tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-85862484797100437262024-03-23T12:00:19.813-06:00The Bottle Gangmaxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.comBlogger90125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8586248479710043726.post-10239394979033300312007-09-13T12:35:00.000-06:002007-09-13T12:38:39.758-06:00Chuck & Sean's Trivia: The answers for 09.09.07<span style="font-weight:bold;">Round 1</span><br /><br /><br />1. Who was the first woman to serve as a justice on the Supreme Court? Sandra Day O'Connor<br /><br />2. What year of the Olympics were filmed in Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl's film Olympia Spiele? 1936<br /><br />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<br /><br />4. What is the highest waterfall on the Mississippi river? St. Anthony Falls<br /><br />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<br /><br />6. What rapper acted as the Mouse King in the Nutcracker at Baltimore's School for the Arts? 2pac<br /><br />7. What Canadian-born architect, who designed a building in Minneapolis, also designed the trophy for the World Cup of Hockey? Frank Gehry<br /><br />8. What month did Kurt Cobain die in in 1994? April<br /><br />9. In 31 B.C. The Final War of the Roman Republic ended in the battle at Actium. Who won? Octavian, or Caesar<br /><br />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<br /><br />11. What city and state did Michael Moore grow up in? Flint, Michigan<br /><br />12. What is the name of the first published novel by Chuck Palahniuk? Fight Club<br /><br />13. What country is Lesotho entirely surrounded by? South Africa<br /><br />14. What rite of passage, when directly translated is known as: one to whom the commandments apply? bar or bat mitzvah<br /><br />15. Author Madeleine L'Engle died on Friday. What was her most popular book? A Wrinkle in Time<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Round 2</span><br /><br />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<br /><br />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)<br /><br />3. In what city did Jimi Hendrix die? London, England (wiki)<br /><br />4. Name the four inner planets? Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars<br /><br />5. What is the most populuous city in Vietnam? Ho Chi Minh City<br /><br />6. What are the names of the crash test dummies who are the mascots for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration? Vince and Larry<br /><br />7. Who was the lead role in the TV show Monk originally written for? Michael Richards<br /><br />8. What movie did Kevin Spacey win his first Oscar for? The Usual Suspects<br /><br />9. Hmong people's original homeland is the mountainous Southern region of what country? China<br /><br />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<br /><br />11. What non-coastal Western state has the lowest median age in the United States with a median age of 28.5? Utah<br /><br />12. Which county has a higher Asian population, Hennepin or Ramsey county? Ramsey<br /><br />13. In rap slang, if someone is a crooked eye sipper what does that mean? they drink st. ives malt liquor<br /><br />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<br /><br />15. What title, used in numerous fields, literally means "holding a place"? lieutenant<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Music Round</span><br /><br /><br />Daughter – Pearl Jam<br />The Rat – The Walkmen<br />The Beatles – Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite<br />50 Cent – 21 Questions<br />Death Cab for Cutie – Soul Meets Bodysteve mcphersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06772838934065540974noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8586248479710043726.post-78519707253820365142007-09-04T10:03:00.000-06:002007-09-04T10:05:38.478-06:00Chuck & Sean's Trivia: The answers for 09.02.07EVERY 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.<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Round 1</span><br /><br />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<br /><br />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<br /><br />3. Please name all seven counties in the Twin Cities seven county metro area? Anoka, Carver, Dakota, Hennepin, Ramsey, Scott, Washington<br /><br />4. What are the O’s made of on the logo for the TV show Divorce Court? Wedding rings<br /><br />5. What college was the crap show Felicity based on? New York University<br /><br />6. Alberto Gonzales is a dipshit. Spell the dipshit’s last name? Gonzales<br /><br />7. What state pays the most for redeeming used cans? Michigan, 10 cents<br /><br />8. What state is Arlen Specter a senator from? Pennsylvania<br /><br />9. What date and day of the week did the 35W bridge fall down on? Wednesday August 1, 2007<br /><br />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<br /><br />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.