An online speakeasy of potent potables and other pabulam.

“Losers always whine about their best. Winners go home and fuck the prom queen.”
“Carla was the prom queen.”
“Really?”
(chambers a round in his gun) “Yeah.”

Sorry. I love that movie (The Rock, if you have to ask). We used to watch it twice a night in college – once on a copy with crappy video and good sound, and once with a copy that had good video and crappy sound. Typically put away a block of Kroger’s brand pepper jack cheese and a bag of tortilla chips along with a couple of 40s while doing it.

No, I do not wonder why I am fat.

When DJ Hawaiian Shirt aka MEESTER CHREES posted this topic my first thought was to whine. After all, I did not go home with the prom queen.

To be honest, I don’t even remember who the prom queen was. Though, by careful scientific calculation, I’m sure that whomever she was, she’d want to hook up with me now, definitely, unless she’s married, in which case she’d just be thinking about in the back of her head.

(waits for someone from high school to read this blog post and either direly insult me or post pictures of how dorky I am was back then)

(waits for Marshall to say something so he can break out Photoshop and have some real fun)

Anyways, I realized I did have a drink that was popular. It’s not that I don’t think I make good drinks (SHUT THE HELL UP REST OF THE COCKTAIL BLOGGER COMMUNITY) it’s just that I don’t typically sit around and tweak them until they’re perfect.

THAT’S MY EXCUSE AND I’M STICKING TO IT.

But some of them have been popular.

I don't know KP is hosting it but hey.

Back a few years ago (2, to be precise) I decided to come up with drinks named after a bunch of folks working up to Tales of the Cocktail 2009.

Oh, to be young and stupid in those days!

One of the drinks I did I named after local bartender Derek Brown. To call him just a “bartender” is to call Tiger Woods just a “golfer” or “trashy girl aficionado” or to call [POLITICIAN RANT DELETED].

Those motherfu[DELETED] how much I [DELETED].

Sorry.

Basically, this was an easy drink to come up with: Dolin Blanc is delicious. At the time – and I don’t think he still is, but I could be wrong, and don’t have time to double-check so as to give this post the delicious patina of last-minute-panic that DJ Hawaiian Shirt evidently just drinks in from my posts – he was a brand rep for Domaine de Canton.

Thus, the Derek:

The Derek
3-4 leaves of mint
1/2 ounce Domaine de Canton
3 ounces Dolin Blanc
1 dash orange bitters (Regans #6)
Lightly muddle the mint and Domaine de Canton in an old-fashioned glass.  Add the vermouth, bitters, and ice.  Stir gently to mix.  Garnish with a fresh sprig of mint.

(The post I originally put this in explains why it has so much better a picture than I’d normally give a drink.)

The really cool thing about this drink is how easily it’s modified; just sub out the Domaine, really. Try The Bitter Truth E***X***R, for instance, or Berechovka – two of the drinks I’ve had recently – or even better, try Hum. Replace the Dolin Blanc with Caparno.

Okay, there’s one of my best drinks. People really seemed to like it.

But this is SCOFFLAW’S DEN! We don’t just kowtow to MxMo with one drink! NEIN! NYET! NO! We do multiple drinks!

So, I give you, by far, and without pictures, the two most popular drinks I’ve ever come up with. In some synchronicity, these are also named after people I know. In fact, it’s my brother and my sister-in-law.

Back in the hectic, lawless, far-flung days of 2009 I lived with my brother and his fiancée. As they approached the sacred rites that would bond them as one, forever destined to take care of two flagrantly obnoxious cats, and one condo surrounded by some pusillanimous (and some recherché, I admit) neighbors, I suggested I’d make up drinks named for each of them. They liked the idea and I disseminated some test drinks which, soon enough, got narrowed down to these. The fact that their cakes would be soaked in Grand Marnier gave me the appropriate animus.

The Matt
2 ounces Crown Royal
1/2 ounce Grand Marnier
2-3 dashes Regan’s #6 orange bitters
Top with Coca-cola
Build in a low ball glass. Stir.

