The Bottle Gang

Chuck & Sean's Trivia: The answers for 09.09.07

2007-09-13T12:35:00.000-06:00

Round 1

1. Who was the first woman to serve as a justice on the Supreme Court? Sandra Day O'Connor

2. What year of the Olympics were filmed in Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl's film Olympia Spiele? 1936

3. What is the first and last name of the character from that 70's show cast who is referred to as a "cocktail dad"? Red Forman

4. What is the highest waterfall on the Mississippi river? St. Anthony Falls

5. The rules of the very difficult and useless game golf is written jointly by two organizations, one in the U.S. and one in what country? Scotland

6. What rapper acted as the Mouse King in the Nutcracker at Baltimore's School for the Arts? 2pac

7. What Canadian-born architect, who designed a building in Minneapolis, also designed the trophy for the World Cup of Hockey? Frank Gehry

8. What month did Kurt Cobain die in in 1994? April

9. In 31 B.C. The Final War of the Roman Republic ended in the battle at Actium. Who won? Octavian, or Caesar

10. Billy Madison rises himself out of his hung-over pool side stupor at the beginning of the film Billy Madison when he realizes what special day it is. What day is it? Nudey Magazine Day

11. What city and state did Michael Moore grow up in? Flint, Michigan

12. What is the name of the first published novel by Chuck Palahniuk? Fight Club

13. What country is Lesotho entirely surrounded by? South Africa

14. What rite of passage, when directly translated is known as: one to whom the commandments apply? bar or bat mitzvah

15. Author Madeleine L'Engle died on Friday. What was her most popular book? A Wrinkle in Time

Round 2

1. What is Peter Griffin's sole response to all questions when he is on a parody of Jeopardy on the "Brian: Portrait of a Dog" episode? Diarrhea

2. What major Southern city was occupied by the Union early in the Civil War and was thus spared the destruction that many Southern cities endured during the Civil War? New Orleans (wikipedia.org)

3. In what city did Jimi Hendrix die? London, England (wiki)

4. Name the four inner planets? Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars

5. What is the most populuous city in Vietnam? Ho Chi Minh City

6. What are the names of the crash test dummies who are the mascots for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration? Vince and Larry

7. Who was the lead role in the TV show Monk originally written for? Michael Richards

8. What movie did Kevin Spacey win his first Oscar for? The Usual Suspects

9. Hmong people's original homeland is the mountainous Southern region of what country? China

10. The U.N. recognizes 192 countries, but most scholars agree there are 194 countries in the world. One country missing is an island, and the other one is completely within the borders of another country, name both. Taiwan, Vatican City

11. What non-coastal Western state has the lowest median age in the United States with a median age of 28.5? Utah

12. Which county has a higher Asian population, Hennepin or Ramsey county? Ramsey

13. In rap slang, if someone is a crooked eye sipper what does that mean? they drink st. ives malt liquor

14. What living singer, born in 1940, is the only vocalist to win Grammy's in three separate categories, jazz, pop and R&B? Al Jarreau

15. What title, used in numerous fields, literally means "holding a place"? lieutenant

Music Round

Daughter – Pearl Jam
The Rat – The Walkmen
The Beatles – Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite
50 Cent – 21 Questions
Death Cab for Cutie – Soul Meets Body

Chuck & Sean's Trivia: The answers for 09.02.07

2007-09-04T10:03:00.000-06:00

EVERY SUNDAY NIGHT down at the 331 Club in Northeast Minneapolis, writer Chuck Terhark and musician Sean McPherson throwdown on some kickass trivia, and The Bottle Gang is proud to sponsor it. Starting this week, we'll be posting the questions and answers from last week's trivia for ONE WEEK ONLY, so study up and learn from your mistakes.

Round 1

1. Recently a baseball game between the Detroit Tigers and the New York Yankees resulted in a score of 0 to 16. Which team got 16? Detroit Tigers

2. What Seinfeld character said “you could throw a dart and find someone better than me” and also described himself as “steeped in gayness” in the same episode? George Castanza

3. Please name all seven counties in the Twin Cities seven county metro area? Anoka, Carver, Dakota, Hennepin, Ramsey, Scott, Washington

4. What are the O’s made of on the logo for the TV show Divorce Court? Wedding rings

5. What college was the crap show Felicity based on? New York University

6. Alberto Gonzales is a dipshit. Spell the dipshit’s last name? Gonzales

7. What state pays the most for redeeming used cans? Michigan, 10 cents

8. What state is Arlen Specter a senator from? Pennsylvania

9. What date and day of the week did the 35W bridge fall down on? Wednesday August 1, 2007

10. Mississippi is the fattest and poorest state in the United States. What pseudo Midwestern state is the slimmest state, with only 18% of the adult population being overweight? Colorado

11. Rupert Murdoch’s company bought the Wall Street Journal two weeks ago. What is the official name of the company that bought it? News Corp.

12. How many weeks does Billy Madison get to pass the tests for each grade in the amazing film, Billy Madison? 2 weeks

13. Who founded the Order of the Missionaries of Charity? Mother Teresa

14. Hurricane Felix is moving through the Carribean right now as we speak. What number Atlantic hurricane is Felix for this year? 6

15. Who is the first African-American Secretary of State? Colin Powell

Round 2

1. Was Saddam Hussein Sunni or Shia? Sunni

2. What was the 50th state to be joined into the Union? Hawaii

3. What year did Nixon unsuccessfully run for President? 1960

4. What is the capital of Egypt? Cairo

5. What was Bill Murray's character’s name in the Royal Tenenbaum's? Raleigh St. Clair

6. What is the name of the new head coach of the Gophers football team? Tim Brewster

7. What was Theodore Roosevelt doing in Minnesota when he first said “speak softly and carry a big stick” on September 2, 1901? Attending the Minnesota State Fair

8. Name one of the two closest bus routes that flank the 3-3-1 club. #17 & #11

9. Are the days on Mars longer or shorter than those on Earth? Longer, 24 hours 39 minutes

10. What is the total complement of genes in an organism or cell known as? Genome

11. Which gender is known as the homogametic sex in chromosomal studies? Women XX

12. What 2005 movie had the tagline, "the cure for the common man"? Hitch

13. Who is known as the father of geometry? Euclid

14. What type of Jewish bread is often used to make French toast in New York Diners? Challah

15. In 490 B.C. Pheidipides ran 26 miles, starting in Marathon to announce the Greeks success over the invading Persian. What city was he running to? Athens

A quick note about the Martini

2007-08-11T09:16:00.000-06:00

I HAD HEARD THAT bartenders can be skittish on the subject of vermouth, but, in the last few months, I have discovered a rather startling phenomenon. On two separate occasions, in two separate bars, I had bartenders serve a gin Martini without any vermouth in it at all, and act surprised when I complained. The Martini has only two necessary ingredients (three if you use orange bitters, but few bars carry them); if you leave out the vermouth, you're serving a straight shot of gin. One bartender had to be cajoled into putting the Vermouth in, and then added it in drops, like he was dropping acid into a base and was afraid the whole thing might explode at any second.

"Customers don't like vermouth," he explained. Well, then, they don't like the Martini, and should be steered to another drink. I'm frankly flabbergasted by this. What self-respecting bartender takes a drink order, and then deliberately leaves out the defining ingredient, without even bothering to ask the customer if that's what they want? Here's a hint to area barkeeps: If a customer orders a gin Martini, and even goes so far to specify what gin they want in it, chances are they want a Martini, and not a glass of gin with an olive in it.

You know what else people don't like? Bitters and rye whiskey, so I must assume that when someone orders a Manhattan from these bartenders, they get served a maraschino cherry, and nothing else. (SPARBER)

The Flaming Moe :: A Simpsons Movie Special

2007-07-26T20:03:00.001-06:00

SO YOU ALL KNOW about the Flaming Moe, right? Episode 8F08 in the third season revolved around it—the drink Homer invented and then Moe ripped off whose secret ingredient is children's cough syrup and that's made special by lighting it on fire.

In the show, Homer explains that the drink was invented when one of Marge's sisters drank the last beer. He combined all the alcohol that was left in all the bottles in the house, accidentally including children's cough syrup, and when Patty (or perhaps Selma) ashed into his drink, it went up in flames, improving its taste immeasurably. Most bars (I'm pretty sure) don't have children's cough syrup, so we set about making up a drink that would approximate the Flaming Moe. The only kinds of alcohol you can actually see when he's making the drink are tequila and creme de menthe, but man, we're not going to combine those two drinks. It has to have enough mass to fill a largish glass (hello, vodka) and taste like cough syrup (enter the flavored brandies) and be flammable (welcome, 151 rum).

3 oz. vodka
1.5 oz. Kirschwasser
1.5 oz. Creme de Cassis
1.5 oz. Blackberry Brandy
1 tsp. 151 rum

Take everything except the rum and pour it into a rocks glass. Stir. Now take a spoon, turn it upside down, and pour the 151 rum over the spoon so it distributes itself evenly over the top. WARNING: DO NOT ACTUALLY DO THIS. THE BOTTLE GANG ACCEPTS NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY DAMAGES INCURRED BY THIS DRINK. Light it.

But I wouldn't drink it if I were you. I'd make it a shot if you had to, but in the show, it's clearly in a bigger glass than a shot glass, so we made it in a rocks glass. If it's a shot, I'd probably nix the vodka and cut the other things down to .5 oz. apiece. Again, though, DON'T EVEN TRY TO MAKE THIS. JUST LOOK AT THE PRETTY PICTURES. (McPHERSON)

Cocktailphernalia: Hobo pump decanter

2007-07-25T20:36:00.000-06:00

THIS PLASTIC NOVELTY, probably dating back to the early Fifties, is precisely what you want when you need to decant some liquor -- the sense that an inebriated, clowlike-hobo is vomiting liquor directly into your glass. (SPARBER)

Book Review: The Ultimate Bar Book

2007-07-20T09:36:00.000-06:00

WHEN IT COMES TO getting a book with an exhaustive list of cocktail recipes for you to try out at home, you've got a lot of options, and they're all more or less the same. But if you want to get a book which will give you all that, but also enrich your knowledge of the art of cocktails and give it to you with a wink and a nod, you absolutely need to get Mittie Hellmich's Ultimate Bar Book.

The first thing that distinguishes it from most other bar books is that the cocktail recipes are divided into categories based on the dominant alcohol in the drink, not alphabetically. This makes it phenomenally easy, once you've familiarized yourself with the basic liquors, to find a drink to suit your mood. Feeling whiskey? Just flip towards the back and find something delectable to mix up. Within each section, there are also subsections devoted to particularly significant drinks and their variations. So you get a page discussing the history of the gimlet under gin, a spread on the Bloody Mary under vodka, and a whopping three pages each devoted to the Manhattan and the mint julep under whiskey.

That's the technical part of the book, but there's so much more. The front section includes a glossary of bar equipment (with illustrations of the implements), a glassware guide, a guide to types of drinks (with the histories of standards like the rickey, the fizz, the flip, and exactly makes a drink a highball), and an invaluable section on the science/art of making a drink. Did you know that most cocktails consist of three parts? Hopefully you do if you've been reading The Bottle Gang, but thinking of a cocktail as consisting of the base (the bedrock liquor, greatest by volume), the body (the modifier, a sort of comment on the main alcohol, like vermouth), and the perfume (the last touch that adds complexity to the drink, whether through sweetness, bitterness, or perhaps a fruity overtone) makes it much easier to come up with good cocktails on your own.

Then there's Hellmich's writing, which is dry as a dry martini, especially in the sections that detail the stories of each type of alcohol. "Although originally used as a health tonic," Hellmich writes, "gin has no official medicinal value today; nonetheless, Martini drinkers claim a variety of positive effects."

And regarding vodka: "Even the regular premium vodkas tend to have a somewhat harsh finish, so unless you wish to evoke a Dostoevskyian moment, they are really suitable only as mixers."

There are lots of websites that can give you recipes for making cocktails, but Hellmich's Ultimate Bar Book treats the subject with respect and just a bit of tongue in cheek—a perfect companion for a night of tippling.(McPHERSON)

Road Trips: 21 Club

2007-07-16T17:47:00.001-06:00

The Bottle Gang tippled a glass or three
at New York's 21.
We didn't drink them dry,
though they may say we tried.

We left so we could drink no more,
to go home and dream from our beds
that when we come back to 21
they don't treat us like the Feds.

WE'VE BEEN INTERESTED in New York's 21 Club for years, mostly because it piques our fondness for history. After reading Marylin Kaytor's "21" The Life and Times of New York's Favorite Club, we found that the club could have modeled itself after the wildly rambunctious, unbelievably booby-trapped speakeasies of Hollywood talkies. However, Kaytor's anecdotes are of the we-can't-make-this-stuff-up-folks kind, which helped us draw our own conclusion: Hollywood went to 21 for inspiration. Every nook and cranny in this low-light, checkered tablecloth atmosphere has its own fantastic story.

Our favorite stories about 21 begin during Prohibition with a man named Soll Roehner, a necessarily trustworthy construction worker, and his equally trustworthy, hand-picked crew. He was put in charge of designing a Federal Agent-proof door, not to keep the Feds out of 21 altogether (21 has never been a private club), just keep them from finding the 2,000 gallons of illegal hooch hidden in the basement. This door would have to endure, successfully, multiple tap tests, draft tests, and any other liquor-seeking tests the Feds could dream up. Roehner had quite a task at hand. He set to work with some ingenious ideas; not only did he design an invisible door, but an undetectable lock as well. Set a few feet back in a small alcove is a wall -- or the door to us insiders. Inside the alcove and on the back wall are thousands of small holes, many of them painted over now. To the Feds these looked like nothing other than places to put pegs on which to rest shelves -- and 21 did just that. They had cured hams hanging above miscellaneous sundries on the shelves. But one of these holes is actually a key hole. If inserted at just the right angle, an 18" long metal rod unlocks the behemoth, 5,000 pound door. Roehner had to design hinges that could facilitate this hulk to move smoothly, so as not to damage the brick on the door and the wall. In Kaytor's book, Roehner speaks about his famous feat of architecture:

"[The door] would have to function with precision balance to avoid damage to the brick door as it met the brick jam stop. A concealed metal adjustment stop was fabricated so that the brick just kissed against brick as the door swung shut. In the locked position, the door had to be perfectly solid with no visible play. The lock had to operate without a conventional key, to be absolutely jam-proof, and to be lockable from the warehouse side in case of siege."

Inside is a cavern of wines, practically over stuffed with bottles as old as 1880. Bottles of wine seem to be stored in the cellar indefinitely, among them are wines owned by Elizabeth Taylor, Elvis, and Richard Nixon among hundreds of others. Each bottle has the name of its owner labeled on the bottom and facing outward for easy locating. Further back is yet another cavernous room. We had to practically fold ourselves in half to get through this literal hole in the wall. Inside is a luxurious dining room -- longer than it is wide with a table that almost matches the size of the room. This room is also the active red wine cellar, and bottles line the walls. It takes some tricky maneuvering getting out -- especially for those exiting after dining and imbibing. This doorway is jokingly referred to as The Sobriety Test.

It may only be out of sheer unwieldiness that all of this still resides at 21 -- the door in particular -- as many remnants from that dry time have been renovated out of the infamous brownstone at 21 West 52nd Street. "You have to understand," explains Philip W. Pratt, 21's Sommelier. "People did not like Prohibition -- it was not a happy time." So the coat closets with dummy walls that could only open with an electric charge from a strategically placed metal coat hanger are gone, as is the back bar shelf that could turn over and dump bottles of illegal alcohol down a chute leading directly to the New York City sewer system at the push of a button. Kaytor describes what this sight must have been like:

"Shades of Orson Welles, Vienna, and The Third Man -- if one had looked down the opening revealed behind the back bar as the shelves tipped over, one would have seen a brick-lined chute with iron spikes jutting from the walls, arranged so that bottles would strike the spikes and shatter, and then fall on down to an iron grating to smash completely any stubborn glass. Under the grating was an opening leading down past the basement drain and into the New York sewerage system, into which everything ran off to disappear forever!"

For those of you squealing over all of that lost liquor, according to Pratt, the speakeasy was only raided three times. Federal Agents spent many unsuccessful hours searching the place, undoubtedly growing more frustrated by the minute as the smell of alcohol filled the room, and seeing patrons holding only empty coffee mugs instead of splashing cocktail glasses. In one case, an agent thought he had them figured out. This agent asked to be lowered into the water tower on the rooftop, thinking that 21's stash of alcohol would be hidden there. Once he reached the water, however, he remembered that he didn't know how to swim and the search was called off. It was an unsuccessful search with a nearly successful drowning. Another raid was cut short by James J. Walker, New York's Mayor at the time. Of course, it would be devastating to his career to be caught drinking in a speakeasy so "he called his friend the police commissioner," explains Pratt, "and had all the Feds' cars towed." 21 still has Mr. Walker's private booth where he could "do whatever he wanted to do out of the public eye."

The 21 Club's sense of playfulness is not overshadowed by their extreme professionalism. There are lawn jockeys lining the facade of the building and toys hanging from the dining room ceiling -- the toys are an especially surprising sight for such a posh establishment. "This was the second plane that we hung up," Mr. Pratt says as he points upward to a large model plane of the Spruce Goose. "Mr. Hughes had to one-up the first plane we hung up." The first plane, according to Kaytor's book, was an American Airlines plane; 21's website says it was a British Airways "flying boat." Now there are thousands of different memorabilia hanging from the ceiling, from airplanes to baseball bats, brought in by patrons from around the world.

As for 21s drink selection, they have a talent for making room for new tastes while making sure to keep the classics. We're sure this theory permeates throughout the entire establishment, in fact, and is one of the major reasons for its longevity. We tried The South Side, which is basically a mojito made with vodka instead of rum and, according to Pratt, was invented at 21 along with Humphrey Bogart's drink of choice, the Brandy and Benedictine. We also tried a Cosmopolitan, which, from the first sip, spoiled us rotten for any other Cosmos from any other bar. This Cosmopolitan made all the others we've had in the past seem like something poured out of a juice box rather than the fresh citrus concoction that was set before us at 21. And we couldn't pass up the opportunity to have a martini -- Tanqueray, dry Cezano vermouth, with a dash of orange bitters (yes! They have orange bitters!), straight up with a twist. It was perfect. We tried two of their newer additions to the drink menu, the Peg Leg and the Global Daquiri, which are lemon drinks. We weren't crazy about these new additions to the drink menu, which seemed to be sweet and sour takes on the same recipe, but, admittedly, they were tolerable.

21 isn't the only remaining speakeasy in New York City; Minetta's, Pete's Tavern, and Chumley's are just a few of the better known establishments that have remained open. 21, however, certainly has the heir of being the most notorious among the group.

We were curious if any of those Federal Agents returned to 21 after Repeal, if only to ask where the good stuff was hidden. Mr. Pratt could only conclude "they probably did." As of now, the Bottle Gang hasn't found any accounts of curious Feds returning to 21 on a friendlier basis. But we agree with Mr. Pratt that at least one agent must have come back. After all, curiosity almost drowned one of them. With a cocktail lounge as luxurious as 21's, we can't see any reason for staying away. Except the danger of drowning in libations more exciting than that found in a water tower.
(MAULT)

Cocktail I made last night: The Tornado Cloud

2007-07-06T21:57:00.000-06:00

LET US LAY THIS on you: You don't always have to invent an entirely new drink to come up with something banging and classy. Our recent interview with Rob Skoro (see below) touched not only on this idea, but also on the Dark and Stormy. Skoro's version sounds delicious, but the letter of the law dictates the following:

2 oz. dark rum
1/2 tbsp ginger or simple syrup
3 to 4 oz. chilled ginger beer
2 lime wedges

Get yourself an old-fashioned glass, put in ice, the rum, and the ginger syrup, then stir. Top with the ginger beer and squeeze those lime wedges in there.

That's your basic Dark and Stormy, but what if you wanted to keep the ginger overtones and bring in some aspects of a mojito or caipirinha? Here's what we'd do, and we'd call it the Tornado Cloud, because instead of being Dark and Stormy, it has the pale green color of clouds that are threatening to turn into funnels.

4 lime wedges
2 tsp. sugar
2 oz. Mt. Gay Sugar Cane Rum
2 oz. ginger-infused vodka
Club soda

Muddle the lime wedges with the sugar in the bottom of a highball glass, then add ice, the rum, and the vodka. Top off with club soda and stir. Voila. You've got a refreshing drink that retains some of the gingeriness and the rumminess of the Dark and Stormy and mixes it with the lime-muddling and effervescence of a mojito. (McPHERSON)

Robert Skoro: Bartender, Musician

2007-07-05T13:52:00.000-06:00

MINNEAPOLIS' OWN ROBERT Skoro has been making music for an awfully long time for someone who's just 25. He got his start playing bass with Mason Jennings back in the late '90s, but since leaving Jennings' band, he's carved out his own niche with his independently-released debut, Proof, and his sophmore follow-up on Yep Roc Records, That These Things Could Be Ours. After a stint in Philadelphia, he returned to the Twin Cities and has been playing around town again and working at the 331 Club in Northeast. Since starting there, he's helped put together Sean and Chuck's Trivia, which happens every Sunday night there. He's got perfect pitch and writes compelling and thoughtful songs about everything from love to politics to loss, so naturally, the best place to start would be to ask him about music.

Bottle Gang: I'm going to ask you about bartending.

Robert Skoro: Oh my god.

BG: When did you start bartending?

RS: A little less than a year ago.

BG: And at the 331?

RS: Pure nepotism. That's like the story of me and this city, is just pure nepotism. I had enough experience running Caffetto to be comfortable working by myself. I move really fast and you need to if you're going to work in the food service industry if you're going to work in any sort of branch. So I think Jarret's words himself were, "Dude, a monkey could bartend." Make the drinks, take their money, give them the change. It was just a matter of—Jarret and I had never met, but I knew a couple other people who worked there already, and I knew Jarret's dad. It's a real small, tight-knit kind of staff. Everybody is related. There's two people who work there who aren't related who are childhood friends of the family, and I'm one of them. Nepotism. We haven't hired anyone since.

BG: But you haven't just been a monkey. I know you like making drinks.

RS: It's been really fun to take on that part of it. I'm kind of a foodie to begin with, but I was never the kind of person to keep a bar at home and make stuff at home. If you play music, you're in bars enough where you're just drinking brews most of the time. It's fun to get to study that stuff. The 331 was really great because they have such a vast selection ofliqueurs, so you can get really creative with the stuff. It's not just always some kind of liquor and a gun.

BG: Do you feel like you're getting a clientele, if I can use that word, that orders that kind of stuff? Has that been the vibe? Because I know I go there and look at the back wall and go, "Hey, you have that and you have that and you have that."

RS: Well, it's still a neighborhood bar. But a good thing to keep in mind about what we're doing there on Sundays, it's a scene that I basically told Jarret, this is what I want to try and do. I have enough people who are running some kind of hustle that could help bring people in here and create an atmosphere that's not just random people ordering Long Islands all night. It's people that I engage with in conversation with both in and outside of the bar so you can create this kind of environment where you can just suggest something to someone, and they'll gladly try it out.

BG: So what's your current favorite drink?

RS: Well, that's kind of a tough one. I've gotten really into this liqueur called Gammel Dansk, which is a kind of sweeter, less pungent liqueur like Fernet Branca or Pernod. I'm a pretty bare bones kind of guy. Usually a really nice rum or gin and a little bit of citrus and maybe a splash of something. Nothing all that fancy. I've sort of been making these modified versions of what you'd call a Dark and Stormy, which is rum and tonic and cola and citrus. We've got that ginger wine at the bar—that's really fun to use. You can use it in place of ginger ale for a lot of things. It's a great little secondary kind ofliqueur.

I guess mostly there aren't really drinks that I get into so much as there are kinds of alcohol I like to toy around with. For a while, it's been the Pirate Rum, which is just delicious. I think of rum and I think of getting really, really sick when I was 14.

BG: I think that's a problem that a lot of people have with certain alcohols—tequila gets a bad rap for that, gin also gets a bad rap for that—because bad gin and bad tequila are horrible. But good stuff is good. Good gin, good tequila—you can sip good tequila like you would sip whiskey.

RS: It's amazing how much, especially brown liquors—well, any liquor: I take that back—it's kind of amazing how much a really great product can transcend the status quo for what people think. I remember the first time I had Hendrick's or a nice yellow Patron. It's almost like a different liquor from something bar pour or Cuervo, even.

BG: I've always felt that really good gin has more in common with really good whiskey than it has with bad gin, in the sense of an experience, because it becomes complex. You get a lot out of it. When you drink Hendrick's, there are a lot of different notes and flavors going on. It's a totally different experience.

RS: That tends to be the trend with any top shelf liquors—the recipe is dialed in and you're wasting your money if you're going to start doing things that are going to challenge the pre-existing properties of the alcohol. Just getting into a nice brand of alcohol and doing little subtle modifications to it, but never going too out of control.

I had some of that potato vodka—the Chopin—I had never tried that and I don't really like vodka all that much, but the Chopin was really nice. Vodka's supposed to be colorless, tasteless, odorless legally, but somehow they always end up having these distinctive characteristics, even if they are filtered. The Chopin just had a fundamentally different quality to it. I really liked it. I think people drink vodka because they associate it with being a refreshing beverage, and the Chopin is by far the most transparent.

BG: I've been really into this Bison Grass Vodka which is really delicious. It has a spear of grass in the bottle, and it's slightly green. It's got a kind of slippery quality to it, almost a sake kind of thing. But it's really good. I can sip a shot of that, but generally—that's the weird thing about vodka: it's essentially a dilutant to whatever you're going to drink because it's supposed to be like water, but alcoholic. So it's weird because we got a sample of Reyka and it's almost completely tasteless, odorless, whatever, but for that reason it's great to combine with other things. The thing about that high-end vodka is that you can use other stuff and have a good drink because it lets that other stuff work together without getting messed up by some funky flavor you don't want in there.

RS: You know, one drink that I'm really into right now is a Bloody Mary made with Citron, Peppar and about two fingers of Guinness in it. It's really something else.

BG: That sounds good. I've been a little interested in Bloody Marys since I went to Topolobampo in Chicago. They only have tequila drinks and they had a drink called a Vampiro, which is a crazy Mexican Bloody Mary. (McPHERSON)

To continue reading about Skoro's musical endeavors, head to the jump over at Signal Eats Noise.

Southern Comfort and Astrology

2007-06-23T07:28:00.000-06:00

The only two things that can make cocktail hour better, according to this rather embarrassing pamphlet from the Seventies. (Via.)

Mixology Monday: Cream

2007-06-18T11:09:00.000-06:00

WE AT THE BOTTLE GANG have decided to participate in a little project called "Mixology Monday," in which one Monday per month the various cocktail blogs suggest, or invent, a drink based around a certain theme.

This month, the theme is cream drinks, which is to say cocktails that were made with cream liqueurs, such as Bailey's Irish Cream, or actually had cream in them, such as the White Russian. Crème liqueurs, which have no actual cream in them, were excluded. Check in with Morsels and Musings this weekend to see what the other cocktail blogs produced for this month's theme.

So we went ahead and invented a drink. The drink is made from B&B (a mixture of Benedictine and Brandy), Bailey's Irish Cream, and Blackberry Brandy, and so we named it the Straight B. For a short while, we considered calling it the Three Point Oh, or The Hive ('cause it's all Bs), or a similar punning name, but then we thought better of it.

The resulting cocktail is creamy and sweet, but not overly so, with a mellow blackberry flavor. Here's how to make it:

The Straight B

Two shots B&B
One shot Bailey's Irish Cream
One-half shot blackberry brandy

Serve in a lowball glass over ice. (SPARBER)

Poldy at the pub: A Bloomsday celebration

2007-06-16T09:12:00.000-06:00

DO A SEARCH for "Ulysses" and "drinking" and you're not going to get a lot of results having to so with the James Joyce novel that takes place on June 16, 1904 and gets celebrated every year on this day, Bloomsday. You're going to get a lot of hits about Ulysses S. Grant and drinking, but almost none about Leopold Bloom.