<br /><br />12. How many weeks does Billy Madison get to pass the tests for each grade in the amazing film, Billy Madison? 2 weeks<br /><br />13. Who founded the Order of the Missionaries of Charity? Mother Teresa<br /><br />14. Hurricane Felix is moving through the Carribean right now as we speak. What number Atlantic hurricane is Felix for this year? 6<br /><br />15. Who is the first African-American Secretary of State? Colin Powell<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Round 2</span><br /><br />1. Was Saddam Hussein Sunni or Shia? Sunni<br /><br />2. What was the 50th state to be joined into the Union? Hawaii<br /><br />3. What year did Nixon unsuccessfully run for President? 1960<br /><br />4. What is the capital of Egypt? Cairo<br /><br />5. What was Bill Murray's character’s name in the Royal Tenenbaum's? Raleigh St. Clair<br /><br />6. What is the name of the new head coach of the Gophers football team? Tim Brewster<br /><br />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<br /><br />8. Name one of the two closest bus routes that flank the 3-3-1 club. #17 & #11<br /><br />9. Are the days on Mars longer or shorter than those on Earth? Longer, 24 hours 39 minutes<br /><br />10. What is the total complement of genes in an organism or cell known as? Genome<br /><br />11. Which gender is known as the homogametic sex in chromosomal studies? Women XX<br /><br />12. What 2005 movie had the tagline, "the cure for the common man"? Hitch<br /><br />13. Who is known as the father of geometry? Euclid<br /><br />14. What type of Jewish bread is often used to make French toast in New York Diners? Challah<br /><br />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? Athenssteve mcphersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06772838934065540974noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8586248479710043726.post-41587413985145161432007-08-11T09:16:00.000-06:002007-08-11T09:32:50.039-06:00A quick note about the MartiniI 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.<br /><br />"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.<br /><br />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)maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8586248479710043726.post-78534664736643994702007-07-26T20:03:00.001-06:002007-07-26T20:21:08.268-06:00The Flaming Moe :: A Simpsons Movie Special<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/20916473@N00/911058690/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1076/911058690_69961686bf.jpg" width="250" align="right" hspace="10" vspace="10" alt="Burn, baby burn" /></a>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.<br /><br />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).<br /><br />3 oz. vodka<br />1.5 oz. Kirschwasser<br />1.5 oz. Creme de Cassis<br />1.5 oz. Blackberry Brandy<br />1 tsp. 151 rum<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/20916473@N00/911058146/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1126/911058146_9743f9a08f_o.jpg" width="95%" alt="Lighting the Flaming Moe" /></a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/20916473@N00/911058330/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1240/911058330_b45fcd00e6_o.jpg" width="95%" alt="The Flaming Moe on fire" /></a><br /><br />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. (<a href="http://bottlegang.blogspot.com/2007/01/steve-mcpherson-editor.html">McPHERSON</a>)steve mcphersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06772838934065540974noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8586248479710043726.post-48612020222036107892007-07-25T20:36:00.000-06:002007-07-26T20:39:34.695-06:00Cocktailphernalia: Hobo pump decanter<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ventriloblog/910481363/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1315/910481363_f68355fb36_m.jpg" width="180" height="240" alt="Hobo pump decanter" /></a> <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ventriloblog/911327544/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1373/911327544_b4b166cda8_m.jpg" width="180" height="240" alt="Hobo pump decanter" /></a><br /><br />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)maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8586248479710043726.post-43183250877799635812007-07-20T09:36:00.000-06:002007-07-20T09:59:50.900-06:00Book Review: The Ultimate Bar Book<img src="http://imgred.com/http://www.drinkstuff.com/productimg/7822.jpg" align=right hspace=10 vspace=10 width=40%>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 <b>need</b> to get Mittie Hellmich's <i>Ultimate Bar Book</i>.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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."<br /><br />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."