Pittsburgh, Part 2

COVID wasn't kind to hotels and their classy wine bars. Masks and social distancing is not conducive to the mingling of old men with money and middle-aged women that we saw chatting each other up at the Fairmont's wine and jazz abode named Andy's in pre-COVID times. The Fairmont, a Four Diamond, 185-room hotel in Pittsburg's downtown cultural district, shares a contemporary art and industry design theme with its downstairs bar. Although the Fairmont has reopened, Andy's has remained closed since COVID struck; it claims, though, like Douglas MacArthur, that is shall return!

When we visited, Andy's was awash in the sounds of piano jazz and the murmurs of the crowd in its expansive glass and industrial walled space. The cocktails smacked of over-the-top swank. We won't recreated them for you, because the Lounge Lizards cannot abide the pretension or time required for these pinky-in-the-air draughts. Cindy selected one of Andy's 'simplest' cocktails, a Smoked Caipirinha which consisted of cachaca, lime, and smoked cilantro syrup. I ordered up a Japanese Garden, an overwrought combination of dill-infused Tanqueray Ten, cucumber-infused sake, maraschino, and fresh-squeezed lime. And while the cocktails were good, we decided to move on to a different atmosphere.

We walked a couple of blocks closer to the confluence of the three rivers to Market Square and wandered into the champagne bar Perlé (now the Metropolitan Club), a wannabe club/wedding venue that was crazily schizophrenic enough to have $500 bottles of classy champagne but also served the cheaper stuff on tap!

Cindy and I scored seats on the back sofa and ordered our champagne concoctions- the classic Bellini for her (peach puree and champagne) and a Manhattan Noir for me- a combo of Dickel, cherry juice and champagne. The Noir is not complicated and gives you that excuse to buy that bottle of Dickel you know you wanted. Here's the recipe-

Drink: Manhattan Noir
Establishment: Perlé
Location: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
First Connoisseur: Holly

1/2 ounce Dickel 12
1/2 ounce chilled cherry juice
Champagne

Prior to making the drink, chill your Dickel in the freezer and your Champagne and cherry juice in the fridge. In a large Champagne flute, add the Dickel and cherry juice. Top with Champagne.

Cuffs and Buttons

Several years ago, I discovered a recipe for the original Southern Comfort created by New Orleans barman Martin Wilkes Herron. The original formula, named ‘Cuffs and Buttons,’ is a citrus and spice infused bourbon which was so popular that Herron patented the formula in 1899. 

To make the infusion, start with a good bottle of bourbon. In my two versions that worked well, I used a 750 ml bottle of Evan Williams for the first batch and a 750 ml bottle of Four Roses for my second batch. Pour your preferred bourbon into a large Mason jar. Add 2 inches of vanilla bean, 1 inch of cinnamon stick, 4 whole cloves, 12 dried cherries, a quarter of a small lemon, and 3 half-thumb pieces of orange to the jar. Let sit for five days. Agitate daily and taste. If the cinnamon gets too bold, remove the stick.

On the fifth day, remove the citrus and spices and strain the liquor. Heat a cup of good quality honey (don’t go cheap here) with a ½ cup of water. Add the honey syrup little by little to the infused bourbon until you find it tasty. If you pour the whole amount of honey syrup into the bourbon, the finished mix will be between 65 and 70 proof (Commercial Southern Comfort is 70 proof). Enjoy in your favorite whiskey cocktail or neat.

Cuffs and Buttons Old Fashioned

2 ounces of prepared Cuffs and Buttons
2-3 dashes of Angostura bitters
Top with 7up or club soda

Build the cocktail in a rocks glass filled with ice. Serve with a bourbon cherry or orange wheel or both.