Nevertheless, "Ulysses" is a book that takes place in Dublin, so it's almost inevitable that the characters are going to find themselves in a pub. The most widely accepted schema for the book names each of the numbered chapters according to an episode from "The Odyssey". Paul Schwaber, in his excellent book "The Cast of Characters" sets the stage beautifully for Chapter 12, "Sirens".

Dublin's pubs offered dependable comforts to men at all troubled in mind or spirit. At 4:00 pm, the appointed time for Boylan to arrive at 7 Eccles Street, Leopold avails himself of that solace. Set for the most part in the Ormond Hotel's dining room and bar, "Sirens" uses the musicality of English to evoke qualities of experience that delight, absorb and generalize--that dissolve distinctiveness into the amiable satisfactions of chat, booze, flirtation, and song, of comfortable expressions of acceptable sentiments. The narrator--and thereby the music maker--stand out. His words virtuosic as notes, his prose plaing melody and harmony, the narrator, though not a visible character, now calls the tune.

The Ormond Hotel (located at 8 Ormond Quay Upper) was, according to Don Gifford's "Ulysses Annotated", "a favorite haunt of Dublin's amateur musicians, and the saloon was frequently the setting for the small concerts that were popular in turn-of-the-century Dublin and in which the distinction between amateur and professional was not of much importance."

To be sure, Joyce's prose can be difficult to parse, but what's lost in most discussions of "Ulysses" is that the writing can be enjoyed without a complete understanding of the references and meanings of every sentence. His skillful way with the music of conversation in the bar is supremely evocative of the hum and buzz of a typical pub. The chapter opens on the two barmaids, Miss Douce and Miss Kennedy, whom the narrator likens to bronze and gold, based on their hair color. Just check out this scene of them laughing:

"Shrill, with deep laughter, after, gold after bronze, they urged each other to peal after peal, ringing in changes, bronzegold, goldbronze, shrilldeep, to laughter after laughter. And then laughed more ... Exhausted, breathless, their shaken heads they laid, braided and pinnacled by glossycombed, against the counterledge. All flushed (O!), panting, sweating (O!), all breathless."

That strong undercurrent of flirtation and barely restrained sexuality courses through the whole chapter, just as it charges a packed bar on a weekend night.

"--You're the essence of vulgarity, she in gliding said.

Boylan eyed, eyed. Tossed to fat lips his chalice, drank off his chalice tiny, sucking the last fat violet syrupy drops. His spellbound eyes went after, after her gliding head as it went down the bar by mirrors, gilded arch for ginger ale, hock and claret glasses shimmering, a spiky shell, where it concerted, mirrored, bronze with sunnier bronze."

We're not asking you to read the whole thing--that's a task more suited for Hercules than Odysseus. But if you get a chance today, pick up a copy of "Ulysses" and just blow right through Chapter 12, "Sirens", if you get a chance before you head out to the bar tonight.

Happy Bloomsday. (McPHERSON)

Absinthe: Legal again?

2007-06-15T08:23:00.000-06:00

SO THE ABSINTHE COMMUNITY is all a-twitter, and, perhaps, with good cause. The anise-flavored spirit has been banned in the United States since 1912, primarily because of overstated concerns about the psychoactive quality of one of its ingredients, thujone, a ketone of wormwood, which is present in true absinthe in small amounts. It didn't help the drink's cause that absinthe was the preferred liquor of Victorian artists and other layabouts, or that there were a few notable cases of people going on murderous rampages after drinking the green spirit. There was, for example, Jean Lanfray, who in 1905 murdered his pregnant wife and two children. Absinthe was blamed, and was banned; never mind the fact that Lanfray, along with a sandwich and two glasses of absinthe, had also drunk five liters of wine, six glasses of cognac, one coffee laced with brandy, and two crème de menthes.

In the time since the ban, absinthe's reputation has grown, and the drink enjoyed a massive revival in Europe in the Nineties, with European distillers discovering a variety of loopholes in the law that allowed them to put absinthe back on the market. These have not been hard to get in America, although they have not been legal, precisely. There is no law against owning or drinking absinthe in the United States, but it is illegal to manufacture, sell, or import absinthe (a notable exception is Absente, a drink that greatly resembles absinthe, but is made with wormwood's thujone-free relative, southernwood; Absente, however, is not well-liked by hardcore absinthe fans).

Did we say it is illegal to manufacture, or buy, or import absinthe? We meant, it was illegal. Because there is a new absinthe being marketed, made in the United States, called Lucid, and, unlike Absente, it contains thujone. As it turns out, the US laws had a little loophole of their own: Drinks were only illegal of they contained greater than 10mg of thujone per liter. And, as it turns out, most pre-ban absinthe had less than that. Lucid is based on pre-ban recipes -- it was designed by chemist Ted Breaux, a New Orleans-born fellow with a talent for reverse engineering absinthe recipes from old bottles of the stuff.

Fans of European absinthes might take issue with the resulting drink, as, according to a New York Times article, Breaux has reduced the drink's strong anise flavor to suit the American palette. To purists, this is a bit like reducing the flavor of juniper in gin -- anise is one of Absinthe's defining flavors. We shall, however, reserve judgment until we actually sample the stuff, and, in some ways, what Lucid tastes like is rather beside the point. It has been approved for manufacture and sale by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, and this opens the doors for the manufacture, sale, and, presumably, importing of other absinthes that are likewise made with less than 10mg of thujone per liter. According to what we have read, this is consistent with the European Union's rulings on thujone, and therefore there is a wealth of European absinthes that may now be eligible for legal import to the United States.

It shall be interesting to see how this all plays out. We at the Bottle Gang are fans of absinthe, particularly a refreshing cocktail invented in New Orleans called the absinthe frappe, which was a so popular in the United States back in 1904 that Victor Herbert wrote a hit song named after the drink. But because absinthe's illegality made the liquor prohibitively expensive, we've tended to make our frappes with pastis, such as Herbsaint, which was, after all, originally an absinthe, or at least pretended to be. Our sense is that absinthe's legend is grander than the drink itself, and increased availability should do much to return absinthe to its proper place in the world of cocktails -- that of being a fine, and common, ingredient in a really well-made mixed drinks, such as the Sazerac, rather than being some semi-mystical, hallucinogenic drink of artists and madmen. (SPARBER)

And now, a brief informational film

2007-06-14T22:52:00.000-06:00

BOURBON AND COKES at Scotty's diner. Seems harmless enough, but a few drops of alcohol can turn a man into an ape. A few more and, brother, you're a dead duck.

Cocktailphernalia: Work is the Curse of the Drinking Class

2007-06-14T12:59:00.000-06:00

THERE WAS A TIME when this ceramic drunkard, with his red nose and black tails, could easily be found at home bars. Him or others like him: cheerful hillbillies in straw hats or hobos with their jackets fallen around their elbows. Unfortunately, this sort of novelty mug tended to belong to the type of a guy who wore plaid jackets, pranked his friends with joy buzzers, and slapped your back when telling the punchline to a particularly bad joke, his laughter literally sounding like this: "HAR de HAR HAR!"

Oscar Wilde, who originated the quote hand-painted on the mug, would have died from shame had cerebral meningitis not taken him a half-century earlier.

Sailor Martin's Bar Jokes What Make Me Laugh 06.11.07: Whales

2007-06-11T01:10:00.000-06:00

SO, two whales walk into a bar ... (SAILOR MARTIN)

Drinkers Art: "Les Quatre Ages" by Honoré Daumier

2007-06-10T10:43:00.000-06:00

WE AT THE BOTTLE GANG are interested in more than just drink recipes. We happily dive into the much larger task of bringing our readers the history and culture of alcohol. As a result, we have found many songs devoted to alcohol, games invented to speed up the consumption of spirits, and with this story, alcohol in art. Artists have a reputation for drinking alcohol in the hopes that their creativity will flow into their art as easily as it slides down their gullets.

Which brings us to our first art piece, a woodcut from 1862 entitled "Physiologie du Buveur, Les Quatre Ages (Physiology of the Drinker, The Four Ages)" by French artist Honoré Daumier. He isn't famous for alcohol-fueled creativity, however. Rather, his environment was inspiration enough: his art is based in social and political commentary.

"Les Quatre Ages," upon first glance, looks like a charcoal sketch instead of a woodcut. The title is in reference to four males, ranging in degrees from very young to very old, each drinking from a mug. Clearly they are working class, and they stand before a pitcher set upon a table. They are disheveled, hunched, and even the youngest boy seems to have a withered face. Their fingers are knobby and thick, not smooth from living privileged lives. Perhaps this imagery symbolizes the relentless cycle of the working class.

This piece has a direct connection to a painting entitled "The Drinkers" by Vincent Van Gogh in 1890. In a pair of letters to his brother Theo, Van Gogh, wrote, "... this is to say that I do not hesitate to do copies. ... Thus, this that I slandered to do in paint, this is 'The Drinkers' of Daumier." In another letter, Van Gogh wrote, "I tried to copy Daumier's Drinkers ... c'est very difficult." Van Gogh is known to have been a troubled fellow, but not necessarily a pilferer. Just as people challenge each other to drink, Van Gogh may have considered it a challenge to paint his own rendition of Daumier’s work.

Van Gogh recognized the difficulty in copying Damier's woodblock print. Which is why it is so impressive to see how minuscule the differences are between Daumier’s "Les Quatre Ages" and Van Gogh’s "The Drinkers." The most obvious difference is Van Gogh's signature wavy lines and bright, complimentary colors. Rather than Daumier’s gray, monotone image that gives the feel of one generation after another drinking heavily because their hard work will always be unrecognized, Van Gogh's version seems like a more light-hearted scene, as though we're looking at some guys just taking a break from repairing a neighbor's front porch. (MAULT)

Vodka review: Reyka Vodka

2007-06-07T09:42:00.000-06:00

IT'S NOT EASY TO WRITE ABOUT VODKA. It's a relative upstart in the world of hard liquor, having little audience outside of Eastern Europe until the 1950s. And it's an oddity in the world of cocktail ingredients. Unlike every other liquor used as a base for making cocktails, such as gin and whiskey, most popular vodkas are essentially flavorless. In fact, a large selling point in premium vodkas is the sophistication of their distilling process. Our subject for today, an Icelandic vodka known as Reyka, is distilled through lava rock, and made with steam from a 4,000-year-old lava field. The resulting liquor is so pure, according to Wikipedia, that its level of dissolved solids is less than 1/15 that of Evian bottled water. And the purer the vodka, the less it tastes like anything at all, specifically.

This might be part of the appeal of vodka, which has fast risen to be one of America's most popular liquors. There's a joke in cocktail snob circles: When you hear a customer at a bar say "I don't like the way it tastes," you can immediately translate that as "I can taste the liquor." Contemporary drinkers just don't like the flavor of traditional alcohols, it seems, unless they are easily masked by sugars and fruits, which may be why rums and tequilas sell so much better than gin.

For such drinkers, flavorless vodkas are ideal. They essentially function as a diluent: Making a cocktail with them is a little like adding alcoholic water to a drink (note that vodka, translated liberally, actually means "little water.") This is part of the reason we at the Bottle Gang are so opposed to the idea of a vodka martini. The taste of the martini is based around the complex relationship between the flavors of gin and vermouth. With a vodka martini, you are basically drinking a cocktail that tastes like diluted vermouth. And, since many bartenders are afraid even to use vermouth, as customers complain about the flavor of it, in many cases, you're drinking a drink where the strongest flavor is the garnish. We suspect this is why infused and flavored vodkas are starting to gain in popularity. After all, just because a drinker doesn't want their cocktail to taste like alcohol doesn't mean they want their cocktail to taste like nothing at all.

But don't let these prefatory comments fool you: Our complain is not against vodka. Firstly, there are many vodkas that do have a native flavor, or are infused in a distinct way, such as Bison Grass vodka, which we will write about soon. Secondly, there is a place in mixology for a well-made neutral spirit. There's a great logic to Ian Flemming's use of vodka in the Vesper, for example. Without it, he had concocted a drink that was just gin and Lillet, which, at the time, was high in quinine, and quite bitter. The addition of vodka to the recipe diluted the bitterness, making the final drink far more palatable.

The first popular vodka cocktail was the Moscow Mule -- in fact, in the 1950s, it created the vodka craze in this country. At that time, Smirnoff was just trying to break the American market, without much success: it was actually marketed as "white whiskey" in South Carolina. But the owner of the distribution rights to Smirnoff, a fellow named John G. Martin, happened to have drinks in an LA bar called the Cock 'n' Bull Tavern with the proprietor, Jack Morgan. As it happened, Morgan had purchased quite a lot of ginger beer, and was having trouble moving it, and so the two conceived a cocktail that mixed these two unpopular ingredients. And so: vodka, ginger beer, and lime juice, and you have a Moscow Mule. The resulting drink was a smash, and with good reason -- it's delicious. Ginger beer has a very strong flavor, one that is not vastly diminished by the addition of vodka. The result tastes much like you would expect: Like beer with lime and ginger added.

So there are great cocktails out there for vodkas, assuming the liquor is being used as an ingredient, rather than as a substitute for an ingredient, as in the vodka martini. It is worth noting that with a really good neutral vodka, such as Reyka, the favor of the cocktail is going to be defined by the other ingredients -- if you're going to make a Screwdriver or a Harvey Wallbanger, it won't do to use anything but fresh orange juice. If you're going to make a White Russian, get a quality coffee liqueur and fresh cream. Also, forget about drinking it in shots: The only native flavor to Reyka, and other premium vodkas, is the taste of ethyl alcohol, which tastes exactly like rubbing alcohol smells. Reyka does take on other flavors exceptionally well, though. We tossed in a few grains of freshly ground pepper, and the resulting shot of vodka was one of the best pepper shots we've enjoyed. For people who make their own infused vodka at home (a topic we plan to cover soon), Reyka is an excellent choice.

There is one thing we can say about premium vodkas, and particularly about Reyka. They have been among the most ecologically conscious liquors manufactured. Reyka is proudly green, from the geothermal steam used to heat their plant to the indigenous lava used to filter the vodka. Most vodka, by comparison, is filtered through charcoal made from trees. This is a strong selling point for Reyka, as it is hard to select a neutral vodka on the basis of which tastes better. (SPARBER)

The Raspberry Caipirinha

2007-06-04T21:01:00.000-06:00

WE AT THE Bottle Gang are big fans of the "that which does not kill you makes you stronger" school of cocktail making. We like our martinis with gin, we like our whiskey straight up, and--for God's sake--we like Campari. But sometimes you just want something delicious. That doesn't mean you have to drink crap, though, good people.

According to Mittie Hellmich's superlative "Ultimate Bar Book," the caipirinha, a Brazilian drink, takes its name from Portugese for "country bumpkin" or "little peasant girl," in a nod towards the economical approach of making the drink in the container you're going to drink it out of. Your basic caipirinha contains just a couple of key ingredients:

4 lime wedges
2 teaspoons sugar
2 oz. cachaça

Now, cachaça is a Brazilian rum made from sugar cane, and in our experience is next to impossible to find. You can feel free to substitute Mount Gay Sugar Cane Rum, or even just Mount Gay Rum. You put the lime wedges in a rocks glass, add the sugar, and muddle them wedges. We highly recommend tracking down a pestle for this purpose, since it makes things easier. You just crush the limes and the sugar until they're good and pulpy. To make the raspberry variety, just add a couple raspberries at this point and muddle them in there too.

Add some ice to the top, your rum and stir. Then photograph and enjoy. You have the satisfaction of drinking something fruity and sweet, plus the satisfaction of drinking an actual Brazilian drink with some history and heft to it, and not some pansy drink. By which we mean a drink made with pansies. (McPHERSON)

Cocktailphernalia: Humorous cocktail napkins

2007-06-04T17:47:00.000-06:00

ILLUSTRATED BY ANNE LEAF IN 1962, two years after she illustrated a similar series of cocktail napkins called "Wry Martinis." Drawn in the bold charcoal-illustration style of cartooning that you could learn from the back of a matchbook, this is a collection of comical vignettes of drinkers, mostly intoxicated, if their red noses, sleepy eyes, and the bubbles around their heads are any indication.

And now, relax with an enjoyable cartoon

2007-06-04T08:46:00.000-06:00

IT'S JUST WHAT we need on a busy afternoon -- an enjoyable cartoon, narrated by Art Carney, of a group of forest animals getting soused on PM Whiskey. (Via.)

Your friend, the olive.

2007-06-02T15:46:00.000-06:00

THINK OF IT LIKE THIS: If a martini is a television, a martini made well with Plymouth Gin and Noilly Pratt is a widescreen, high definition television. And that same martini with a great olive is that television with Surround Sound.

See, a great olive won't make a bad martini good, but it can make a good martini great, since it extends the taste along a different dimension. The traditional formula for a cocktail is tripartite: the base, the body and the perfume. In a negroni, the base is gin, the body is sweet vermouth and the perfume is Campari. You'll notice that in a classic martini, there are only two components: gin and dry vermouth. So where's the perfume? It's the garnish: that thing that enhances and accentuates the flavors of the drink.

A truly classic martini also uses a lemon twist, but consider the humble olive. At most bars, you'll be lucky to get something that has any flavor other than salt. Maybe you'll get a pimento. Some tony bars will offer blue cheese or gorgonzola stuffed olives, but for the home bartender, the sad fact is that these cheese stuffed olives don't fare very well on store shelves. We'll get back to them in a moment, but first, let's get at your best store-bought options for olives.

If you want to go beyond your basic green olive, those stuffed with jalapenos or garlic are your best bet for ones that come in a jar. Still, though, extensive research has led us to one conclusion: the best olives have pits. Like bone-in chicken, an olive with a pit has a deeper and more complicated flavor than its pitted brother. Removing the pit is like cutting the soul out of an olive. Krinos makes a killer cracked green olive with the pit still in there, and it has a bold and peppery flavor that's less of a cosh than your average jalapeno stuffed olive.

Now you may be asking yourself, how do you get a toothpick through a pit? The simple answer is, you don't. Actually, that's the whole answer, but there's enough olive there to squeeze the toothpick through the side, so do it. Or just drop 'em in there and let them settle. Of course, you have to figure out a classy way to get rid of the pit when you're done, but we'll leave that to your imagination.

If you're going to go with fresh olives, though, your options expand exponentially. Most gourmet grocery stores (in the Twin Cities, I'd recommend Byerly's or Kowalski's) have solid olive bars where you can get several different types of olives, not to mention sundry other marinated goodies (more on those in a minute). This is where you want to go for your blue cheese and gorgonzola stuffed olives, plus, the jalapeno and garlic stuffed ones will be considerably better than the jarred variety. For something unusual, try a citrus stuffed olive. And even though it's got an almond in it, the almond stuffed variety will take a toothpick with surprising ease.

It's obvious that you could match the olive to the drink: a citrus stuffed olive in a martini with Grey Goose Citron, a jalapeno stuffed olive with Absolut Peppar (not that we recommend that stuff--Absolut Peppar is not to be trifled with). But a lot of interesting combos can be contrasting. How about an almond-stuffed olive in a martini made with Hendricks? The olive's savory butteriness offsets the flowery and clean flavor of the gin excellently well.

Now, part of the beauty of a martini is in the simplicity; by even putting stuffed olives in a martini you're messing with perfection. But once you've started down the path of corruption, it's hard to stop.

In preparing for this piece, we collected a bunch of things from the olive bar that you wouldn't normally find in a martini. Thus was born The Antipasto Martini.

It may not be pretty, but it sure is delicious. Prepare yourself a regular old martini (5 pts Plymouth gin, 1 pt Noilly Pratt dry vermouth, stir with ice, then strain into a chilled cocktail glass), then grab two toothpicks. On one, place a jalapeno stuffed olive, a peppadew pepper, and a garlic-stuffed olive. On the other, a citrus-stuffed olive, a slice of salami, and an almond-stuffed olive. We know what you're thinking: we're crazy.

We are. Crazy delicious. (McPHERSON)

Road Trips: A Drinker's Guide to Omaha, part two

2007-06-02T11:50:00.000-06:00

CONTINUED FROM PART ONE.

AS YOU MIGHT EXPECT from a city that retains so much of the architecture of the 50s and 60s, Omaha has a tiki bar, a remainder of America's obsession with Polynesian culture. One day we at the Bottle Gang will tackle the enormous legacy of tiki culture, but it is a vast topic, and we shall limit our comments here to one point: There was almost nothing Polynesian about the way Americans expressed their interest in Polynesia. The word "tiki" is Maori. The tropical drinks served in tiki bars were generally inspired by drinks from the Caribbean. The style of music most associated with tiki culture, such as the lush exotica of Les Baxter, borrowed heavily from South American music. And tiki bars were often nestled in the back or the basement of Chinese or Japanese restaurants -- if you are looking for a well-made tropical drink nowadays, there is still a very good chance of finding one at a Chinese restaurant.

And so Omaha's tiki bar, the Mai Tai Lounge, is found in the basement of a Japanese restaurant, the Mt. Fuji Inn on Blondo street. It is a late-era tiki bar, dating back to the late 60s, and, at first, is unimpressive. The bar is a dark cavern of a place, smallish, with bamboo walls, a jukebox that plays contemporary music, a half-dozen portraits of comely Polynesian lasses painted on what looks to be velvet, and unfortunately, a television that plays sports events. Early tiki bars were enormous tropical fantasias, Disney-like monuments to faux-South Seas culture. This is not that. If it were, it might not have survived: As the popularity of tiki culture faded, most of the tiki palaces went out of business.

Unimpressive though it may seem, the Mai Tai Lounge does have two things to recommend it. Firstly, it has a terrific drink menu, which contains almost every classic, if kitschy, tropical cocktail, ranked like you would rank a movie. Their zombie, for example, is rated Triple-X, as is their Mai Tai and Fogcutter, while less alcoholic drinks, such as the Singapore Sling, get more family friendly ratings.

These are not fancy tropical cocktails. They have nowhere near the variety nor complexity of ingredients of a well-made version of the drinks, instead tending to consist of a mix of rums and one or two fruit juices. The Mai Tai's cocktails are stripped-down versions of tastier originals, but the bar uses middle-shelf alcohol and good fruit juice, and the resulting drinks are quite palatable. They also tend to be enormous.

The other thing the Mai Tai Lounge offers is Hawaiians. Not always, mind you: Sometimes the bar will be empty, and sometimes it will be filled with pasty skinned locals. But every so often, you'll walk in, and every customer will be Hawaiian. There is an unaccountably large population of Hawaiian students in Omaha, mostly at Creighton, and every so often they collectively decide to get drinks at the Mai Tai Lounge. The result is the rarest of experiences in Middle American tiki lounges: Finding a parking lot filled with cars with Hawaiian license plates, and walking into the bar to find yourself surrounded by dark skinned, brown-eyed drinkers who bandy about Hawaiian slang and chat idly about gossip from the Big Island. Out of the blue, one of America's least authentic Polynesian bars becomes absolutely, unmistakably Hawaiian.

Across town, on 13th Street just south of downtown, is another ethnic restaurant, one that has always been indisputably authentic. The Bohemian Cafe was started by a Czech family all the way back in 1924, and still features employees dressed in traditional Czech outfits. Their menu consists of Eastern European dishes such as jaeger schnitzel, or veal steaks in wine sauce and mushrooms, and the food tends to be meaty and heavy: We once ordered plum dumplings that came in a bowl filled with butter and cream, and took close to three weeks to eat.

They also have a small cocktail lounge, the Bohemian Girl, decorated, like the rest of the building, with hand-painted folk-art pictures of girls in native costumes and with little signs that read "We accept Czechs, not checks." They serve Pilsner Urquell and a Czech beer called Czechvar, which calls itself "The Czech Budweiser," and apparently was actually calling itself Budweiser long before the American beer of that name. It's a bland pilsner, tasting much like the American brand that they claim stole its name; stick with the Pilsner Urquell. Incidentally, you can also purchase bottles of these beers to take with you from the Bohemian Cafe.

Recently, they have introduced a few specialty cocktails, including one called Bohemian Shepherd Pie, made of plum brandy, Limoncello, Blue Caraco, and pineapple juice. This one frightened us, so we did not try it. We did order something called the Bohemian Sidecar, which drew gales of laughter from a rather asinine drunk at the bar, a stupid looking young man in a baseball cap and a bluetooth headset. This fellow was drinking himself into oblivion, bullying everyone nearby. When we discovered that he was the husband of one of the bartenders, a sweet-faced and recently pregnant young woman, we realized we were watching the makings of an American tragedy. Take the advice of some strangers in a bar, young bartender, should you read these words: A drunk who is belligerent to other drinkers, to bartenders, and to his own wife, is not worth the effort. Any man who must be taken aside and warned that his drinking will have to stop when the baby is born, and who responds by loudly proclaiming that he must get a new wife, and says this in a cocktail lounge in front of strangers, is a man to be avoided.

As to the drink that this young boor mocked, well, it was actually rather good. It is a sidecar, of sorts, but made with slivovitz, which is a Balkan plum brandy. It's a scorcher of a liquor, as anyone who has tried it can tell you. It's the sort of drink that grows hair on your chest, and then sets fire to those hairs. But the harshness of the brandy is undercut in this drink by Limoncello, Triple Sec, and lemon juice, and the resulting drink is actually quite satisfying. Fools may laugh at us for ordering it, and laugh harder that we like it. But fools will be fools, and, at the end of the day, as happened on this occasion, will have a second bartender, the mother of the first, threaten them with a baseball bat. (SPARBER)

CONTINUED TOMORROW

Slideshow: Scenes from "Drinking With Ian"

2007-06-02T01:22:00.000-06:00

PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN during a filming of "Drinking with Ian" at First Avenue on June 2, 2007. Ian's guests included WCCO anchorman Don Shelby, who brought along a guitar and performed several surprisingly good blues numbers. (SPARBER)

Road Trips: A Drinker's Guide to Omaha, part one

2007-05-31T06:10:00.000-06:00

"THERE'S A PLACE CALLED OMAHA NEBRASKA," Groucho Marx sang once, before misplacing the town on the map: "In the foothills of Tennessee." Singers don't seem to know just where Omaha is, come to think of it. All the Counting Crows knew was that the town was "somewhere in Middle America," while Bob Seeger placed himself "on a long and lonely highway, east of Omaha," which could be just about anywhere that's not west of Omaha. Way to be specific, gents.

Well, we at the Bottle Gang have been to Omaha. And not just in a passing-through-on-the-way-to-somewhere-else sort of way. We've been to parties with The Faint and Conner Oberst (and a lesser-known act from Omaha, Mulberry Lane, who once sent us a postcard from Japan). We've crashed three of Alexander Payne's shindigs, once wishing him a happy birthday when it wasn't his birthday at all, and made many calls to the Academy Award-winning writer/director, several times by accident, which he did not appreciate. We drunkenly strolled through the halls of the Joslyn Museum with Omaha's former mayor, Hal Daub, after dining with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee, who has a yearly theater festival in Omaha. We made friends with an enormous, bearded astrologer and blues guitarist who is reported to have once bitten off a man's ear. Also, we've been to a lot of Omaha strip clubs, although, on the whole, we prefer those in Council Bluffs.

