UPS just delivered my bottle of Root, the new spirit on the market that I mentioned recently. It’s a bit early to try it (no, really, I have work to do this afternoon!) but I’m pretty excited. It smells fantastic, like a grown-up root beer.

The packaging has some nice details too, from the simple label on the front to the herb illustrations on the back. I would have preferred to see a real cork, but the Art in the Age logo engraved on the cap is a nice touch.

The included booklet has some basic serving suggestions such as Root and Tonic (self-explanatory), Root and Ginger (Root and ginger beer), and a “Root Beer” (Root and dark beer). Simple stuff I’m sure I’ll try, but I’m more interested first in trying it neat, to really get the full flavor, and then in some of the more complex recipes on AITA’s Root recipe page. Stay tuned for tasting notes.

More pictures

Sensation

• 6 to 8 mint leaves
• 1/2 ounce maraschino liqueur
• 1 1/2 ounces gin
• 2/3 ounce fresh lime juice

In a mixing glass, muddle the mint with a few ice cubes and the maraschino liqueur until the mint is broken into very small pieces. Add more ice, the gin, and lime juice, and shake until cold. Strain into a sugar-rimmed cocktail glass.

I’ve owned my copy of The Art of the Bar for over two years but had never made this gem until yesterday. I was flipping through the pages looking for something cold and refreshing after a long day and the Sensation jumped out at me. I don’t know how I missed it for so long.

And refreshing it was. I used mint fresh from the garden, going with the high end of eight leaves, and ended up with a fantastic tart/sweet/minty cocktail. It went very well with our dinner of broccoli udon with peanut sauce and it was the perfect thing to sip on the porch while the sun went down.

Recipe from The Art of the Bar.

Oriental Cocktail

• 1 1/2 ounces straight rye whiskey
• 3/4 ounce triple sec
• 3/4 ounce sweet vermouth
• 1/2 ounce fresh lime juice

Combine all ingredients in an ice-filled shaker and shake until cold. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

I had originally set my mind on a James Joyce cocktail this evening but, much to my dismay, I found I was out of Irish whiskey. A trip to the store wasn’t convenient so I opted to fall back to that drink’s ancestor, the Oriental.

Like so many classic cocktails, the Oriental appeared in Harry Craddock’s Savoy Cocktail Book. And then, like so many of those recipes, it was adapted for a modern palette, this time by Gary Regan who published this version of the recipe in The Joy of Mixology. The original recipe called for rye and orange curaçao; Gary suggests triple sec in place of the curaçao and offers a choice of bouron instead of rye. In making these, I went with Russell’s Reserve six year rye and Cointreau.

Upon reflection, I think I might prefer this version to the later James Joyce cocktail. Maybe a side-by-side comparison is in order.

There’s a new spirit in town: Root. Conceived in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Root is…

The first truly authentic American liqueur since the pre-Prohibition era, ROOT is a certified organic spirit made with North American herbs and pure cane sugar. Unlike anything else on the market today, ROOT signifies a return to creativity and quality in spirits production.

The story behind Root is interesting. It was created by the minds behind Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (AITA), an artist collective of sorts based in Philly. Alongside their other projects, they’ve recreated a pre-prohibition spirit that hasn’t been seen since the early 1900s, when it evolved into the non-alcoholic beverage we know today as root beer. That they were able to put this together is pretty awesome; doubly so if it tastes as good as it sounds.

AITA has a sprits page on their site with a video explaining the origins of Root, a bit of history, and some recipes, along with an invitation to send in your own creations. Root is brand new and so distribution is limited, but you can order it online. A 750ml bottle is $38.99 plus shipping and sales tax if applicable. Root is distilled by Modern Sprits in California, makers of TRU organic vodka and gin.

I just ordered a bottle so watch this space for reviews . Thanks for the tip, Jen — you’re invited over for drinks as soon as it arrives!