Hot Toddy

Coronavirus. Ugh. We may not have a cure yet, but thankfully, we have some boozy remedies for respiratory ailments. Tonight looks like the last freeze of the 2019-2020 cold season and we’re all spending it in quarantine. So the Hot Toddy to the rescue! So what’s so great about the Hot Toddy? Well, for one, it’s old; it’s been healing Scots for about 300 years. The drink is also easy to prepare when you are sick and hard to screw up (if you do, it’s probably because you added too much lemon- add more honey to fix it).

The best part about the Hot Toddy, though, is that it really does help you through your cold symptoms. One, it has some Vitamin C from the lemons. Two, honey is antibacterial and soothes throats. Three, the heat of the Toddy itself acts as an expectorant, thinning your breathing passages. If you are worried about the alcohol, don’t be; most doctors are okay with an ounce and a half of spirit a day, even if you have a cold. So, a toast to your health (literally)!

Hot Toddy

¼ ounce fresh-squeezed lemon juice

1 bar spoon of  honey (about ¼ oz)

4 ounces boiling water

1 ½ ounces whiskey (we like Stranahan’s)

Combine all ingredients into a warmed mug or Irish coffee glass and stir to dissolve honey. Traditional garnishes include lemon peel, cinnamon sticks, and/or star anise. If you want to be fancy, stud your citrus peel with whole cloves.

Chicago, The Loop, part 3

After our nightcap at Potter’s, Cindy and I thought that we ought to take in a bit of the blues, so we sauntered down to Buddy Guy’s Legends nightclub to see who was playing in the Jimmy Burns-hosted Jam. Buddy Guy’s no-frills atmosphere sports a wide-open warehouse of a room cluttered with tables and chairs around a broad stage in the center of its south wall and a shot-and-a-beer bar tightly cloistered into a back corner. The people come to Buddy’s for the music, not the drinks and, despite the weekday’s late night, the musicians put on a helluva show, gutting it out for the half-filled venue on their mics, guitars, and washboards.

As we do for all bars of this nature, I ordered double Seven and Sevens, relishing the sweet whiskey as an afterthought between and during sets. Buddy’s servers are as no-frill as the atmosphere and the Sevens came large, cheap and quick by Chicago standards. The Sevens were so good with the blues that I had to order another round.

For those of you that are too young to drink in Wisconsin, here’s how to pour the immortal Seven and Seven-

Drink: Double Seven and Seven 

Establishment: Buddy Guy’s Legends

Location: Chicago, Illinois

First Connoisseur: Every Midwestern ever

4 ounces Seagram’s Seven Crown Whiskey

8 ounces 7up

Get a solo cup. Fill with ice. Put in 7. Put in 7. Drink. Repeat.

Durango, part 3

After the Belle, we could have called it a night, but I had more of the breweries to try that I wasn’t going to be able to get to before they closed. Instead, we parted ways with the saloon girls and visited the dark and quiet recesses of the Office Spiritorium, a quaint one-room affair that is bedecked with antique western flair, a staircase to more private seating above the bar, and a big stuffed peacock. The bar menu is really an extension of the Belle’s and awkwardly out of place for the ambience. You would expect the Spiritorium to be a shrine to old whiskey and specialty mescals, instead you get a ‘martini’ menu straight out of 1986. So I drank beer like a good Wisconsinite.

The first order (and third brewery sampled) was a Amber Ale from Durango Brewing Company. It is their regular amber, a year-round seller. It pours out clear amber with a rapidly diminishing beach-sand colored head. The Amber Ale is well-balanced; however, it’s a rather one-note version of a beer I love (American Amber), since the caramels were lacking for me in general, but drinkable. I compared it to a second Amber from the fourth brewing Company- Ska Brewing. Their amber, named Pinstripe Red, is not as clear as the Durango’s and more of a golden hint to its color. I thought that its flavor was similar as the Amber Ale, unfortunately, too watered-down and looking for a commercial audience I believe (tourists!). That said, both beers would have been just fine on a hot day, just not something you drove a 1000 miles for. Or maybe Carver’s Old Oak Amber spoiled my red beer drinking palate forever!

