermouth would be overdoing it.

Try it if you want, though. It's Halloween. Overkill is underrated.  

cocktail review no. 74 - Greyhound

If you don't like grapefruit, get the heck away from this page, pronto. They might as well have named this cocktail "a screwdriver with grapefruit juice." That's what it amounts to.

• 2 ounces vodka
• 4 ounces grapefruit juice

Pour the ingredients into a highball glass half-filled with ice cubes. Stir and serve.

That's it. That's all there is to it. I have no idea who decided that this was a better alternative to the screwdriver, but that's not how I see it. In my opinion, this highball's good for preventing scurvy and not much else. All you can taste is the juice. If you see fit to add more vodka, then you're just tasting vodka and grapefruit juice. You'd be much better off adding some salt to the rim of the glass and having a salty dog. Or you could nut up and use a nip of tequila or rum or gin instead of vodka, I reckon. Some enterprising young fool has probably already concocted those versions of the drink and given them trite names and is busy disseminating them on the Internet, waiting for you to find and sample them. Go to it!

And for today's image, here's a picture of Margaret Gorman's greyhound, "Long Goodie." And Margaret Gorman. And Margaret Gorman's calves.

You're welcome.

cocktail review no. 73 - Highball

I've been talking so much about highballs lately that I might as well tell you about the grandaddy of them all, the original sin, the Very First Highball: the highball.

Yes, that's its name. Highball. It's the first highball, so every highball after it was called a highball too. Geddit? Kind of like how everybody calls tissues "Kleenex" or sticky bandages "Band-Aids" even when they're not Kleenex or Band-Aids.

As you can probably tell, I love highballs. I just adore them. They're simple, they're quick, they taste good and they go down easy.

No dirty jokes, please.

From Wikimedia Commons

To clarify, highballs are a large family of drinks composed of a spirit and a larger proportion of an alcoholic mixer, and sometimes incorporating a simple garnish. That's it. Two or three ingredients in a highball glass. The name "highball" comes from the old days of railways and steam engines, when a station master would raise a brightly-colored ball on a chain or a pole (see photo) to let incoming trains know that there were no passengers or mail to pick up. The train wouldn't slow down and waste a lot of coal and time getting up to speed again. It would just blow right through the station at top speed. Hence "highball"...a quickly-made and satisfying libation.

The original "highball" was whiskey and ginger ale. And it's still around today. And still called a "highball," thus confusing bartenders everywhere. Here's the recipe:

• 2 ounces whiskey
• 4 ounces ginger ale

Pour the whiskey and ginger ale into a highball glass half-filled with ice cubes. Stir well.

In the interests of accuracy, I printed this recipe as I saw it in The Bartender's Bible. One part whiskey to two parts ginger ale (or whatever proportion you desire) is just fine and dandy. This is a highball, after all. They're customizable.

No dirty jokes, please.

cocktail review no. 72 - Gin Rickey

Okay, let's step away from vodka for a moment. I'll use the last of that godawful cheap bottle from Bucheon in my special penne-with-tomato-and-vodka sauce later this week. Then it'll be gone and I'll just have the lovely, quality Parliament-brand vodka that I got in the Russian quarter near Dongdaemun. I have nearly a full bottle of Gordon's, so it's time for some gin recipes.

The rickey was wildly popular back in the day, you know. It was invented in the 1880s, reached the height of its popularity just after the turn of the century, and remained prevalent enough into the 1920s that it was mentioned in several prominent works of literature, most notably The Great Gatsby. That means that F. Scott Fitzgerald knew about this drink, and likely drank a few. Awesomeness by association? Here you are.

But let's talk about the drink itself. Where'd the name "rickey" come from? And why are there so many variations?

Well, I'll tell you: drinks with names like "rickey," "flip," "crusta," and "sour" are actually written in code. "Rickey" is a codeword for a specific cocktail recipe, where the only variation is the spirit. The rest is just stock ingredients. There are gin rickeys, whiskey rickeys, rum rickeys, vodka rickeys, and bourbon rickeys.

