When Life Gives You Lemons... Make Whiskey Sours.

My wonderful, teetotaling Baptist parents have a Meyer Lemon tree. It lives in a pot in the backyard and is mostly neglected, except for the occasional watering, but somehow that thing is just lousy with lemons. While my precious, coddled pink lemon tree this year produced... three lemons. But I don't mind their gardening triumph so much because, of course, they shared with me. ("Don't tell me what you are going to do with those," my mother said.) I thought briefly about making a pie, but I hardly ever cook, or even bake, and I don't even like pie. So instead I made a whiskey sour.

This whiskey sour is just a little bit more specialer than your average whiskey sour. Even if you don't have gardening parents, you can hunt down some Meyer Lemons at the grocery store when they're in season. (A Meyer Lemon is a cross between a traditional lemon and an orange, and is therefore a bit sweeter than the Eureka lemons you're used to.) The drink also makes use of a simple syrup made with turbinado sugar - the ratio of sugar to water here is 1 to 1. I like to use an overproof rye (like Rittenhouse) for this, but feel free to use whatever you've got around. I promise it'll still be delicious.

Meyer Lemon Whiskey Sour
1 oz Meyer Lemon juice (fresh squeezed, duh)
.5 oz turbinado simple syrup (1:1)
2 oz rye whiskey (overproof if you're a badass like me)

Shake (over ice) and strain into a glass. Enjoy.

The Summer Sage

Here's part 2 of my series of cocktail posts for the Kitchn. It's a re-jiggering (see what I did there?) of one of my very first drinks, a delicious combination of red plums, sage, and rye whiskey. If you're wondering what, exactly, the difference is between rye whiskey and plain old whiskey, flip back to this post for all the details. To see the new recipe (and more delicious photos), check out the Kitchn post here.

Warning: looks like pink lemondade. Will knock you on your ass. (So...pretty much the perfect cocktail.)

Accidental Deliciousness: Courtyard Bar at Brennan's

About a month ago, I strode confidently into the Courtyard Bar at Brennan's. I'm here to try the Brugal Anejo Rum drinks, I told them. My people talked to the bar manager. It's all worked out.

The bartender looked at me like I was crazy.

A few minutes later, along came the manager himself. He gently informed me that he knew of no such arrangement. Perhaps I meant to go to Brenner's? Imagine me going from confident to deeply embarrassed in about 3.5 seconds.

But I was already there, at the bar, with my schmancy camera, and the afternoon sunlight was slanting through the windows just so, and the bottles behind the bar looked oh-so-alluring. I had dinner plans a couple blocks away in 45 minutes. What was I supposed to do, wait in the car? And everyone had been so nice. So I did what any reasonable person in my position would have done: I ordered a few drinks.


I spotted a bottle of Fernet Branca behind the bar, which intrigued me because I have my own bottle of Fernet Branca, sitting unopened, waiting for the proper inspiration. So I asked the Bartender, Adam (who, despite the initial mix-up, was courtesy itself) to make me a cocktail with Fernet Branca that was "not too bitter". He presented me with something called the Problem Solver - not too sweet, not too bitter, just the perfect little whiskey cocktail. If you would like your problems solved as well, you're in luck, because Adam was kind enough to give me the recipe. (See, I told you they were nice.)

The Problem Solver
2 oz rye whiskey
1/2 oz cherry heering
1/4 oz Benedictine
Fernet Branca

Stir the rye, cherry heering, and Benedictine together in an ice-filled mixing glass. Strain into a Fernet-rinsed cocktail glass.


For my second drink, Adam made me a yellow plum daiquiri. Believe me, it tasted as light and beautiful as it looks. Unfortunately, I don't have the recipe for this one - you may just have to go to Brennan's and order one yourself.

HARRY POTTER COCKTAILS.

One of your bartender's favorite books is Gone with the Wind. (I know, this post is about Harry Potter, not Scarlett O'Hara...but bear with me here.) The first cocktail book I ever owned is something called the Cocktail Bible, which is actually pretty terrible, as cocktail books go. (Creme de menthe in a long island iced tea...whaaat?) But on page 98, I found something that piqued my interest - signature cocktails for all the major characters in Gone with the Wind. (The Scarlett O'Hara - cranberry juice, SoCo, and a bit of lime - is pretty delicious.*) I loved it. It was the ultimate exercise in higher-level thinking...turn a fictional character into a cocktail. I could do this, right? I could totally do this.

*Disclaimer: I have not tried any of the others. Although maybe tonight is the night for a Rhett Butler??

Your bartender also loves Harry Potter - and the first installment of the last movie of the Harry Potter series came out this Friday, so what better excuse to cook up some delicious, creative, and original cocktails? I know that none of the Harry Potter kids are actually old enough to drink...but once they turned 18 (or 21 here in the US), here's what they would be quaffing.

The Hermione Granger

Here's what I was thinking when I started thinking about what would go into the Hermione cocktail...Hermione is a strong woman. She's smart, and she's very good at what she does (magic, being a giant deus ex machina), but that doesn't make her any less feminine. The casting agents could hardly have known that Emma Watson would grow from a bushy-haired know-it-all into the beautiful young woman she is today, but it's only appropriate: seventh-year Hermione Granger is both beautiful and intimidatingly smart. (In the words of Janis Ian: "Suck on that.") The Hermione cocktail is based on a lot of flavors (sloe gin, pomegranate, grapefruit) that are strong and manage to achieve that perfect sweet-tart balance. Together with champagne (fizzy, delicious, feminine without being weak) they combine to form a lovely cocktail.