After sleeping off my beers and whiskey, it was time to say goodbye to Durango. But before leaving, I stopped across the street from the Strater to the rather chintzy-named Durango Liquor World for a bottle of Colorado something. The something that landed in the cart was Rocky Mountain peach whiskey from Leopold Bros., respected brewers-turned-distillers. Their peach whiskey is made with macerated Colorado Palisade peaches, rested in deep-charred American oak, and hand-bottled to keep its long, dense peach-cobbler-in-cast-iron characteristic finish. The thick tart peach flavor sings through in two and three part cocktail recipes. Here’s one below to transition your spring rains into the summer sunshine-

Peach Whiskey Mule 
Classic Pour

1 ½ ounces peach whiskey (we used Leopold Bros)
4 ounces ginger beer (we used Rocky Mt. Soda Company)
Juice of half a small lime

Find yourself a copper mule mug and fill with ice. Build all ingredients in the order presented. Stir gently for a handful of revolutions so as not to kill the ginger beer’s carbonation. Drink. I hope it’s hot out!

Durango, part 2

As you might have guessed from our first post, Durango is all about beer. Having six major craft breweries (Carver, Durango, Brew Pub & Kitchen, Animas, Ska, and Steamworks) in a town of less than 20,000 people is pretty incredible; it speaks to the tourist area that Durango has become. To those ends, our family set up shop in the Strater Hotel. The Strater opened in 1887 as a grandiose hotel (which sucks up the better part of a modern block) offering comfort to well-to-do ranchers, traveling businessmen, and Wild West authors. It also houses two drinking establishments: the famed Diamond Belle Saloon and the quieter Office Spiritorium.

Before we got our drink on, though, we had to get something to chew on for supper. So we walked the two blocks from the Strater to Steamworks Brewing Company. Steamworks features a huge beer hall/dining hall plastered with kitschy cartoon art, historical pictures of the Old West, and drink advertisements; the crowd was so large, it spilled to the tables on the balcony behind the eatery.

We started with their feature beers; Cindy ordered a Backside Stout and I got a Ginger Ninja. The Backside Stout is easily Steamworks’ best beer. In a pint glass, it is dark as chocolate and has flavor hints of the same. Its head retention wasn’t as solid as its lacing, but looked good going down. The flavor was everything Cindy likes- sweet upfront, chocolate malt in the middle and finishing with a touch coffee bitterness. The Ginger Ninja, however, was pretty awful. I rarely pan anything in the FWL (I just don’t write about it), but you really don’t need the Ginger Ninja in your mouth. It was a flat shandy, an jumbled combination of wheat and ginger that fought each other for supremacy, neither of which won. I quickly replaced the Ninja with a Lizard Head Red, a clear amber-red brew that gave off scents of rock candy and a bit of citrus. The Lizard Head’s aroma was its best characteristic, however, because it really didn’t present much flavor- it was thin, somewhat sweet and overall blah. Lucky for Steamworks, their cajun boils and burgers are great, because we’d probably just rather head back to Carver to drink beer.

But since it was getting late, we went back to the Strater to tuck in the kids. After they were snug in their beds, we went down to give the two hotel bars a try. We started in the Diamond Belle, where a raucous crowd was being entertained by an old-school saloon pianist who was banging away on the keys with fervent gusto. We ordered cocktails from a dancing-girl-coiffured waitress who, like in the Wild West days, was far too busy being flattered by amorous and drunken patrons at the bar than to serve our table with promptness. I surmised that the bartenders were a bit suspect as well, so my cocktail was a simple one.

Drink: Bustamonte 1957
Establishment: Diamond Belle Saloon
Location: Durango, Colorado
First Connoisseur: Holly

1 ½ ounces Colorado whiskey
3 ounces grapefruit juice
½ ounce real grenadine

Build all ingredients in the order presented in an old-fashioned glass pre-filled with ice. Stir gently to combine grenadine. Garnish with a swath of lemon or grapefruit peel.