So trust us when we say that Omaha is a great place to drink. We've drunk our share there. The alcohol is plentiful and it's cheap -- three cocktails made with middle-shelf liquor will cost you the same as one cocktail in Minneapolis's North Loop. But be warned: Omaha bars generally are not very well stocked when it come to liquors, generally carrying a small and generic selection, and Omaha bartenders, for the most part, are only capable of making a half-dozen of the most common drinks, and will look confused if you ask for anything fancy. What Omaha lacks in cocktail sophistication, however, it makes up for in character. Sometimes the city seems like a glacier flowed over it in 1964 and just recently melted, leaving the architecture of the period perfectly preserved, and so here we have a town filled with oversized Steak Houses and gaudy signage, an eye-popping, kitschy delight.

Drinkers, should you find yourself in Omaha, here is a travelogue of our favorite watering holes.

We begin, as we always do, on Saddle Creek at the Homey Inn. This small neighborhood bar has gotten quite busy recently, since Esquire named it one of the best bars in America; it used to be quite desolate, except on weekends, when all Omaha bars spring to life.

The Homey Inn seems constructed out of the fallen remains of previous bars, some in Omaha, some elsewhere in the Midwest. The walls are hung with fading newspapers and decorated with ancient menus, beer cans from long forgotten brands, and old novelty items from liquor distributors, such as Nude Beer, upon which photos of women in Eighties hairstyles wear brassieres that can be scratched off to reveal ample bosoms. Some have been scratched.

They also have champagne on tap, both sweet and dry. Of course, it's not real champagne, but rather a fruity and inexpensive sparkling wine, but who cares, really? They don't know how to make a champagne cocktail with the stuff, but they will gamely try, tossing in a few drops of bitters and a packet of sugar. You wouldn't serve it to Humphrey Bogart, but it's passable.

Additionally, the Homey Inn serves peanuts. In dog bowls. And you can order food from across the street, from a Beatles-themed pasta restaurant called Sgt. Peffers, presumably out off fear that if they called themselves Sgt. Peppers, Apple Records would sue. Interestingly, the Homey Inn has a wider selection of Irish beers than many Eire-styled pubs. We couldn't tell you why this is. And we don't care to ask. We're happy enough sipping our sweet sparkling wine, eating our peanuts, waiting for the delivery man to bring us a plate of spaghetti, and scratching the bra off a woman on an old beer label.

Next, it's onward to The Lynx Lounge, just a few blocks away on NW Radial Hwy. The bar is rather unassuming to look at from the outside, nestled in a strip mall between an assortment of low-rent businesses that have, in the past, included an off-brand makeup store and an erotic lingerie dealer. Inside, however, the bar is pure Seventies, including a fire pit and a recessed and mirrored alcove where couples can pair off for a more intimate drinking experience. The bar is kept dark, and the alcove may be the darkest spot on earth -- it is pitch black until a bartender lights a candle, and then the only thing visible in the alcove is the candle.

The bar is mostly patronized by African-American drinkers, who have, in the past, been so surprised to see the Bottle Gang sidle up to the bar that they have greeted us warmly and bought us drinks. Omaha is a disquietingly segregated town, with most of its black community living north of the city, and white Omahans can be unaccountably nervous around their black neighbors. Actually, this isn't just true of white Omahans -- we once brought a young girl of Korean extraction to the Lynx Lounge, and, upon leaving, she asked a surprising question: "Did you notice that we were the only white people in the bar?" We briefly considered reminding her that, as an Asian, she wasn't precisely white, but then we decided the whole discussion was crass and politely let it drop.

Anyway, we've been patronizing the Lynx Lounge for years, for their good selection of brandies, their swanky ambiance, and their terrific jukebox upon which you can find a marvelous selection of soul and R&B songs. We may be too light-skinned to pretend to be Billy Dee Williams, but that doesn't mean we won't drink at a place where he would seem perfectly at home. (SPARBER)

Read part two here.

Nick Mancini, founder of Mancini's, dies at 80

2007-05-30T13:11:00.000-06:00

We over at The Bottle Gang extend our hearfelt condolences to Mr. Mancini's family. Mancini's is a special, special bar, so hopefully we can get over there in the near future and write up a proper review. In the meantime, here's the obituary from the Star Tribune.

Cocktailphernalia: Bottoms Up Tumbler

2007-05-30T12:45:00.000-06:00

THIS YELLOW PLASTIC TUMBLER, manufactured in the 50s or 60s, starts with the toast "bottoms up!" before rotating to reveal, first, two enormously round protrusions with legs emerging from beneath them, and finally a woman, doubled over, looking startled. We cannot imagine what sort of devil-may-care bachelor once owned this, as it seems exactly the sort of drinking cup that might discourage amorous liaisons with the fair sex. But perhaps we underestimate the fair sex, and their bawdy sense of humor. Next time we offer highballs at a Bottle Gang gathering, we shall have to serve them in cups such as these, and see whether we are met with smirks or slaps. (SPARBER)

Bar Review: BANK Restaurant

2007-05-24T22:25:00.000-06:00

IT IS THURSDAY NIGHT at the Westin Hotel in downtown Minneapolis, and it is pretty quiet at the BANK restaurant -- the bar is crowded, but it is a big room, and is, at most, sixty percent full. The Bottle Gang feels sure this will change soon, and, being fond of bars when they aren't crowded, we are glad to be here when the restaurant is still relatively mellow. It won't be for long.

We won't speculate on the dining experience at BANK, because that's not what we do, but we can tell you this as drinkers: It's a good bar. Nix that -- it may be a great bar. It benefits from a gorgeous location, for starters. The BANK Restaurant is located in the lobby of the old Farmers and Mechanics Bank Building, a structure with a quotidian name but an art deco sensibility. Built in 1941, the building is less a small-town bank than a monument to industry, with vaulting, 34-foot high walls decorated with the sort of neo-classical bas-relief images that capitalism used to celebrate itself during the war years -- busts that could have been designed in antiquity, but surrounded with text in Roman Capitals reading things like "agriculture." The ceiling is hung with enormous, palm tree-like chandeliers, so stylized in an absurdly tropical way that they resemble a bronze version of the hat Carmen Miranda wore.

Looking inside, you can imagine the wide open floor, with red velvet ropes leading people to tellers. But the ropes are gone, and the tellers are replaced by a dining bar, where patrons can sit and order up food without waiting to be seated, with chefs handing them food in exactly the way bankers once handed bags of money. The center of the restaurant is taken up by a large oval bar, and seats radiate out from it -- tables for four, and then tables for two, and then little sitting areas, sofalike, where drinkers can lounge. On the far end of the bank, where once there were banker's offices, there are now private dining rooms, each given a precious metal theme -- there is a gold room, for example, in which everything is gilded, and there is a platinum room, in which the decorations are appropriately cold and silvern. When you head away from the bar to the restrooms, there is another clever design choice: The bank's main vault has been converted into a wine cellar, with the vault still revealing it's massive metal door, and it's complex locking system that promises to be dynamite proof.

But it is easy to get lost in decorations, especially when they are so dazzling. You can't drink decoration, however, and so it is on to the drink menu. BANK offers a self-named signature cocktail, a bright red mixture of Cointreau, pomegranate juice, fresh lime juice, a float of peach wine, and, as a smart touch, decorated with gold leaf, so you are literally drinking gold. It's a gimmicky, if uncomfortably indulgent, touch: one drinker commented that he felt like he was pissing on the poor. It's a tasty cocktail, but hardly classic.

Fortunately, they do serve classic cocktails, such as the Mai Tai and the Ritz Sidecar, which we ordered and were superb. They are somewhat pricey at $10, but you always pay a bit more at a hotel cocktail lounge, and it's worth paying for a drink that's well made. The bar also offers a rarity: The Vesper, James Bond's original drink, invented by Ian Flemming himself. It's a mix of gin, vodka, and Lillet, and you will be hard-pressed to find another local bar that makes it, because nobody has Lillet. It's famously a bitter drink, but Lillet was recently reissued, and the current version is much subtler. The resulting cocktail tastes quite a bit like a martini, but not quite. The gin flavor isn't quite as pronounced, despite BANK using Tanqueray, and the Lillet bitterness gives it a pleasurable kick. It's a terrific cocktail, and BANK makes it well.

Their bar menu is suitably upscale, including sea scallops, poached lobster, and five spice rubbed duck breast; frankly, we expect that this menu will get a little more declassé as the bar becomes more popular, as sometimes you just want french fries with your drink, and their french fries looked superb, but were not listed on the bar menu. We ordered a cheese flight: three cheeses, chef's choice, for $6.

We ended up with two cheeses, but with one prepared two different ways. The chef chose a hard Wisconsin cheese called Pleasant Ridge, which was rather similar to Beaufort, and a soft cheese from Colorado called Colorouge. The cheeses were garnished quite carefully with nuts, sliced grapes, and olives. The garnish choices were excellent -- significantly adding to the flavor of the cheese, rather than distracting from it.

The cocktail menu had some surprisingly low rent options, including several frou-frou faux martinis and a drink made with Red Bull. The Bottle Gang disapproves of these sorts of things, and suspects the sorts of people who will drink them are just going to head over a few blocks to the trendy but sophomoric bars in the North Loop to get their classless drunk on. Still, the first drinks offered on BANK's menu are the classics, and they are made with care. It's rare enough for a drinker to find a bartender who can make these drinks well, it's even rarer to enjoy the cocktails in so grand an environment. (SPARBER)

Sailor Martin's Bar Jokes What Make Me Laugh 05.16.07: Pirates

2007-05-24T11:21:00.000-06:00

SAILOR MARTIN tells of a sailor with a hook for a hand and an encounter with pirates. (SAILOR MARTIN)

Road Trips: The Crow Bar in Tomah, Wisconsin

2007-05-22T08:44:00.000-06:00

THERE'S A TOM WAITS SONG, "Gin-Soaked Boy," where the gravel-voiced singer name checks one of America's great cheap bourbons, telling a tale of staggering home loaded on the stuff and finding his woman missing, presumably in the arms of a gin fan. It's a great, mean song from Waits, a propulsive blues number backed by a menacing electric guitar riff by Little Feat guitarist Fred Tackett, and we will have to write about the song someday, because it is that good.

But today we're going to talk about the bourbon, and a bar. First, the bourbon: when bars have Old Crow, you tend to see it on the bottom shelf, because it's cheap, and that's a shame. Old Crow is a venerable bourbon. It was the first sour mash bourbon created, and was Ulysses S. Grant's favorite drink. It was a top selling American brand for years, but then went belly up and was bought by its competitor, Jim Beam, in 1987. The Old Crow distillery was closed, and so the contents of current bottles of Old Crow are, presumably, essentially the same as Jim Beam White Label. I have a bottle of the current stock of Old Crow, and it's good enough for mixed drinks -- it makes a perfectly satisfactory bourbon sour, for example.

The original Old Crow had quite a following, and fans still pine for the original stuff, but it should be noted that the current version, despite its reputation as a "cats and dogs" mix, in which Jim Beam pours whiskey that they wouldn't package under their own name, nonetheless consistently does well in blind taste tests, and got a 91 rating from the Beverage Testing Institute in the 1990s.

And Old Crow has one more thing going for it -- a terrific mascot, featuring a top-hatted and red-waistcoat-wearing crow, resplendent in string tie, spats, and gold-tipped cane. The mascot never seems to have made it onto the logo for Old Crow, which features a woodcut of a raven clutching a sprig of wheat, but was used extensively in advertising the bourbon at least as far back at the '50s. The mascot doesn't seem to be in much use anymore, but you can still find plastic statuettes of the fellow in antique stores and in older bars.

There's a rather large one in the corner of the Crow Bar in Tomah, Wisconsin, and the Old Crow mascot also emblazons the front of the building, although the bar itself doesn't feature the bourbon. "We had a bottle for years," the bartender explains, shrugging. "Nobody ordered it." They do, however, have Maker's Mark, stashed away on the bottom shelf, for some reason.

The Crow Bar can be compared to Old Crow, mixaphorically speaking, in that both are older specimens of drinking culture that have seen better days. The Crow Bar dates back to 1939, and there's a photo of the bar from that era on one wall, partially obscured by a video gambling machine. It was a fairly plain bar back then, with a sign hung on one wall reading, in all caps, KEEP 'EM FLYING. Above that there was what appears to have been an actual stuffed crow, posed in flight. The photograph is a blow up of a promotional postcard that somebody found, and the back of it features a laboriously hand-lettered note reading, in part, "Regular half-way stop for more and more regular travelers. There's a reason - stop in - learn why."

We would wager that weary travelers don't stop in much anymore. At least, we don't meet many people who pass through Tomah on the way from someplace to someplace else. It's a bit of a drive off the highway although, like television host Craig Ferguson, we at the Bottle Gang make a habit of going off the highway for a few miles when we travel. We knew of Tomah already -- local writer and editor Mark Baumgarten hails from there, as did Gasoline Alley creator Frank King, who worked at the Minneapolis Times in 1901. The main street of Tomah has one of the largest accumulations of bars we have ever seen on an American street -- perhaps one in every three or four businesses is a bar of one sort or another, mostly undistinguished sports bars or grills, none of which seem particularly busy. There's only two customers besides us in The Crow Bar just now, both older, one chatting amiably about a friend she has in common with the bartender. "Is she getting ready for menopause?" the bartender asks.

The bar has suffered from years of decorating and redecorating. There are still kitschy -- yet surprisingly elegant -- deco-styled wooden tables for patrons to sit at, probably installed sometime during the late '40s. The stuffed bird above the bar is gone, replaced by a painting of several crows worrying an owl. The floor is the sort of industrial carpet that you find in cheap businesses, and there is a picture of Tony Montana from Scarface on one of the back walls and a picture of Muhammad Ali near the door. It's the sort of generalized crap bars accumulate over time, and it rests awkwardly on the walls next to assorted crap from earlier times, such as wooden posts with quotes from Omar Khayyam, or my favorite, a promotional triptych from Michelob that must have been given to the bar about 1975. In the center is the Michelob logo, in a faux gold frame, surrounded on either side by mock elegant electric gaslamps. On either side of the lamps are headshots of women, likewise framed in faux gold, each holding frothy glasses of beer. The women are very much the type that ads featured in the 70s, with mile high hairdos and white pantsuits, and they look absolutely ridiculous now.

But there is something about this accumulation of bric a brac that's comforting. We've written about how Irish-American bars will fill their shelves with junk from Ireland, to give the pub a more authentic quality. Well, here is an American bar that has legitimately filled up with American junk, representing decades of operation. And it's a good, comfortable neighborhood bar, with a nice selection of beer on tap, including Hacker-Pschorr and Guinness. The bar might have faded from its glory as a popular travelers' watering hole, but it's still worth peeking your head in, if you're in Tomah. Again, a little like Old Crow whiskey: It may not be what it once was, but it's still not too bad. (SPARBER)

Bar Tales: Blessing the maibock at the Town Hall Brewery

2007-05-20T08:46:00.000-06:00

THE TWIN CITIES are a beer loving pair of towns, and us cocktail drinkers just have to get used to it. Perhaps it's the lingering influence of Minneapolis's once enormous German population, as Germans are famously a beer loving people. Perhaps it is the fact that so many bars are just one step above a dive, serving bottom shelf liquor and aging, stale mixers, and you just can't get a good cocktail in that sort of environment, but if the taps are clean and the kegs are recent, it's hard to go wrong with beer. Perhaps it's that Twin Citians are thrifty, or stingy, and won't pay a half-sawbuck for giggle juice when they can pay a buck for a brewski.

Whatever the case, when locals turn alcohol snobby, they turn to beer first. We at The Bottle Gang love beer, but we're drinkers, god damn it, and view beer as little more than an adult soft drink, a refresher on a hot summer day, a chaser for a real cocktail. But we respect the skilled brewmaster, and respect a well-made beer, and appreciate the fact that so many Minnesotans have a taste for a good beer. It tells you a lot about the Twin Cities' relationship with beer that, when the Town Hall Brewery introduces their maibock, they bring in a Episcopalian vicar in a red and blue dalmatic and red sneakers to bless the stuff.

The Town Hall Brewery is relatively spacious -- it is a former comedy theater, although the current owners have taken great pains to antique it, covering the walls in old photographs of enormous beer casks, with proud brewers posing alongside and atop them. But today, Saturday, the pub is crowded beyond capacity, drinkers standing behind each other at the bar, two and three deep. A group has pushed several tables together, and they all wear t-shirts identifying themselves as Hash House Harriers, who make a regular habit of running together, then stopping off in bars and drinking together. As is their tendency, they drink, and then drink some more, and then rise to their feet, raise their cups, and sing songs about drinking.

In the meanwhile, the staff is desperately trying to get maibock into everybody's hands before the ceremony begins, which will be soon, if the vicar wandering around swinging a incense censer is any indication. The maibock is foamy and dark and nutty and bitter. It's also free, which may help explain the throng of people that even now continues to pack the bar; one exceptionally small and stout man begs a young woman to give up her chair, so he can stand on it, because he can't see.

The vicar takes his place under a photograph of an oversized cask, again with proud brewers scampering atop it, and launches into his ceremonial duties, which include reading from classic literature and a call and response section, where he beseeches heaven to prevent us from such untoward behavior as thinking ourselves clever after a few drinks, when, in fact, we actually are starting to sound like idiots. With each of his entreaties, the multitude chant back, tunelessly, that they too would like heaven to save us from this, particularly when the vicar's pleas include protection from having cars towed or spending the night in jail. At the end of the blessing, all the assembled raise their glasses in toast, as the vicar reminds us that Jesus himself did not avoid the drinker, despite the possibility that he might be considered a drunkard himself. (SPARBER)

Bar Review: Topolobampo

2007-05-19T08:33:00.000-06:00

A SPECIAL BOTTLE GANG ABROAD REPORT FROM CHICAGO

WE'RE USED TO GOING INTO bars and getting static over wanting things like Campari, Red Breast whiskey and other exotic things, but the waiter's reply at Chicago's Rick Bayless-owned Topolobampo to a request for a gin and soda?

"We don't have gin."

That's because what Topolobampo has is over a hundred different kinds of tequila and a special rotating drink menu. Why would you want anything as humdrum as a gin and soda when you can try something exotic?

The Trago Bravo is a couple ounces of 100% Blue Agave Silver tequila (Tres Mujers) served beside another couple ounces of spicy sangrita with a serrano chile split and jammed on the side. The chaser is rimmed with salt, and the idea here is to sip the tequila, bite the chile, and drink the chaser. The tequila has a decidedly buttery aroma and a woody smooth flavor and personally, we don't think you need to cut it with a chaser, but it turns out the chaser is delicious as well. Sangrita is the Mexican version of a Bloody Mary and not-- as it turns out-- a Margarita crossed with sangria. The chile? Well, that's a spicy meatball. Definitely bite it, but watch out for the seeds-- they'll mess you up. When everything is combined in the approved order, the effect is a broad swath of spice, from the smooth heat of the tequila to the sharper tang of the chile and finally the savory spice of the sangrita.

One of the seasonal Margaritas was a Blood Orange Margarita, prepared with reposado tequila, Hornitos, Cointreau, organic lime and fresh blood orange juice. Quite a good margarita, but not as exciting as it should have been, was the general consensus. Because you know what? Blood oranges are really just red oranges.

The Mezcal Maragarita was an entirely different affair. Made with Del Maguey Single Village artisanal mescal from Oaxaca, Don Pedro brandy, Peychaud bitters and lime juice, the waiter recommended it as his favorite, and it was pretty damn special. Appropriately for something from Oaxaca, it had a smokiness you rarely find in a drink-- a really unique flavor for a margarita. The waiter was right; this drink kicks ass.

For the second round, we started with a Chamochela, a Mexican beer cocktail composed of spicy-fruity chamoy salsa, fresh lime and Tecate in a salt-rimmed glass over ice. As we'd come to expect by now, this was an interesting combo-- not sweet, which is what the presentation would lead you to believe, but not spicy or bitter or anything else, really. Kind of flat in flavor but fizzy in texture. As a companion drink for a meal (which is how we were enjoying it), it's not the best, but a pitcher of these on a hot summer day on a porch? Dial it up.

We also sampled a more involved take on the sangrita, the Vampiro Fronterizo. Made with Bayless' Maraca Bloody Mary mix, Oro Azul Silver tequila, fresh lime juice and a hint of smoky chipotle seasoning, the Vampiro is another smoky wonder. The ingredients have a tendency to separate out a bit, so you need to keep stirring it to get the full effect, but provided you can keep your stir on, it's a delicious and spicy take on the Bloody Mary.

All in all, we barely missed having access to a full bar, and these specialty drinks certainly paired up excellently well with our food. As a bonus, they weren't terribly expensive for a fine dining experience, topping at $11 for the Blood Orange Margarita, and the adventurous Trago Bravo and Vampiro Fronterizo were $8, which is around what you'd pay for a run-of-the-mill mojito at Bar Abilene.

It can be tough to get a table at Topolobampo, but if you're down Chicago way, consider hitting up the bar and sampling some exotic takes on traditional Mexican drinks. (McPHERSON)

The Gibson: It's the little things that count.

2007-05-17T14:15:00.000-06:00

THINK WE'VE COVERED ALL THERE is to cover about the martini? Think again. Aside from the time we spend making crazy cocktails from books, we also spend some time messing around trying to make new drinks. Most of the time it ends in disaster, a small amount of the time in success and this one time? Well, the less said about that the better. Let's just say the monkey's doing much better now. We should probably take a tip from Charles Dana Gibson and keep it simple, sippers.

Or rather, we could follow his lead and dare our friends to make great drinks better. The most likely origin story for this martini variation is that Gibson challenged Charley Connolly, who was the bartender at the Players' Club in New York, to improve the martini. Did Connolly substitute vodka for gin and add a bunch of fruity garbage to it? Hell no! He garnished it with a pearl onion instead of an olive. Genius.

Of course, it's just possible that the story's total bunk. Like most good legends, there are other versions. One involves an American diplomat named Gibson, a teetotaler, who, when attending swanky parties abroad, had the bartender fill his cocktail glass with ice cold water and an onion, so he could tell it apart from all the olive-garnished martinis. We, as a rule, try not to pick up other people's drinks in the first place, but maybe drink swapping was all the rage back then and hey, Europe. What are you going to do?

There are other variations on this, inevitably involving someone trying not to get drunk by drinking cold water with an onion in it, but seriously: That's gotta taste just horrible. Nowadays it's far more common to reverse the ruse: substitute gin (we recommend Plymouth English gin-- believe the hype) for the water, and everyone will think you're just pretending to be drunk.

Fascinated by the possibilities, we hit Sharrett's liquor store and picked up a bottle of Santa Barbara Olive Company martini onions, which are marinating in vermouth and vinegar. Also, we've come to the realization that just one ingredient that isn't the very best reduces the quality of a martini by about half, so forget about Martini and Rossi Dry Vermouth. Get some Noilly Prat. Here's the business:

2.5 shots of Plymouth English gin
1/2 shot of Noilly Prat dry vermouth
2 to 3 martini onions

Chill a cocktail glass, put the ingredients except for the onions in a shaker with ice and shake gently. Don't be doing the conga with that thing. You should kind of swirl it in the shaker. Pour into cocktail glass, garnish with onions. Welcome to the Gibson.

The onion adds a nice dimemnsion, what with the vinegar and salt combo. Straight up, these bad boys taste a little like a salt and vinegar potato chip, if potato chips were soft and round and marble-sized. A martini with a lemon twist is refreshing, a martini with an olive is savory and complex. With an onion, it's a cleaner savory taste.

While we're on the topic, I'd like to introduce the newest member of The Bottle Gang, named for the very drink we're discussing: Dr. Cornelius Gibson, or Gibson for short.

Dr. Gibson is a 9-week-old Shiba Inu, which we're pretty sure makes him almost one year old in human years, which we're pretty sure is legal drinking age for a dog. This photo was taken shortly after we drank him under the table. (McPHERSON)

Sailor Martin's Bar Jokes What Make Me Laugh 05.16.07

2007-05-16T16:40:00.000-06:00

THE FIRST in a series of saloon witticisms and drinking stories by The Bottle Gang's own Sailor Martin, a tattooed and pierced Sailor Puppet. (SAILOR MARTIN)

Three Bar Tricks Involving Napkins

2007-05-14T07:56:00.000-06:00

MAGIC TRICKS GENERALLY COME IN KITS, must be specially designed for specific illusions, and are often expensive. Bar tricks — a much more specific genre of trickery — simply involve objects on hand at any local saloon. As an example, complimentary bar matches weren’t originally designed to assist wagering drinkers. In these examples, the humble napkin proves to be useful beyond mopping the sweat from a tall cool one.

Matches, napkins, and other everyday objects are generally discarded without a second thought. At The Bottle Gang, we see greater possibilities in these overlooked objects — we see their potential to do the seemingly impossible, which gives them an edge of store-bought magic tricks. Such pre-fab examples of sleight-of-hand encourage immediate suspicion. Upon seeing a magician link and unlink three metal rings, audiences immediately start suspecting trickery. For this reason, we find the bar trick infinitely more impressive. It seems, for a moment, that something impossible has happened. Magic has been produced with everyday objects — plucked not from a hidden jacket pocket, but right from the bar where anyone could have found them.

Bar tricks have the potential of reaping certain rewards if done well: cash; a phone number; free alcohol. Before sipping a hard-won drink, though, dedicate a toast to the simplicity of the bar trick.

BERNOULLI’S BOTTLE

Materials: 1 empty beer bottle, and a small piece of a paper napkin.

The trick: Try to get someone to blow a napkin ball into an empty beer bottle.

How to do it: This trick is based on scientist Daniel Bernoulli’s principle stating that flowing air has less pressure than inert air.

Be sure the neck of the empty beer bottle is dry before attempting this trick. Tear off a small piece of napkin and crumple it into a ball. This ball should be smaller than the bottle opening. Holding the bottle horizontally, place the napkin ball inside so that it rests on the lip of the bottle. Keeping the bottle horizontal, hold the opening up to someone and bet that they cannot blow the napkin into the bottle.

Because of Bernoulli’s principle, the ball will be met with resistance from the air inside the bottle. This will cause the ball to blow back out into the participant’s face every time.

CAPTURE THE BULLS-EYE

Materials: Dry paper napkin, pencil or pen

The trick: Mark a dot in the middle of a napkin and, without lifting the pencil or pen, draw a circle around the dot. There should be no lines connecting the dot and the circle.

How to do it: Begin by folding in a corner of the napkin to the center of the square. Draw a dot at the napkin’s center, ending with the pen on the tip of the folded corner. Keep the pen on this corner while slowing easing the corner of the napkin away from the dot. At any distance away from the dot, draw a circle. At no point did the pen have to leave the surface of the napkin.

THE BIG SNEEZE

Materials: Linen napkin, utensil such as a fork or spoon

The trick: Blow your nose with such force that it causes a napkin to fly upward in a comical fashion.

How to do it: This is less a bar bet than a bar amusement, but it always seems to get a laugh, so we shall include it. To achieve this stunt, sneeze. Grab a napkin and unfold it to blow your nose. Secret the utensil inside the napkin before bringing the napkin to your nose. At this point, the utensil should be hidden under the napkin. When the napkin is to your nose, you should place the utensil in your mouth in such a way that when you bite, it will cause the utensil to rise upward until it is perpendicular to your face. The napkin will rise as if by a forceful blow. Feel free to make exaggerated blowing noises. Enjoy the surprised expressions of your drinking mates. (MAULT)

Mother's Day cocktail: The Dorothy Mantooth is a Saint

2007-05-12T07:10:00.000-06:00

TOMORROW IS MOTHER'S DAY, and, like all American Mother's Days in the past, it is an opportunity for pacifists and suffragettes to protest the American Civil War.

Why are you giving me such an odd look? Surely you remember that Mother's Day was introduced in the United States by Julia Ward Howe, the author of "The Battle Hymn of The Republic," herself an activist in the joint causes of pacifism and women's suffrage. And you must remember that her intention in starting the holiday was to unite women to protest the unspeakable carnage of the War Between the States, as expressed in her "Mother's Day Proclamation," mustn't you?