Hermione Granger
1.5 oz sloe gin (Get the Plymoth. Usually I'm not a big pusher of top-shelf liquors, but trust me: you need the Plymoth. use the cheap sloe gin and this cocktail will taste like medicine.)
1 oz gin
.75 oz Pama pomegranate liqueur
.5 oz red grapefruit juice (Rio star!)
1.5 oz brut champagne

Combine the ingredients in a pint glass full of ice. Stir lovingly for 30 seconds (or more), and then strain into a cocktail glass.

The Ron Weasley

Ahh, Ron Weasley. A little bit Samwise Gamgee, a little bit everyman. The Ron Weasley started out with the pairing of whiskey (so manly!) and Campari (a bitter, very red Italian liquer). Because Ron is manly, a little bit rough - and a little bit bitter. (I would be, too, if my best friend were the second coming.) The pairing of whiskey and Campari presented me with more than a little bit of trouble, and a lot of drunken, frustrated weekday nights sampling versions of a Ron Weasley that turned out to be absolutley disgusting. I wanted to make my Ron Weasley with Jack Daniels, which is very headstrong young man, but it didn't start to gel until I switched to rye whiskey, which a bit more old-school. But hey - in addition to trying to stay true to the characters, I am also trying to make drinks that taste good. The Ron Weasley owes a little bit to the Old Pal, appropriately, and also a bit to the Blood and Sand - in its essence, it is manly, strong, a bit sweet, and a little bitter.

Ron Weasley
1.5 oz rye whiskey
.75 oz cherry brandy (I used cherry heering.)
.5 oz campari
.5 oz sweet vermouth
1.0 oz fresh-squeezed orange juice

Directions: same as the Hermione. Make sure you give the ice plenty of time to melt. This one is potent.

The Harry Potter

I will admit that I was completely without direction on the Harry Potter. Harry Potter's friends start off as carricatures and slowly morph into real people, which makes their transition into alcoholic drinks easier, but Harry Potter himself is a bit harder to pin down. It was Rachel who gave me the idea to start Harry off with chocolate - a very familiar, very everyman, very boy-next-door taste. Combine that with butterscotch and you have a sweet, warming cocktail. Add a teeny bit of absinthe and you have something sweet and familiar - with just a hint of something sinister. SPOILERS.

Harry Potter
1 oz vodka
1 oz dark creme de cacoa
1 oz butterscotch schnapps
1/2 oz heavy cream
1/2 tsp absenthe

Directions: See Hermione.

And the Verdict: I had a Harry Potter Cocktail Party, because how could I not? All the Harry Potter cocktails were a big hit. (I was a bit worried I just liked them because I'm a huge lush.) Hermione: sweet, a bit tart to balance it all out, a good starter for the other drinks. Ron: Very strong. Dudes liked this cocktail, while my girl friends tended to (not surprisingly, I suppose) prefer the Hermione. Some guys even went so far as to say that I gave Ron too much credit, and the drink was manlier than Ron himself. Ouch. The Harry Potter got good reviews: some people compared it to a white russian, or a buttery nipple; I think the taste is a bit more complicated than that. Sweet, but not too sweet. The little bit of absenthe makes you think. Like any good cocktail. Like any good book.

Now, dear reader, I think I will settle down with the Deathly Hallows a and stiff drink. (And these are all stiff drinks. Don't say I didn't warn you. :) Perhaps you should do the same.

And now...even more Harry Potter cocktails. Check out part 2 for Luna, Draco, Neville and Snape.

Pink Sage

I have become the sort of person who googles things like "sage flavor pairings". Because I recently bought a sage plant, and if I can't make it into a drink it is basically useless to me. Some suggestions were: sage and plums. Interesting. Sage and rye whiskey. More interesting. But what about...sage and plums and rye whiskey? The plot thickens.

So here's what you need to know about rye whiskey: Rye whiskey (sometimes referred to simply as "rye") is kind of a big deal. It shows up in a lot of old cocktail recipes, and has recently been re-discovered by the cocktailing elite. (Apparently rye whiskey has a long and storied history - according to this guy, it was distilled by George Washington at Mount Vernon.) It tastes like whiskey but different, i.e., in rye, the spicy flavors present in the whiskey are sharper and more distinct. It practically begs to be paired with bitters, which is probably why the most famous cocktail made with Rye Whiskey, the sazerac, includes a healthy dose of Peychaud's. (Sazerac also happens to be the brand name of a kind of rye.)

Whiskey and Rye whiskey go head-to-head.

I bought my first bottle of rye whiskey a couple weeks ago and set to work on a sage-y cocktail. Here's what I came up with:

The Pink Sage
3/4 of a juicy, ripe red plum
4-5 sage leaves (thank you, backyard herb garden)
.5 oz sugar syrup
.25 oz lemon juice (make it fresh!)
2.0 oz rye whiskey (2.5 if you want the taste of the rye to come through more strongly.)

Add the plum and sage to the shaker. You will want to muddle this one rather vigorously - it may help to add the sage and half the plum, muddle, and then add the rest of the plum and then muddle again. Fill the shaker with ice and then add the remaining ingredients. Shake and strain into a cocktail glass.


Verdict: Wow. This is very, very good. The plums, sage and rye are such a natural pairing that it's hard to tell where one flavor ends and another begins. It's sweet and smooth and herbal and complicated. Adding a couple dashes of Peychaud's bitters will add an interesting, licorice-y dimension to it. (Sounds weird, but - try it.) Just don't drink it too fast. Rye whiskey is almost 50 percent alcohol. I'm gonna go sit down.