The Cocktail Artist

As promised in our previous blog post we are using this post to give you our Mezcal version of the Penicillin Cocktail. A key ingredient in our Penicillin No. 2 was homemade Orange Honey Simple Syrup. A batch of simple syrup will keep for a couple of weeks, so once it’s made we like to experiment and create a couple of different cocktails so that we use it before it expires. A Penicillin Cocktail features peaty Scotch along with lemon, honey and ginger. We were quite pleased with our version using the orange-honey syrup and thought another riff using Mezcal to replace the smoky Scotch could be interesting. We tried it with and without ginger liqueur, and with lime in place of lemon juice, but in the end the recipe that our taste testing team preferred the one that had fresh lemon juice and orange liqueur. We also cut the Mezcal a bit and replaced it with another agave spirit – silver tequila. We are calling this one the “Agave Sunset” and have paired it with a Cocktail Arti...

This blog post could be considered our version of a get well soon card. Hopefully our spin on the Penicillin cocktail, along with the accompanying floral artwork from the Cocktail Artist’s archives, will drive away any mid-winter doldrums that you may be experiencing.  The original Penicillin Cocktail was created in 2005 by bartender Sam Ross and contains blended and single malt Scotch, along with fresh ginger, lemon and honey. For our version we used a domestic Peated Whiskey made in the Boston area by Short Path Distillery . This small-batch distillery uses locally sourced ingredients (the peat in this Scotch-style whiskey is harvested in Maine). Short Path’s attention to detail is evident not only in their product, but also in their well-designed bottle labels. Each spirit’s label features a different bird in a bold black and white graphic (or an egg for their newly hatched limited edition spirits). A Penicillin Cocktail seemed like a good idea last weekend when the J...

Happy New Year! We celebrated the start to 2019 with a blanket of fresh snow in Northern Michigan and some cocktails made with local spirits. We are normally “Up North” during the summer months, but decided to spend a week in Charlevoix during the holiday season. The result is this blog post packed with three recipes (and some travel tips if you find yourself in this part of the world). As regular readers of our blog know, we often sing the praises of local craft distillers, and when we are on vacation we typically have more time to hunt down and visit new distilleries. This past summer we visited Mammoth Distilling’s wonderful tasting room in the tiny town of Central Lake, Michigan. Thanks to Mammoth, Central Lake is the smallest town (population 936) in Michigan to have its own distillery. The tasting room happens to be next door to another Central Lake landmark, Bachman’s Store – a classic 5 and dime that hasn’t changed very much since it was opened in 1942. We highly recomm...

During December we participated in a fun holiday event sponsored by Matthias Soberon – the creative cocktail genius behind the Served By Soberon blog and Instagram. Through our Instagram account we have come to know fellow cocktail enthusiasts and home bartenders who hail from all parts of the globe. We have learned so much by following, and becoming a part of, this group. During the holiday season Matthias (who lives in Ghent, Belgium) paired up Drinkstagrammers in a cocktail version of “Secret Santa” for his #SecretSanté event – where over 150 people are created and posted cocktails to celebrate a fellow home bartender. We were assigned Travel, Food, Cool - an awesome Instagram account (and blog) created by Elin. It’s dedicated to cocktails, recipes, restaurants, and cool stuff - with a focus on Italy. Basically, it’s about all things we love! As a tribute to @travelfoodcool, it seemed only right to do a riff on an Italian drink, and so we chose the Americano. ...