<br /><br />There are lots of websites that can give you recipes for making cocktails, but Hellmich's <i>Ultimate Bar Book</i> treats the subject with respect and just a bit of tongue in cheek—a perfect companion for a night of tippling.(<a href="http://bottlegang.blogspot.com/2007/01/steve-mcpherson-editor.html">McPHERSON</a>)steve mcphersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06772838934065540974noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8586248479710043726.post-36700976733648774112007-07-16T17:47:00.001-06:002008-11-10T00:13:08.229-06:00Road Trips: 21 Club<i>The Bottle Gang tippled a glass or three<br />at New York's 21.<br />We didn't drink them dry,<br />though they may say we tried.<br /><br />We left so we could drink no more,<br />to go home and dream from our beds<br />that when we come back to 21<br />they don't treat us like the Feds.</i><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6GHU8By3xEp14YoTzzek9JthAaZQ47y4DJdW6Da6cNqPQMvzGHFmFC_aXvDq8WoI9PWwqK-3Lggs0JEc4ejgiCRsQL4Aaoa82CptYl_P12st11M1u0ZIvuT_sguO9jHqP9W1WUBWCrCY/s1600-r/Jockeys.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhb6Wdd6XkGqKW8u3p1RlKlVRslurV3iDzyXSTnI8pGa7UQAl5Tugn9Sx01It5dx6YGKwpsIeDfsWiFvFEjFJAyza-mONG-SBxy47s6PHCxWvA1kVEsrlLNDYEBxQBqyO3wUM66BsgdDYw/s320/Jockeys.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5139312033090432482" border="0" /></a>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.<br /><br />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:<br /><br />"[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."<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6IIgT_Qm7B_XaCiZu23Xttqwyn821BvdF9LfWJqTT4qNDjBfgmEkcJ7VmVOUUXYi98_nPc2nk4oLGPPr3g07e811rubB1Qhd5GzndM9QadyEm7XF75mpk_PGEoF7x97WnGzLPLCvqkO4/s1600-r/713845634_6597aea8d3_m.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHZes4m1nRx2kYV8p05OX_Fw1we37rk5D4-RYPh5gox2RZTc3eu2CSyMHa2fjzu_ktgWhTBUUoIfK4-4lmX9jX5ZRX__6qfv_9FcdkAIcfBgs3rbyK14FfDAHT7djCWoozSfOhfOOon2A/s320/713845634_6597aea8d3_m.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5139312277903568370" border="0" /></a>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.<br /><br />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:<br /><br />"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!"<br /><br />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."<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRKSpoolVzyWNla9cAvfjBJyqI7bYTThNFMenmSg0qDwcYjxWEnJvfmIYJoD5AfkSprMjPpnu535z7FhmYmebeY7ATWTpsUtKEkl3_3k4xb-QDxhRFOtD4ea0Q0C1y4L-qw7A7y_GXHfw/s1600-r/658015479_384a123503.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWHdBGCL4ee1bU8W1kel97tf9ieyAhaI5F9ZTHo86VsEiqSxM8DCixALJm1-K2X2rDzUPNI5u38DS2YfjDqjJYkT4hxv3LzCDoKhPo5cKnQOJV79pJOL0KqEBZU_Clxd4IYR2nNnm_bZM/s320/658015479_384a123503.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5139312419637489154" border="0" /></a>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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br />(MAULT)maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8586248479710043726.post-59837996102451488682007-07-06T21:57:00.000-06:002007-07-06T22:09:11.898-06:00Cocktail I made last night: The Tornado Cloud<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/20916473@N00/744886160/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1429/744886160_7c8d1dc017.jpg" width="200" align=right hspace-10 vspace=10 alt="The Tornado Cloud" /></a>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:<br /><br />2 oz. dark rum<br />1/2 tbsp ginger or simple syrup<br />3 to 4 oz. chilled ginger beer<br />2 lime wedges<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />4 lime wedges<br />2 tsp. sugar<br />2 oz. Mt. Gay Sugar Cane Rum<br />2 oz. ginger-infused vodka<br />Club soda<br /><br />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. (<a href="http://bottlegang.blogspot.com/2007/01/steve-mcpherson-editor.html">McPHERSON</a>)steve mcphersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06772838934065540974noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8586248479710043726.post-44925995520931340912007-07-05T13:52:00.000-06:002007-07-05T14:06:47.201-06:00Robert Skoro: Bartender, Musician<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTywKjag3TAsszaOynzCNzOgHZM4ptCBwJAjY_5_0cZ9kmzRU9YsObpldpHFd3S65XBq5q_6uwU_iWWJbO4MiQP6D3strxv3EzgNNFYuA4myUfUd1d-c9Z4qCXhnxD6WRjUN6wkZemMLK8/s1600-h/skoro_pinetree.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTywKjag3TAsszaOynzCNzOgHZM4ptCBwJAjY_5_0cZ9kmzRU9YsObpldpHFd3S65XBq5q_6uwU_iWWJbO4MiQP6D3strxv3EzgNNFYuA4myUfUd1d-c9Z4qCXhnxD6WRjUN6wkZemMLK8/s200/skoro_pinetree.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5083804247741333394" /></a><br />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, <i>Proof</i>, and his sophmore follow-up on Yep Roc Records, <i>That These Things Could Be Ours</i>. 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.