The Cocktail Artist

It’s a tired cliché, but kind of true - time flies when you’re having fun. It has been just over two years since we began publishing this blog. We started it just to keep track of our recipes and share them (along with Chris’s artwork) with a few friends. To our surprise, we have created something that people (who are not our blood relatives) actually read! It really has been fun creating the posts and meeting other craft cocktail enthusiasts through the blog and our Instagram account.  We don’t typically share much personal information about ourselves. If you click around through the pages on our blog you will find the About Us section where we give brief bios. For those of you who don’t know us personally, we are a husband wife team (Chris and Beth). In December we celebrated 33 years of marriage (time really HAS flown!)… Beth is the one who comes up with the cocktail recipes, does the photography, and writes the blog. Chris is solely tasked with creating the original wor...

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 cocktail is our variation on the prohibition classic Bee’s Knees. The traditional Bee’s Knees is a straightforward combination of gin, honey, and lemon juice. It was developed at a time when gin wasn’t what you would call high quality. Actually, it was barely drinkable and required the addition of the lemon and honey to mask its flavor. Thankfully we don’t have that problem now!  One of the drinkable spirits we have been enjoying is from the kind people at Bluewater Organic Distilling – who recently sent us a bottle of their new Wintersun Aquavit. This is a clear, crisp aquavit with citrus and anise notes. More people are discovering aquavit – a traditional Scandinavian spirit, and using it as a gin or vodka substitute in classic cocktails (with varying degrees of success). We thought herbal notes of Wintersun Aquavit would be best complimented by honey and some citrus – which brought us to the Bee’s Knees recipe. We then set about experimenting with ratios and ingredient...

Planter’s Punch is a classic rum concoction that traces its roots to the West Indies. The first recipe for Planter’s Punch was written in verse in 1878 in  Fun – a London magazine.  As with all things cocktail-related, the story of the origins of Planters Punch are fuzzy. The Planters Hotel in Charleston, South Carolina and Planter’s Hotel in St. Louis have both claimed to be where this drink originated, but rum punch can be traced back to Jamaica – the birthplace of rum. One story tells of a Jamaican planter's wife who concocted it to cool down the workers. This seems rather dubious since knocking back a couple of cups of rum punch wouldn’t exactly make planters very productive.  Recipes for Planter’s Punch include all kinds of add-ons, but the basic ingredients are dark rum, lime juice, and some sweetener. We ran across one recipe that said the secret to the perfect Planter’s Punch is fresh nutmeg. That got us thinking about using spiced rum in our variation. For...

Many people take some time off from alcohol in January (do a Google search for Dryuary). This isn’t a bad idea – especially if you overdid it during the holiday season, but then again, the East Coast got hit with a nasty cold snap…. Since it was too cold to go outside and take down the Christmas lights, we started flipping through Ted Haigh’s Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails book and came across “The Soother”. It sounded like the perfect cold weather cocktail. This drink splits the base spirit by using half cognac and half Jamaican rum. It also includes orange curacao, lemon juice, apple juice and simple syrup. This relatively long list of ingredients allows plenty of room for experimentation. The original recipe came from the Waldorf Astoria’s Old Bar and dates back to the early 1900’s. It’s included in The Waldorf Astoria Bar Book by Frank Caiafa – where the author suggests that you could serve this as a warm drink. Now the possibilities were becoming overwhelming! ...