The Cocktail Artist

We’re thinking warm thoughts these days. Spring has been officially here for almost a month, but we’ve barely had any decent weather. Before we know it though, we’ll be be complaining about how hot it is! Of course, we would complain less if we were at the Yacht Club sipping a cocktail. The mixologist member of the Cocktail Artist team was perusing one of our favorite cocktail books ( The Waldorf Astoria Bar Book by Frank Caiafa ) and came across the recipe for the Yacht Club cocktail. We had some surplus apricot liqueur after experimenting with it in the Coronation Cocktail , and the recipe sounded like a good way to put it to use. The Waldorf’s version of the Yacht Club uses white rum, apricot liqueur, sweet vermouth, and orange bitters. As usual, we changed things around a bit to create our own spin on the drink, but we did retain the slightly pink color by using True Grenadine in place of the sweet vermouth. We wanted a bit of sweet and tart flavor and real grenadine (made...

We love a good brandy, and if you have read some of our other blog posts you have probably noticed that the mixologist member of this partnership is quite partial to apple brandy in particular. Does apple brandy (or applejack, or Calvados) taste like apples? Well, yes in the way that wine tastes like grapes. You get the essence of the fruit in apple brandy, but the fermentation, distillation, and aging results in liquor that’s 80 proof (or more) and tastes more like whiskey than apple juice. We enjoy sipping apple brandy neat, but it’s also a part of several of our favorite cocktails including our Presidents’ Day Cocktail and Shenandoah Cyd Car. Laird & Company is America’s oldest commercial distillery and today the Laird family is still producing Applejack and Apple Brandy – as they have been for nearly 300 years. For most of those years they have pretty much had the apple brandy market to themselves (for good reason - they produce a really solid product), but recently cr...