This cocktail is an adaptation of the Gin-Gin Mule served at Pegu Club in New York, which itself is an adaptation of the Moscow Mule, using gin in place of vodka and adding mint. Great idea, I say. The Moscow Mule is a tasty drink but I prefer gin to vodka and mint works great with gin and ginger (this combination is also seen in the Ginger Rogers cocktail). The extra “gin” in the name of this one comes from my using ginger simple syrup in place of regular.

Gin-Gin-Gin Mule

• 2 ounces gin
• 3/4 ounce fresh lime juice
• 1/2 ounce ginger simple syrup
• Ginger beer
• 6 – 8 mint leaves, plus a sprig for garnish

Muddle the mint leaves with the lime juice and simple syrup in a mixing glass. Add ice and gin and shake until cold. Strain into an ice-filled collins glass and fill with ginger beer. Garnish with a mint sprig.

Ideally, this should also be made with homemade ginger beer but time constraints and convenience made me go with Fentiman’s Ginger Beer instead. I made the ginger syrup this afternoon using the recipe from The Art of the Bar, which I wrote up last September. I found a number of recipes for the Gin-Gin Mule and none of them seemed quite right, so I improvised my own recipe, which you see above. It came out pretty well, especially refreshing on a hot day like today, but I think I might play around with the proportions a bit next time.

I made this today because ginger is this month’s Mixology Monday theme. This is my first time participating in this but it’s a fun idea so I’m sure I’ll be doing more. Every month someone picks a theme and participants blog about something related to that theme, usually a drink recipe but not necessarily. The posts are then rounded up on the web site of the “host”, which also changes every month. This month’s host is RumDood.

I haven’t been to Pegu Club yet but it’s on my list of places to check out next time I’m in NYC (hear that Rob, Sarah?).

It’s that time of year again: Tiki Central just announced Tiki Crawl 9, this year’s annual annual tiki bar crawl around the San Francisco bay area. Taking place July 9 through 12, Tiki Crawl 9 features the best tiki spots around SF.

Thursday, July 9 – San Francisco

• Trad’r Sam, Richmond district, SF
• Tonga Room, Nob Hill, SF (downstairs at the Fairmont Hotel)
• Bamboo Hut, North Beach, SF

Friday, July 10 – South Bay

• Smoke Tiki, San Jose
• Lost Tiki Island bar, San Jose
• Trader Vic’s, Palo Alto

That second item is interesting because it’s a home tiki bar built by one of the regulars on the Tiki Central forums.

Saturday, July 11 – East Bay

• Forbidden Island, Alameda
• Conga Lounge, Oakland
• Kona Club, Oakland
• Trader Vic’s, Emeryville

Forbidden Island is a personal favorite of mine.

Sunday, July 12 – Slowdown

• Tiki Tom’s, Oakland
• Forbidden Island, Alameda

Unfortunately, the Tiki Central site doesn’t have much info on the event beyond the basics you need to attend. I’d really like to see an archive of the previous years and maybe some photos (and, for that matter, a proper permanent URL for the event instead of just tikiroom.com/misc). But for more details on the schedule, locations, etc, see the Tiki Crawl schedule page.

I freely admit that I haven’t been doing a very good job keeping this site updated lately. There are a few reasons for this, not the least of which being laziness, being a crap blogger, being busy with other things, etc, but one less apparent reason is that I had forced the site into a format that wasn’t really appropriate and that affected how I came to maintain it.

Cocktailia started out as a blog back at the end of 2007. It was spun off of my regular blog, seeded with a bunch of back posts I had originally written for that site. That worked out pretty well for a time but then I started thinking bigger. I wanted an online magazine, not a blog. So I invented a structure for my posts and designed a new site based around that. That also worked ok for a while, until I realized that I didn’t have a good way to present anything that didn’t fit into my rigid structure of recipes, bar reviews, etc. The kind of stuff you would post to a blog, basically. This led to a kind of stagnation and put up a barrier to my posting more frequently, as regular readers have seen lately.