<br /><br />Bottle Gang: I'm going to ask you about bartending.<br /><br />Robert Skoro: Oh my god.<br /><br />BG: When did you start bartending?<br /><br />RS: A little less than a year ago.<br /><br />BG: And at the 331?<br /><br />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.<br /><br />BG: But you haven't just been a monkey. I know you like making drinks.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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."<br /><br />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.<br /><br />BG: So what's your current favorite drink?<br /><br />RS: Well, that's kind of a tough one. I've gotten really into this liqueur called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gammel_Dansk">Gammel Dansk</a>, 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 <a href="http://www.webtender.com/db/drink/2414">Dark and Stormy</a>, which is rum and tonic and cola and citrus. We've got that <a href="http://www.stonesgingerwine.com/">ginger wine</a> 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://www.hendricksgin.com/">Hendrick's</a> or a nice yellow Patron. It's almost like a different liquor from something bar pour or Cuervo, even.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />I had some of that potato vodka—the <a href="http://www.chopinvodka.com/">Chopin</a>—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.<br /><br />BG: I've been really into this <a href="http://www.bisonbrandvodka.net/">Bison Grass Vodka</a> 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 <a href="http://www.reykavodka.com/ageverification.php?jump=">Reyka</a> 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />BG: That sounds good. I've been a little interested in Bloody Marys since I went to <a href="http://bottlegang.blogspot.com/2007/05/bar-review-topolobampo.html">Topolobampo</a> in Chicago. They only have tequila drinks and they had a drink called a Vampiro, which is a crazy Mexican Bloody Mary. (<a href="http://bottlegang.blogspot.com/2007/01/steve-mcpherson-editor.html">McPHERSON</a>)<br /><br /><i>To continue reading about Skoro's musical endeavors, head to the jump over at <a href="http://signaleatsnoise.blogspot.com/2007/07/robert-skoro-musician-bartender.html">Signal Eats Noise</a>.</i>steve mcphersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06772838934065540974noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8586248479710043726.post-67668811379178245802007-06-23T07:28:00.000-06:002007-06-23T07:34:59.090-06:00Southern Comfort and Astrology<img src="http://imgred.com/http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1273/560910296_203ccae875.jpg" width="95%" height="95%"><br /><br />The only two things that can make cocktail hour better, according to <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/87039192@N00/sets/72157600389562498/">this rather embarrassing pamphlet from the Seventies.</a> (<a href="http://www.mrbalihai.com/goof/">Via.</a>)maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8586248479710043726.post-20760861503145321272007-06-18T11:09:00.000-06:002007-06-18T14:28:24.453-06:00Mixology Monday: CreamWE 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.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ventriloblog/504055727/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/196/504055727_c2b18e89e1_o.gif" width="100" height="87" alt="Mixology Mondays logo" align=right hspace=10 vspace=10 /></a>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 <a href="http://morselsandmusings.blogspot.com/">Morsels and Musings</a> this weekend to see what the other cocktail blogs produced for this month's theme.<br /><br /><img src="http://imgred.com/http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1176/564558734_c360dc7327_m.jpg" align=right hspace=10 vspace=10>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.<br /><br />The resulting cocktail is creamy and sweet, but not overly so, with a mellow blackberry flavor. Here's how to make it:<br /><br /><B>The Straight B</b><br /><br />Two shots B&B<br />One shot Bailey's Irish Cream<br />One-half shot blackberry brandy<br /><br /><I>Serve in a lowball glass over ice.</i> (<a href="http://bottlegang.blogspot.com/2007/01/max-sparber-editor.html">SPARBER</a>)maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8586248479710043726.post-88007086953808858162007-06-16T09:12:00.000-06:002007-06-16T10:09:04.621-06:00Poldy at the pub: A Bloomsday celebration<img src="http://imgred.com/http://www.lib.udel.edu/ud/spec/exhibits/treasures/images/joyce.gif" align=right hspace=10 vspace=10 width=200>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.