No? Well, no matter. Even if your mother is neither a pacifist or a suffragette -- if she spends her weekends, say, writing hawkish letters to government demanding more and better war, but, in the meanwhile, steadfastly refusing to vote, she's still your mother. On this day you owe her a card, and a phone call. And, we daresay, a cocktail.

This is why we have invented one to celebrate the event. We wanted a drink that was potent, yet feminine. We wanted a drink that would satisfy firebrands and homebodies alike. And, more than anything, we wanted to create a cocktail that would involve chamomile tea. And so we give you our invention, which, after the film Anchorman, we have dubbed the Dorothy Mantooth is a Saint. Mix your mother up a glass tomorrow, kiss her on the forehead, and, when she slips into slumber, pull the biography of Carrie Chapman Catt out of her hands, put away her collected photos of Mathew Brady, and let her sleep, for God's sake -- she's your mother!

The Dorothy Mantooth is a Saint

2 parts peppermint schnapps
1 part chamomile tea, iced
ice cubes

Mix together the peppermint schnapps and the iced tea and serve over ice in a highball glass. (SPARBER)

In honor of the Geek Prom: The nerdiest cocktail ever

2007-05-11T13:27:00.000-06:00

FOR THOSE OF YOU who went to college on a football scholarship, or whose daddy gave you a Mustang for your sweet 16, or who experienced your first kiss at age 18 or younger, or have never seen a 20-sided dice, or don't know what COBAL and FORTRAN is, or dislike Pee Wee Herman, or are shocked by the idea of dressing as cartoon animals prior to -- and during -- lovemaking, there is a Twin Cities event that you might wish to steer clear of.

I speak, of course, of the annual Geek Prom, now in its fifth year, occurring, inevitably, at the Science Museum of Minnesota tomorrow night, Saturday, May 11.

Of course, we at Bottle Gang do not consider ourselves geeks, but, rather, debauched sophisticates and rootless cosmopolitans, but we cannot resist a party, and this looks to be a very good one. Further: It looks inspired. From the choice of music, an Electric Light Orchestra cover band called E.L.nO., to a dance contest where prizes are awarded for the most spasmodic terpsichore, there looks to be much fun to be had. And, as we suffer an agonizing addiction to novelty, and silliness, and fun, we shall be there, on the dance floor, drunk as always and dancing as badly as possible.

But in preparation for the Geek Prom, we would like to offer a new cocktail, which we have decided to dub The Nerd, although, if you prefer, you can spell it N3rd, or you can call it OMG Imz drinak teh N3rdz, if you like. We won't mind.

The Nerd

Vodka
A selection of soft drinks, mixed together at random; alternately, just use OK Soda
Pop rocks

Mix a random selection of soft drinks together, preferably in a large plastic tumbler that looks like Darth Vader, creating the drink long known to children as the "suicide" or the "kamikaze." If possible, include Mountain Dew. Alternately, if you have old cans of OK Soda, just use that. Fill tumbler three quarters of the way with this concoction, top off with vodka, and stir. Rim tumbler with pop rocks the way you would rim a margarita with salt. (SPARBER)

Drinking With Drinking With Ian's Ian

2007-05-10T17:49:00.000-06:00

SO CITY PAGES BEAT US TO THE PUNCH, and it's our own damn fault. We've been sitting on a story about Ian Rans for about nine months, ever since we first conceived of The Bottle Gang, and just never got around to writing it.

In all fairness, we had a perfectly reasonable excuse. We had decided the best way to get to know the boozy public access television show host was to go out drinking with him, and we spent the greater part of the evening hopping from one bar to another in Northeast Minneapolis. When we woke the next morning, the scant notes we had taken from the previous night were soaked in a sticky mixture of amaretto and Peychaud's Bitters, and flecked with vomit (a drink I like to call the Siamese Pick Me Up). Ordinarily, this would not be an issue, as, like Truman Capote, we have trained our brains to retain hours of conversation at a time. Unfortunately, we were just beginning the process of training our livers to hold a gallon of rum. Just as you cannot easily be a rich man and a moral man, you cannot be a drunkard and a mnemonicist.

And so Peter Scholtes, a good fellow, a former coworker, and, obviously, a sober man, has written a cover story about Ian, scooping us. We don't blame him, although next time we see him we shall be forced to strike his face with a doily, or whatever it is gentlemen do when they are planning to duel. Actually, Scholte's story is something of a relief. He has admirably introduced Mr. Rans to the general public, whose knowledge of public access television is certainly limited enough that they must believe it to be a Somali television station that Minneapolis receives through some quirk of physics. And so we are relieved of the onus of remembering details like Ian's place of birth, or what he does for a living, or how his show got started, or whether he is a man, as he seems, or an extremely crafty drag king.

Instead, we can write what we do remember. Specifically, we can write about what it is actually like to drink with Drinking With Ian's Ian. And, if our memory fails us, we will simply make up clever anecdotes, or steal them from history. And so we can begin our story by telling you that Ian Rans is not simply a television host famous for drinking on air, but also designs album covers for comedian Louis Black, and we believe this to be true. We also recall him mentioning that he is the notorious woman in black, who puts a single rose on the grave of the tragic film star Rudolph Valentino every year on the anniversary of his death. This may not be true, but, if it is, it calls into question Scholtes assertion that Rans is male, and lends some credibility to the drag king hypothesis.

As those of you who have seen Drinking With Ian know, Ian Rans is a dapper, lean faced fellow with a shock of reddish-blond hair that rather resembles a pompadour that has collapsed in a sudden fit of weeping. Ian knows the bars of Northeast Minneapolis with the practiced expertise of a drinking man. He knows, for example, precisely what a Dago is at Dusty's Bar -- it's a burger made from Italian sausage -- and he recommends it. He also knows the young white man who dresses in vintage suits and plays superlative blues guitar; they chat for a moment, and then Ian cocks his thumb at the man. "He was on my show," he explains.

Ian likes working class bars, and knows what you're talking about when you mention places like Gilligan's on Lake Street, which seems to have recently closed and been renamed Merlins. "I've been there!" he declares. "There was a blackout, and we went into the place, and it was pitch black! I still don't know what it looks like with the lights on."

Ian knows working class bars as far away as Rochester, and can quote you the price of a pitcher of beer, which is ridiculously low, and so we choose to remember that it was eight cents, although it almost certainly wasn't. He knows which Northeast bars look away when he smoke cigarettes, which he does often, and asks that we not mention the name of the bar. We couldn't if we wanted to, as we have forgotten it, so we will simply invent a bar name. Ian smoked a cigarette at The Sheep-Eating Dog Head Pub while he was eating roast lamb and an English dessert called spotted dick, which he wasn't.

Ian is an amiable fellow with a quick wit, except when two acoustic guitarists are working their way through the catalog of Pink Floyd, as is the case at one particular Northeast bar. This odd cover band drives Ian into a visible rage, his face reddening, his adam's apple working its way up and down his throat. "I swear to God, if they play 'Money,'" he begins, and then chokes on his own threat as the acoustic duo play the opening riff to "Money." We leave this bar immediately.

Ian is not a fancy drinker, as you probably already know if you watch his show, which is sponsored, in part, by a bottom-shelf liquor. While we fuss with our drink orders, demanding multi-layered concoctions that must certainly have been invented by Medieval alchemists (and are despised by bartenders), Ian orders a variety of straightforward beers. He proudly discusses the shots offered every week by his show's bartender, a large man with a shaved head who looks more like a bouncer than a barkeep. He is not a bartender, Ian tells us, and that explains why the shots he introduces every week, usually made with their sponsor's products, cause the show's live audience to turn various colors, flap their hands in the air, and roll their eyes like a cartoon character. But Ian's show is not meant for the effete sophisticate who insists his vodka be distilled through a 365 foot-high volcanic mountain and then passed through a South American lynx before it is to be drunk. Ian's show is for the common man, the common drinker, the sort who drinks in the sort of a bar that Nick in "It's a Wonderful Life" describes thusly: "We serve hard drinks in here for men who want to get drunk fast. And we don't need any characters around to give the joint atmosphere."

The show is also, it must be said, darn funny, the interview format frequently interrupted by interstitial short films made by Ian's wealth of friends, and all have a sort of frenzied, knockabout wit. Despite Nick's admonition, Ian, and his friends, are characters -- one repeatedly spouts haikus, for example, and one cannot imagine that Nick would approve of that. Ian himself is a character, in vintage clothes and exploded vintage hairstyle, holding court among Northeast Minneapolis's assorted working class hipsters, all of whom he seems to know, except for the acoustic Pink Floyd cover band, who he hates. Also, at one point in the evening, Ian finishes a beer with an unusual flourish, eating the bottle whole and explaining that he learned to do it from a fakir. He studied with the man for many years, but the fakir was a serious man, and wanted Ian to study the writings of Harrm Bin Hian, and also wanted Ian to give up liquor, which is forbidden in Islam. This was too much to ask of Ian, and so the two went their own separate ways, but before they parted, the fakir taught Ian the secret of eating glass, and also how to summon a djinn at times of great need, although the djinn would require an offering of qamhiyyi. This story, of course, is not true.

As the evening ends, we gather our notes out of the massive urinal at Stasiu's, where they have unaccountably fallen, and we walk Ian to his car and bid him a good night. He is, we realize, a terrific drinking partner -- eager to talk about alcohol, filled with entertaining anecdotes, and easy to invent tales about. And so we cheerily say goodbye to him, and he asks when we will write our story about him.

"Very soon," we tell him, lying. (SPARBER)

Appalling drinking customs from the past: Skull cups

2007-05-09T09:42:00.000-06:00

Excerpted from Cups and their Customs (1863), by H. Porter, available as a free ebook at Scribd, where you can also download an MP3 of the book read by what sounds like a robot with a rather sexy English accent:

There is no lack, in old chronicles, of examples illustrative of that most barbarous practice of converting the skull of an enemy into a drinking cup. Warnefrid, in his work "De Gestis Longobard.," says, "Albin slew Cuminum, and having carried away his head, converted it into a drinking-vessel, which kind of cup with us is called Schala." The same thing is said of the Boii by Livy, of the Scythians by Herodotus, of the Scordisci by Rufus Festus, of the Gauls by Diodorus Siculus, and of the Celts by Silius Italicus. Hence it is that Ragnar Lodbrog, in his deathsong, consoles himself with the reflection,"I shall soon drink beer from hollow cups made of skulls". (SPARBER)

The Martini: Whose Child Is This?

2007-05-09T06:50:00.000-06:00

AT THE BOTTLE GANG we've learned more about religion by researching alcohol than from reading about monks, which we sometimes do. Granted, we only pick up books about those guys when they're fermenting grapes. But there's a different type of religious experience that interests us. In The Martini, author Barnaby Conrad III describes the many holy experiences had by figures of state and housewives alike. These ecstatic experiences are the result of drinking frigid glasses of gin and vermouth. Like any good religion, the history of the martini is filled with rituals, true believers, misfits, heretics, and, just go with us here, crime fighting.

Conrad's book -- which reads like a martini encyclopedia -- includes an excerpt from My Last Sigh by filmmaker Luis Buňuel, who explicitly links the drink to religion: "Like all cocktails, the martini, composed essentially of gin and a few drops of Noilly Prat, seems to have been an American invention. Connoisseurs who like their martinis very dry suggest simply allowing a ray of sunlight to shine through a bottle of Noilly Prat before it hits the bottle of gin. At certain periods in America it was said that the making of a dry martini should resemble the Immaculate Conception, for, as Saint Thomas Aquinas once noted, the generative power of the Holy Ghost pierced the Virgin's hymen 'like a ray of sunlight through a window -- leaving it unbroken.'"

The martini may be an American invention, but this drink's true paternity is hard to pin down. Like any rags-to-riches orphan -- and the martini is just that -- there will be someone out to claim him as their very own. As one example, Conrad mentions "a zealous group" in the town of Martinez, California in 1992 that "installed a brass plaque on the corner of Alhambra and Masonic" naming Martinez as the birthplace of the martini. This is the result of the following story: "Citizens of Martinez, California, claimed that around 1870 a miner from San Francisco stopped his horse at Julio Richelieu's saloon on Ferry Street in Martinez for a bottle of whiskey. Richelieu was a young Frenchman who had come up to Contra Costa County from New Orleans. The miner plunked a tobacco sack of gold nuggets on the bar near the weigh-scales and handed Richelieu a bottle. The bartender filled the container with whiskey from a large barrel, but the traveler said he wasn't quite satisfied. To make up the difference, Richelieu picked up a glass, mixed him a small drink, and dropped an olive in it. 'What is it?' asked the miner. 'That,' replied Richelieu, 'is a Martinez cocktail.'" Conrad clearly finds this particular story suspect and provides other stories, as well as his own theories to the origins of the martini. His book is something of an omnium gatherum of martini lore, filled with smart jokes, interesting historical tidbits, short stories, dazzling quotes, and boozy philosophizing.

"Martini Culture is not about getting stinking drunk and slipping under the table with a burp and a curse," writes Conrad. "It's about grace under pleasure. The idea is to make the rest of the evening more pleasant -- not to obliterate it. Richard 'Mr. Rick' Fishman, founder of San Francisco's floating party known as 'Mr. Rick's Martini Club,' says, 'A martini is like a woman's breasts: one is not enough and three are too many.'"

Conrad writes of famous martini drinkers. In the evenings, he tells us, W.C. Fields "would perform a trick of balancing a full Martini glass on his head." If the glass moved while he stood for a count, he would know that he had had enough for the day. However, "his skill and self-command were such that the glass rarely shook, and he then rewarded himself by emptying the contents." This a man who, estimated by biographer Robert Lewis Taylor, drank roughly two quarts of gin daily.

Conrad also discusses the various techniques for making a cocktail. He describes special techniques designed to pour an especially dry martini, such as "in and out," in which the mixer simply coats the shaker with vermouth and pours out the rest. And, on the subject of ice, Conrad quotes an excerpt from For the Wayward and Beguiled, in which author Bernard DeVoto writes, "Sound practice begins with ice. There must be a lot of it, much more than the catechumen dreams, so much that the gin smokes when you pour it in ... Fill the pitcher with ice, whirl it till dew forms on the glass, pour out the melt, put in another handful of ice. Then as swiftly as possible pour in the gin and vermouth, at once bring the mixture as close to freezing point of alcohol as can be reached outside the laboratory and pour out the martinis."

And, as if the martini were trying to break its own cool record, in 1965 it actually became a spy. Conrad includes an excerpt from Patricia Holt's The Bug in the Martini Olive: "The glass held a facsimile of an olive, which could hold a tiny transmitter, the pimento inside the olive, in which we embedded the microphone, and a toothpick, which could house a copper wire as an antenna. No gin was used -- that could cause a short.
"Our point was that a host could wander through his own party, having drunk his own martini, and pick up the conversations that were directed at him, or leave his glass near a conversation he could then monitor in secret. We wanted to show the vast proliferation of this equipment, and the bug in the marini olive was once a very fashionable example of many ... I felt I had introduced a new toy, like a play-chew for a dog. [the reporters and photographers] couldn't stop gnawing at it."

Yet another excerpt from The Martini, this time from J.A. Maxtone Graham, demonstrates the pleasing effect of the drink. "A party of thirty-six ladies from Stockton, California, were at the peak of their Martini happiness when two armed burglars broke in and announced at gun point that they would take away all the ladies' jewelry and money. There was no correct response from the party-makers, who merely asked the intruders to join them for a drink. Baffled by the whole affair, the burglars left empty-handed, and the party continued unabated."

We have our own theories as to why these gun-wielding scofflaws left such a party. Perhaps the burglars left because they didn't agree with how the ladies were mixing their martinis -- not enough ice, perhaps? Or perhaps the women were shaking the martini, and the burglars preferred theirs stirred. Perhaps that party's hosts were committing the monstrous act of passing off a vodka drink as a martini, and the burglars simply could not endure this. If they were smart burglars, though, they'd have come back with some decent gin, a mountain of ice, and more damn olives. (MAULT)

Bottle Gang Media Taster

2007-05-09T06:24:00.000-06:00

TAKE A LOOK TO THE RIGHT. You see that tall, narrow flashing thing that rather looks like an MP3 player? Well, it rather behaves like an MP3 player as well -- it's the Bottle Gang media taster, brought to you by the folks at Intelligent Media Platform. They have created similar players for Bust, City Pages, and the Austin Chronicle, and one would think they would have better sense to associate with a disreputable lot of drunks, but apparently they don't. And we thank them for it.

With great regularity, we at The Bottle Gang will be updating our Media Player with the latest and greatest drinking songs, some from IMPs already vast collection of music, some from the distant past, and some brand new and unique to the The Bottle Gang. By the way, if you have a drinking song to contribute to our Media Player, send us an email at max [at] thebottlegang.com; we're always looking to add a new soundtrack to our revelries.

New York Times weighs in on martinis

2007-05-07T17:18:00.000-06:00

New York Times story on martinis from May 2, 2007

We haven't gotten to read it yet, but we already like the sound of 4 people and 80 martinis. Sounds like Thursday night.

Post-reading:

Our favorite martini gin, Plymouth English Gin, could not have been more stylish and graceful. Plymouth has the classic juniper-based gin profile, yet it is uncommonly subtle and smooth. Still, it is assertive, its complexity emerging slowly but distinctly, the proverbial fist in a velvet glove.

Plymouth English gin, eh? Consider us interested, and out of Bombay Sapphire.

The Drinking Song: "The Pub With No Beer"

2007-05-07T07:09:00.000-06:00

THERE IS A RECURRING JOKE in James Garner’s amiable 1969 western Support Your Local Sheriff! In the film, Garner plays Jason McCullough, a laconic if irritable gunslinger who ends up in Colorado in the midst of the Gold Rush. Even as he gets roped into acting as the town’s lawman, he has his sights set on the real frontier, where things are really wild. “I’m only here to get a stake,” he’ll tell anyone who will listen. “For Australia.”

We can thank a country singer named Slim Dusty for some of this sense of Australia’s wildness. Dusty, born David Gordon Kirkpatrick in New South Wales in 1927, was the first Australian performer to enjoy success on the American pop charts — with a drinking song, no less! In 1957, Dusty released a song titled “The Pub With No Beer” as the b-side to a song titled “Saddle Boy.” But it was “Pub With No Beer” that caught on, because the first Australian song to chart in American and earning Dusty the first Gold Record issued to an Australian.

The song was originally written by outback poet Dan Sheahan in 1943, telling of American soldiers that had emptied the Day Dawn Hotel of suds after one evening of carousing. A songwriter named Gordon Parsons eventually added a melody to the song, a rollicking folk melody borrowed from Stephen Foster’s“Beautiful Dreamer.”

The song tells, with a combination of wry humor and impenetrable Australian dialect, of the disappointment of a bar’s locals when they discover their watering hole has run dry. “Then the swaggy comes in smothered in dust and flies,” Dusty sings cheerfully above a plainly strummed guitar, and he’s talking about a swagman, approximately the Australian equivalent of the American hobo, who is nonplussed to discover that he cannot get a drink. “I’ve trudged 50 flamin’ miles to a town with no beer,” he complains.

The song is an inventory of outback characters, none of whom are prepared for a beerless night, There’s a blacksmith who greets his wife sober for the first time and burst into tears before her, as well as stockmen, publicans, maids, and a dog expecting a beating from his frustrated master, all of them in a foul mood thanks to an empty pub. The song’s descriptions of each of these characters are arch and brief, a cartoon of melancholy drinkers.

Since the song’s release, the Cosmopolitan Hotel in the small New South wales’ township of Taylor’s Arms has claimed itself as the original Pub With No Beer, and, in fairness, it has some rights to that claim — it was, after all, frequented by songwriter Gordon Parsons, and did frequently run out of beer. The Cosmopolitan has since renamed itself The Pub With No Beer and positioned itself as a tourist destination, with a microbrewery, a fine restaurant, live musical performances, and walls lines with memorabilia from the Australian outback, as well as a Pub With No Beer Festival every Easter.

And, if you’re a weary jackaroo looking for a cold refreshment, you’re going to have to go to the former Cosmopolitan. Were you to attempt to get a drink at the original Pub With No Beer at the Day Dawn Hotel, you’d walk away as frustrated as any of the characters in Slim Dusty’s song. The Day Dawn Hotel, it turns out, was demolished in 1960. One could, presumably, purchase a can of Fosters, stand on the site of the old hotel, and toast its memory; one might as well celebrate its disappearance by enjoying a beer with no pub. (SPARBER)

The Bottle Gang Happy Hour Wiki

2007-05-06T07:39:00.000-06:00

WE AT THE BOTTLE GANG NEED TO ENLIST YOUR HELP, fellow drinkers. We have decided to create a comprehensive list of Minneapolis/St. Paul bars, happy hours, and specials, but it just too vast a task for this small cadre of professional drinkers. So we're inviting your help, in the manner favored at the start of this 21st century: We've created a wiki that can be edited by anybody. If you know the details of your favorite bar -- its address, its specials, its happy hours, bands that might be playing -- head on over to the wiki and plug the information in. Password: sazerac.

Cocktail I made last night: The Polish Sidecar

2007-05-04T18:46:00.001-06:00

IT'S ALWAYS NICE WHEN A drink surprises you. See, we at The Bottle Gang like to muck around a bit, and for every Stiletto, there's a Pink Panther. Or even an Alaska, which is a nice drink for certain circumstances, but we don't think you'll be rushing home to make one the way you would a good solid martini.

You may have noticed there's no picture for this drink. Well, guess what? It's Friday, and we're a little more interested in drinking and writing a quick recipe than setting up a photo shoot and all that argle bargle.

We picked up a giant handle of blackberry brandy a couple of weeks ago with the express purpose of making this drink, and it's nice to reach your goals. Here's the recipe for this lovely little drink, straight from a sight that might be Polish (it might be Swedish):

6 cl gin
3 cl bjørnebær-brandy
3 cl nypresset sitronsaft
friske bjørnebær

Lemme help you: combine 2 pts gin (we used Hendrick's, which continues to impress-- you'd think that a gin with hints of cucumber and rose petal would clash with a lot of ingredients in mixed drinks, but really: it's just lovely), 1 pt blackberry brandy and 1 pt fresh squeezed lemon juice in a shaker with ice and shake it like a Polaroid™ picture. Serve in a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with friske bjørnebær, er, fresh blackberries. Or possibly frisky blackberries. Your call.

Once again, it's all about the conversation the ingredients are having. A good mixed drink is like a good cocktail party-- everybody gets along famously, and everybody has something to say. The blackberry and the lemon are a naturally compatible pair, and the freshness of the cucumber overtones livens everything up a bit. The cumulative effect is not unlike some cosmos we've had, although with more zing and less sweet.

Highly recommended. (McPHERSON)

Five tequila cocktails for Cinco de Mayo

2007-05-04T11:55:00.000-06:00

SO TOMORROW IT IS THE FIFTH OF MAY, which is a pretty big deal if you are in Mexico -- although, to get a common misconception out of the way, it is not Mexican Independence Day (that falls on September 16). No, instead it is a celebration of the Battle of Puebla in 1862, which was a significant victory for the Mexicans against the occupying French army. By the way, had Mexico not defeated the French, it is widely assumed Napoleon III would have supported the Confederate side of the Civil War, which might have changed the course of history. So, unless you're one of those Americans who thinks the South should have won the War of Northern Aggression, you've got reason to celebrate Cinco de Mayo too.

So we'll be reaching for tequila tomorrow, instead of a shotgun and a Rebel Flag. We tend to prefer top shelf tequilas for these drinks, although it'll push the price sky high. Nonetheless, we're loathe to give up a good tequila. We recommend Patron, which has gotten quite popular later. We're also fans of Don Julio, Tres Generaciones, and Cabo Wabo, although we try to ignore that the latter is owned by Sammy Hagar. Lately we've been drinking a lot of Cielo, and find it agrees with us. Pick your own favorite tequila, and here are a few tequila cocktails to get you started:

Green Iguana

2 ounces sweet-and-sour mix
1/2 ounces tequila
1 ounce melon liqueur

Mix all ingredients with ice in a shaker or blender. Serve in a chilled Margarita or cocktail glass, the rim of which has been dipped in salt. Garnish with basil as you would add mint to a mojito.

Petroleo

1-1/2 ounces tequila
1 ounce Mexican lime juice
1 serrano chile halved from top to bottom

Pour the tequila and lime juice into a small glass. Add salt, pepper, Maggi sauce and Worcestershire sauce to taste. Mix ingredients. Add one half of the serrano chile and one or two ice cubes. Use Blanco or Reposado tequila.

Tequila Collins

2 ounces tequila
juice of 1/2 lemon
1 tsp powdered sugar
fill carbonated water

Shake well with cracked ice and strain into 12 ounce collins glass filled with ice cubes. Fill with carbonated water and stir. Decorate with a slice of lemon, orange and a cherry. Serve with a straw.

Tequila Sour

1-1/2 onces tequila
2 ounces lemon juice
1 teaspoon sugar

Blend ingredients with crushed ice and strain into sour glass. Garnish with a red cherry. Use Añejo for a better taste.

Tequila Stinger

1 1/2 oz white tequila
3/4 oz white creme de menthe

Shake well with ice, strain into large martini glass.(SPARBER)

Drinking Games: Top Notch Nymph

2007-05-03T08:30:00.000-06:00

This is a drinking game I invented, and has proven to be popular for years. The rules are quite simple: Get an old hard-core pornographic novel. They're usually available for a couple of bucks at a bin in those anonymous adult shops that you'll find in the downtown of any large city. (Minneapolis suggestion: Triple-X Superstore.)

Next you'll need some liquor and some naughty-minded friends. For liquor, we recommend shots of the trashiest sort possible -- Buttery Nipples, for example (Irish cream floated on top of butterscotch liqueur), or the deservedly despised Jello shot. I know, I know -- the Twin Cities' Guide to Sophisticated Drinking, eh? Well, we'll get back to Scotch and cognac soon enough, but sometimes you're just in the mood for some cheap liquor and licentiousness.

The game is simple: Each participant opens the book at random and reads a sentence. If the sentence is unspeakably filthy, they take a shot. Continue until the police and the tabloid reporters arrive.

The game gets its name from the book that inspired it, Top Notch Nymph by the formidably named Dana Furstenbed. This particular book is so filthy that the rules of the game had to be modified somewhat. Rather than take a shot when you read a notably vile passage, with Furstenbed's opus, you are only allowed to drink when you read a passge that is entirely innocent, of which there are precious few. Some samples passages, taken at random, I swear to god, and edited for our more prudish readers:

"She was fascinated by the deliberate strokes of Keith's pr***."

"Sandy swallowed his c*** and began her sucking motion."

"'Roberta, f*** me,' she whispered. 'F*** me hard. Ram that big c*** into me.'"

I can't really explain the last one either.

By he way, the Internet has allowed for a novel variation of Top Notch Nymph that I have dubbed "Suck and Screw Orgy" after the MP3 that inspired it. There's a surprising number of audiobloggers converting old erotic recordings into MP3s and posting them on their blog. Find one, download it, and play it to your assembled guests. Every time someone laughs, they must take a drink. Here's a sampling from Dinosaur Gardens to get you started, including the original Suck and Screw Orgy, which I highly recommend. (SPARBER)

The Bottle Gang presents these drinking games for entertainment and educational purposes only. Their presence on this site should not be construed as an endorsement of these games, and The Bottle Gang accepts no liability for the misuse of any information presented on this site. Alcohol should be drunk responsibly, and irresponsible or binge drinking can result in alcohol poisoning, injury, and even death.

When you can't live top shelf ...

