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 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. ...

Now that we have most of the holiday decorations up its time to refocus our energy and make a cocktail! We were a bit parched after struggling with all of those strings of lights.  Mulling spice, cider, brandy, and citrus are all traditional ingredients in wassail – a warm punch that dates to the middle ages. Wassail is a great holiday drink, but it requires a bit of time and quite a few ingredients. We were looking to make something easier – preferably on the rocks since we worked up a sweat bringing those bins of decorations up from the basement!  We had some Apple Cider Simple Syrup leftover (previously used in our Apple Rye Cocktail ) and some terrific Spiced Rum from Far North Spirits , so we thought we would do a wassail riff on an Old Fashioned. A classic Old Fashioned contains a base spirit, a sweetener, bitters, and garnish. Our rum had plenty of spice, so we didn’t need the bitters, but we decided to throw in a bit more alcohol (and balance the spice) by ...

T his classic cocktail is well over a century old. It originated at Philadelphia’s Bellevue-Stratford Hotel – which was the meeting place for the men’s social group known as the Clover Club. It’s very similar to a Pink Lady, but without the Applejack. We have a Pink Lady variation on the blog – see our In the Pink cocktail where we replaced the gin with aquavit. Some Clover Club cocktail recipes call for grenadine (which is what is traditionally used for the Pink Lady), but most use raspberry simple syrup. We have a number of cocktails on our blog that call for raspberry syrup, so it’s an ingredient we make and keep on hand. Check out our Up North Raspberry and Rye or Raspberry Smash – or use the syrup in a Daiquiri .  Back in October, the Cocktail Artist team took separate overnight trips. Beth (the team mixologist) was in New York City visiting our daughter – where she went out for drinks at the Dingle bar in Fraunces Tavern . This historic tavern has been operating sin...

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...

According to the calendar it’s fall, but here in the Mid-Atlantic we are still experiencing summer weather. We’re ready for fall, and we got a taste of it before we left Northern Michigan a few weeks ago – the weather was crisp, leaves on the maple trees were starting to turn, and there were some delicious apples available in the farm markets. While we were in Michigan we created a delicious autumn-inspired cocktail using local ingredients. Now that we are back home in Washington, DC we wanted to replicate the drink, but we failed to bring home the honeycrisp apple syrup that we had picked up at a farm market. Fortunately, we were able to capture the taste by making our own apple cider simple syrup by simmering fresh apple cider with brown sugar and a dash of mulling spice (we had a jar of Williams-Sonoma mulling spice in the cabinet and it was just what we needed). By simmering the syrup to reduce its volume, you are left with an intense apple flavor. The brown sugar adds just eno...

We are in our home away from home in Northern Michigan, and lucky for us there are plenty of local products to use to create new cocktails and plenty of inspiration to create new artwork! We are huge fans of Cherry Republic - home to all things cherry. If we haven't already schooled you on this, the northern part of Michigan's lower peninsula is the cherry capital of the United States, and Cherry Republic produces a huge array of products that utilize the local crop. This year we discovered their Cherry Ginger Bear - a ginger spiced cherry soda. We decided that this would be perfect to use in our Northern Michigan cocktail of the season, and the result did not disappoint. This soda is similar to ginger beer, but with the addition of cherry notes. So what better to do with ginger beer than make a Dark and Stormy - that classic highball made with dark rum and ginger beer. We were lucky to find a local white rum from Iron Fish Distillery to work into our drink, and the re...