<br /><br />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 "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FCast-Characters-Reading-Ulysses%2Fdp%2F0300078056%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1182007163%26sr%3D8-1&tag=pulmusblo-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325">The Cast of Characters</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=pulmusblo-20&l=ur2&o=1" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" />" sets the stage beautifully for Chapter 12, "Sirens".<br /><br /><i>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.</i><br /><br /><img src="http://imgred.com/http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1189/557183695_8621295e74_o.jpg" align=right width=150 hspace=20 vspace=10>The Ormond Hotel (located at 8 Ormond Quay Upper) was, according to Don Gifford's "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FUlysses-Annotated-Don-Gifford%2Fdp%2F0520067452%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1182007818%26sr%3D1-1&tag=pulmusblo-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325">Ulysses Annotated</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=pulmusblo-20&l=ur2&o=1" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" />", "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."<br /><br />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:<br /><br />"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."<br /><br />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.<br /><br />"--You're the essence of vulgarity, she in gliding said.<br /><br />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."<br /><br /><img src="http://imgred.com/http://www.facade.com/celebrity/photo/James_Joyce.jpg" align=right hspace=10 vspace=10 width=150>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.<br /><br />Happy Bloomsday. (<a href="http://bottlegang.blogspot.com/2007/01/steve-mcpherson-editor.html">McPHERSON</a>)steve mcphersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06772838934065540974noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8586248479710043726.post-66642896479423051102007-06-15T08:23:00.000-06:002007-06-15T11:02:26.558-06:00Absinthe: Legal again?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.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ventriloblog/552650689/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1412/552650689_d2c3b4c1a5_m.jpg" width="240" height="180" alt="Old Absinthe Bar" align=right hspace=10 vspace=10/></a>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).<br /><br />Did we say it is illegal to manufacture, or buy, or import absinthe? We meant, it <I>was</i> illegal. Because there is a new absinthe being marketed, made in the United States, called <a href="http://drinklucid.com/">Lucid</a>, 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. <br /><br />Fans of European absinthes might take issue with the resulting drink, as, according to a <A HREF="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/business/yourmoney/29goods.html?ex=1181966400&en=2c684e7200f53b19&ei=5070">New York Times</A> 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.<br /><br />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. (<a href="http://bottlegang.blogspot.com/2007/01/max-sparber-editor.html">SPARBER</a>)maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.com31tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8586248479710043726.post-26115094031629699822007-06-14T22:52:00.000-06:002007-06-14T22:55:29.405-06:00And now, a brief informational film<object width="400" height="325"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/HCobSDcen8M"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/HCobSDcen8M" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="400" height="325"></embed></object><br /><br />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.maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8586248479710043726.post-10016408357074646802007-06-14T12:59:00.000-06:002007-06-14T13:07:44.083-06:00Cocktailphernalia: Work is the Curse of the Drinking Class<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ventriloblog/548721851/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1053/548721851_1d435a90e7.jpg" width="375" height="500" alt="Work is the Curse of the Drinking Class" /></a><br /><br />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!"