George Stark, Needful Thing

The second of our Stephen King cocktails feature characters from back-to-back novels written from 1989 to 1991. The first we named after The Dark Half villain, the hard-drinking George Stark. The George Stark is a riff off the very-manly Sazerac. The difference is the homemade peppermint-horehound syrup. While you don’t have to be a diabolical killer to enjoy these two cocktails, it helps.

Captain Trips

The Firewater Lounge threw their annual summer shindig in July; this year’s theme was Stephen King characters. To complement the eerie proceedings, we created an interesting menu that was a decent hit with the crowd. Many of the drinks are spin-offs of classic cocktails, which were a lot of fun to make. We’ll post six of the best from the sixteen-drink menu and point out their original classic as well.

Hard Cider - Drinking Notes

Not much is more American than hard cider. John Adams drank a tankard of the stuff every morning and proclaimed it was the reason for his longevity (Adams died on Independence Day in 1826 at the age of 90). It featured prominently in the 1840 presidential election that promoted William Henry Harrison as the common man’s candidate since he was the hard cider imbiber. Strangely, though, the only hard cider available by our college years was Woodchuck, a run-of-the-mill, uncomplicated green apple slug (but still light years ahead of gut-destroying malty hard lemonades). Now, however, we have a number of interesting hard ciders from which to choose.