After drinking the Bustamonte 1957, the piano player still had a tune or two in him, so we ordered one of the Belle’s Colorado whiskey flights. The flight was tasty trio of Stranahan’s straight whiskey (one of our all-time faves), Beckenridge malt mash, and Peach Street small batch. Each of the whiskeys were very pleasant, with Beckenridge’s offering leading the flight.

Dallas, Part 2

Last time we left you, the boys (Aaron and M.J.) and I were thirsty and looking for a drink. Surprise! We drove back into uptown Dallas in search of the cocktail bar Parliament and found it buried in various townhouse-like apartments and scattered classy eateries, mostly still relatively active given the growing late hour.

Dallas, Part 1

As we all get middle-aged, epic road trips among the boys get fewer and farther in between. So when the Badgers were called to begin the 2015 football season in Arlington against the Crimson Tide, Aaron, M.J., and I took to the road for the 15-odd hour trip into the heart of Texas. The overnight trip cost us a few hours of sleep, but, luckily for us, the game was at night so we had tailgating to do. Now, dear reader, if you are a true Lounge Lizard, you know that I can’t leave the Lone Star State without dropping in at a Spec’s. Fortunately, there was a Spec’s just blocks away from AT&T Stadium, so we added more thirsty gentlemen (term used loosely since Tom N. joined us) to the van and took off to find some tailgate goodies.

Once at Spec’s, we perused the whiskeys, mezcals, and tequilas that makes being close to the border with Mexico oh so great. I grabbed some Ranger Creek Rimfire Whiskey (see its separate entry in the FWL), a 1.75 ml of Cazadores, and a bottle of Boxcar Texas Whiskey from Rio Brazos Distillery in College Station. Aaron snared a local Texas whiskey as well as some of Ranger Creek’s rye. Now, Cindy couldn’t make the trip with us, but she still made a demand. “If you’re going to Spec’s,” she said, “you need to pick up some Paula’s Orange.” Aaron and I did, five bottles of Paula’s products a piece, which was all that Spec’s had.

What’s so special about Paula’s Texas Orange? Well, it’s Texas’ version of arancello and limoncello respectively, made with hand-squeezed love by Paula Angerstein, the first woman licensed distiller in Texas. Also, it’s cost-effective at around $16 a bottle. It’s Texas-sized 80 proof is roof-high for a liqueur and packs a zing in the drink it was made for- the margarita.

Let’s give you that recipe-

Texas Top Shelf Margarita

1 ½ ounces tequila
¾ ounce Paula’s Orange
½ ounce simple syrup
A squeeze of ½ a lime

Build all ingredients in a small iced Margarita glass or cocktail glass. Stir to incorporate. If your glasses are bigger, double the recipe!

Here’s one with Rio Brazos Boxcar whiskey (which combines sweet creaminess with green apple notes)-

Improved Whiskey Sour

1 ½ ounces Texas whiskey (we used Rio Brazos)
½ ounce Paula’s Orange
½ ounce Paula’s Lemon
½ ounce simple syrup
A squeeze of ½ a lemon.

Build all ingredients in an iced rocks glass. Stir to cool down.

Back at the tailgate, the Ranger Creek whiskeys came out along with lots of Miller Lite (roots, you know) to challenge the aim of those partaking in rounds of bags (not cornhole, losers). The drinking was only interrupted by football. The night would have been so much better with a big Badger win, but it was not to be, so we reloaded the van to the brim with obnoxious, partially-lubed ‘gentlemen’ for the ride back to their temporary digs in and around Dallas.

Now that was it for most of the boys, however Aaron, M.J. and I came to drink! So it was time to find an honest-to-goodness cocktail bar in Dallas. I think we’ll save that story for next time we meet.