2007-05-02T23:33:00.000-06:00

WE CONSIDER OURSELVES a pretty top shelf website, but sometimes, you can't drink top shelf. Maybe you're at a bar that just doesn't have the good stuff. Maybe someone else is buying. Or maybe you're in a band. See, most venues will give you drink tickets when you play, which are good for everything-- as long as it's on tap or below waist level.

What's a classy drinker to do under circumstances like this? There's a powerful argument for the sour drink at a time like this, but you have to know where you are. The Triple Rock Social Club has great sour mix, as does the Turf Club. First Ave and Seventh St. Entry? Pretty good. The Nomad's terrible when it comes to sour. Great at other things, like the Negroni, but their whiskey sours leave a lot to be desired.

There are a couple other tricks you can pull to make a drink made with rail liquor more appetizing. Knol Tate, of the bands Askeleton and Ela (and a veteran of many a drink ticket-fueled evening), makes any drink a "Tate" by asking for a lemon and a lime in it. The original "Knol Tate" is a whiskey sour with a lemon and a lime, but the other night at First Ave he was throwing back a "Tate Sunrise." By the way, you can totally order a "Knol Tate" at the Turf Club and they won't look at you funny.

Of course, you can always go with an amaretto sour, which is pretty much the candy of the gods. It's pretty hard to catch a buzz off of, given amaretto's relatively mild alcohol content, but damn if they're not tasty. Amaretto also varies a lot less between the top shelf variety (DiSaronno) and the lesser types. My co-editor, Max Sparber, turned me onto the amaretto Coke, which basically tastes like alcoholic Cherry Coke. It also works pretty well with Diet Coke, if you're watching your
figure.

Also great with Diet Coke are rum (get Malibu and ask for a lime to make a Diet Hawaiian, a drink I will stay lay claim to inventing, although I'll give Kevin Hunt credit for the name) and whiskey. Oddly, the combo of diet cola and whiskey provides a taste not unrelated to that of a Manhattan. My theory is that the diet cola (being less sweet than real cola) behaves more like bitters. Try it with a maraschino cherry and tell me I'm wrong.

One final tip: you might want to find out if the cola the bartenders are shooting out of that nifty little nozzle is completely off brand or just semi-generic. Bad diet cola in any drink can totally ruin it. (McPHERSON)

Get your drink on ... a T-shirt

2007-04-18T14:31:00.000-06:00

Or a button. Your choice. The Bottle Gang's online store is now open. We've got big plans, but for now, you'll have to content yourself with shirts bearing The Bottle Gang's Latin motto: "Bibimus, Bibemus, Biberimus." It's a motto handed down by generations of Bottle Gang members, but it means roughly, "We drink, We will drink, We will have drunk." Wear in good health.

Cocktail I made last night: The Alaska

2007-04-13T12:25:00.000-06:00

CHARTREUSE IS A MYSTERIOUS LIQUOR, AND it doesn't agree with some people. It was originally created by the Chartreuse Order of cloistered monks (aka The Carthusians). They'd already been around for 500 years when they got a present from the marshall of artillery for King Henry IV-- a manuscript describing an herbal liquer touted as "An Elixir of Long Life." You've gotta kind of give it up to any alcohol that's called an elixir. Of course, it took them over a hundred years to figure it out and so, in 1737, Chartreuse was born, an herbal liqueur whose secret recipes is known only to two monks and which consists of some 130 herbs. Today, there are two kinds: green (110 proof) and yellow (90 proof). The yellow is also a bit sweeter.

I've tried it in a couple different cocktails, one of which tasted a little bit like licking a tennis ball. It's a testy liquor with a distinct taste and a weird buzz, so you've got to be careful with it. Here's the best cocktail I've found so far to make use of it:

THE ALASKA

4 pts gin (Bombay Sapphire is a good choice)
1 pt green Chartreuse
3 dashes of orange bitters

Combine in shaker with ice, shake and pour into a chilled cocktail glass with a couple maraschino cherries. Don't know how to chill a cocktail glass? It's easy: put a bunch of ice in it and fill it with water before you start making the drink. Before you pour, dump out the ice and water. I'd also maybe wipe out the glass so you don't water down the drink.

This drink's kind of a bastard. Just know what you're getting into. Before my brother sprang Chartreuse on us, he explained that it amplifies everything else you drink after it, and you know what? I think it amplifies anything you drink with it, so that gin will go straight to your head. I wouldn't, for example, follow this up with a Brandy Alexander, which is what I did. Let's just say the couch and I were best friends for the rest of the night. (McPHERSON)

Cocktail I made last night: The Stiletto

2007-04-11T11:17:00.000-06:00

HERE'S THE GREAT NEWS ABOUT this drink: You can actually order it in a bar and, even if they don't know it, you have a pretty good chance of them being able to whip it up because it's not made of anything ridiculously exotic.

THE STILETTO

3 pts bourbon
2 pts lemon juice
1 pt amaretto

You know the drill by now. Shaker. Ice. Shake it. Serve in a cocktail glass. You can hit it up with a twist, which is nice, but I recommend cherries if you got 'em, because it makes it a little Manhattan-ish. I think the worst bourbon you can get away with is Jack Daniels here, and I don't mean that as a knock on JD, which was my first bourbon love. If you can get Knob Creek or Makers Mark in there, so much the better. It falls into the classic category of cocktails which don't seek to hide the flavor of the main alcohol so much as just ameliorate the drinking experience-- make it a little easier on you, you know? The amaretto softens the impact of the bourbon, and the acid of the lemon juice balances out the sweet. It's also a sturdy recipe that can be served on the rocks if you don't have a shaker handy, and you can always just crush a bunch of lemons in there if you don't have lemon juice. (McPHERSON)

Cocktail I made last night: The Pink Panther

2007-04-05T11:12:00.000-06:00

WHOA NELLY! IS THIS THING ever pink. I didn't really expect it going into the shaker, but it came out pinker than a roll of Owens-Corning insulation. Here's the deal: I've been dying to try a drink with a raw egg in it. Why? I can't tell you, but it just seems dangerous and mysterious, and isn't that what a cocktail should be?

THE PINK PANTHER

4 pts Reyka vodka
2 pts dry vermouth
1 pt Creme de Cassis
2 parts o.j.
1/2 egg white

Put all that in a shaker, shake it REAL well (based on the idea that maybe the vodka will kill germs in the egg) and serve in a chilled cocktail glass. I'm coming around to the idea that chilling the glass is muy importante for a good cocktail.

This however, is not exactly a good cocktail. I mean, it's all right, but that was way too much vermouth, and it overwhelms the good qualities of the orange juice and Creme de Cassis. It has potential, but I'd recommend cutting the dry vermouth to 1 pt or even less. (McPHERSON)

BAR REVIEW: Town Talk Diner

2007-04-01T10:11:00.000-06:00

TOWN TALK DINER
2707 1/2 E. Lake St.
Minneapolis, MN 55406
612.722.1312
towntalkdiner.com

THE TOWN TALK DINER'S GOT SOME SERIOUSLY tasty vittles, make no mistake, but that's not what I'm here to talk about. Although do yourself a favor and try the cheese curds, which are dipped in scallion and caper batter and served with housemade ketchup that takes me back to Home in New York. I'm here to talk drinks, which are quite the highlight at this recently renovated and re-opened (Feb. 17, 2006) diner.

First things first: What I didn't get. You have to love a bar that provides beer in sizes from 7 oz. (Miller High Life and Heineken) all the way up to 40 oz. (Mickey's, Schlitz and Miller High Life). Not to mention they serve the 40s in champagne buckets with ice. They've got a solid selection of beers in bottles and cans (including a selection of Bell's, Anchor Steam and my personal favorite, Samuel Smith's Nut Brown in bottles and local brew heros Surly in cans) and they also have an amazing selection of what they term adult malts/floats. These things looked great every time they came flying by our table on servers' trays-- almost too good. Too much to have with dinner, for sure, but just picture this: Guinness with vanilla ice cream in it. You've got the drift.

I like a bar that prides itself on its traditional drinks, and Town Talk has plenty of suggestions for you, from the Manhattan to the Stilleto, and they put the options for your martini right on the menu for you: Up, Rocks, Gibson, Gimlet. Rail martinis (which I don't recommend-- what you save your wallet will come out of your head the next morning) will only run you $4, but even for top shelf it's only $6.

My first stop was a Tom Collins, which is gin, lemon juice, sugar syrup and sparkling water. The Town Talk garnishes it not with a Maraschino cherry, but with some kind of alcohol-soaked cherry. It's a little unexpected, but quite tasty. I remember this great place in Bennington, VT, called the Brasserie, which I believe is no longer around, but which made their lemonade with Tom Collins mix, so I have a joyful childhood association with the drink that bears little similarity to what it is in its full-on alcoholic mode. They'll make it with either gin or vodka, and I went with Reyka vodka, which is my current fave. One thing I like about old school cocktails is how they're not super sweet, even if they have sugar in them. It's more about taking alcohol and adding soda, lemon and a little sweetness to make them easier to drink, it seems, and Town Talk's Tom Collins fits the bill just right.

My lovely dining companion got a Stilleto, which is mostly bourbon, a little amaretto and a whole bunch of fresh lemon juice. The amaretto eases up the bourbon a bit, while the lemon counterbalances the sweetness of the amaretto. It's one of those exceedingly simple drinks that it seems has disappeared from most bars. Maybe you can walk into a lot of bars, tell 'em you want a Stinger, and you'll get what you want, but it sure doesn't seem like it.

Lastly, I tried a gin fizz, which I was getting confused with a flip. Really, I was gunning for something with a raw egg in it, which I want to try, but am kind of scared of. So the gin fizz is gin (I picked Hendrick's, natch), lemon juice, sugar and sparkling water. So I guess not all that different than a Tom Collins, but I found it more refreshingly lemon-y than the Tom Collins. It seemed whipped and, well, fizzier, which is all to the good. Calley said if she had to drink gin, this would be the way she would do it.

We had drinks with dinner, but there is an actual bar portion which has been converted from the original diner. So instead of a high, wooden bar, you get a low-slung counter with swiveling seats, not unlike the one at Al's Breakfast in Dinkytown. So, it's a bit novel, and it looks like it gets a bit crowded around the bar on the weekend nights, what with people waiting for tables and all. Still, the atmoshpere is convivial, and not rushed or harried. There's plenty of staff, which makes everything run super-smoothly, it seems. (McPHERSON)

DRINK UPDATE: The drink formerly known as the Yellow Cake Batter Martini

2007-03-28T21:55:00.000-06:00

THIS IS REALLY MORE of just an update on a previously covered drink. I first got to know it at Fuji-Ya, so props to them, but I've experimented with it a bit and gotten a reasonable recipe together. Plus I gave it a banging new name, because, as you know, if it ain't gin and vermouth, it ain't a martini.

THE DRUNKEN HINES

3 shots of Svedka vanilla vodka
1 shot white Creme de Cacao
Splash of Frangelico

Combine all the ingredients in a shaker with ice. Shake. Serve in cocktail glasses, preferably stemless ones because they're just so bamf. Garnish with a Pocky stick, 'cause there ain't no other way. (McPHERSON)

Saint Patrick's Day 2007: Minneapolis and St. Paul Events Calendar

2007-03-15T08:25:00.000-06:00

ST. PAUL

St. Patrick's Day Parade
12:00 noon
Parade route begins at at Fourth and Sibley Streets, heads West on Fourth Street and ends at Rice Park.

IMDA St. Patrick's Day Irish Celebration
10 am - 4:30 pm; $5 adults / $3 kids & seniors
Get your green on! Celebrate the 26th annual St. Patrick's Day at Landmark Center. Irish food, lively music, Irish dancing, and authentic vendors make this a tradition you can't pass up! You can get more details by going to the IMDA Web site. Produced in partnership with Minnesota Landmarks.

Dubliner Pub
2162 University Ave W
St Paul, MN 55114
(651) 646-5551
Music: Live music all day featuring Paddy Wagon and Todd Menten & Tom Dahill

Half Time Rec
1013 Front Ave
St Paul, MN 55103
(651) 488-8245
Bands: Music starts at 12 noon. Bands include Hammer Schlagen and The Irish Brigade.

The Happy Gnome
498 Selby
Saint Paul, MN 55102
(651) 287-2018
Bands: Music starts at 1pm. Bands include The Sweet Colleens, Swamp Kings, The Scottie Miller Band

Matty B's Supper Club
354 Wabasha St N
St Paul, MN 55102
(651) 291-0404
Bands: Music starts at 11am. Bands include The Macalaster Bagpipers, The Daoine Sidhe Irish band, Half Mile Back band, The Chris Hawkey Power Play Band.

O'Gara's Bar and Grill
164 Snelling Ave N
St Paul, MN 55104
(651) 644-3333
Events: 3:00-6:00pm: Prizes and giveaways with on-air personality Jeremy Stone of Drive 105
1:30pm: The world's shortest St. Patrick's Day Parade, led by the Brian Boru Irish Pipe Band through O'Gara's bar, restaurant, and garage.
Bands: Orange McWhip, Tony McSims Band, Love Songs for Angry McMen, GB O'Leighton, Bud O'Farley, Mark Starry with Dan Neale, Tim Mahoney, Jud's New Harmony

MINNEAPOLIS

St. Patrick's Day Parade
6:30pm
Parade route begin between 11th and 12th Street on Nicollet Mall and continues down Nicollet to 5th Street

Blarney Pub and Grill
412 14th Ave Se
Minneapolis, MN 55414
(612) 331-1527
Bands: Brothers Laurent, Holiday

Keegan's Irish Pub
16 University Ave NE
Minneapolis, MN 55413
(612) 252-0880
Bands: Erin Rogue, Minnesota Police Pipe Band, and Drunk & Disorderly

Kieran's Irish Pub
330 2nd Ave S
Minneapolis, MN 55401
(612) 339-4499
Bands: Music starts at 2pm. Bands include Paddy O'Brien & Chulrua, Alicia Corbett, Locklin Road, Paddy, Paddy O'Brian & Steve Mulligan, Rince Na Chroi School of Dance Performance, Gael Force (from NYC), Erin Rouge

Kip's Irish Pub
9970 Wayzata Blvd
St Louis Park, MN, 952.367.5070
Specials: $12.95 Irish Buffet
Bands: Music starts at 12 noon. Bands include Glengariff and The Tim Malloy's.

The Local: An Irish Pub
931 Nicollet Mall
Minneapolis, MN 55402
(612) 904-1000
No current information. Check back for updates.

The Nomad
501 Cedar Ave
Minneapolis, MN. 612.338.6424
Specials: Free beer until someone pees.
BANDS: Live Irish music all day.

O'Donovan's Irish Pub
700 1st Ave N
Minneapolis, MN 55403
(612) 317-8896
Bands: Music starts at 10am. Bands include Seamus, Todd Menton, David K Band, Brian Baru Pipe Band

The Shout House
650 Hennepin Ave
Minneapolis, MN 55403
(612) 337-6700
Specials: $2 Finnegans and $4 Car Bombs good from open until 6:30. $3 Finnegans therafter; Free buffet from 2 while supplies last; free Bushmill’s sampling at 6:00pm.
Bands: Music starts at 3:45pm. Bands include Brian Baru Pipe Band and live dueling pianos.

CONCERTS

First Avenue
701 1st Ave N
Minneapolis, MN 55403
(612) 332-1775 Boiled in Lead's 24th Annual St. Patrick's Day Concert
6:00pm. $10/$12.

Triple Rock Social Club
629 Cedar Ave S, Mpls.; 612.333.7399
Second Annual Thin Lizzy Tribute Night w/Jailbreak, Heavy Sleeper, Paddy Wag (Members of Clair De Lune), Tom Hanks (Grant from Passions)
9:00pm. $5

O'Shaughnessy Auditorium
2004 Randolph Ave
St Paul, MN 55105
651.690-6700
Great Big Sea
8pm. $26/$28.

Nativity of Our Lord Catholic Church
1900 Wellesley Ave, St. Paul; 651.604.4466
Magnum Chorum: Songs of Ireland
8:00 pm. $18-$21.

CEILI DANCING AND COMMUNITY EVENTS

Fitzgerald Theater
10 E Exchange St, St. Paul; 651.290.1221
St. Patrick's Day Children's Matinee: Irish Tales of Elves, Leprechauns, and Fairies
2:00pm. $10.

11th annual Minnesota Folk Festival Saint Patrick's Day Ceili
Friday, March 17, 7 pm.
CSPS Hall
383 Michigan Avenue
St. Paul, MN.
$9 at the door. Seniors and children 5 to 16 are $4.50. Children under 5 are free.
Music: Barra - Irish Dance Instructor: Ann Wiberg

2nd Annual St. Patrick's Day Party fundraiser for Fáilte Minnesota
Friday, March 16, 2007 -- 6:30 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.
Rosemount Community Center – Banquet Room
13885 South Robert Trail (Highway 3)
Rosemount MN
Tickets: $20 for adults and children over 6 (children 6 and under, free); Ticket price includes meal (Irish stew, soda bread, salad, dessert, coffee, tea) and free pop all night.

33rd annual Minnesotans for a United Ireland (MUI) Saint Patrick's Day Ceili
Saturday, March 17, 2007, from 6:30 to 10:00 p.m.
Hillcrest Recreation Center
1978 Ford Parkway in Saint Paul
Live music by The Blackbirds, dances taught and called by Mike Whalen. Easy dance lessons will be offered at 6:30, with dancing to follow at 7:00. Admission is $8, seniors and children under 9 get in free. There is also a $1 discount with a non-perishable food shelf donation.

DISCUSS ST. PADDY'S DAY IN THE BOTTLE GANG FORUM!

SxSW REPORT: The Driskill Hotel Bar

2007-03-14T10:25:00.001-06:00

THE DRISKILL HOTEL
604 Brazos St.
Austin, TX 78701
800.252.9367 | 512.474.5911

GOD BLESS THE HOTEL BAR. Here's the skinny on the Driskill Hotel: It was built by Jesse Lincoln Driskill in 1886, on what was then Pecan St. and is now 6th St., which is pretty much where everything goes down for SxSW. Another helpful factoid? While the Capitol building was being built, the state legislature used the Driskill for meetings and official business.

This giant bull's head adorns the fireplace in the bar, which has all the woody ambiance you'd expect from a quality hotel bar. The ceilings are ornately decorated, a large bar sits in the middle of the room and various couches and tables are arrayed around it, and there's even a high piano which has stools encircling it. I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've ever seen it, but I already know I love it. Sitting around a piano? That's great.

They have an extensive selection of liquors and beers, including some of the earmarks of a quality place; Red Breast Irish whiskey in particular, but they've got all the top shelf stuff. Plus, there's a good spread of specialty cocktails.

My choice? The Colonel Driskill, which is listed under martinis, but isn't really a martini. It's Corzo Reposado tequila, Cointreau, a splash of sweet & sour, and jalapeno stuffed olives. You read right: It's basically a margarita with olives in it, but man it kicks ass. They rim the glass with salt, so the salty sweet balance is nigh perfect. This bad boy will set you back $14, though. Our prompt and awesome waitress also brings mixed nuts and a dish with more jalapeno stuffed olives.

Matt Perkins (of radio promoters Vitriol and the Nomad Pub) has a Sidecar, which is up to snuff, but also $14. He switches to a local beer called Live Oak, which shares its name with a street here in Austin. Lindsay Kimball, she of 89.3 the Current, sticks with Amstel Light, which is a solid choice to go with food, which arrives shortly.

This is not your average pub fare. Kimball gets the grilled cheese, which she says is the best grilled cheese she's ever had. It has truffle oil, which is never a mistake. I get the steak sandwich, which has a great horseradish sauce on it, and Perkins goes with the burger, which is a little more well-done than he generally likes it, but the presentation was good and his general satisfaction was high. "Four out of five stars," he says. He also introduces me to a condiment combination of ketchup and mayo. I've seen it in the movies, but never tried it. Perkins is right. It's great.

I switch to an Old Fashioned, which is good. There's not as much muddled fruit in there as I generally like to see, but the balance is right and it's a drink I'd recommend, especially at half the price tag of the Colonel Driskill. However, if you go, you owe it to yourself to try at least one of those bad boys. (McPHERSON)

SXSW REPORT: Lone Star Beer

2007-03-13T12:37:00.000-06:00

CHICAGOANS HAVE THEIR OLD Style, Minnesotans have Grain Belt Premium and Texans have Lone Star Beer. I don't think they have an official sponsorship, but Lone Star may as well be the official beer of South by Southwest. It's available everywhere here (and, incidentally, at the Triple Rock Social Club) and just one sip is enough to give anyone who's come to SXSW a kind of contact high.

So what's it got to recommend it? Pretty much the same downhome appeal that leads Midwesterners to champion any of the aforementioned brands, or Pabst Blue Ribbon or any other such low brow beer that isn't a Lowenbrau. It's as much a statement of non-conformity as it is a statement of a populist sentiment. It ain't something so disgusting as Bud Light or Coors Light, but it's not so pretentious as even a Sam Adams. It's not so much a flavor experience as it is a vessel for good times.

All that being said, it tastes a heck of a lot better than PBR, and it's not nearly so sweet as Premium. It's got a little more on the ball than Old Style as well. Somehow, without being tremendously distinctive, it manages to be just pretty good at a whole lot of things. Like a five-tool player on a baseball team, you want it around when you need something for any occasion. Better yet, it's the Shane Battier of beers: A solid team guy whose stats don't accurately reflect his immeasurable contribution to the team. Plus, Battier plays for the Houston Rockets.

Lone Star Beer and Shane Battier, we at the Bottle Gang salute you. (McPHERSON)

DISCUSS LONE STAR, AND OTHER REGIONAL BEERS, IN OUR FORUM.

A South-By-Southwest Special Report: Death Drinks of Rock Stars

2007-03-11T10:18:00.000-06:00

ANYBODY ELSE get the eerie sense, when watching a show like MTV’s Cribs, that every time the camera focuses on a rock star’s swimming pool we are seeing the site of a future drowning? It might be, oh, let’s say Tricky’s swimming pool instead of Brian Jones’s, but it doesn’t matter. Within a year or two, there will be a bloated corpse floating at the pool’s surface; a fact worth remembering as tomorrow's rock stars demonstrate their chops at this week's annual South by Southwest Festival in Austin, TX, where Bottle Gang cocreator Steve McPherson is spending his week, and from which he will be filing reports.

Rock and Roll just seems to have a natural affinity for self-destruction, and, often enough, a rock star’s decline will be spectacular. When they’re not dying in plane crashes, a la Buddy Holly and Lynyrd Skynyrd, they’re crashing cars (Marc Bolan), getting crushed under a bus (Metallica’s Cliff Burton — twice in one night!), or just offing themselves (Johnny Ace, Roy Buchanan, Kurt Cobain, et al). Sometimes they simply drink themselves to death.

We’re not talking about the rock stars who drank and died young, such as that of the hard-boozing Jim Morrison, whose bathtub heart attack at age 27 has longed fueled speculations that his appetite for alcohol and drugs eventually simply stopped his heart. As much as Janis Joplin loved her Southern Comfort, it was heroin that killed her, also at age 27. Certainly booze played a factor in Jimi Hendrix’s death in 1970 — but mostly because he had used it to wash down nine sleeping pills.

We won’t concern ourselves with these famous casualties of the rock and roll lifestyle. Not when there are rockers whose ends came exclusively as a result of hootch. These are the men — and they are all men on this list — for who alcohol was their poison, and had the steely resolve to keep pouring the stuff down their throats until it did them in. Rock and Roll is famous for those who live its hard-drinking lifestyle, and some of them went ahead and died from it.

We give you the men and their drinks, and those of you plucking a scratched up old guitar while sipping Jack and Cokes and dreaming of fame might pause to reflect on them.

John Bonham: The man behind the ferocious drums on Led Zeppelin’s albums was a former construction worker from Worcestershire, England, with a taste for breaking drumheads. He had an intense dislike of the itinerant life of a rock star, though, and took to drinking shots of vodka. On September 20 of 1980, Bonham, en route to rehearsal for an upcoming tour of America, began binge drinking, downing four quadruple vodkas. He continued drinking throughout the evening, consuming an estimated three-dozen shots of vodka before bedding down at Jimmy Page’s house. By morning, he was dead. The coroner determined that Bonham had died in a manner that seems especially popular among rock stars: He had choked on his own vomit.

Rory Gallagher: “I wanna try some one hundred percent,” Irish rocker Rory Gallagher sang in a song presciently titled “Too Much Alcohol,” ending the song with the words “Then I won’t feel a thing at all.” Gallagher developed an exceptional reputation as a guitarist and bluesman in the Seventies: He was invited to become a permanent guitarist for the Rolling Stones and took the title of Melody Maker’s Musician of the Year from Eric Clapton in 1972. Gallaghar toured relentlessly, appearing in grueling, marathon performances, one of which was preserved in a film titled Irish Tour ’74. Unfortunately, Gallagher was also a drinker, although he seems to have been unusually discreet about the fact. His consumption was significant enough to destroy his liver: Rolling Stone lists the cause of his 1995 death as being cirrhosis, but most of his other biographers demur from being so explicit, simply stating that Gallagher died from complications brought about by liver transplant surgery. True though that might be, it's an unsatisfactory explanation. After all, Gallagher’s original liver didn’t just go bad all on its own. But if Gallagher’s fans wish to be delicate about the subject of alcoholism, so be it. We do not lack for rockers whose drinking is a public spectacle.

Ron “Pigpen” McKernan: For some reason, it just doesn’t seem like a member of the Grateful Dead should have died from alcohol abuse. After all, this is a band who will forever be associated with the two great countercultural drugs of the Sixties: LSD and marijuana. These drugs were supposed to liberate the spirit; if someone were to die of either (a rare scenario, except for the occasional acid casualty who, convinced he can fly, leaps from a roof), the death should be suitably trippy. After all, wasn’t it at a Dead concert that a fan reportedly simply evaporated in an ecstatic trance? Ron McKernan, known since high school as “Pigpen,” wouldn’t enjoy such a metaphysical end. No, the singer, harmonica player, and organist for the Dead had fashioned an image for himself that drew equally from old timey bluesmen and contemporary bikers, and McKernan’s steered clear of hippie drugs in favor of Thunderbird wine and Southern Comfort. McKernan drank so much that it only took a few years for his liver to begin to fail; he quit alcohol in 1971, but two years later was dead of a hemorrhage in his booze-weakened gastrointestinal tract.

John Panozzo: If pressed, the casual fan of Styx might be able to name its singer and keyboardist, Dennis DeYoung. But this Chicago-based prog rock band from the Sixties and Seventies would not have enjoyed its four consecutive triple platinum albums were it not for the band’s distinctive rhythm section, made up of twin brothers, Chuck and John Panozzo. The band named themselves after the river the dead pass across on their way to Hades, but, for John Panozzo, his passage into the afterworld would be across a river of booze. He died in 1996 of the same cause as Ron McKernan: a hemorrhaged gastrointestinal tract, in this case brought on by a decade of alcoholism that had made it impossible for Panozzo to participate in any of his band’s recordings or tours in the mid-90s. Bandmember Tommy Shaw penned a saccharine ode to Panozzo for the 1997 live album Return to Paradise titled “Dear John,” which included the following lyrics: “Dear John, how are you; God knows its heaven where you are.” Wherever he wound up, one thing is certain: Thanks to his taste for drink, John Panozzo managed to be the first member of his band to actually get to the river Styx.

Bon Scott: Prior to taken the reigns as lead singer of the Australian rock band AC/DC, the Scottish-born Ronald Belford Scott had quite a diverse career, including playing in a pipe band, spending several months in a coma after a motorcycle accident, and being rejected by the Australian Army, who claimed he was “socially maladjusted.” The singer, better known as Bon Scott, howled his way through most of AC/DC’s best known albums, singing lascivious ditties that barely qualified as single-entendres, fronting a band best known for noisy, stripped down power chords. As a performer, Scott seemed every inch the wild man, and so, on February 20, 1980, it came as a surprise to nobody when he was found dead in his car after a night of binge drinking. Scott, famously, once sang that “it’s a long way to the top if you want to rock and roll.” Unfortunately, he discovered that, with the help of too much alcohol, it can be a very fast plummet downward.