<br /><br />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.maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8586248479710043726.post-8992043124746757422007-06-11T01:10:00.000-06:002007-06-11T09:38:17.609-06:00Sailor Martin's Bar Jokes What Make Me Laugh 06.11.07: Whales<object width="400" height="325"> <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/6Pe-Fwy8umc"> </param> <embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/6Pe-Fwy8umc" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="400" height="325"> </embed> </object><br /><br />SO, two whales walk into a bar ... (<a href="http://bottlegang.blogspot.com/2007/01/sailor-martin-contributor.html">SAILOR MARTIN</a>)maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8586248479710043726.post-24071469223379900872007-06-10T10:43:00.000-06:002007-06-10T10:54:44.254-06:00Drinkers Art: "Les Quatre Ages" by Honoré DaumierWE 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. <br /><br /><img src="http://imgred.com/http://photos22.flickr.com/30339378_0fbfb91e64_m.jpg" align=right hsapce=10 vspace=10>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. <br /><br />"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. <br /><br /><img src="http://imgred.com/http://home.uchicago.edu/~amb/VanGoghDrinkers.jpg" align=right hspace=10 vspace=10 width="60%" height="60%">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. <br /><br />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. (<a href="http://bottlegang.blogspot.com/2007/02/courtney-mault-writer.html">MAULT</a>)maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8586248479710043726.post-54109758470757247472007-06-07T09:42:00.000-06:002007-06-12T23:24:37.276-06:00Vodka review: Reyka VodkaIT'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.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ventriloblog/534729965/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1390/534729965_adc4cc262a_m.jpg" width="180" height="240" alt="Reyka vodka" align=right hspace=10 vspace=10/></a>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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesper_%28cocktail%29">Vesper</a>, 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.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ventriloblog/534730957/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1331/534730957_1dcf83daa7_m.jpg" width="180" height="240" alt="Moscow mule" align=right hspace=10 vpspace=10 /></a>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.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://bottlegang.blogspot.com/search/label/shots">pepper shots</a> 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.<br /><br />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. (<a href="http://bottlegang.blogspot.com/2007/01/max-sparber-editor.html">SPARBER</a>)maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8586248479710043726.post-79293638590624989542007-06-04T21:01:00.000-06:002007-06-05T10:33:34.977-06:00The Raspberry CaipirinhaWE 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.<br /><br /><img src="http://imgred.com/http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1076/530907526_9db45fecb4.jpg" align=right width=225 hspace=10 vspace=10>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:<br /><br />4 lime wedges<br />2 teaspoons sugar<br />2 oz. cachaça<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. (<A href="http://bottlegang.blogspot.com/2007/01/steve-mcpherson-editor.html">McPHERSON</a>)steve mcphersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06772838934065540974noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8586248479710043726.post-20333554019022015772007-06-04T17:47:00.000-06:002007-06-04T17:59:21.100-06:00Cocktailphernalia: Humorous cocktail napkins<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ventriloblog/530729233/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1183/530729233_0d4caf14b5_m.jpg" width="180" height="240" alt="Cocktail napkins" /></a> <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ventriloblog/530623776/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1106/530623776_4f83607c90_m.jpg" width="180" height="240" alt="Cocktail napkins" /></a><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ventriloblog/530728343/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1079/530728343_8cf04540aa.jpg" width="395" height="265" alt="Cocktail napkins" /></a><br /><br />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.maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8586248479710043726.post-75005870986011377542007-06-04T08:46:00.000-06:002007-06-04T08:48:44.559-06:00And now, relax with an enjoyable cartoon<object width="400" height="325"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/wgq0PkWtjNY"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/wgq0PkWtjNY" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="400" height="325"></embed></object><br /><br />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. (<a href="http://www.mrbalihai.com/goof/2007/05/clean_clear_taste.html">Via.</a>)maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8586248479710043726.post-18820988847946585032007-06-02T15:46:00.000-06:002007-06-03T11:33:18.549-06:00Your friend, the olive.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.