In fact, the original rickey was made with bourbon: the Joe Rickey.

From Wikipedia:

In 1883, Colonel Joe Rickey was purported to have invented the "Joe Rickey," after a bartender at Shoomaker's in Washington, D.C. added a lime to his "mornin's morning," a daily dose of Bourbon with lump ice and Apollinaris sparkling mineral water. Some stories place the exact day as a Monday after Col. Joe Rickey celebrated his wager with a Philadelphian on the successful ascension of John G. Carlisle to Speaker of the House. Col. Joe Rickey was known as a "gentleman gambler" and placed many bets on the outcome of various political contests.

There you have it, ladies and gentlemen. Now, the gin rickey:

• 2 ounces desired liquor (in this case, gin)
• 5 ounces club soda (or mineral water, if you so desire)
• 1 lime wedge

Pour the liquor and club soda into a highball glass almost filled with ice cubes. Stir well and garnish with the lime wedge.

A few quick things before I get to my review.

Firstly, don't mix up highball glasses and rocks glasses (also called lowball glasses or old fashioned glasses). Capisce?

Second, if you live in a benighted, uncivilized country like South Korea that hasn't the faintest clue what a lime is, then you can just do like me and squirt some lime juice into the drink and call it even.

My diagnosis:

My goodness, I thought gin-and-tonics were refreshing and summery! The gin rickey blows every light, fizzy highball I've ever had right out of the water. It's easily the most cool, frosty, smooth and stomach-settling cocktail I've ever had.The mineral water does wonders for indigestion, the gin gives your head that pleasant, warm, humming feeling, and the hint of lime rounds the whole effect out. If you need to cool off, cool down, kick back or chill out, this here's your drink. And it takes roughly ten seconds to make.

You're welcome.

cocktail review no. 71 - Hotaru

Today's a red-letter day, folks: I'm reviewing one of my own creations. Not since the Potion F have I created a cocktail, much less posted a semi-objective review on this here blog. Feel privileged.

To my knowledge, nobody has (officially) crafted anything like this before, nor named it what I've named it. Don't fret, I'll explain the title presently. But before we do anything else, let's have the recipe:

• 1.5 ounces soju
• 1 ounce triple sec
• 1 ounce lime juice
• 1 lime wedge

Pour the soju, the triple sec and the lime juice into a cocktail shaker half-filled with ice cubes. Shake well and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with the lime wedge.

Does this sound familiar? It should. It's practically identical to a kamikaze. The only difference is that soju stands in for the vodka in the original.

The taste, if I may be so bold, is marvelous. The soju performs the same function as the vodka would, soaking up the flavors of the orange liqueur and the lime juice. However, it is milder and sweeter than vodka, so even great prominence is given to the citrus flavors. And yet, the soju adds just a hint of the exotic to the mélange. You know, right away, that this isn't a vodka drink. The overall flavor was akin to a glass of orange limeade, with a mild kick afforded by the base liquor. It was infinitely refreshing and delightfully tangy. And as always, it's customizable. If you like sweet more than sour, just minimize the lime juice and add more triple sec. If you wanna pucker up, just do the reverse.

The inclusion of soju in this cocktail had a great deal to do with my choice of the name "hotaru." Hotaru is the Japanese word for "firefly." It's also the name of a film about—get this—Korean kamikaze pilots.

Tak Kyung-hyun, a Korean who gave his life as a special attack pilot for the Japanese in WWII.

Yes, they existed. I was shocked, too, believe me. But historical research has shown that a dozen or more ethnic Koreans (taking Japanese names, as per the prewar Soshi-kaimei ordinance which Japan imposed on the Korean peninsula) served as kamikaze pilots in World War II. This news story from 2008 talks about a memorial for one of these fellows, Tak Kyung-hyun, being erected in the city of Sacheon. Naturally, there was quite a bit of controversy. Some Koreans think these dudes were pressured or coerced into flying suicide missions for Japan, and therefore deserve some posthumous sympathy; while others insist that they were collaborators of the worst sort, and their memories should be stricken from the history books.