A lot of my family likes Crown & Coke and so I built from there. What’s scary about this drink is how easily it goes down, as the GM just makes it … well, damn easy to drink. Even if you replace the Crown with rum (as one guest did at the reception) or the Coke with diet (as many guests did).

The Cathy
1/2 ounce Grand Marnier
1/2 ounce vodka
Top with sparkling wine/champagne
Garnish with a long twist of orange peel
Build in a champagne flute

Like the other drink, I also wanted to make sure these were easy to make for the bartenders. When I tested this for the first time I was actually asked (surprisingly to me) to make it stronger, thus the vodka.

Warning note: Five of these might mean you nap somewhere you’d rather not do so.

So that’s it for this MxMo. Thanks to DJ Hawaiian Shirt for hosting, and Paul for organizing. Cheers!

First off – happy belated two year anniversary to us!  I admit we maybe haven’t been blogging perhaps as much as we should be, and I’m trying to get off my tookus and do more.  Tales of the Cocktail and that trip to Korea broke my rhythm!  But the good news is that I’m finally working things out right again.  I think.  Ask me that again in a week.

Second off – Phil Greene alerted us to this post covering the cocktails from the DC bracket of the Domaine de Canton competition.  I know I’ve tried a couple of those – the Domainatrix by Rachel Sergi, now over at Againn, and the Thai’s the Limit by Gina Chersevani of PS7 (which also features your Scofflaws in the Washington Post video about it).  I want to say I’ve tried the Owen Thomson (of Bourbon) Jack O’ Ginger but I might just be confusing it with another drink.

So – now to drinking and reading.

When I moved into my current apartment my parents commented on how it seemed like all the boxes I brought in had one of two things in them – either books or liquor.  Well, duh, I thought – what are my hobbies?  Cocktails and reading!

Them's a lot of words!

As I settled down recently to reread a ten part alternative history by Harry Turtledove (the Timeline-191 series, if you must know, where the South won the War Between the States thanks to not losing Lee’s Special Order 191 to McClellan), I did it my usual way – most of the time outside, on my balcony, drinking a beer and smoking a cigar.

mmmm, beer and a cigar

As I read through the first book How Few Remain that was mostly fine, but then I got into the Great War series with American Front.  That series introduces what has to be my favorite character in the entire series, Quebecois farmer Lucien Galtier.  Unlike most of the characters in the book (slight spoilers here, I’m afraid) his life doesn’t entirely suck.  In fact, his often humorous sections really help out through the grimmer parts of the series.

It was also his sections quite a while ago that got me introduced to Calvados.  Calvados is an apple brandy produced in France, and while the character drank basically a moonshine variation of it – after all, he’s a farmer in Quebec, not in the Calvados region of France, and it’s so often wartime with occupation forces etc yadda yadda yadda – that I had finally managed to get a bottle a few years ago.

I still remember the first time I actually tried Calvados.  It was on a date at a place called Sonoma here in DC and I was so excited to see it on the menu that I spilled red wine on my shirt.  (Hey, that was like over 2 years ago!  I had no idea what I was getting myself into.)  I didn’t care for it much straight, and the bottle I had tended to only be used in cocktails for a number of years (that number being two).

As I started rereading the series, I thought, hey, I should drink appropriately for the books.  Cigars are fine, a lot of the characters smoke them though the US characters will remind you repeatedly that their cigars are bad compared to Confederate ones (the Confederacy, in these books, own Cuba as well as the prime tobacco growing parts of North America).

At first this started with sipping on Calvados while reading them, which helped with the Galtier parts to feel more “into it”.  Depending on night of the week and compunction, I started adding in other things.  Whiskey, for instance, is an easy choice for a lot of the characters, as well as beer – which I had before, naturally – and occasionally for the characters from Sonora and Chihuahua some mezcal, specifically, Del Maguey crema de mezcal.

Of course, you can’t keep up with the characters in the book, but on the other hand, keeping it close to what you’re reading helps a lot.  I feel an urge to read The Great Gatsby again, since I think it’d fun to drink appropriate cocktails to that – though it is kind of funny to try to figure out what to drink while reading my Warhammer 40K novels.