So in an effort to fix that, I’m relaunching yet again as a basic, no-frills cocktail blog, with a new site design that better reflects that. All the old content is still here, of course, and I’ll continue writing recipes, photos, and bar reviews, but I’ll also be posting more blog-like content with bits of things I find interesting, useful, amusing, or whatever. This change in focus will hopefully help me get back into a more frequent posting schedule. I doubt you’ll be seeing daily updates, but let’s try to find a middle ground between that and the every-week-or-two thing I’ve been doing lately.

Feedback is welcome, either here or on my new Cocktailia Twitter account: @cocktailia (my regular account is @kchrist). As for articles to come, I’ve found a bunch of really great bars here in Portland that I’ll be posting about soon, so stay tuned. Thanks for reading.

When you ask a Portlander where to get a good, creative cocktail, your answers will vary from person to person but nearly everyone’s list will include the Teardrop Lounge. Centrally located in the Pearl district, Teardrop offers up a nice combination of classic cocktails and their own creations.

There were a few empty tables when we arrived at 8:00 Saturday evening. Ours was a large party and we had the foresight to make a reservation (taken for parties of six or more, if I remember correctly), but we might have been able to get by without it. Any later than that and all bets would have been off, as the bar filled up quickly as the evening went on. We were lucky enough to get a couple tables by the front windows so we had a good view of the bar, the street outside, and were far enough away from the center of things that we could hold a conversation without too much trouble.

I started with a Modus Operandi (a phrase which always reminds me of one of David Lynch’s lines in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me). The Modus Operandi contains rye, Amaro Nonino, Carpano Antica, sasparilla and clove tinctures, and bitters, and it was excellent. For once, I didn’t take notes on what we were drinking, so I don’t remember everything we tried, but between the eight of us we sampled pretty much everything on the specialty cocktail menu and nothing disappointed.

While the drinks were all very good, I found the atmosphere left something to be desired. The decor was all very modern not really to my taste, and there was very much a “hip”, “downtown” sort of crowd (for lack of a better description). None of this was a problem, of course, but it’s just not my preferred type of place. I’ll go back for cocktails if I’m in the neighborhood and it’s not too crowded but probably won’t go out of my way. The drinks, however, definitely make it worth trying out once.

More pictures

St. Germain & Champagne on the left, Bittersweet Symphony on the right

Bittersweet Symphony

• 1 1/2 ounce Martin Miller’s gin
• 1 ounce Punt e Mes sweet vermouth
• 1 ounce Aperol
• Dash of lemon bitters
• Lemon twist for garnish

Combine all liquid ingredients in an ice-filled mixing glass and stir until cold. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a lemon twist.

This recipe comes to you from Clyde Common in Portland. It’s a milder take on the classic Negroni, substituting Aperol for Campari and using a touch more gin. The lemon bitters are my own addition — the Bittersweet Symphony made at Clyde Common only includes the first three ingredients but I find that the addition of the bitters lends the drink a little extra twist.

The photo above was taken at a housewarming cocktail party we hosted last week. The Bittersweet Symphony is on the right; on the left is a St. Germain & Champagne.

St. Germain & Champagne

• 1 ounce St. Germain
• Champagne
• Strawberry for garnish

Pour 1 ounce of St. Germain into a chilled flute and fill with Champagne, leaving only enough room to float a strawberry.

Elderflower Margarita

• 1 1/2 ounces silver tequila
• 1 ounce St. Germain
• 1/2 ounce fresh lime juice
• Coarse sea salt

Combine ingredients in an ice-filled cocktail shaker and shake until cold. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass with a salted rim.

This is a simple variant of the classic Margarita, using St. Germain elderflower liqueur instead of triple sec. This liqueur blends well with the herbal notes of the tequila and produces a refreshing finish. We paired this with a smoky black bean soup.

Salting a glass rim well can be tricky (I’m still perfecting the technique myself). Start with coarse sea salt or similar; pour a bit onto a cutting board or plate. Rub a lime wedge around the outside rim of the glass to moisten it, then gently run the rim through the salt, taking care to keep the salt on the outside of the glass; the salt should be kept out of inside of the glass to prevent it throwing off the taste of the drink.