In today’s hyperactive cocktail climate, new ideas travel faster than a bottle of Fernet Branca in a room full of mixologists. Case in point: barrel-aged cocktails. The seed was planted when Portland, Oregon-based bartender Jeffrey Morgenthaler tasted a Manhattan that had been aged five years in a glass vessel by noted London bartender Tony Conigliaro. | Read More

Jeffrey Morgenthaler, who runs the bar at Clyde Common in the Ace Hotel in Portland, Ore., and also writes an engaging cocktail blog, was in London for Rumfest last October and found himself sitting at 69 Colebrook Row, appreciatively sipping one of Conigliaro’s vintage manhattans. “Being American, I thought to myself, ‘How can we age this more, and faster, make | Read More

Food and Wine polled trusted correspondents around the globe to learn their most phenomenal discoveries – from mind-blowing restaurant dishes to unbelievable cocktails. Even the most in-the-know foodie will be surprised by the results. #83: Portland, Oregon Clyde Common: Instead of just buying aged spirits, Jeffrey Morgenthaler ages his own cocktails in oak barrels. Negronis | Read More

One theory about the origin of the word “cocktail” says it was swiped from 18th-century slang for a non-thoroughbred horse, whose docked tail signified mixed heritage. A drink so adulterated with something other than pure spirits – like bitters or sugar – adopted the nickname by analogy. In the two centuries since Americans discovered a | Read More

Jeffrey Morgenthaler of Clyde Common in Portland, Ore., says: “There are two basic principles to muddling. The most common technique is to get in there and really bash things apart — using a little force breaks up the fruit entirely and gets the most flavor. The other technique is reserved for citrus segments and peels, | Read More

When Jeffrey Morgenthaler of Clyde Common got fed up with commercial tonic water, he made his own. “I don’t like the sweetness,” he says. “There’s a lack of depth in the flavor profile.” For his housemade version, he boiled cinchona bark with citrus peel, citric acid and lemongrass to extract the quinine, then filtered it | Read More

Innumerable Christmas stories, from Charles Dickens to Charlie Brown, conclude with the same message: how great it wold be if only we could keep the holiday spirit all year round. That, more or less, has become the credo for a circle of cocktail enthusiasts – though for “spirit” substitute “punch”. Most of us these days | Read More

Unemployment is rising and banks are disappearing. It may feel like 1929 all over again, but there’s a crucial difference between the Great Depression and our fiscal crisis: We modern folk can legally drown our sorrows in alcohol. It may not be much solace, but on Friday, Dec. 5, you can spend your few remaining | Read More

How does the national media love the man Eugeneans voted Best Bartender? I’ll spare you from counting the ways; you can check the press page of his website for that. I just want to mention the two latest, er, mentions: Last week, The Wall Street Journal did a story on Repeal Day, the growing-in-popularity sorta-holiday that celebrates the end | Read More

TEN years ago, cocktail seekers would have been hard-pressed to find a bar that used fresh juice in sour mix (never mind adding microplaned zest), and ordering an Aviation would have earned a cold look instead of a refreshing but potentially lethal mixture of gin, lemon juice and maraschino liqueur. Today drinkers don’t need to | Read More

“Prohibition went into effect on January 16. 1920, and blew up at last on December 5, 1933, an elapsed time of twelve years, ten months, and nineteen days,” H.L. Mencken wrote shortly after the ratification of the 21st Amendment to the Constitution eliminated the 18th Amendment. “It seemed almost a geologic epoch while it was | Read More

It seems appropriate that it’s this year that Jeffrey Morgenthaler tops the list as your favorite drink-mixer in town. In the last year, Morgenthaler’s had drink recipes appear in Playboy (the Bourbon Renewal) and Food and Wine Cocktails 2008 (the Batida Rosa, an “interpretation of a classic style of Brazilian beach cocktail”); his writing has | Read More

Jeffrey Morgenthaler is a man on a mission, and he’s carrying on his crusade these days from behind the well-stocked bar at Bel Ami Restaurant and Lounge at Midtown Marketplace, on Willamette Street in just-south-of-downtown Eugene. The mission — and not only has he already accepted it, he helped start it — is “to put | Read More

From the Pacific Northwest, A sweet and sour twist on Kentucky whiskey. Jeffrey Morgenthaler is our kind of guy: an obsessive practitioner of lost arts and an inventor in his own right. He toils behind the bar of the Bel Ami Restaurant & Lounge in crunchy Eugene, Oregon, mixing, remixing and improvising, and he documents | Read More

Q: “Is it rude to use my laptop at the local watering hole? My neighborhood pint-puller always shoots me the stinkeye when I open my MacBook by his taps.” As long as you’re a good customer, you have every right to compute while getting buzzed. “If you’re spending money and tipping well, and you want | Read More