Gene Vincent: Gene Vincent nearly died in 1955. The Virginia-born rockabilly singer responsible for “Be-Bop-a-Lu-La” was in the same car accident that killed Eddie Cochran, a fellow rockabilly now best remembered for the song “Summertime Blues.” The accident left Vincent with a leg brace and constant pain, which might explain why the singer started drinking. Then again, after The Beatles arrived in the United States in 1963, Vincent’s career bottomed out — like many other early rock stars, he languished during the British Invasion. Ironically, the only place Vincent could make a living was in England, and he spent most of the Sixties touring Europe while English pop acts stormed the American charts, which might drive anybody to drink. Vincent’s increased dependence on alcohol sent his health into a steep decline, and he returned to the United States in 1971, where he died in October of a heart attack. Perhaps it would have been best for Vincent had he died in the crash that took Eddie Cochran’s life. It would have spared him years of pain and decline. But Vincent recorded several sides of country music in his last few years of life that are gorgeous and haunted, suggesting that, had liquor not killed him when it did, he might have had a career ahead of him singing honky tonk. Country music would have been a good for Vincent, as it was for fellow disgraced rockabilly star Jerry Lee Lewis. After all, it’s a style of music that encourages singers to weep into their drink and complain of their troubles, and Gene Vincent had troubles to spare. (SPARBER)

Discuss this story in our forum.

The Yellow Cake Batter Martini

2007-03-08T19:58:00.000-06:00

NO, NO, NO, NO--NOT THE kind you buy from Niger.

It's more like this-------------->

And boy if it isn't delicious. And yes, you can start yelling at me now about how it's not really a martini according to my own rules because it has vodka instead of gin in it, but here's what I say to that: Phooey. I'm not saying it's a martini; it's just called a martini. When I go to Fuji-Ya for happy hour sushi, I want something girly and tasty and this fits the bill nicely.

The recipe is simple: Stoli Vanil, White Creme de Cacao and a bit of Frangelico. Put it in a shaker, shake that sumgun and then serve in a cocktail glass with a cherry. Bonus point for tying the cherry stem in a knot with your tongue. Thank you, Audrey Horne. You know what else would be good in there? One of those Pocky Snacks. Especially if they're the Men's variety, as pictured there.

What's great about the drink is how eerily it replicates the taste of good old Duncan Hines yellow cake batter. I can't say exactly what the proportions are for the ingredients, since I haven't tried to make one myself, but all I need is some Stoli Vanil and Frangelico and I'll be good to go. I'll get back to you on what the exact measurements are once I get them down. (McPHERSON)

Drinkers Ahoy! The Bottle Gang Forum and Social Network

2007-03-08T13:58:00.000-06:00

THE BOTTLE GANG is pleased to announce our own forum and social network. Consider it a place where local drinkers can meet, get to know each other, and chat about such essential topics as favorite dive bars, drinking songs, and cocktail lounges. Looking for a drinking buddy? Here's the place to find one! Looking for some cocktail tips? We've got them! Looking for a sleazy midnight hookup? Well, all right, we'll see what we can do!

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Drinker's Cinema: Nightmare Alley

2007-03-07T08:49:00.000-06:00

POOR PETE. The sallow-faced, haunted Pete Krumbein is not the main character of 1947’s carnival noir masterpiece Nightmare Alley — no, that honor belongs to Stanton Carlisle, a handsome young jerk of a roustabout, played by Tyrone Power with a quick smile and murderous eyes. Carlisle is headed for a fall, but first he must rise high enough for it to mean something, and the film adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham's tough-minded novel takes Carlisle about as high as a two-bit hustler can get, running his own empire of sham spiritualism, bilking millionaires with parlor-trick mind-readings. Then the film takes Carlisle just as low: Suffice it to say that when the first scene of a movie has a carnie wondering aloud how a man can be brought to a condition where he works as a geek, the subject of the film is going to be finding the answer to that question.

But we do not concern ourselves with Carlisle here. Instead, we look to a smaller character in the film, another sham mind reader, Pete, who has already had his fall. Carlisle and Pete have an uneasy friendship. They are, after all, bedding the same woman, the aging and very willing mitt camp tarot reader Zeena, played by Joan Blondell. With his instinct for cold reading and his commanding presence, Carlisle is an echo of the man Pete used to be, before Zeena’s sexual treachery drove him to drink. Now Pete spends his days slumped under a tent, working just hard enough to earn money for a bottle of rotgut. Pete was a star once on the vaudeville stage, performing impossible mentalist routines with the help of a two-person code he cooked up with Zeena. Magnificently played by Ian Kieth, Pete occasionally shows flashes of his former self, a man who was at once both kindly and charismatic. One night at the carnival, while the geek roams among the tents screaming from night terrors, Pete mesmerizes Carlisle with a demonstration of his act. He stares into a bottle and seems to draw out of it lost tales of Carlisle’s own past, and then he laughs at Carlisle. He’s been hustling the younger man, telling him stock readings that fit everybody. “Every boy had a mother who waited for them,” Pete says, grinning savagely. “Every boy had a dog.”

There are many cinematic drinkers who warrant our attention, but we will focus here on Pete, because he serves as an important warning. Pete’s a good man gone wrong, thanks to betrayal and alcohol; both will eventually kill him, and he seems to want it that way. Without a drink, he’s capable of very little but staggering around the camp, shaking deliriously and begging for alcohol. But, when drunk, he does very little but crawl into a corner and sleep, or stare suspiciously at passers-by. Carlisle wants Pete’s act, he wants Pete’s woman, he wants Pete’s fame, but you can’t have everything that was good in Pete’s life without being infected by some of the bad. When Zeena’s tarot readings for Stanton Carlisle begin to turn up the hanged man card, which had been Pete’s card, and when Carlisle himself begins to surreptitiously purchase bottles of bathtub gin from bellhops, his die is cast. He would do well to remember the words Pete uttered when he drank from his last bottle of alcohol, because Pete’s misfortune will soon be Carlisle’s.

Pete’s last drink was poison, from a bottle of rubbing alcohol, accidentally offered to him as corn mash. When asked how it tasted, Pete screwed up his weary face and complained: “Awful.” Then he grinned, a gallows grin, filled with dark humor, before adding “I wish a had a barrel of it.” (SPARBER)

That’s hot: the toddy

2007-03-05T17:24:00.000-06:00

A FUNNY THING HAPPENED on my way to the kettle a few weeks ago … I passed over the Sleepytime tea for a persuasive bottle of Jim Beam. Splashing a shot (or two) of the pungent bourbon into a boiling cup of water, I instinctively added a teaspoon of raw sugar and a generous squeeze of fresh lemon to create My New Favorite Drink.

Cupping the piping hot mug in my hands as the fragrant steam wafted beneath my nose was a pleasure in and of itself; but sipping the smooth concoction made me forget about winter, cured my nagging sore throat and left me sleeping like a baby.

What I'd unconsciously brewed is a twist on an age-old drink that originated in Scotland: the hot toddy. There are many variations of the hot toddy, but generally there are three basic components: liquor, hot liquid and sweetener.

Rum, especially spiced rum, is tasty, but so are brandy, whiskey and bourbon. The beauty of making hot toddies is that you can experiment with a variety of flavors and perfect your own signature blend. Just add any of these spirits to hot water, tea, coffee or cocoa (hint: warm the glass or mug first); sweeten with sugar, simple syrup or honey; and flavor with citrus (fresh lemon, lime or orange) and/or spices (cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg).

Spring is just around the corner, so don’t let the last few weeks of winter melt away without trying a hot toddy. Here are a couple recipes to get you started:

Hot Jimmy
Serves one. Fill a cup or glass two-thirds full with boiling water. Add sugar and lemon and stir. Add bourbon, stir, sip and enjoy.

1 c. boiling water
1 tsp. sugar in the raw
2 lemon wedges
1 – 2 shots Jim Beam

Rum Toddy
Serves four. Spread sugar on small plate. Dip rims of mugs into cold water, then dip moistened rims into sugar. Mix rum and honey in a measuring cup; add boiling water and stir to blend. Divide among prepared mugs, garnish with cinnamon sticks and lemon slices and serve.

¼ c. sugar
2/3 c. spiced rum
4 T. honey
3 c. boiling water
4 cinnamon sticks
4 lemon slices (SARTOR)

The Myth of the Scottish Picnic

2007-03-05T15:02:00.000-06:00

DISCOVERY PROCEEDS FROM research, folks. Research and happenstance. And cool packaging. I discovered Hendrick's Gin, which hails from Scotland, land of my forebears, a few weeks ago while on a routine trip to Zipp's Liquors on Franklin Ave. in Minneapolis. Incidentally, Zipp's has recently become my liquor store of choice, not least because of its presence on my homebound route from work, but also in large part because of their phenomenal selection, resident weiner dog and, now, their boldly-colored website.

So Hendrick's is a gin which is infused with two things: cucumber and rose petals. Now, I like gin. I'm with Oscar B. Goodman, the mayor of Las Vegas. Max recommended drinking Hendrick's with soda and a slice of cucumber which makes fantastic good sense. I don't keep cucumbers on hand, though. Sorry, I just don't roll that way. So I made a standard martini (and I, unlike Mayor Goodman, like a dash of dry vermouth in mine) with Hendrick's and found the cucumber and rose notes added a nice complexity to the usual juniper flavor, even with olives.

So then last night I went to the 331 Club for Chuck and Sean's Trivia after I got done with Homegrown for the night, and my good buddy Rob Skoro was tending bar. Now I like Skoro because he's an adventurous drinkmaker. This is the man who introduced me to Diet Coke and red wine on the rocks, aka ghetto sangria. Which is surprisingly delicious on a hot night. But this was a cold night, and I saw they had Hendrick's and so asked if they had cucumbers. They didn't (hey, neither do I), but Rob said he could make me a "Scottish Picnic," which he said is Hendrick's and soda and a pickle for garnish. I'm crazy and down-for-whatever so I got one. And it was pretty great. Pickles qua garnish opens up a whole new range of possible decorations for drinks. The mind reels when you think of the possibilities when it comes to different kinds of pickles. I'm a firm believer that good ingredients can almost always improve a drink, especially if it seems weird. Cheap-ass gin and soda plus a crappy deli pickle? No thanks. But Hendrick's, soda and one of these bad boys? Serve it up. I plan on researching this. I'm eyeing the Hot Kosher Spears for possible inclusion in a Hendrick's-based drink in the near future.

The bad news? This drink is demonstrably NOT called a Scottish Picnic. Webtender doesn't kow about it, Extra Tasty doesn't know about it. And a web search for the term turns up zilch in the way of drink references. I say we call it "Pickle Wing." Since it's Hendrick's and gin. Or "Manic Depress-gin." "Spanish Pickle Magic?" (McPHERSON)

Bar review: Dan Kelly's

2007-03-02T09:14:00.000-06:00

Dan Kelly's Bar and Grill
212 S 7th St
Minneapolis, MN 55402
612-333-2644

THE FIRST THING I CHECK when I walk into an Irish bar is their selection of Irish whiskys, and Dan Kelly's comes up a short. They have Black Bush, which I ordered, but our server looked confused when I asked about Red Breast. "We're owned by a Jewish guy," she explained, "so we don't have much of a selection." To their credit, though, the Black Bush came with a large pour -- about five fingers of the whisky, when the best you can expect is three fingers elsewhere, and only came to about $5 per glass, which is quite reasonable for a whisky that retails for about $40 per bottle.

Truth be told, despite the generic four-leaf clover they use as their logo, there's not much about Dan Kelly's that's Irish -- it belong to a category of bar I've begun calling "Irishish," in that the biggest concession these bars make toward their faux-Hiberian identity is to serve a few Irish-styled beers (it's Killian's Irish Red from Colorado at this one, which, thanks to tonight's special, was only $3 per pint), and a few generalized bits of decoration from the Emerald Isle. In truth, Dan Kelly's is about as Irish as a Swedish girl in a "Kiss Me I'm Irish" t-shirt on St. Patrick's day, and, while I know that everybody gets to claim to be Irish on St. Pat's, they just ain't.

That being said, Dan Kelly's is the sort of downtown neighborhood bar that does brisk business with the afternoon lunch and after work dinner crowds from the nearby business and government buildings (many of their menu items are named after nearby buildings) -- there's some concessions to upscale dining, such as a surprisingly diverse wine list, including Tempranillo and Manyana, as well as a selection of frou frou cocktails, including one called The Green Hornet, consisting of Absolut Vodka and Midori Melon Liqueur. They also offer a lunchtime club, offering certain discounts for patrons who regular swing by for lunch. The menu is diverse, including a surprising number of Walleye dishes, but mostly consisting of typical pub food: Buffalo wings, burgers, cold sandwiches, nachos, etc. I suppose they figure that if you're really desperate for British food, you're just a few blocks down from Kieran's; while you're at Dan Kelly's, you're going to eat like an American.

The pub itself is rather lovely, featuring a long wooden bar decorated with Tiffany-styled stained glass opposite a row of intimate booths. The night I was there, they were playing a fine selection of classic blues, including Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson, which generated a much mellower atmosphere than you usually find in a downtown bar, although, as Dan Kelly's is a popular pre- and post-sporting events hangout, it can get quite full and noisy. The bar plays to this sort of crowd well -- they offer free parking if you spend $20, which isn't hard to do in a bar, and they offer a broad assortment of specials on popular beer brands, such as Budweiser and Leinenkugel's. It's not a beer snob's paradise, and it's not much of an Irish pub, but as an unshowy American businessman's bar, Dan Kelly's is friendly and comfortable. Some folks just ain't looking to indulge their ethnic identity or raise their pinky fingers while sipping sophisticated cocktails during their lunch break, I guess. (SPARBER)

The Drinking Song: "Cigareetes, Whusky and Wild, Wild Women"

2007-02-26T07:51:00.000-06:00

AMERICANS NEVER SEEM TO BE entirely satisfied with sinning unless they can regret it afterward. “I used to smoke and drink and dance the hootchy koo,” LaVern Baker sang in one of her best songs, and bully for her, as it sounds like she must have had a grand old time. But just when the listener is thinking that Miss Baker sounds like a great sort of gal, she roars out, “but now I’m SAVED.” She has, like so many before her, traded in her entertaining previous life for a stern-faced current one, standing on a street corner, banging a bass drum, and railing against wickedness.

Tim Spencer, the gangly, strong-featured cofounder of The Sons of the Pioneers, used to smoke and drink and dance the hootchy koo as well, it seems. He authored a song about the subject, released by his singing cowboy group (whose members included Roy Rogers) in 1947 and called, magnificently, “Cigareetes, Whusky, and Wild, Wild Women.” Over a background of a heavily plunked double bass and a chattering mandolin, the Sons of the Pioneers don’t bother with LaVern Baker’s reproachful tone. Instead, they affect an attitude of mock contrition, setting their voices warbling as though they were on the verge of an embarrassing fit of weeping as they recount their tale of woe.

And what is their tale? “Once I was happy and had a good wife,” they tell us, but then, tragically, another woman entered the picture: “She started me smokin’ and drinking whusky.”

And that’s it. The Sons of the Pioneers don’t even bother explaining what happened next. They didn’t need to. In the 1930s, such confessions were so common and so public that the degradation that followed exposure to sin needn’t be spelled out. Evangelists such as former baseball player Billy Sunday toured the United States in tents, dragging remorseful sinners, many of them alcoholics, onto the stage and demanding that they confess. And they did, in the thousands, in tearful, extended expositions.

But The Sons of the Pioneers weren’t simply creating a musical version of these exhausting atonements. With their choked, weepy presentation of the song's lyrics and the genuinely lust in their voice as they sing the chorus, they sounds as though they were slyly mocking such repentance narratives. To its credit, “Cigareetes, Whusky and Wild, Wild Women” sounds more like a song that you would sing while drinking — and while drunk — then while rejecting alcohol. These things might drive you insane, as the song warns, but you get the genuine sense from the singers that it might be a very pleasant madness. (SPARBER)

Know Your Mixed Drinks

2007-02-24T07:54:00.001-06:00

PUNCH, FLIP, SMASH -- the categories of mixed drinks seem to have been inspired by a fight scene from an adventure comic. Unfortunately these specific names rarely surface anymore, as they are hidden under the blanket term "cocktail."

Not until Prohibition did the word cocktail gain popular usage as a name for any type of mixed drink. Until then, drinks were categorized much more clearly: A mint julep is within the category of julep; a sloe gin fizz is a fizz; and a brandy crusta is, as you might guess, an example of a crusta. Technically, only a drink consisting of any choice of liquor, sugar, sometimes a dash of liqueur, and bitters -- is a cocktail. Specifically, bitters, an additive made of herbs, is the ingredient that makes this drink a cocktail. Without bitters, it's something else.

There is no clear etymology for the word cocktail, and the reason for its usage is equally elusive. Some historians conjecture that its name came from alcoholic mixtures that Antoine Peychaud served in a coquetier, or egg-cup. Ted Haigh, author of Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, feels certain that "they were named cocktails because they were your morning wakeup call -- like a rooster heralding the early morning light." There are literally hundreds of theories on this subject, none of them definitive.

But enough about the cocktail -- we feel it has been hogging the limelight for far too long. There are other drinks out there, and it is about time people ordered them by their proper names.

Joe Santini invented the Crusta in New Orleans. It consists of the ingredients in a proper cocktail, with brandy as the typical liquor, along with liqueur, and a fruit peel garnish. What makes it a Crusta is sugar on the rim of the glass. This drink has an interesting geneology: The Crusta is father to the sidecar cocktail and grandfather to the margarita.

Many drinks are a combination of sugar, wine, or some kind of spirit, chilled, with a creamy consistency. What makes this drink distinctly a flip is the addition of an egg or two. Flips are most popular when made with brandy or sherry.

Fizz drinks such as the Sloe Gin Fizz require a carbonated beverage, such as champagne, or more commonly, carbonated water, as an essential ingredient,.

Crushed or shaved ice characterizes Juleps. These are made of bourbon, sugar, and, most commonly, mint, served in a tall glass. A similar version of this is called a Smash, which is made with many sorts of liquors and served in a shorter glass.

Alcoholic punch can be made up of any combination of liquor. There are many punch recipes, and all of them require fruit juice, and sometimes tea. Until bartenders begin serving all mixed drinks in giant bowls, this is probably the easiest drink to remember as not being a cocktail. (MAULT)

Bar Review: Patrick McGovern's Pub

2007-02-23T15:11:00.000-06:00

Patrick McGovern's Pub
225 7th St W, St Paul, MN
651.224.5821

FIRSTLY, JUST TO GET THIS OUT OF THE WAY, despite its name, despite having a few Irish beers on tap, and despite several Guinness Beer posters hung around the joint, Patrick McGovern's is not an Irish bar. It's as though, in response to the half-dozen local bars that strive for a sort of manufactured authenticity (including The Liffey, just down the street from McGovern's), this bar decided, screw it, we will do nothing at all to pretend we're actually an Irish bar. So it is that they have a dining room with a menu that consists mostly of typical American fare, including several sandwich options, roasted turkey, and blackened pork chops. Their selection of Irish whiskys is minimal -- I counted exactly two, Jameson and Bushmills, which means they have less whisky than they do Scotch, which suggests we might actually be in a Scottish bar, but for the fact that haggis isn't on the menu. They do offer two Irish beers on tap, Guinness and Smithwick's, but Harp is not on hand, and neither, as far as I could tell, is Bass, which means they make their Black and Tan's with an alternative pale. Neither do they offer an extensive schedule with céilí dancing, and you won't find local supporters of Irish nationalism brooding over the subject of a free Ulster in a darkened corner. They have offered some St. Paddy's Day specials, but, then, so do Kosher butcher shops on Columbus Drive in Chicago, so there you are.

With that out of the way, Patrick McGovern's is a local favorite, and with good reason. It's a nice bar -- clean and pretty, with reasonable prices and some entertainingly tacky specialty drinks. Cocktail snobs, take note -- their martini menu offers no actual martinis, and most are made with vodka, so this is not the bar to go to for mixological brilliance. But they do offer something called the "Minnesota Pickle," a vodka martini with pickle brine added in, which, if you think about it, isn't that far removed from a dirty martini. They also offer a selection of hot drinks during the colder months, including a version of the White Russian made with actual coffee rather than coffee liqueur, which is not a bad idea at all.

The upstairs is a sports bar, with at least a dozen flat-paneled television sets lining the walls and rimming the bar, tuned to every imaginable sport except cricket or rugby, which, again, does not speak to the bar's Irishness. Unless a particularly popular game is going on, however, the televisions are sans volume, with music playing instead, and the upstairs bar is actually quite mellow and comfortable during these times. The bar has a reputation for bad service, but that has not been my experience, and I suspect complaints stem from patrons who crowd the bar prior to events at the nearby Xcel Energy Center, when service is bound to be a little slower.

McGovern's has two elements that really recommend it. Firstly, it has a very attractive patio, recessed to one side of the bar, off the sidewalk, that looks to be a particularly nice place for outdoor summer drinking, if you don't mind the fact that it will be crowded with smokers. Secondly, Patrick McCormick's has the best fresh popcorn to be found in a Twin Cities' bar -- it's white, hot, and delicious, much better than the sort of flat, half-cooked kernels usually found baking under a yellow light at local bars. It may seem like a small thing, but, when you're in the mood for a drink and some popcorn, you don't want your beer to be stale and you don't want your popcorn flavorless. No sir. (SPARBER)

The Still

2007-02-21T20:15:00.000-06:00

ALL RIGHT, TOUGH GUY. So you brew your own beer. So you’ve dropped a few hundred dollars on a home brewing kit and you’ve spent the last six months regularly churning out a frothy, bitter tasting mash. Nobody is impressed. After all, in Europe, children drink beer. Far from being a master brewer, you’re a manufacturer of kids’ drinks.

It’s time to step up into adulthood. It’s time to buy a still.

What are you waiting for? After all, it’s been 1200 years since an Arab alchemist by the name of Jabir ibn Hayyan developed a method of distilling alcohol; the word alcohol itself is Arabic. Hayyan discovered that ethyl alcohol boils at a lower temperature that water: 173 degrees Fahrenheit, as compared to water’s boiling point of 212 degrees. Therefore, if you toss a fermented spirit atop a flame and heat it to 173, you’ll produce a steam of relatively pure alcohol. Collect this steam, cool it and let it condense, and there you have it. If you started with wine, you'll have a more potent drink called brandy. If you started with fermented molasses, you now have rum. And if you started with beer, you now have whiskey, or, if you flavor the liquid with juniper berries, you have gin, a favorite of home distillers during the Prohibition.

It’s quite easy to purchase a still online. Type the words “Alembic stills” or “pot still” into any search engine and you’ll come up with a dozen or so companies that sell the item. The stills tend to look something like an old-fashioned potbellied stove made of copper, although some of the newer models have parts fashioned from stainless steel. Stills also have a length of copper wire, or, nowadays, plastic tubing emerging from the top, snaking downward (often through a bucket of cold water, to condense the vaporized alcohol), and then dumping its contents into a container. This length of copper or plastic tubing is called the “worm.”

Our favorite still on the market is this one, which actually markets itself as a water distiller — the very same nudge, nudge, wink, wink technique used to market home stills during Prohibition! For those with a taste for something a little more traditional, we would point you to this site, which offers handcrafted copper stills of the sort traditionally favored by Ozark mountain moonshiners. For hard-core hobbyists, you could even build your own stills: instructions can be found online, some sophisticated, some wildly inventive, and some probably suicidal. There is a long tradition of making stills out of anything at hand — during the Second World War soldiers used to make stills out of salvaged parts and automobile radiators — but caution must be exercised. Firstly, the alcoholic vapor produced during distillation is highly flammable, and more than one eager home distiller has lost limbs or lives to exploding stills. Secondly, a poorly manufactured still runs the risk of producing poison instead potable: a recent study of Virginia moonshine showed potentially toxic levels of lead in the liquor.

Keep in mind, home distilling is still illegal in the United States, although, generally, if you’re distilling spirits for your own use and not for profit the law will turn a blind eye. And the pure lawlessness of the activity is part of its appeal, isn’t it? Think about it: Who will enjoy the maddest props at the next meeting of your local home brewing club? The hobbyist with the tepid, foul tasting lager, or the outlaw who strolls in with a half-dozen clay jugs, all marked XXX, filled with throat-burning pure mash liquor?

So go ahead and buy yourself a still! Sure, there’s a risk of incinerating yourself in an explosion of vaporized liquor, poisoning yourself with adulterated liquor, or spending time in the pokey for manufacturing liquor without a license, but if you’re ready to distill adult drinks, you’re ready to take adult risks.

Otherwise, well, there’s always beer. As we understand it, Europeans sometimes mix it with 7-Up, to make it taste better when their children sip it. (SPARBER)

Mardi Gras Cocktails

2007-02-19T23:36:00.000-06:00

AND IT'S MARDI GRAS again, just like that, and it's impossible to believe that it is my second away from New Orleans, thank you Hurricane Katrina. When I was a boy, I read a book about the Crescent City's Fat Tuesday traditions called Mardi-Gras ... As It Was by Robert Tallent, and quickly became enamored with the holiday's traditions: King cakes, crewes, throws, floats, etc. I finally moved to New Orleans in my mid-30s, and, because of a miserable bit of timing, ten months later fled rising waters in the city. But I was in town for one Mardi Gras, and it has ruined parades for me. Once you've seen both Rex and the Zulu King in one day, you're done, baby. Nothing else -- or, at the very least, nothing Minnesota has to offer -- has the sheer strange majesty of the event.

There's no local opportunity to watch a group of black men in black face, pompously smoking oversized cigars and laconically tossing hand-painted coconuts to desperate parade goers. You can't end a parade here by wandering up the street to the Mother-In-Law Lounge, formerly owned by R&B great Ernie K-Doe (whose biggest hit was called "Mother-In-Law," natch), and is now bartended by his excitable widow Antoninette, who keeps a life-sized wax statue of her husband on hand, dressed in the plumage of a Mardi Gras Indian. Ernestine even takes the statue with her to parades. At least, she did before Katrina, and before the Mother-In-Law Lounge partially filled with water from Lake Pontchartrain. I've only been back to New Orleans once since I left, to rescue my belongings, and at that time Ernestine's neighborhood, Treme, still looked as though a bomb had been dropped on it. I hear the lounge is back on its feet now, and good for it.

But what's a former resident of the French Quarter to do in Minneapolis when Mardi Gras rolls around? I won't be going to any parades, and the local businesses that offer Mardi Gras-themed events don't really know what they are undertaking, and how far they will fall from the mark.

All I can do is drink.

When friends would visit me in the City that Care Forgot, I took them on my very own tour of the city. A drinker's tour. New Orleans is home to some very old bars, and it is home to some very old drinks, and what better way to spend an afternoon than wandering the city on foot, visiting the holy sites of one of the world's drinking Meccas? Of course, it wouldn't take long for wandering to turn to staggering, particularly once the tour reached Bourbon Street, which features some of the city's worst but most potent drinks.

I might not be in New Orleans for this Mardi Gras, and I may not be able to roam the city of New Orleans as I once did, but, god damn it, I do have a liquor cabinet, and so I plan to revisit the city, if only through its cocktails. Join me, won't you?