Carpano Manhattan

One of the toughest common cocktail ingredients for the typical red-blooded beer-drinking Wisconsinite to get through is vermouth. Vermouth is just fortified wine (wine with a distilled spirit like brandy added) to bring the proof up to around 30-34 in most cases and also aromatized. Aromatization is the flavoring of wine with various botanicals like roots, barks, flowers, seeds, herbs, and spices.

A Visit to Spec's

Heaven is Spec’s. The Texas liquor superstore is everything the alcohol connoisseur needs and wants- aisles and aisles of liquid awesome. Boasting 150 stores all over Texas, if Spec’s doesn’t have it, it’s likely able to get it for you. I stopped at my first Spec’s outside San Antonio and spent $200 without blinking. I was kicking myself because I didn’t have cash since Spec’s has a policy of 5% back if you pay with cash. So, to get this discount, I got cash, and stopped at the Spec’s in Austin. I spent another $100. I know, either I have to leave Texas or find a clinic that specializes in liquor warehouse addiction.

Greenbush Special

Madison's Old Sugar Distillery gets a bunch of love from the Firewater Lounge and they should; they produce fine spirits. It's also no secret that we hoard their sorghum whiskey, Queen Jennie, so that we never run out. Jennie Justo, the famed Madison bootlegger, ran a speakeasy during Prohibition on Spring Street in Madison a few blocks down from where Cindy and I's college apartment was located (at that time it was called the Greenbush neighborhood). Known as Queen of Bootleggers, Jennie would run and serve anything she could get her hands on. So I don't think she'd mind one bit if we threw her namesake whiskey into Guinness, although her Greenbush neighbors, mostly Italian, might chafe at the Irishness of this post's beer cocktail.

Greenbush Special

Holly's Original

2 ounces sorghum whiskey (we used Queen Jennie)

1 3/4 ounces Guinness

1/2 ounce cinnamon syrup

3 dashes of angostura

1/4 - 1/2 ounces freshly-squeezed lemon (to taste)

Stir all ingredients on ice in a mixing glass. Strain into a cocktail glass and enjoy. If you don't have cinnamon syrup, remember you can make it yourself. Just take a gander at our Zombie write-up for the recipe.

MacFuddy Smash

We have extolled the virtues of not pulverizing your mint in a muddle or shaking it on ice until it shreds it to bits, however there is a style of drinks that actually calls for it- the smash. Famous barman Jerry Thomas called the smash “a julep on the small plan” because the smash and julep often has the very same ingredients. However, the smash’s mixing procedure does not call for as much time or delicate hand as the julep does. Essentially, the smash needs the bitter green in a plant to suck out sugar in a drink and add dimension.

Granny Apple Flip

In this post, we will teach you how to do a simple fruit maceration. A maceration is a breakdown of fruit through the use of sugar, salt, or liquid or, in this case, all three. So, grab some Granny Smith apples and get to it!

Plymouth Fury, Lot 6

Our last Stephen King cocktail post involves novels from the early 1980s- Christine and Firestarter. Our Christine cocktail, called the Plymouth Fury from the make and model of Christine herself, requires that the cocktail have Plymouth gin in it and that it was the correct shade of red. So we riffed from the modern classic Cosmo and added Aphrodite bitters (from Dr. Adam Elmegirab’s) to remind us of the bittersweet love Arnie had for his Christine.

A New Series

Don't worry, the Around America series isn't over. We'll return as we gather more recipes to sample. In the meantime, we hope to introduce several new themes. Today, we begin with Holly's Originals. Just as it sounds, these are recipes Jason has created.

Essential Liquor #22

#22) Canadian Whiskey - We have a ton of Canadian whiskeys in Wisconsin. Why not just use the American stuff for your 30 Essentials?

Essential Liquor #11

#11) American Whiskey - A bar without Jack Daniel's is like a farm without a dog. It's not absolutely necessary, but, if absent, you notice that it's not around.