When I found my first bottle of St. Germain elderflower liqueur last year, I was – like many of you – inspired by its unique flavor and wanted to use it in a cocktail. I mixed it with vodka, I mixed it with gin, I mixed it with lemon juice, and I sweetened it with | Read More

I like to use Buffalo Trace’s Sazerac 6-Year rye in my Sazeracs. The nose is sweet and fruity, but the palate is nice and dry with a lot of spice – a perfect choice for the Sazerac experience.

Well, here we are at Mixology Monday time again. Our host for this round is Marleigh over at Sloshed! and in my mind she’s picked a real winner of a theme: brandy. I love brandy. I love to consume it, I love to sell it, and I love to mix with it. A few months | Read More

A couple of months ago, my friend Kevin from The Scotch Blog sent me a bottle of Pig’s Nose scotch in the mail. As an aside, I highly recommend making friends with people who do things like, say, run the world’s biggest blog on scotch whiskey. Really. Anyway, Pig’s Nose is a fun, easy-to-drink, everyday | Read More

There’s this little… thing… that some bartenders, like myself who are from a certain generation do, and I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why we do it. And it’s probably going to sound super weird to you at first, but hopefully by the end of this piece you’ll be convinced and might even want | Read More

To be honest with you, I didn’t really have much of a chance to prepare for this month’s Mixology Monday. In fact, when Natalie emailed me a reminder earlier today, my first thought was, “Oh, f*ck!”. And as much as I loves me some Mixology Monday, I’ve been a little out of the loop this | Read More

It’s football time here in the university town I call home, so on Saturday mornings my kitchen often becomes the epicenter of pre-game madness. I like to put out a bottle of vodka, a pitcher of my Bloody Mary mix, and a tray of fun garnishes for the fans and let people put together their | Read More

I never really venture too far outside of my comfort zone when it comes to cocktails. Sure, I’ve tried some strange combinations before, but when all is said and done I usually tend to stick to the classics. Until this evening. Maybe it was all the late-summer sun I got at the pool this afternoon | Read More

Earlier today at our little Cocktail Summit, we played with seaberries (aka sea berries or sea-buckthorn). If you haven’t tried seaberries before, they’re a small, soft fruit full of a milky, citrusy, tart juice – slightly astringent and very rich. They’re unlike anything I had ever tried. I had been messing around with some wine syrups | Read More

This is my interpretation of a classic style of Brazilian drink. Often these are blended, but variations appear here and there that are on the rocks like this one. I like to use Leblon cachaça at the bar because it’s a multi-distilled, and therefore lighter, product.  

Greetings, and happy Mixology Monday! Paul over at Cocktail Chronicles is hosting this month’s get-together, and the theme is Blog Love. Yikes, what a name, huh? But it’s a great idea: we’re all going to try out recipes that we’ve seen on each other’s sites, and report on our findings. Because we’re bloggers. And we | Read More

After a brutal weekend of making drinks for what seemed like every single graduate of the University of Oregon this weekend (and their parents), I’m propping myself up at my computer to once again take part in the Mixology Monday festivities. I did some advance planning (a first) and started working on this recipe last | Read More

There are so many bad Mojitos out there that I just had to share what I think is the most perfect, simple Mojito recipe. While a lot of people want to overthink the drink, I think it’s important to take a step back and look at the cocktail for what it truly is: a Rum | Read More

While working on a host of new drinks for the El Vaquero drink menu, I found several references to a Nacional Daiquiri, created at the Hotel Nacional in Havana, Cuba using apricot brandy. Never able to leave well enough alone, I fooled around with proportions and flavors until I came up with this twist on | Read More