The Cocktail Artist

Darn! Why didn’t we buy those airline tickets to Italy when they were cheap? It would be so nice to be lounging in a beautiful Italian seaside town right now.  The Amalfi region, on Italy's west coast, is known for it's production of lemon liqueur and fine writing and art paper - sounds like the perfect place for us! Oh well, maybe it would be better to be there during the off season. Italy is probably packed with American tourists right now. Let's  just pull out the watercolor paints and the cocktail shaker and bring a bit of la dolce vita  to our patio. Our Amalfi Martini (naturally) features limoncello. It's a fairly low-alcohol liqueur, so we boost the proof of this cocktail by adding our vodka of choice - District Made Vodka by One Eight Distilling. If you are using a vodka that doesn't have much flavor on it's own (which, honestly, is most vodka) you may want to add a couple dashes of citrus bitters to this recipe. This just wouldn't be an Ita

  This cocktail came about as the result of several nice gifts. I guess when one of your hobbies is putting together a cocktail blog people naturally give you things which would inspire new drinks - and we're not complaining! Several years ago we, along with a group of friends, attended a rum tasting hosted by the Jamaican Embassy which featured rums from Appleton Estate . We thoroughly enjoyed their barrel aged rums, but they are really best for sipping neat.  Our friends recently gifted us a bottle of the Appleton Reserve Blend, and we found it makes a great cocktail. The other gift was The Waldorf Astoria Bar Book - by Frank Caiafa. This excellent bar book is where we found the "Daisy" family of cocktails - which date back to the mid 1800's. One of the nice features of this book is that they give a bit of history about the drink along with the recipe and ways you might want to vary the ingredients to suit your taste. So, here is our version of the Rum

Summer is officially here, so we thought we would share one of our favorite cocktails for sipping on a warm summer evening. It's hard to beat a great whiskey sour, and to make a great whiskey sour you should NEVER use pre-made sour mix! The "sour" comes from using fresh citrus juice. In our recipe we use lemon and orange. You don't need to use a top-shelf bourbon. A decent one (like Maker's Mark) gets the job done, since this cocktail uses as much citrus juice as bourbon. We can tell you from personal experience that this cocktail tastes even better than you drink it outdoors (preferably when sitting near the beach and/or watching the summer sun go down). A couple of the paintings in this blog post were done during cocktail hour while we were on vacation last summer. So when you are putting together a packing list for your summer vacation, don't forget about the cocktail shaker! An early evening cocktail hour is a great time to really relax and appre

Most people are familiar with the Manhattan cocktail (we certainly are!), but there are versions named for other New York City boroughs. One of our favorites is the Brooklyn - which is similar to the Manhattan but uses maraschino liquor and vermouth along with the bourbon. Yes, we know, everyone is sick of hearing about how hip Brooklyn is now, but this cocktail seems more like a throwback - something to sip while listening to a Sinatra album. We did a barrel-aged version of our Brooklyn recipe (aged for 6 weeks in a mini oak barrel from Deep South Barrels ) and it was a huge hit at our recent party. For the barrel-aged version we used Maker's Mark bourbon, but when we make it as a single drink our preference is for Old Scout Smooth Ambler or Russell's Reserve bourbon. For another one of our barrel-aged creations see:  Autumn on 44th Street . So go ahead and mix yourself a drink and imagine a time when you could go into a bar in Brooklyn and not have to pay $18 for a co