If you’re drinking your booze fairly unadulterated, you want to reach for the top shelf. Pouring a whiskey on the rocks? Go for an aged scotch (we like Lagavulin) or a small-batch bourbon like Blanton’s. And your martini deserves Beefeater or Hendricks gin. But every bar needs well-liquor, the workhorses stashed below the bar– or…
Barbary Coast Cocktail (p. 7)
We were feeling adventurous this fine early autumn Sunday, so we decided to really dig into Old Mr. B’s catalogue and try the Frankenstein-y Barbary Coast cocktail. This thing has it all: a half ounce each of Gin, scotch, rum, creme de cacao, and sweet cream. With an ingredient list like this, it couldn’t possibly…
Western Rose Cocktail (p. 106) and What We’re Really Drinking
With full time jobs and an almost-two-year old, we’re not drinking a lot of complex mid-century drinks. We’re going to TRY and mix up one drink a week from Old Mr. B for ya (5782 new year’s resolutions, FTW!), and pop in with some pictures and recipes for the simpler tipples we tend toward these…
Rose Cocktails (English and French, p. 82)
Everyone loves recipes with big, long introductions, right? That’s what we all come to the internet for! But seriously, if you’re just interested in cocktail recipes, there are better web sites for that. What we’ve been doing is taking a step back to 1963, drinking the cocktails of our midcentury forebears, and commenting on them…
Addington Highball (& We’re Back!)
All plans to find a way to write during pregnancy were derailed by, well, being pregnant. It’s hard. And then we had our baby six weeks early (I had preeclampsia, and it sucked) in mid-October. The little guy and I are both doing well now, so I’m getting back to boozy form. We can’t quite…
Where did we go?
We haven’t posted since March 4 (almost four months ago), but we haven’t given up on our goal of drinking through Old Mr. Boston’s Bartender’s guide. It’s just that, well, Liz is sidelined from boozing for about 5 more months. Yep– we’re having a baby! The kid is due November 30. Here he is waving…
Hot Buttered Rum (p. 48)
Snow was in the forecast and Chris was fighting off a particularly nasty cold, so it seemed like a good night for a hot drink. Liz recently heard a episode of David Wondrich’s podcast Life Behind Bars where he referenced Hot Buttered Rum, and it sounded like a decadent take on the regular old toddy….
Three Miller (p.99)
There was an episode of this season’s Top Chef where the competitors had to make dishes inspired by prohibition-era cocktails: the Last Word, the Whiskey Sour, and the 12-Mile Limit. While the first two were familiar to us, the last one was intriguing, calling for rum, whisky, brandy, grenadine, lemon juice, and a lemon twist. It…
Favourite Cocktail (p. 37)
Old Mr. Boston loves flavored brandy. When we started this project, our experience was limited to some bad memories of cheap blackberry brandy in flask-sized bottles. We figured flavored brandies just sucked, and we bought cheap stuff in that category for mixing. Why spend tons of money on artificially flavored fruited liqueur, we reasoned? After…
Brazil Cocktail (p. 17)
Among our frustrations with Old Mr. Boston is a frequent lack of specificity. His sherry drinks are among the most irritatingly vague. Sherry is a broad category of fortified wine. There’s quite a lot to know about the stuff, but what we’ve surmised is that Fino sherry is light and somewhat dry as compared to…
Midcentury Mixology 