The Cocktail Artist

Basil Gimlet - original watercolor by The Cocktail Artist For a number of years this has been one of our favorite summer cocktails, but we just can't resist continuing to tweak it. We've made it with either gin or vodka with good results, but when we tried adding a bit of aquavit we felt that we had arrived at the perfect balance. The fresh basil really comes through when enhanced by the herbal flavor of the aquavit. The lime juice and muddled basil also give the cocktail a vibrant green color - making it a lovely muse for a watercolor painting. Because we love Italian food, we always have plenty of sweet basil growing during the summer - usually in pots so that it can be moved around during the course of the growing season. When the weather gets cool we bring it indoors just to extend the taste of summer a bit longer. If you are not growing basil at home you can certainly find it now at the farmer's market. To keep cut basil fresh, trim the stems and put it in a ja...

The Blue Garden - original artwork by the Cocktail Artist For many years we only planted blue and purple flowers in our garden (with the exception of some of our azaleas). It's so nice to look out at that cool color palette during the heat of the summer. Blues are also a good palette for summer watercolor paintings, and this post includes a few of the blue floral watercolors we have done during the past several summers. There is no shortage of blue flower paintings done by great masters. Take a look at Irises , Van Gogh, 1889 (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles) and Monet's Water Lilies , 1914 - 1926 (MoMA, New York) . In the description of Monet's 3-panel oil painting, the Museum of Modern Art says that Monet was trying to create " the refuge of a peaceful meditation in the center of a flowering aquarium. " That's exactly the atmosphere we are looking for on a hot and muggy summer day. Just to be clear, we are in no way comparing our artwork with these ...

Peaches and Bourbon - original watercolor painting by the Cocktail Artist During the summer the farm market serves as a wonderful inspiration for our art and our cocktails. Right now peaches are coming into season here. Peaches can be either clingstones or freestones , depending on whether or not the fruit sticks to the stone. This is not obvious until you bring them home and try to cut them up, and (in the case of clingstone peaches) create a huge mess. There was no mistaking that the peaches we just bought are clingstones since our attempt to make nice slices for a cobbler resulted in a bunch of (visually unappealing) peach blobs. Well, we're not about to let this fresh fruit go to waste. A Bellini would be the obvious way to use the peach pulp in a cocktail (and certainly not a bad way to go), but we thought we would try for a cocktail version of peach cobbler. We came across a recipe for a Peach, Ginger and Bourbon frozen cocktail in Bon Appetit magazine a couple of y...

Typically we come up with a drink recipe and then create some original artwork to illustrate the cocktail. This time we are working in reverse. The watercolor of Split Rock Lighthouse was painted a number of years ago by the artist member of this partnership. It’s a painting we’ve always loved and it hangs in our dining room. For our Split Rock Cocktail we are translating the colors of the rocks, sky and water into purple basil, blueberry and honey (along with alcohol of course - but more on that later). Split Rock is located on Lake Superior - north of Duluth. According to the Minnesota Historical Society; “A November gale that wrecked nearly 30 ships in 1905 prompted this rugged landmark's construction. When the U.S. Lighthouse Service completed Split Rock Light Station in 1910, it soon became one of Minnesota's best known destinations… with a drama-filled history and breathtaking Lake Superior views.” Split Rock Lighthouse is worth the trip, but we suggest you try to...

Fresh picked raspberries are perfect on their own, but (naturally) we can't help ourselves from putting some into a cocktail. When we go raspberry picking we often end up with far more fruit than we can use before it begins to get overripe. So instead of letting those beautiful berries go bad, make fresh raspberry syrup - which is great for cocktails as well as for pouring on plain yogurt for breakfast (or on your pancakes). The recipe for the syrup follows the cocktail recipe in this blog post. We have an abundance of mint in our garden, so what we came up with for this berry cocktail is a variation on a julep. According to our research this should technically be called a "Smash" (not a julep). The name Smash is derived from the herbs that are smashed during the shaking of the cocktail. A julep is created in the glass in which it is served, whereas a smash is mixed in a cocktail shaker. This seems to be a rather fine point of distinction, but we're keeping wit...

You've probably heard of a Tom Collins. It's a great summertime drink - fizzy lemonade for grown ups. There are a few stories about how this cocktail got it's name, but we particularly love the one called "The Great Tom Collins Hoax of 1874". This seems to be a case of fake news going viral more than a century before we had the internet. Go to Mental Floss  to read the full story. Prior to doing some Googling, we had a mental picture of Tom Collins as a old sailor or fisherman (maybe you have figured this out from our original artwork). We could see him coming back thirsty from a day on the water and enjoying a nice cool lemon and gin drink with his lobster roll. A Tom Collins is an excellent choice as the cocktail for a picnic or barbecue. It's served on the rocks with club soda, so it's cool, refreshing, and offers much less alcohol per sip than a martini. Our version sticks to the traditional recipe - perhaps with a bit more lemon juice and the ad...

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...