1. LET'S BEGIN AT THE BIRTHPLACE OF THE COCKTAIL, 437 Royal Street, in the French Quarter. You can still visit the site, a former pharmacy, although you can't get a cocktail here -- it's now an antique store that specializes in rare coins and Civil War-era weapons. Nonetheless, there is a little marker of the locations historic importance, an egg cup of the sort that was used to serve the first cocktail, and a notice that informs us that the French word for egg cup, cocquetier, is likely the source of the word cocktail. This is disputed, as is the location's claim to having originated the cocktail, but these things are always disputed, and the dispute isn't likely to be resolved. So this is as good a place as any for the cocktail to have started, and better than some.

The drink in question is a marvelous concoction called the sazerac, which any good bartender in New Orleans knows how to make, and no other bartender anywhere else seems to be able to manage. It was created by a Creole pharmacist named Antoine Peychaud in the 1800s, and, when he invented it, the drink was composed of cognac, absinthe, and bitters -- an excellent brand of bitters still bears Peychaud's name. The drink didn't get its name until a fellow named Sewell Taylor opened a bar called The Sazerac Coffeehouse in 1853, and made the drink with a brand of cognac called Sazerac-du-Forge et fils. Usually the drink is now made with rye whiskey, but it can still be made with cognac, if you are so inclined. The bar is still around now in the Fairmont Hotel on Baronne Street, and, if you're in New Orleans, that's just the place to get yourself a sazerac. But you're not in New Orleans at just this moment, and there's not going to be a bartender who can make one for you, so you're going to have to make one for yourself. Here's how:

THE SAZERAC

teaspoon of simple syrup (or 1 sugar cube or 1 teaspoon of granulated sugar)
3 - 4 dashes Peychaud's bitters
2 ounces rye whiskey (typically, Old Overholt)
1/4 teaspoon Herbsaint, an anise liqueur from New Orleans, although pastis will do in a pinch
Strip of lemon peel

Pour a few drops of Herbsaint in an old fashioned glass, swirling it around to coat the glass. Pour out any residue. Add ice to a cocktail shaker, add simple sugar, rye whiskey, and bitters. Stir gently until the drink is cold. Strain into glass. Twist lemon peel into drink, then add as garnish.

2. WHILE WE'RE ON THE SUBJECT OF ABSINTHE, which is, as any of you regular drinkers know, both illegal and easy to obtain in the United States, we should move on to an absinthe cocktail. I generally began my drinking tour of the city with absinthe, but my reasons were suspect. Firstly, I lived close to a Pirate Alley bar that served a contemporary version of the drink called Absente, and the bartender there was a fellow named Rick, who actually dressed as a pirate and carried loaded black powder pistols with him. Once, there was a rumor going round that the Pirate's Alley bar was going to be robbed, and so Rick brought in his collection of muskets, loaded them, and readied himself to do battle with his robbers. They never showed, perhaps having glanced in and seen a pirate standing guard with a brace of antique muskets and pistols on hand. It was an impressive way to start a day of drinking, and absinthe is an impressive drink to start drinking with, as it is reported to double the effects of any drink that follows it.

I won't tell you how to get hold of absinthe, and, if you can't, feel free to use Herbsaint, which started life as an absinthe, or any pastis, which have the anise flavor of absinthe without the wormwood that makes the drink illegal. The cocktail we're going to make is called the Absinthe Frappe, and it spawned a national craze in the early part of the 20th century, including its own pop song, which included these lyrics:

I will free you first from burning thirst
That is born of a night of the bowl,
Like a sun 'twill rise through the inky skies
That so heavily hang o'er your souls.
At the first cool sip on your fevered lip
You determine to live through the day,
Life's again worth while as with a dawning smile
You imbibe your absinthe frappe.

You can still order an Absinthe Frappe in New Orleans, at a Bourbon Street bar called The Old Absinthe House, appropriately enough, although they make it with Herbsaint. Here's how to make it yourself:

THE ABSINTHE FRAPPE
Fill a rocks glass with crushed ice add:
1 1/4 ounce of absinthe or Herbsaint
1/4 ounce of Anisette
top with a splash of soda water

3. MY FAVORITE RESTAURANT in the Quarter was a place called the Napoleon House, a former home to the city's mayor from 1812 to 1815, who supposedly gave the house to Napoleon Bonaparte to live when the emperor escaped his island exile on Saint Helena, which he never did, dying instead. It's now a lovely bar restaurant featuring a sort of dark, decaying elegance, a terrific menu, classical music, and a specialty drink. The drink is the Pimm's Cup.

Pimm's is one of those alcohols that you find on the liqueur shelf-- nobody ever seems to buy it-- and in any well-stocked bar, where nobody ever seems to order it. One assumes this is because nobody has any idea what it is -- the exact ingredients are a carefully guarded secret, purportedly known by only six people in the world. But folks who have tried the Pimm's Cup are often mad about it, and many of them tried it for the first time at the Napoleon House. A surprising number of local bartenders pour a good Pimm's Cup, and you'll know they know their business if they ask you whether you prefer 7-Up or ginger ale as the mixer, and you'll know they really know their stuff if they also offer lemonade as an option. The best garnish for the drink is a cucumber slice, and bars that have those on hand are worth remembering.

PIMM'S CUP
Fill a tall 12 oz glass with ice and add 1 1/4 oz. Pimm's #1 and 3 oz lemonade.
Then top off with 7up.
Garnish with cucumber.

4. THERE ARE, if you can believe it, two bars that spin within blocks of each other in New Orleans. The first is at the top of the city's World Trade Center, now called Altitude33, and is a rather tacky contemporary bar that nonetheless offers a spectacular panoramic view of the city. The better option is the Carousel Bar, nestled near the entrance to the Monteleone Hotel on Royal Street. As it's name suggests, the bar is designed to look like a carousel, and it makes a slow rotation around the bartenders, who don't seem to mind it. The bar offers two specialty drinks, one a fruity beverage called The Goody, which is a rather typical beverage, and the other a superb cocktail called the Vieux Carré, which is the French named for the French Quarter.

THE VIEUX CARRE
1/2 oz rye whiskey
1/2 oz cognac
1/2 oz dry vermouth
1/2 tsp Benedictine
dash Peychaud
dash Angostura bitters

Shake and serve on the rocks with a twist of lemon.

5. JUST AS YOU CAN'T SEEM TO GET a decent Sazerac outside New Orleans, it's almost impossible to find a bartender outside The City That Care Forgot who is willing to even attempt this next drink. In fact, governor Huey P. Long adored the drink, and couldn't get it elsewhere, and so would bring a New Orleanian bartender along with him when he left town, just to make him his favorite cocktail: The Ramos Gin Fizz, invented by a bartender named Henry C. Ramos in the 1880s. One expects that bartenders are trepid about making the drink because it includes raw egg whites. Or they may simply not have one of its constituent ingredients, orange flower water, which can really only be found nowadays at Middle Eastern markets. Then there's the fact that it's a gin drink, as gin can be a hard-sell nowadays, with modern drinkers preferring sweeter cocktails that don't taste quite so much like chewing on an evergreen. The shame of it is that the Ramos Gin Fizz is a sweet drink -- one of the sweetest I've ever tasted, unless you count the sort of cocktail that tastes like crushed up Pixie Sticks. The Ramos Gin Fizz is light and frothy, but with a subtler, more complicated flavor than the sort of sweet drinks popular nowadays, such as the Buttery Nipple or the Long Island Iced Tea. It is, however, a bear to make, but if you are willing to tackle a challenging drink recipe, you'll be rewarded with a classic, albeit nearly forgotten, concoction.

RAMOS GIN FIZZ
2 ounces gin
3 drops orange flower water
1 egg white
1 teaspoon bar sugar
1 ounce lemon juice
1/2 ounce lime juice
1 ounce cream
Soda water

Shake very vigorously for at least one minute. Strain into a tall thin glass, or a very large old fashioned glass, and top with some soda water. Stir.

THERE ARE TWO REMAINING New Orleanian drinks I should mention, but I will only mention them in passing, as, in truth, they are rather dreadful. These are the drinks served on Bourbon Street to tourists who are looking to get drunk fast and without fuss, and they are named the Hurricane, which is native to a Bourbon Street institution called Pat O'Brien's, and the Hand Grenade, served by an entirely disposable company with the unfortunate name Tropical Isle, Inc. Pat O's is, in fact, a rather nice bar, and the Hurricane isn't the best drink they serve (in fact, they mix a hell of a Zombie). It's an uninspired tropical drink, and, if you want one, you can actually order a packet of mix that you can use to make your own unconvincing version. The Hand Grenade is a trade secret of Tropical Isle, but tastes like melon and vodka, and should only be drunk in an emergency. This is, after all, Mardi Gras -- one of America's most astounding pageants. Why waste your time on declassé drinks for tourists who are desperate to either photograph exposed breasts or to produce breasts to be photographed? No, there's more and better to the city than the relentlessly tacky chaos of Bourbon Street, and this is a good day to explore it. (SPARBER)

Drinking Game: Sandbox Rodeo

2007-02-19T10:37:00.000-06:00

OUR RECENT TRIP TO THE Red Dragon reminded me of a game that my friends invented that makes good use of a certain playground implement in a nearby park. I'll just get out of the way and let my friend/game inventor Joey Vegas tell it:

How it goes down: You must drink a prerequisite 2 specialty drinks, preferably the Zombie. Then proceed to the park between Colfax/Bryant and 24th/25th in uptown. There you will find a piece of playground equipment obviously meant for children but defiled by us adults. It's hard to explain but it's a football-shaped piece of equipment that has a pair of handles on it. It is meant for grabbing onto with your hands and propelling yourself across a 6 foot tall, 10 foot long bar. This football-shaped object spins around 360 degrees freely on the bar.

Some friends and myself discovered this appartus one night after consuming a couple of these Zombie drinks, since the park was on the stumbling route home from the Dragon. I'm not exactly sure as to how it happened, because of the alcohol, but before we knew it we were climbing on top of the football-shaped piece and trying to ride it across the beam. With our feet in the spot where you would normally hang on to it, we tried to pull ourselves across this 10 foot bar to the other side. Not the brightest idea for many reasons: the 360 degree spin capabilities of the equipment, the slightest shift in weight and you're falling off, not to mention you're about 7 feet up in the air, and there's also a large metal balance beam within falling distance for you to crack your head on. We later made a rule to have "spotters" to prevent people from falling on this beam.

After many failed attempts, we started getting our balance, which was, again, difficult due to the amount of alcohol we had ingested. After we were confident in this stage, maybe beacuse the drinks were wearing off, we then started adding "Style Points" for embellishments such as pretending we were on a bull and trying to pull ourselves across with one hand while keeping the other free to do stylistic flavorings. Thus this is where the rodeo name came into play. After several trips to the Red Dragon and back home, this game started catching on, and we started gathering other friends and passers-by to join in on the competition. Because of the prerequisite drinks rule at the Red Dragon, and different levels of alcohol tolerance, style points became a huge thing in the game. It was no longer about just getting across this beam-- it was about how many tricks you could do in the process and how impressive your dismount was, because after all, if you made it across you still had to get down gracefully. After founding this game with a friend and holding the champion spot for several outings, I have stepped down in competition and have become an official judge. I will still get up and ride every once and a while, but only for the nostalgic feeling it brings when I'm drunk. I love the Red Dragon, and all of the staff there.

The Bottle Gang presents these drinking games for entertainment and educational purposes only. Their presence on this site should not be construed as an edorsement of these games, and The Bottle Gang accepts no liability for the misuse of any information presented on this site. Alcohol should be drunk responsibly, and irresponsible or binge drinking can result in alcohol poisoning, injury, and even death.

Bar Review: The Red Dragon

2007-02-18T23:00:00.000-06:00

Red Dragon Restaurant
2116 Lyndale Ave S
Minneapolis, MN 55405-3026
612.874.8877

STEVE McPHERSON: TODAY IS THE START OF THE CHINESE NEW YEAR--year of the boar, of virility and fertility--but you'd hardly know it from the bar at the Red Dragon. All anybody cares about, it seems, is the finish of the Daytona 500. Apparently, money has been wagered and one somewhat soused individual is trying to convince the booth behind us that NASCAR is just, well, the shit. I can't quite catch what he's saying; all I hear is, "Imagine I'm the Chicago Bulls." I'm trying, Ringo; I'm trying real hard.

You don't come to the Red Dragon for the food-- or at least not for dinner-- but the appetizers are pretty solid, if uninspired. We get the cream cheese wontons, which come with some excellently spicy mustard and some "eh" sweet and sour sauce. I've had the pupu platter here before and trust me: you want to steer clear of the meat. I mean, the teriyaki beef is all right, but sweet Jesus do not get the rumaki. I think that's what it was called. Ugh.

Besides, you're really here for the insanely strong drinks. I'm a fan of the Red Dragon Special, which has Captain Morgan's, cranberry, and juice, plus a maraschino cherry. I'm not sure if that means cranberry juice plus fruit juice or what, but it's definitely red, and it's definitely special. It's a deceptively strong drinkin for being so durn tasty. You want to get messed up and leave sophistication at home? Get a couple of these bad boys. They're $5.75, but, to quote Dave Chappelle, "it'll get you drunk."

Calley got the Mai Tai, and was somewhat dismayed to find a fruit fly up in it. When we flagged the waitress down, she said, before we could even explain, "Did you find a fruit fly in the drink? Yeah, that happens a lot." Noted, but not appreciated. A clean Mai Tai was delivered and order was restored. Calley reports satisfaction with the beverage.

Maybe I'm sounding a bit negative about the whole Red Dragon experience, but this is really more of a place you go in spite of itself, rather than because of itself. They have a wealth of fruity drinks that are better than the ones at Psychosuzie's and cheaper than the ones at Azia, so you come here to get fruited and blitzed, plus eat greasy food. It's a humble joint that asks little and gives a lot. Happy Year of the Pig, y'all.

MAX SPARBER: In the meanwhile, I ordered the bar's most notorious signature drink, the Wondrous Punch, a fruity rum beverage that comes at the wondrous price of $7.50, but still seems a bargain, as it comes in a glass the size of a small fishbowl. The Red Dragon doesn't always do their tropical drinks well -- I've had zombies there that could peel paint, which is a crime, as a well-made zombie is shockingly good. But the Wondrous Punch is sweet without being sickly sweet, and quite refreshing, although, as you work your way down to the bottom of the glass, the taste becomes somewhat antiseptic. But, frankly, by then it doesn't matter.

The cocktail lounge itself is, to put it politely, bijou, just large enough for a few booths, a few tables, and a bar that can only fit one bartender. Notoriously, on weekends, it fills up; in past years, those who visited on weekends were often rebuffed by short-tempered waitresses, long waits, and an inattentive bartender. In all fairness, I have never had this experience, and our servers today were fast and skilled, the fruit fly incident notwithstanding.

The bar used to be famous for its jukebox, which featured such oddities as polkas, but they've replaced it with the same sort of CD jukebox you see in every bar, with the same selection. But the bar retains its cheerfully schmaltzy decor: everything seems to be made of cheap lacquer and faux Chinese lanterns, with black wallpaper showing gilded scenes of China. It's tacky, but gloriously so -- this is the way dive bars should look, and instead they tend to look like someone's tool shed. In Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet's crew of exhausted salesmen endlessly stream out of their low-rent office and across the street to a Chinese restaurant, which is never shown in the play. It looks like a rather reputable establishment in the film adaptation, and shouldn't have. It should have looked like the bar at the Red Dragon.

Casablanca

2007-02-17T13:34:00.000-06:00

Major Strasser: What is your nationality?
Rick: I'm a drunkard.
Captain Renault: That makes Rick a citizen of the world.

I REMEMBER THE FIRST time I saw "Casablanca": It was my freshman year of college, and the Wesleyan film series was doing a yeoman's job of catching me up on the many classic films I had missed out on for one reason or another. There was "Citizen Kane" and "The Third Man" and "Peking Opera Blues," but I remember "Casablanca" striking me for the leanness of its plot and how well it stood up. The characters in the film have long since become archetypes: the unctious rat, the noble humanitarian on the run, the corrupt police chief, and, of course, the lapsed idealist full of smoldering charm. What's shocking is how well they stand up even today as real people in the film, and, as Max pointed out to me the other day, despite the sheer volume of classic lines, the dialogue never comes off as anything less than earnest.

All that was still present in the film on my recent re-watching (brought to you by Netflix), but with my newly-honed interest in all things drinking culture-related, I was struck by the film's quality as a drinking movie. I guess I should have seen it coming, given that Rick owns a bar, but it's more than that.

Early in the movie, Rick's a teetotaler, a fact alluded to several times by patrons as he makes the rounds of his Cafe Americain. Perhaps predictably, the reappearance of Ilsa send him back to the bottle. It's a great subtle turn when Victor Laszlo asks Rick, "Won't you join us for a drink?" and Captain Renault jumps in, saying, "Oh no, Rick never--" before Rick interrupts and brusquely says, "--Thanks, I will." Later that night, we see him, down one glass of bourbon with another at hand, drowning his sorrows. And then the line: "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine."

Aside from bourbon and gin, brandy gets its place of honor when Mr. and Mrs. Leuchtag are getting set to leave Casablanca and invite the waiter Carl for a drink. "Oh, thank you very much," he says. "I thought you would ask me, so I brought the good brandy. And - a third glass!"

The drink that really drew my attention, though, was the champagne cocktail that everybody's always drinking. Seems like an awfully girly drink for such tough guys at the last outpost of free France in a fascist world, but hey, apparently the champagne cocktail was all the rage back in the day. The classic one, from the Metropolitan Hotel in Manhattan circa 1935 calls for soaking a sugar cube with a few dashes of Angostura bitters, tossing it (gently) into a large champagne flute, filling the flute with champagne, and then garnishing with a lemon twist. Max gave it his own twist to honor Anna Nicole Smith.

I've found that what happens a lot with "classics" of any stripe (books, films, albums), is that far too often, they're just taken as classics, as if people don't need to actually experience them, having absorbed their cultural significance through osmosis. I've fallen victim to it as often as anyone else, so I find it a good idea to go back and watch "Citizen Kane" or "Casablanca," read Shakespeare's plays, or actually listen to a whole Beatles album. Do yourself a favor: find some classic movies on Netflix and bump 'em to the top of your queue.

Then shake and enjoy with a real martini, folks: That means gin, dammit. (McPHERSON)

Bar Review: Keegan's

2007-02-16T16:47:00.000-06:00

Keegan's Irish Pub and Restaurant
16 University Ave NE
612.245.0880

THERE IS A COMPANY in Waterford, Ireland by the name O'Sullivan Interiors, and they've developed quite a cottage industry making traditional Irish pubs and shipping them to the United States. There is, for example, Dublin Square Irish Pub in San Diego. Then there's Gus O'Conner's in Rochester, MI. And, locally, we have Keegan's, which O'Sullivan's built to resemble an Edwardian bar in Eire, and which is located directly across the street from Surdyks. So if you're peering at the Irish whiskys at the venerable St. Anthony liquor store, and you find yourself wondering what Tullamore Dew tastes like, pop across the street and order three fingers of the stuff.

I haven't been to Ireland, but I have drunk at several New York Irish bars that date back to the Edwardian era, and, based on those, there's a quality to Keegan's that's a little like a stage set. The Irish bars I've been to tend to be wooden and clean and dark and plain, while Keegan's is wooden and clean and well-lit and filled with bric-a-brac. There are little Irish collectables everywhere, from bowler derbies to regional crests, all in glass containers, a barroom version of objects d'art. It's a busy but uncluttered accumulation of props that seem to serve the same purpose they might in a realist play -- to convince the audience of an authenticity of location. It's as though, if the bar had enough earthenware whisky jugs, we might actually believe ourselves to have been transported to Hibernia.

And I don't mind it, even when it gets a bit silly. For example, the bar offers a kilt night on the last Saturday of each month, and anyone who walks in wearing a tartan apron gets a discount. It was a while ago that the Irish claimed they had invented kilts, but there is scant evidence that this is true, but never mind -- bars are no place for history, and if men want to wear ahistoric skirts while enjoying their pocheen, who are we to complain?

The bar has a nice menu, featuring a variety of British and American offerings, including a category called "comfort food," including macaroni and cheese if you're feeling like a Yank and Shepherd's Pie if you ain't. They also offer an Irish cheese flight for their late night and breakfast menu that I'm sorely tempted to try, if I could manage to be awake for either option. Keegan's has bucked the trend of having a noisy bar, but it's a busy one -- their schedule includes Irish singalongs, frequent bands, and pub quizzes, all of which can be satisfyingly rowdy. The pub itself might have a staged quality to it, but the atmosphere they've created -- which is warm and fun -- is entirely authentic. (SPARBER)

Three Bar Bets Involving Fire

2007-02-12T05:50:00.000-06:00

THE BAR BET, it sometimes seems, is the last remnant of a great American con artist tradition. Of course, the hucksters are still with us. Anyone with email knows that only too well; how much time per day do we spend opening and deleting countless Nigerian scams and impotency drug hustles? The street corners of every American city are awash with vendors hawking knockoff designer purses. Sometimes you’ll even see such classics as the three-card monte or the shell game, an absolute masterpiece of swindling designed with only one purpose in mind: To separate a fool from his money.

But these schemes are simply criminal, and we at The Bottle Gang find ourselves longing for a more genteel form of duplicity. There is a form of confidence game, long popular in this country, that amounts more to a performance than a felonious act: That of the impossible bet. You’ll still see hustlers on Bourbon Street engaging in one variation of this, demanding money from tourists to tell them where they got their shoes (the answer, of course, is “You got them on your feet.”) The point of these bets is less to make money — although, in the hands of a master, there is much money to be made — than to amuse. The poor sap who takes the bet should feel that he got something for his money, or, in the case of bar bets, for picking up the drink tab. He should feel he got a show.

A good impossible bet is like a well-told joke. And, ultimately, it serves an instructional function. The loser, after all, has taken the bet believing that he is sure to be the winner, because the odds are stacked in his favor. Certainly it cannot be that a watermelon can be thrown over a building, as an example, or that six quarters can be made to equal $17.

The lesson here is that the odds are always in favor of the one who makes the bet. Because, as sure as you may be that six quarters can never add up to more than one dollar and fifty cents, the moment you accept that bet you will be looking at a mathematical impossibility. The amount before you will be $17, and you will be paying for the next round of beers.

As we think that bar bets should be as entertaining as they are instructional, we offer as our first three a series of bets that involve fire. If you are particularly intoxicated or inflammable, we suggest starting with something a little gentler. Offer to tell your drinking partner where he got his shoes.

BET ONE: SAMBUCA SURPRISE

Challenge: Lift a shot glass filled with Sambuca using just a flat, open palm.

Solution: Light the Sambuca on fire and press your open palm atop the glass, sealing the glass (make sure your palm is damp to avoid burning). The fire will burn up the oxygen in the glass, creating a natural vacuum. The resulting suction will hold the glass to your hand, as long as you keep you palm flat.

BET TWO: MATCHSTICK MAGIC

Challenge: Take a match from a matchbook, drop it onto the counter, and make it land on its side.

Solution: Bend the match slightly. Afterwards, use the matchstick to light yourself a cigar; you’ve earned one.

BET THREE: THE BURNING SUGAR CUBE

Challenge: Use a match to set a sugar cube on fire. Challenge your friends to do so first. Despite their best attempts, the sugar cube will do no more than smolder.

Solution: Rub the sugar cube in an ashtray to get some ashes on it. When you hold a match to it, it will burn. (SPARBER)

Bar Review: The Riverview Wine Bar

2007-02-11T17:30:00.000-06:00

The Riverview Wine Bar
3745-3753 42nd Ave. S.
Minneapolis, MN 55406
612.729.4200

LET ME START BY SAYING that I'm in favor of all things Riverview: Theater, Cafe and Wine Bar included. The intersection of 42nd Ave. S. and 38th St. is a great little confluence, and it used to be a block from where I lived, and that's how I first became familiar with the Riverview Wine Bar. I would often walk over late on a summer evening and sit with a good book at the bar working my way through a couple glasses of one Malbec or another (I was really into Malbecs at the time), but that's only one of the ways to enjoy the Riverview.

The other night, the fiancee and I went over to have some dinner and split a bottle of something red. We sat in the lounge, which is a little conglomeration of couches and easy chairs right by the fire in the corner. The joint's got great ambiance-- very northern California (which seem appropriate)-- with maroon walls and intimate tables.

The place to start is probably with the wine flights, which is where I first learned about Malbecs. They have red and white flights, although I can't speak to any of the white flights, given that I don't like white wine. Sorry. I just don't. There's a flight of un-oaked wines (they've been aged in steel casks) and there's also a flight of Pinot Noirs that includes the required joke about the movie "Sideways." At this point, I should make it clear that I don't really know jack about wine, but I know what I like. Dry, mostly. And I can really act like I'm tasting it with authority, I think. Which is the most important thing.

There are a plethora of bottles to choose from as well, and the prices are pretty damn reasonable. You'll get some markup above what you'd pay at a liquor store, but nothing near what you've come to expect from a restaurant. On top of all this, they have a very solid selection of beers as well, including Belgian favorites like Orval and Chimay and bunches of regional microbrews and some other imports. Just a great place to get comfy and explore your palate.

The menu, while humble and basically composed of pizza and salads, is diverse enough to provide a light dinner. We had the cheese plate (which I think almost always includes manchego and drunken goat plus two other rotating cheeses) and split a pear gorgonzola pizza. The cheese selection was definitely not adventurous, the two wild cards being havarti dill and a French cheese whose name escapes me, but which was a little like Swiss. It might behoove them to cast a little further afield for their cheese selections, but still, solid crowd pleasers. The pizza was great, served on a flatbread-like crust and with caramelized onions and pecans in addition to the pear and gorgonzola. There are about five other pizza combos to try, plus desserts, of which we didnot partake. If none of that strikes your fancy, there are also some specials, which included chicken pot pie the night we were there and two soups: tomato basil and beef stew.

Total price for this light yet satisfying dinner was $47, which inlcluded a $21 bottle of Rioja (fruitier than I'm usually into, but in a more tart and less sweet way, so it was good). Cheaper than a reasonable night of sushi at Fuji-Ya, for sure. Not that I'm knocking the Fooj.

I give it, uh, four corks out of five. I just made that up. (McPHERSON)

A cocktail for a dead bombshell

2007-02-08T18:28:00.000-06:00

ANNA NICOLE SMITH died today at the age of 39, and there is little we can add to the media circus that is already setting up its three rings and tents in response. She was, at best, a camp figure -- she was va va va voom made cartoonish, as though a caricaturist had been invited to create a human form out of nothing but blond hair, large breasts, and bulbous ass. If her reality show was any indication of her actual personality, she was gapingly lecherous, given to simply humping anything or anyone that might be nearby. The show also presented a woman who was monstrously lazy and stupid, sometimes possessed of so little energy that she wouldn't bother to even climb out of bed, although she always seemed to have enough spunk in her to quarrel, generally about trivialities. She seemed to adore all seven deadly sins, and made her fortune, or what of it the courts alloted her, from the most potent of them all: lust. But she was also very much a glutton, as her ample pre-Trimspa body demonstrated.

Gluttony is a misunderstood thing. Laymen tends to simply interpret it in terms of food, but theologians have long argued that the core of gluttony is overindulgence. And even before Anna Nicole Smith's weight ballooned, she was a magnificent glutton in the broadest theological sense -- perhaps the closest humanity has ever produced to a physical embodiment of overindulgence. We could join the rest of the bitter world in mocking her for it, but we at The Bottle Gang prefer to celebrate her for it. After all, she loved to drink.

Her drink of choice, according to a 2003 interview in Hustler Magazine, was Cristal champagne, which seems absolutely perfect. Although Cristal is a superb sparkling wine, Smith probably didn't enjoy it for its taste so much as its price tag, retailing, as it does, for about $300 a bottle. After all, Smith's taste in beer was typically declassé: She confessed to Hustler a fondness for Budweiser. But Cristal is the drink of choice for the nouveau riche but otherwise terrifically tasteless. Thomas Aquinas had a name for this specific form of gluttony -- he called it Laute, and defined it as the gluttony of indulging in that which is too expensive.

