As you’ll no doubt discover, I’m not really the recipes guy. There are so many resources out there on the web for cocktail recipes that I’ve never really bothered sharing a ton of mine. What I tend to prefer to focus on is cocktail technique, and general bartending knowledge.
But here are some of my favorite and most popular recipes. These have all been heavily tested in a professional environment and at home, and are guaranteed to be delicious. We use these recipes every day behind both the bars I manage!
March 21, 2024
This recipe, one of the first developed for the opening menu at Pacific Standard, is my reconciliation to a drink that I never really cared for in the first place: The Bloody Mary. Yeah I know it’s weird. But as a bartender, I’ve always been that guy that died a little inside whenever someone ordered | Read More
March 21, 2024
This is a take on the solution to The Bloody Mary Conundrum that I posted over a decade ago, in response to the logistical challenges of having a Bloody Mary on the menu at a bar. This particular take is detailed more extensively in the All-Day Bloody Mary post, and I encourage you to read | Read More
January 23, 2024
This is another one of those instances where I assumed the recipe was already on my website and lo and behold… it wasn’t. So here we go, although many of you have already found this one in other locations (it can also be found on page 40 of The Bar Book, for example) I think | Read More
August 8, 2023
This is one my business partner, Benjamin Amberg, came up with for our menu at Pacific Standard last year – and boy is it a good one. It all started when the owner of a new non-alcoholic spirit company out of Seattle reached out to me and let me know he was coming to Portland | Read More
February 8, 2023
The Keoke Coffee is one of those drinks that I got a lot of orders for back in the late 90s and early 2000s when I was first starting out making cocktails. And I never really gave it much thought back then, because it seemed like there were a hundred coffee drinks that all seemed | Read More
January 21, 2022
Since I’ve had a little more free time these days, I’ve been going back through some of my old recipes and noticing that I’ve got a pretty extensive backlog of cocktails that have never made it on to the site. Until now. You can expect to see more cocktails here this year as I’ve discovered | Read More
November 21, 2021
As any regular visitor to this site can tell you, I. Love. Eggnog. (A LOT). And as I’ve said before, my love for the stuff is not limited to just the alcoholic versions I’ve been evangelizing for the past decade and half. I even love the goop that you get from the grocery store. It’s | Read More
June 18, 2021
One of the things I can’t run a bar without is a solid 2:1 brown sugar syrup. I love a dark rum Daiquiri with Demerara syrup, I only use brown sugar syrup in my Irish Coffees, and Muscovado syrup goes great in cocktails made with my house ginger beer recipe. I’ve been thinking about having | Read More
March 15, 2021
The Irish Coffee used to freak me out. Now, granted, this was back in the day when it was nearly impossible to find the answers to just about any bartending questions online. So you kinda had to go with what the guests or the more experienced bartenders told you was correct. And that information was | Read More
October 28, 2020
I used to have this recipe crammed in with the original Egg Nog post, but this year I think it deserves its own page. And for many reasons. I mean first off, the Clyde Common egg nog has surpassed the original base recipe in popularity. I never could have imagined how popular a tequila-sherry egg | Read More
September 9, 2020
I recently posted on my Instagram about my excitement around finally learning how to use the fruit of my lone Italian Prune Plum (or Empress Plum) tree that grows right outside the back door to my kitchen. I spent all day Sunday learning how to make plum jam (among other things) and then was taught | Read More
August 26, 2020
I have this awful habit, as a blogger, of never getting things posted in time and they just drag on year after year. The fact that I’ve never posted my Tom and Jerry recipe is one of those casualties. I get busy during the holidays, and every year I don’t remember to post it until | Read More
August 13, 2020
OK listen. Yeah I know it sounds s u p e r weird, but bear with me on this one, and trust me: I haven’t led you too far off the path thus far, and I don’t plan on starting now. Here’s the story. It’s hard for me to complain about where my job has | Read More
May 17, 2020
One of my favorite drinks I’ve ever come up with has never been tasted by anyone but me. Okay, that’s not entirely true but there are like five people in the world who’ve ever tried it. And I’ve been going through my site lately (as a currently unemployed bar manager, I have all this time | Read More
April 25, 2020
Yes, you read that right: Chocolate Chip Cookies. And no, this is not a goofy shot recipe. (As an aside, are any of you old bartenders like me who remember when every shot was some sort of attempt to replicate the flavor of a dessert item? The Girl Scout Cookie Shot, the German Chocolate Cake | Read More
These are the books and tools I use every single day to make drinks at home and behind the bar. Clicking on a product takes you to Amazon, which helps me keep this site running, so thank you in advance!