Right now?  Well, I’m reading The Space Wolves Omnibus and therefore drinking ale.  In fact, I started tonight with a Sam Smith Yorkshire Stingo.  Sure, I probably should drink something more viking, but they drink ale in the books, and I don’t have any Skullsplitter.  A lot of the characters drink amasec in 40K, and the description of that seems to be “brandy” as it’s distilled wine.  Hey, I’ve got plenty of brandy in my house…

What do you drink while reading?

Wow, I’ve managed to hit ten in a row!  I’ve been enjoying this but  I feel like it’s a milestone or something.

I’m keeping tonight’s short, not to disrespect it’s namesake (who is busy working right now) but because it’s already been a long day for me.

If you’re into cocktails in the DC area and haven’t met Chantal Tseng yet, you need to make your way to the Tabard Inn on a Wednesday or Thursday night and meet her.  She not only makes some great drinks but is a lot of fun to hang out with whether she’s behind the bar or just chilling.

When thinking of a drink for her, I wanted something a bit classy, but I also remembered her Tabard cocktail which included tequila.  She’s engaged to Derek, so I thought – hmmmm, maybe we should have some Domaine de Canton in there, too.  Well – whaddyaknow.

Yes, that's not very good champagne, but I don't have good champagne in a small bottle.

The Chantal
1 1/2 ounces tequila blanco (inocente)
1/2 ounce Domaine de Canton
2 dashes orange bitters (Regan’s #6)
Champagne
Stir over ice and strain into a cocktail glass.  Top with champagne.  Garnish with a long twist of lime peel, or if you’re as bad at it as I am, three small pieces of lime peel.

If you try it with other kinds of champagne, let me know!

[Tenth in a series of drinks named after bloggers, mixologists, and random others who'll hopefully be at Tales.  The first post in the series is here.]

_This month’s Mixology Monday is hosted by Rumdood and the theme is “Ginger”.  Immediately I thought of Domaine de Canton, though like Marshall I have some G.E. Massenez creme de gingembre, and to be honest, it should include things like ginger beer, muddled ginger, and anything else with ginger in it.  WELL LA DEE DA!

I have all that stuff but good day in the morning, am I lazy.

You might be surprised to hear that because if you’ve been reading the Den in the past week or so I’ve been coming up with a new drink every night to name after people going to Tales even including one that already had ginger liqueur in it.  I had already figured on combining Mixology Monday with my perhaps Quixotic quest but when Marshall pointed out how much he liked ginger I thought, hey, I should name one after him.

I wasn’t happy with how it came out.

That’s not entirely true; it wasn’t bad, it just didn’t seem the right drink for my cohort in crime drinking cocktails so I debated what to do next.  As I gathered up the fixin’s for a cigar a name popped into my head.  Sure, it’s not perhaps as custom as some of the drinks I’ve made, but when I got it right it felt like you could drink a lot of these, and that’d get you pretty sloshed.

Stop making fun of my pictures or I'll take pictures of you and make fun of them.

The SLOSHED
2 ounces rye (Rittenhouse 100)
1/2 ounce lemon juice
1/2 ounce Dr. McGillicuddy’s Vanilla Liqueur
1/2 ounce Domaine de Canton
1-2 dashes Dr. Schwartz’s Cherry Vanilla bitters
Combine all ingredients in a shaker with ice.  Shake, then strain into a chilled cocktail glass.  Garnish with a whiskey soaked cherry.

It’s not a bad drink at all.  I ended up using vanilla liqueur for two reasons: 1, I didn’t want to use vanilla vodka, and 2, I didn’t have any vanilla simple syrup.  Had I had the latter, I would’ve considered also cutting up some fresh ginger and muddling it in the vanilla simple syrup.  I also did completely ruin one cocktail by forgetting the bitters, generously given to me by sylvan, didn’t have a “dasher” thingamabob in the top of it.  OOPS.

If you try it with the G.E. Massenez, I think it’s also good, and this drink could definitely use some tweaking.  I’d love to hear if you tried it, and if so, if you tweaked it at all!

[Eighth in a series of drinks named after bloggers, mixologists, and random others who'll hopefully be at Tales.  The first post in the series is here.]