Anyway, the movie Hotaru, which came out in 2000, is about a Korean kamikaze pilot who dies in combat. His two Japanese buddies survive the war, and one of them winds up marrying his deceased friend's Japanese fiancée, and there's some awkwardness there or something. Sounded like it might be worth checking out.

Anyway, I chose the word hotaru for this beverage because "Korean kamikaze" sounded boring and basic (even if it is alliterative). I wanted something more poetic, and I found it.

Try it, sample it, roll it around your tongue for a while (both the name and the drink) and then tell me what you think. I dare you. Your personal reviews might just save my future bar. Oh, and in case you're wondering, I'm working on a couple of other recipes at the moment. I hope to bring my total of alcoholic creations up to four before the year's out.

Stay put and stay tuned, and you'll get some free samples.

cocktail review no. 70 - Madras

It's hot outside and I have a crap-ton of vodka, so from here on out you'll get an earful about vodka highballs that keep you cool. Capische?

This is a classic drink, and apparently quite popular at the moment. I was one of the simple ones included in the curriculum at National Bartenders, the bartendin' school I attended in Riverside, California. I still vividly remember when our teacher, Joe, taught it to us. (You could tell Joe was raised on the street, 'cause he said "whoop cream" instead of "whipped cream" and "coney-ack" instead of "cognac." I loved him for it.) Joe grabbed the vodka, poured a shot into a rocks glass filled with ice cubes, and then grabbed a bottle of orange juice in one hand and cranberry in the other and filled the glass the rest of the way up. It didn't take him more than five seconds, I swear. We were impressed. He looked so cool doing it.

I pretty much just gave you the recipe, but there's a protocol we have to follow, dang it. So here you go.

• 1½ ounces vodka
• 2 ounces cranberry juice
• 2 ounces orange juice

Pour all of the ingredients into a highball glass almost filled with ice cubes. Stir well.

Now, as with most highballs, there's all sorts of variations. Some call for increased proportions of cranberry juice; some call for more orange juice. Some say to add the vodka and cranberry juice together and then pour the orange juice over the top after stirring. As I mentioned in my review of the Presbyterian, that's the great thing about highballs: they can be customized. It's up to you. I gave you the base recipe here, the one that's in The Bartender's Bible, my most trusted resource. You can play around with it as much as you like. In any event, this will be a smooth, tasty, tangy, cooling-off sort of drink for you. I'm not going to describe the flavor 'cause you already know that vodka takes on the flavors of whatever it's mixed with (I've said that millions of times). And if you're 21 or older and don't know what orange or cranberry juice tastes like, I pity you.

One more thing: I know where the name of this drink came from. The city of Chennai is the capital of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, on the Bay of Bengal in southern India...but that wasn't always its name. It used to be called "Madras." This picture down here is one of its beaches.

Now drink up! 건배!

cocktail review no. 69 - French 75

You thought I was going to do something dirty for this review, didn't you?

Admit it, you perverts, the only reason you even clicked over here is because of the number in the title, am I wrong? (I'm sure the word "French" doesn't hurt either.)

Well, my apologies. If you crept in here hoping to see a couple of French chicks doing something kinky, you're out of luck. This is the dirtiest you're going to get: the French 75 cocktail.

It's a classic one...or perhaps I should say a vintage one. You remember that coffee table book Vintage Cocktails I keep raving about? The one Miss H and I picked up at the Anthropologie in Victoria Gardens nearly two years ago?

The French 75 is one of that book's most prominent constituents. That is to say, it's got an entire two pages devoted to it (as do all the other drinks in the book)—a gorgeous color spread and a recipe written in crayon. There's some debate about whether the primary ingredient should be gin or cognac, but I'm sure you could use either one and still make a damn fine beverage.