<br /><br /><img src="http://imgred.com/http://www.skdunn.com/images/olives.jpg" align=right width=200 hspace=10 vspace=10>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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://www.krinos.com/item.php?PGId=3&PCId=1&sID=C">cracked green olive</a> 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://www.lundsandbyerlys.com/">Byerly's</a> or <a href="http://www.kowalskis.com/">Kowalski's</a>) 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1078/526797957_3bddb3d9d5.jpg" hspace=10 vspace=10 width=95%><br />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 <a href="http://chef-on-call.com/2005/06/peppadews.html">peppadew pepper</a>, 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.<br /><br />We are. Crazy delicious. (<a href="http://bottlegang.blogspot.com/2007/01/steve-mcpherson-editor.html">McPHERSON</a>)steve mcphersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06772838934065540974noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8586248479710043726.post-82869966055423303562007-06-02T11:50:00.000-06:002007-06-02T16:37:45.823-06:00Road Trips: A Drinker's Guide to Omaha, part two<a href="http://bottlegang.blogspot.com/2007/05/road-trips-drinkers-guide-to-omaha-part.html">CONTINUED FROM PART ONE.</a><br /><br /><img src="http://imgred.com/http://www.mtfujiinn.com/building/neonsign2_small.jpg" align=right hspace=10 vspace=10>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.<br /><br />And so Omaha's tiki bar, the <B>Mai Tai Lounge</b>, 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ventriloblog/96587221/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/30/96587221_85accccc2a_m.jpg" width="240" height="180" alt="Bohemian Cafe sign" align=right hspace=10 vspace=10/></a>Across town, on 13th Street just south of downtown, is another ethnic restaurant, one that has always been indisputably authentic. The <B>Bohemian Cafe</b> 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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ventriloblog/521662364/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/193/521662364_48c47fbca5_m.jpg" width="180" height="240" alt="Folk art Czech girl" align=right hspace=10 vspace=10/></a>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. (<a href="http://bottlegang.blogspot.com/2007/01/max-sparber-editor.html">SPARBER</a>)<br /><br />CONTINUED TOMORROWmaxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8586248479710043726.post-23878254745485632322007-06-02T01:22:00.000-06:002007-06-02T01:31:00.104-06:00Slideshow: Scenes from "Drinking With Ian"<iframe align=center src=http://www.flickr.com/slideShow/index.gne?user_id=11828135@N00&set_id=72157600299323358 frameBorder=0 width=400 scrolling=no height=400></iframe><br /><br />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. (<a href="http://bottlegang.blogspot.com/2007/01/max-sparber-editor.html">SPARBER</a>)maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8586248479710043726.post-31237479913913342332007-05-31T06:10:00.000-06:002007-06-02T16:28:33.284-06:00Road Trips: A Drinker's Guide to Omaha, part one<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ventriloblog/96571437/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/31/96571437_0b1361af87_m.jpg" width="180" height="240" alt="Satellite Motel Sign detail" align=right hspace=10 vspace=10 /></a>"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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Drinkers, should you find yourself in Omaha, here is a travelogue of our favorite watering holes.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ventriloblog/521661590/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/201/521661590_d237937172_m.jpg" width="240" height="180" alt="Homey Inn" align=right hspace=10 vspace=10/></a>We begin, as we always do, on Saddle Creek at the <B>Homey Inn</b>. 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ventriloblog/521660636/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/191/521660636_20219f48c2_m.jpg" width="240" height="180" alt="Nude Beer" align=right hspace=10 vspace=10/></a>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 <a href="http://bottlegang.blogspot.com/2007/02/casablanca.html">Humphrey Bogart</a>, but it's passable.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ventriloblog/96610904/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/22/96610904_8f1a50bbd7_m.jpg" width="180" height="240" alt="Lynx Lounge" align=left hspace=10 vspace=10/></a>Next, it's onward to <B>The Lynx Lounge</b>, 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ventriloblog/96610284/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/37/96610284_3a7c663eb2_m.jpg" width="180" height="240" alt="Lynx Lounge bar" align=right hspace=10 vspace=10/></a>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. (<a href="http://bottlegang.blogspot.com/2007/01/max-sparber-editor.html">SPARBER</a>)<br /><br /><B>Read part two <a href="http://bottlegang.blogspot.com/2007/06/road-trips-drinkers-guide-to-omaha-part.html">here.</a></b>maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.com4