It is in honor of this deceased, magnificent glutton that we offer a new cocktail, and, in the spirit of Laute, we insist it must be made with Cristal, although to use a top-shelf champagne for a tacky mixed drink is a sin. So be it. We are sinners all, and if sinners had saints, one of them died today. So, in honor of Anna Nicole Smith, we raise a champagne goblet and toast her memory with a Cristal cocktail, colored her favorite color: pink.

CRISTAL PINK

1 cube sugar
Angostura bitters
Chilled Cristal champagne
1/2 ounce Chambord

Soak sugar cube with a couple of good splashes of Angostura bitters and place in the bottom of a large champagne flute. Add Chambord.

Fill slowly with sparkling wine.

Garnish with a strawberry.

Drink until someone calls the medics. (SPARBER)

Cocktail I made last night: The Bluth Banana

2007-02-05T21:24:00.000-06:00

HOW DID IT COME TO THIS? I started college with a promising career as a paleobiologist, and now I'm sitting at home, watching Veronica Mars and trying to invent drinks. [sigh] All that said, I think this one is pretty genius:

The Bluth Banana
Ice
2 shots Reyka vodka
1 shot Creme de Cacao
1 shot amaretto
1 medium banana, sliced

Combine all ingredients in a blender. Blend it, dawg. Pour into a highball glass, or else split it between two rocks glasses if you have a special friend.

Says fiancee Calley, "It's making my mouth numb." That's about as high praise as I can imagine. And she doubted me at every turn, demanding to know what I was making. "It's my job," she replies. Also true. Plus, she named it.

For a banana-inspired movie to watch while drinking your Bluth Banana, go right here. (McPHERSON)

Cocktail I made last night: The Mint-y-Cocoa

2007-02-04T11:54:00.000-06:00

GET IT? It sounds like Minnesota. I looked this beverage up on Webtender, and they call it a Chocolate-Mint Martini, but I'd like to expand on their recipe a bit, because of two things: 1.) I don't believe in Martinis made with vodka-- sorry, James Bond, but use gin and 2.) you can't just say "vodka" and get away with that. People are going to be making it with Phillips vodka and getting ill. So here's what I recommend:

2 shots of Reyka vodka
1 shot of Creme de Cacao
1 shot of white Creme de Menthe

Combine in a shaker with ice, mix, pour into a cocktail glass, and garnish that mutha with a maraschino cherry. Or maybe some fresh mint. That'd be hot.

It's pretty flippin' sweet, so you have to be in the mood for it. I definitely don't recommend it with dinner or anything, but maybe if you're watching, say, the second season of Veronica Mars on DVD or maybe those couple episodes of Arrested Development with Julia Louis-Dreyfus as blind lawyer Maggie Lizer, it's pretty perfect. (McPHERSON)

DRINKER'S CINEMA: THE BIG LEBOWSKI

2007-02-03T16:21:00.000-06:00

MUCH HAS ALREADY been written about Jeffrey Lebowski, the aging and potbellied bowler at the center of Minnesota natives the Coen Brother’s 1998 film The Big Lebowski. Critics have noted how Lebowski, called “The Dude” and limned by Jeff Bridges, is a cinematic stock character accidentally placed in the wrong type of film altogether: A sleepy eyed, perpetually stoned, aging hippie who accidentally finds himself cast as the private dick in a Raymond Chandler-styled crime film. Daniels’ “Dude” (or “Duder,” or “El Duderino,” if you’re not into the whole brevity thing) is a character singularly ill-prepared for his task: To track down a kidnapped adult actress for her wheelchair-bound and sharp-tongued business magnate of a husband. The Dude is lazy and incurious, only occasionally stumbling across clues by accident. More frequently, The Dude is bullied into action by his bowling partner, a loudmouthed and fatigue-clad Vietnam veteran named Walter Sobachak, portrayed with maximum bluster by John Goodman.

We will not concern ourselves with the preposterous series of turns the plot takes around The Dude — how, step by step, as Lebowski stumbles toward the truth, he loses each of his possessions. (His car, in particular, suffers at the hands of joyriding teenagers, maniacs with crowbars, and arson-minded nihilists.) Neither will we concern ourselves with the film's astounding variety of supporting characters, some of whom, despite their brief screen time, have had an entire industry spring up around their performances. John Turturro’s lizard-like, polyester clad Jesus Quintana, who now appears on any number of T-shirts, or David Thewlis’s pencil-mustached, giggling Knox Harrington, who has inspired, well, any number of video artists.

No. All of this has been covered in depth, as The Big Lebowski has inspired a fervent cult following and reams of critical writing. So we turn our attention elsewhere. The Dude has many fascinating facets to his character. We are fascinated by his drinking.

When we first meet The Dude, he is clad in an open bathrobe and jelly shoes, shambling through a Ralphs grocery store, opening and sniffing cartons of cream. He is, as we find out later, buying one of the three ingredients in his cocktail of choice, the White Russian. (The remaining two ingredients, vodka and Kahlua, are the only items he keeps in a wicker bar that forms his apartment’s centerpiece.) Lebowski will light a jay when he’s in a contemplative mood, but he is never without an alcoholic beverage — upon arriving anyplace new he will instantly search out the bar and mix himself his favorite cocktail, which he has affectionately nicknamed a “Caucasian”; his preference for White Russians is so pronounced that if he fails to find cream he will substitute powdered non-dairy creamer. In all, The Dude downs nine White Russians over the course of The Big Lebowski. College students who attempt to keep up with Lebowski’s pace as a drinking game risk alcohol poisoning. The Dude’s concern for his cocktail is such that, when seized by strangers and dragged into a waiting limousine, his first thought is to protect his drink. “Hey man,” he famously cries out, “there’s a beverage here!”

It should be pointed out that there are a few times in the film when The Dude forgoes a White Russian in favor of beer, seemingly as a precautionary gesture when he needs to have his wits around him. When Lebowski is driving, as an example, or when bowling. The Dude, it should be noted, has as close a relationship with his bartender as any filmic character. Gary, the film’s barman at Hollywood Star Lanes in Los Angeles, knows The Dude’s tastes so well that he will instantly provide a bottle of Miller Golden Draft when Lebowski demands an “oat soda.”

As a result, The Dude is perpetually stewed, to the point that a drugged drink simply impresses him (“You mix a hell of a Caucasian,” he declares before collapsing). “I’m adhering to a pretty strict, uh, drug, uh, regimen,” he explains distractedly to one of his employers, “to keep my mind, you know, uh, limber.” Of course, it isn’t working: The Dude can barely form a sentence, and often simply repeats, verbatim, dialogue he heard earlier in the film. His few attempts at detective work produce exactly one blank-faced teenager and one pornographic drawing, both dead ends. The Dude is not a great thinker, but, then, he never aspired to be. “All The Dude ever wanted was his rug back,” he complains, referring to a cheap piece of home decoration urinated on at the start of the film, and he isn’t even able to get that.

The Dude may be a failure as a detective, but we at The Bottle Gang celebrate him for being a great drinker. The White Russian, never one of the more popular cocktails, gained new notoriety after the film — the Intertube is littered with tales of young drinkers taking their first Caucasian after watching The Big Lebowski. In fact, Jeff Dowd, an amiable Sixties radical turned film consultant — and the inspiration for Jeff Bridges’ character — complained afterward that he hadn’t taken advantage of a Big Lebowski-inspired marketing scheme. “After the film came out I should have put my name on a premixed White Russian canned drink,” Dowd, who also goes by the nickname The Dude, told IFM Magazine.

Perhaps Dowd might have cleaned up on such a scheme, but its more fitting that he didn’t even attempt it; after all, The Big Lebowski is a document of missed opportunities. And, with each new travesty, The Dude’s best friend and nemesis Walter Sobachak has a solution: Fuck it, Dude. Let’s go bowling.

It’s a good solution. Gary’s on hand, and it is time for another Caucasian. (SPARBER)

BAR REVIEW: TURF CLUB QUA VENUE, QUA BAR

2007-02-02T10:25:00.000-06:00

Turf Club
1601 University Ave.
St. Paul, MN 55104
651.917.8839

QUA MEANS AS. IT'S A FANCY Latin term that philosophers are enamored of, usually using it to mean slightly more than just "as"-- something closer to "in its identity as." And that's qua simple qua it gets. You just learned Latin.

But that's neither here nor there. The Turf Club now has music seven nights a week, which means that after 9 p.m., there's going to be a band happening, and thus you might steer clear of it if you're not in the mood for a good rocking, but that'd be a mistake, because the Turf, much like the Triple Rock Social Club, afford you the opportunity to escape the hubbub in the Clown Lodge, formerly known as the Clown Lounge.

But let's step back in time first. The Turf Club's been on the scene since the 1940s, and there are even pictures hanging behind the bar to prove it. I first got to know it as a divey and dank joint that just happened to host great live music, and its reputation for hosting great local and national acts continues to be its calling card. Renovations undertaken in the wake of its purchase by Dubliner owner Tim Scanlon have stripped away the false ceilings and grime, revealing a twinkling and ever so slightly kitschy gem of a bar. Gone is the peeling paint on the western wall that used to have the word "Curtains" imprinted on it, as if the very suggestion of a wall hanging would suffice. The majestic wooden mantle behind the upstairs bar has been restored, the false entrance has been broken down, as has the ad hoc counter that used to dish out Raleigh's Texas Tacos on Tuesdays. Damn, though, I wish I could have had one of those tacos last night while waiting to get onstage. Raleigh's slinging 'em over at the 331 Club now, just in case you get nostalgic/hungry.

As a venue, it's a great place to play: they treat you right (get your drink tickets from the soundguy, in case you didn't know), the sound is generally very good, the stage is of a decent size and it just feels great to play there. The one downside is that its cavernousness can amplify casual conversation to a band-drowning din, and I've seen quieter acts like The Get Up Johns and Haley Bonar suffer as a result. As an audience member, you get the benefit of great sightlines from all over the bar and copious seating, including up on the Old Stage, which runs along the western wall.

If the band that's up isn't your cup of tea or you're just looking to have a conversation at a reasonable volume, most nights of the week Dave Wiegardt mans the downstairs bar in the Clown Lodge. Where formerly you'd find clowns all over the walls, you now get fake wood paneling and the kind of bland, washed-out nature paintings you'd see in the background of a John Waters movie or in a hotel. If you really need to get your clown on, they're still on the walls in the downstairs bathroom. I've also heard that the ladies' room downstairs has photos of Turf Club patrons; I've never screwed up the courage to duck in there to check. Mondays the Clown Lodge plays host to the resurgent Jazz Implosion series, which is hosted by local jazz lions Fat Kid Wednesdays. The intimate quarters down there are a far cry from the upstairs venue, and it's great to see music return there after a long hiatus.

Oh man, this is already running long but there are so many things to talk about when it comes to the Turf. The photobooth is hit and miss: sometimes it's full of toner or fluid or whatever it is they use to make the photos and they look great. Other times, not so much. Other basic requirements are met: darts, jukebox (which has Bad Brains' Rock for Light-- I meant to play "Sailin' On" last night before they went to the house music, but forgot), pool table and a vending machine with salty and sweet snack. The drink selection is pretty garden variety Midwestern bar-- no Campari or anything crazy like that, but you can get your shots of Jameson and they have Premo and Old Style on tap, I believe, along with your Summits and the usual stuff. If you're looking for a hot martini, don't come here; if you're looking for good shows and a convivial atmosphere, this is the place. (McPHERSON)

BAR TALES: NYE'S POLONAISE ROOM

2007-02-02T00:51:00.000-06:00

Nye's Polonaise Room
112 East Hennepin Ave, Minneapolis
612.379.2021

IT HAS BEEN JUST THREE MONTHS since Esquire declared Nye's Polonaise Room to be the best bar in America. The author of the story, a former sports writer from Toronto named Chris Jones, obviously greatly loves the St. Anthony institution. He meticulously researched the place, describing in great detail the bar's kitschy decor and antique staff. Jones drove himself into a frenzy of purple prose trying to find the right words to describe the place, coming up with an embarrassingly orchidaceous intro in the process. "The best bar in America occupies a corner where the path to righteousness and the road to perdition run parallel, east to west, perpendicular to the muddy river that cuts this country in two, north to south," Jones wrote, and it's a mouthful for a bar and restaurant that remains stubbornly charming, despite the fact that the bar is so thoroughly a nesting ground for slumming Yuppies and white-belted hipsters that it's nearly impossible to find a quiet spot to enjoy an overpriced drink.

Jones gets the details of the place right, mostly. But here's a Nye's story he didn't know, or neglected to tell.

Back in 1972, Dayton's had a rather formidable art gallery called Gallery 12, which offered such upscale items as works by pop artist Tom Wesselmann and sculptures by Venezuelan artist Marisol, which even in 1968 were selling for $8,000. Gallery 12's curator was a fellow named John Stoller, and Stoller had an interest in a German artist who was then still somewhat unknown in the United Sates: Jospeh Beuys. The 51-year-old Beuys, a thin man with a long face and a taste for fishing vests and enormous Trilby hats, had a sizable reputation in Europe for producing highly symbolic and idiosyncratic work loosely affiliated with the Fluxus movement, such as 1965's "How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare." In this piece, Beuys put himself on display through the window of a Duesseldorf gallery, his face covered in gold paint, cradling a dead hare and explaining art to it.

Working with a New York art dealer named Ronald Feldman, Stoller arranged to bring Beuys to the United States on a speaking tour: The artist, over the course of 10 days, would lecture in New York, Chicago, and Minneapolis, appearing locally both at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and at the University of Minnesota. Beuys' lectures were sprawling and ambitious, and he illustrated them on chalkboards, dubbing his lectures "Energy Plan for the Western Man" and detailing his ideas for combining art, science, and religion in such a way that might restore the balance he saw lacking in the western world. In Minneapolis, Beuys replaced chalkboard with zinc printing plates, and his diagrams became a piece of art themselves, titled "Minneapolis Fragments." But it was not the only piece of art he created while in Minneapolis.

During his stay, Beuys was taken to Nye's Polonaise Room, and while he was eating, he noticed that the sugar packets in Nye's were printed with the image of a hare sipping water at a lakefront. The hare was a recurring image in Beuys' work -- he was impressed by the fact that the hare burrowed in the earth and emerged from it again, which, to the artist, symbolized death and rebirth. So, with the help of other diners, Beuys rounded up all the sugar packets at the bar. These he later marked with a self-fashioned stamp and exhibited as readymade art, in the manner of Marcel Duchamp, who was an early and important influence on the artist. These stamped sugar packets from Nye's formed a series named "American Hare Sugar," and can be found in the Tate and other important collections.

Most of the pleasures to be had at Nye's are joyously lowbrow, and Twin Citian's know them well: The World's Most Dangerous Polka Band, with Ruth Adams, the band's toothless accordion player; Sweet Lou, who leads the piano bar; the formica tables and glittery plastic booths. It's just what Chris Jones wrote about in Esquire, and it's exactly what locals love about the bar. But it's worth noting that Nye's contribution to the world hasn't just been kitsch: At least once in its history, the bar produced art. (SPARBER)

SKID ROW: MINNEAPOLIS

2007-01-31T11:30:00.000-06:00

Down and Out: The Life and Death of Minneapolis's Skid Row
By Joseph Hart and Edwin C. Hirschoff
University of Minnesota Press (October 2002)

MINNEAPOLIS'S SKID ROW just isn't what it used to be. In fact, all that remains of it is a flagpole situated at the corner of First and Hennepin, which once marked the spot where Nicollet looped around to meet Hennepin. "That post office there," Joseph Hart says, pointing across the street. "That used to be a notorious group of row houses where there was prostitution."

Just now, at the base of this flagpole, Hart is parking his bicycle. He is a thin, jovial fellow with big, friendly features, and he's draped in a floppy sweater against the newly blustery Minneapolis fall. In his hands he holds a copy of his book Down and Out: The Life and Death of Minneapolis's Skid Row.

Published in 2002 by the University of Minnesota Press, Down and Out consists of a series of photographs by Edwin C. Hirschoff, a shutterbug from Minneapolis who in the late 1950s documented the Gateway Center redevelopment project. This massive public works endeavor leveled 40 percent of Minneapolis's downtown in just four years, clearing away the city's notorious Lower Loop, a skid row that housed some 3,500 people, all of whom shared 82 bathtubs, 84 showers, and 220 toilets (one for every 14 men).

Hart authored a lively historical essay that accompanies Hirschoff's striking photographs, detailing a world of transients at its terminus. Just now, Hart is looking at one of Hirschoff's images, which show two slump-shouldered men seated at the base of this very flagpole. Both men wear long overcoats and workmen's caps, and across from them, lining the opposite street, stand a revival mission and two saloons. Above these are a series of "cage hotels," converted warehouses and offices filled with makeshift rooms built of plywood and corrugated tin, and topped with chicken wire.

"Right over there, where the top of that parking garage is," Hart says, gesturing toward a nondescript garage made of dun-colored concrete on Hennepin and Second Avenue South, "that was the St. James Hotel, which housed 600 people." He points to a photograph of it in his book. There it rises 12 stories into the sky, next to a squat, plain building whose roof boasts three tall, white crosses: The Union City Mission. The book quotes a pamphlet from the mission: "A place where human wreckage is salvaged."

"If you went into any of the alleys in skid row, they were littered with glass," Hart says. "Three feet deep. It was a graveyard of old Mad Dog 20/20 bottles, gut-rot wine." There is a photograph of this in the book, an alley choked with shattered glass, the results of years of "bottle gangs" who would pool their pennies to buy and share liquor. "It was a hard-drinking culture," Hart says.

The alley in the photograph is near Gateway Park, which boasted a pavilion and a fountain (the latter, ringed by turtles spitting small geysers of water, now stands in the upscale Lyndale Park Gardens far from Minneapolis's downtown). Hart gestures toward tennis courts just behind the present-day Towers Apartment building. "That is about where Gateway Park was," he says. "Trucks would pull up here looking for day laborers. They would call out their prices, and when they had enough workers, would just load them in the trucks and drive off. It was known as the 'Slave Market.'" Hart's book shows several photographs of the park, always filled with residents of skid row, about 30 percent of whom, according to Hart's research, would have been drunk. The park's pavilion, the book notes, quickly became known as "the pisshouse."

Hart points out that the razing of the Gateway district was an unprecedented act of self-reinvention on the part of Minneapolis. "Look at what went up first," he says. "The library. The Sheraton Ritz. IBM. The Northwest National Life Insurance Building, which they called the 'Temple of Insurance.' Computers. Corporate leisure. Insurance. Information. This was not Minneapolis, a city built on logging and textiles.

"But they were right," Hart adds. "It took root. Look at Minneapolis now." Indeed, the Temple of Insurance--with its elegant, cagelike exterior and vast lobby--still stands, just behind where Gateway Park's pavilion once stood. Hart shrugs.

"There is a part of me that is very sympathetic to drinking too much and pissing on walls," he says. "I wouldn't want to live in the suburbs, in a six-room house made of ticky-tack, but I couldn't just go and tear all those houses down. People in political power would never stand to have their homes and their lives destroyed just because I didn't like it. But that's what they did here." (SPARBER)

BAR REVIEW: THE DUBLINER

2007-01-30T22:09:00.000-06:00

Dubliner Pub
2162 University Ave. W.
St Paul, MN 55114
651.646.5551

WELL, THE GOOD NEWS is they fixed the popcorn machine, although whoever answered the phone when I called seemed to think it was some kind of "Is your refrigerator running?" or "Do you have Prince Albert in a can?" type of joke. But seriously: piping hot popcorn served from an old school popcorn machine can make even an average bar a destination. The Dubliner, however, is no average bar.

It began life as Ace Bar back in the day, and the giant neon Ace Bar sign still looms over the bar's interior, hanging above their incredibly fancily-pantsed dart machines. More on those later, but first, the bevs.

As any self-respecting Irish bar, the Dubliner sports your standards of Irish drinking: Guinness, Harp, Smithwick's, Jameson and all manner of Glen- whiskeys. Their black and tan (your choice of either Harp or Smithwick's) is superlative, the impact of the ale on the stout lightened by a spoon, and the shots are generous. I was in Chicago this past weekend, and there, a shot of Jameson is a shot and no more. Here, it's more like a shot and a half to a double. The real prizes though are Red Breast and Black Bush, which you might not have stumbled across during your average trip to the bar.

I was introduced to Red Breast here: it's a 12-year pot-stilled Irish whiskey which exhibits none of the punch-you-in-the-face qualities you might associate with Irish whiskey. It's best enjoyed the usual way: neat, or with a little water. Can't complain about it over ice, either. Black Bush-- well, that's Protestant whiskey, to quote Jimmy McNulty from "The Wire," so I don't truck in that. My co-conspirator Max assures me it's quality. It's made by Bushmill's, and is their high-end joint. I suppose if you're Orange, it's all right. They also have all the regular stuff for drinks as well as a few other things on tap, but let's face it: you're here for the Irish, right?

The darts are top notch, although pricey at $2 for two people to play a friendly game of cricket. The plastic dart heads are all in pretty decent shape (I've seen worse), but the highlightof the machines is the motion sensitive player switching gizmo on the front. None of that barbaric button-mashing here. When your turn's over, grab your darts and do your best Morpheus impression with an astounding martial arts display, finishing by nearly karate-chopping the button but stopping just short. Voila! Player 2 is up. Don't try this once you've had a few; you're likely to embarass yourself. Even more.

Irish music here happens on the regular, but I have to confess I don't know the exact schedule. Several times it's been a solo act, one guy playing acoustic guitar and some kind of super-mandolin. I'm guessing it's Irish. Here's where I explain that I'm not super-familiar with Irish music and its instruments. Sorry. One night, there was a duo, and the man in charge of the Irish drum proved quite proficient at not just barnyard animal noises, but also some sweet Irish dancing. He even threw in "The Worm" at the end.

And then there's the popcorn. Once you start, you won't be able to stop. It's salty and delicious and a perfect complement to a beer, and Max's theory is that it takes as many calories to chew it as it contains. Wishful thinking, Sparber. Regardless, I'm so glad they got that nifty little machine fixed. Now, if only I could get it up the stairs to my place ... (McPHERSON)

Bottle Gang Cocktails of the Week

2007-01-03T13:21:00.000-06:00

05.20.07 Polish Sidecar. Click here for printable recipe.
05.14.07 Iron Butterfly. Click here for printable recipe.

Sailor Martin, contributor

2007-01-02T07:24:00.000-06:00

SAILOR MARTIN is a pierced and tattooed sailor puppet, originally from New Orleans, currently residing in a houseboat on the Mississippi River somewhere between Minneapolis and St. Paul. Sailor Martin has been a burlesque performer, starred in a series of short movies, was briefly a popular singer, and was a castmember on Chasing Windmills. Learn more about Sailor Martin on his Web page.

CONTRIBUTIONS BY SAILOR MARTIN:
Sailor Martin's Bar Jokes What Make Me Laugh 05.16.07: Pirates Sailor Martin's Bar Jokes What Make Me Laugh 05.16.07

Max Sparber, editor

2007-01-01T23:31:00.001-06:00

MAX SPARBER is the former editor in chief of The Omaha Reader and spent three years as the theater critic for City Pages,as well as being a Frank Premack Public Affairs Journalism Award-winner. He currently can be found back on the theater beat, writing for The Onion's AV Club, as well as editing MnSpeak. Sparber lived in New Orleans for the year prior to Hurricane Katrine, where he co-wrote and co-edited Daily Lush, an online magazine about the culture and history of drinking.

Max Sparber is also a playwright, performer, and heavy drinker, and can often be found haunting local cocktail lounges, hounding bartenders to make him a sazerac, which they inevitably muck up.

STORIES BY MAX SPARBER:

Bar Review: BANK Restaurant
Road Trips: The Crow Bar in Tomah, Wisconsin
Bar Tales: Blessing the maibock at the Town Hall Brewery
Yeast: It eats sugars and poops alcohol. What’s not to like?
Mother's Day cocktail: The Dorothy Mantooth is a Saint
In honor of the Geek Prom: The nerdiest cocktail ever
Drinking With Drinking With Ian's Ian
Appalling drinking customs from the past: Skull cups
The Drinking Song: "The Pub With No Beer"
Five tequila cocktails for Cinco de Mayo
Drinking Games: Top Notch Nymph
Drink the Way James Bond Drinks: Vodka
Death Drinks of Rock Stars
Drinker's Cinema: Nightmare Alley
Bar Review: Dan Kelly's
The Liquor-Soaked Death of Charles II of Navarre
The Drinking Song: "Cigareetes, Whusky and Wild, Wild Women"
Academy Award Special: Hollywood's Greatest Drinkers
Bar Review: Patrick McGovern's Pub
The Still
Mardi Gras Cocktails
The Toast
Bar Review: Keegan's
The Undrinkable Cocktail
Three Bar Bets Involving Fire
Six Really Bad Things To Do When Drunk
A cocktail for a dead bombshell
The Bawdy Song
Drinker's Paradise: Valhalla
Galliano: The Most Dangerous Bottle Ever Made
The Big Lebowski
Bar Tales: Nye's Polonaise Room
Book Review: Skid Row: Minneapolis
What's the Word: Thunderbird!

Nancy Sartor, writer

2007-01-01T17:53:00.000-06:00

Nancy Sartor is a freelance writer whose work has been featured in newspapers and magazines. A Northeast Minneapolis resident, she spent decades in the hospitality industry, learning about beverages during after-hours drinking sessions at various restaurants, bars, parking lots and living rooms throughout the Twin Cities. She blends a mean top-shelf margarita, and rarely breaks a wine cork.

STORIES BY NANCY SARTOR:

That's hot: the toddy

Steve McPherson, editor

2007-01-01T16:20:00.000-06:00

STEVE MCPHERSON has a beard, and a fiancee, and more alcohol in his apartment now than when he met Max Sparber. He has a B.A. in Music from Wesleyan University, plays guitar for Jessy Greene and Big Trouble, and is currently figuring out how to make a living from writing about things that people like, such as music and drinking. He also appears monthly on Homegrown to co-host with David Campbell. His favorite bar is currently the Dubliner, his favorite drink The Bluth Banana and his favorite bar amenity popcorn. His favorite show is The Wire, his favorite movie Glengarry Glen Ross and his favorite band is all of them.

Steve McPherson is not the president of ABC-- I mean, he is, but that's not this one. But wouldn't that be sweet? Private jets, etc. I never would have canceled "Commander in Chief."

STORIES BY STEVE McPHERSON:

SxSW REPORT: The Driskill Hotel Bar
SxSW REPORT: Lone Star Beer
The Yellow Cake Batter Martini
The Myth of the Scottish Picnic
Casablanca
Bar Review: The Riverview Wine Bar
Cocktail I made last night: The Bluth Banana
Cocktail I made last night: The Mint-y-Cocoa
Bar Review: Turf Club
Bar Review: The Dubliner

Courtney Mault, writer

2007-01-01T11:33:00.003-06:00

STORIES BY COURTNEY MAULT:

21 Club
Pirate Drinks: High-seas ribaldry with drunken sea dogs
Undrinkable Hangover Remedies
Three Bar Tricks Involving Napkins
The Martini: Whose Child Is This?
Jake Leg
The Shapes of Drinking Glasses
Know Your Mixed Drinks

To Contact The Bottle Gang

2006-02-25T21:39:00.000-06:00

The Bottle Gang
PO Box 2881
Minneapolis, MN 55402

Max Sparber: max [at] thebottlegang.com
Steve McPherson: steve [at] thebottlegang.com