I've heard that the drink was created in 1915 at the New York Bar in Paris by a fellow named Harry MacElhone. Rumor has it that ol' Harry (who would later come to own the New York Bar) created the drink specifically for returning WWI fighter pilots. It was so powerful, Harry said, that it felt like being on the receiving end of a French 75-millimeter howitzer. 

On that note, here's the recipe (as found in Vintage Cocktails): 

• 1.5 ounces V.S.O.P. cognac
• 1 ounce simple syrup
• 3/4 ounce lemon juice
• champagne

Shake the cognac, simple syrup and lemon juice together and strain into a flute. Fill the flute the rest of the way with champagne.

Just so you know, "V.S.O.P." stands for something. "V" is "very"; "S" is "special"; and "O.P." means "order of the prince." At least that's what this bartender has heard. A cognac may be "O.P." or "V.S." or just plain "S," but if it's "V.S.O.P.", then it's special stuff. Fit for a king (or a mighty good drink)!

And the French 75 is mighty good, I must say. I've had more powerful cocktails, but boy, this thing must have been a killer in 1915. I didn't think brandy and champagne would mix well, but they do.

Even so, brandy does go harmoniously with sugar and lemon juice. (Without the champagne, the French 75 is basically a Between the Sheets cocktail.) The addition of something sweet, tart, and fizzy like champagne does wonders for this libation's flavor and texture. We're given something to offset the sourness of the citrus and the dark spice of the brandy, and a lovely textural counterpoint in the carbonation. We've already seen that brandy mixes well with fizzy things (I think I reviewed a brandy and soda at one point, didn't I?). The French 75 bears that impression out. Even though this drink has four ingredients and therefore violates Dad's Golden Rule, it's still worth your while. So drink up!Wait, what's that?

You came here for something sultry, and by God you're not leaving without it?

Oh, all right. Here:

Now shut up and drink, you lecher.

cocktail review no. 68 - Presbyterian

"A man with God on his side is always in the majority." 
— John Knox, the father of Presbyterianism

Continuing on in the vein of simple cocktails you can make at home ('cause who likes to go out and hunt up a whole bottle of blue Curaçao just for one measly drink?)...

This is one of the most well-known highballs—and yet, well, it isn't. It's the most famous cocktails that nobody's ever heard of. You wouldn't hear it mentioned at a party or a rave, even though its roots go back further than many other lauded alcoholic creations. It's rather like one of those scratch-'n'-win things you'd buy at a gas station: unknown and inscrutable from a distance, but a little digging and the information is revealed.

And what a wealth of information. Famous drinks always have a plethora of variations—everyone has their own margarita recipe, for example, and everybody likes their martinis a little different. But the Presbyterian has a staggering number of variations: literally trillions. Before I go any farther, I should give you the (baseline) recipe. Here it is:

• 1.5 ounces whiskey
• 3 ounces club soda
• 3 ounces ginger ale
• 1 lemon twist

Pour the bourbon into a highball glass half-filled with ice cubes. Add the club soda and ginger ale in equal measures. Add the lemon twist and serve.

A few words about the flavor: simple, direct, easy, and fine. The fire of the whiskey is tempered by the fizz of the ginger ale and the club soda; the ginger ale adds sweetness while the soda tempers it; and the lemon twist adds just the perfect touch of citrusy tang. If you're looking for something a bit more exciting than the classic highball, then this is the drink for you. And if you like anything that resembles a whiskey fizz or an old-fashioned, then you'll love the Presbyterian.

But you wanna know the best part? You can customize this drink. Mix and match the ingredients until you find a winning combo. You can use bourbon, American rye, blended Scotch, or Irish whiskey. Some people substitute 7-Up for the ginger ale and some people add lime instead of lemon. It's up to you. Whatever floats your boat.

Isn't having choice great?