Author: Bob Westal

Cocktail historian David Wondrich informed us in 2011 that today’s drink is an invention from the early 1950s, popularized by theater legends, movie stars, haute couture fashion models, trendsetting columnists and the like. He also told how it disappeared sometime in the early 1980s. I was already alive and drinking by then, and it was certainly not a feature at the bars in Westwood Village where my fellow Bruins and I would commiserate with <shudder> Long Island Ice Teas. By the time I read about it a decade or so later, it was a curiosity….but it was a curiosity I’ve always…

As if you didn’t know, the Saturday after this post goes live is the day of the final four games of this year’s NCAA basketball tournament prior to the championship game on Monday night. On the other hand, if I weren’t writing this post, it’s more than likely that I wouldn’t know that. I’m not a sports fan, though at times I have been less indifferent to basketball than some of the other games. My interest in March Madness peaked a little a million years ago when my alma mater of UCLA made its way to victory, but it was nothing compared to the…

Last week, I let my eyesight get the better of me, and I got the recipe for the Tulip wrong, though in a way that I thought was kind of right. This week, however, instead of going with equal parts of all of our ingredients, I correct the record with the more modulated canonical version of one of many mostly overlooked classics from 1930’s The Savoy Cocktail Book. It’s worth looking at. The Tulip Cocktail 1 ounce apple brandy 1 ounce sweet vermouth 1/2 ounce apricot liqueur 1/2 ounce lemon juice Combine the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with plenty of ice. Shake…

This week, we’re blending optometry with our mixology. For whatever reason, a pretty large majority of the people in my life need to wear eyeglasses or contacts. Not me, As a nerdy youngster, I almost envied my friends’ problematic eyesight;  wearing glasses would be a kind of truth in advertising. My soul was bespectacled, damn it! All these decades later, I still don’t need to wear any kind of prescription eyewear, but at some point after I turned 35 or 40, presbyopia began to set in. Like millions of others, I now have to wear reading glasses when reading books…

Timing, my friends, is everything. Well, no, but it’s definitely a thing. This week’s refreshment is presented by Proper No. Twelve Irish Whiskey. This is for the simple reason that its representatives were nice enough to send me a free bottle of the stuff along with this week’s recipe and, of course, I always like to do Irish whiskey cocktails before St. Patrick’s Day because Irish whiskey is good and why not? So, that’s one kind of timing,  but this week there’s more. Proper No. Twelve is a whiskey that’s associated with MMA star Conor “Notorious” McGregor. He is, I gather,…

After my recent adventures with the Gimlet and the Gimlet Eye, I still had plenty of limes and egg white around. I looked around online and found a number of recipes for a drink that was so simple and just plain logical, it just had to be this week’s choice. This one is my version of a number of recipes that all boil down to a Pisco Sour made with tequila, which really isn’t very different from last week’s creation. I do think it’s better in terms of mass appeal, however. Why isn’t this drink everywhere? The Tequila Sour 2 ounces…

It’s likely that the Gimlet is named for Sir Thomas Gimlette, an English navy surgeon who is credited with stocking and combining overproof navy strength gin and Rose’s Lime Juice on British warships. It’s also possible that Sir Thomas got confused with another kind of gimlet. That’s a tool for drilling small holes, which also would have been widely used on her majesty’s vessels near the turn of the 20th century. It’s the tool, definitely not the drink, that gives us the expression, “a gimlet eye.” If you’re unfamiliar, you probably don’t read many arts reviews, book jackets, or film-festival programs. It’s…

In the very, very early days of this blog series, when I was still using the annoying “royal ‘we,'” or, as I sometimes think it should be called, “the second person precious,” I took on the Gimlet. The accompanying picture at that post has long since disappeared from the platform, and the writing isn’t my best. As for the drink itself, that version consisted of gin and Rose’s Lime Juice, a heavily sweetened product. Now, one of the prime directives of modern-day quality cocktail making — you might call it Dale DeGroff’s first commandment — is “thou shalt use fresh…

I’m starting to think I just dreamed this, since I can’t find a word about it online now that I need it, but here we go. I could have sworn that Michael Pollan, or some other historian of things that go into our bodies, has said that the ubiquity of hard apple cider and apple brandy (aka applejack) in the earliest days of America was partly fueled by a religious loophole. Though we all grew up with the idea of Eve eating the forbidden apple in the Garden of Eden, no apples actually appear in the Holy Bible. And so,…

I’m not sure there’s any proof that this week’s beverage has any particular connection to the Pendennis Club, but it’s possible the naming wasn’t 100 percent random. The Louisville, Kentucky private club describes itself thusly. “It knows nothing of politics nor religion except that its members may or may not be of one persuasion or another. The Pendennis Club is a traditional gathering of friends, where decency, decorum, civility, good manners and the social graces are still very much in style.” A lot to unpack there, American history and geographic location-wise, but it’s probably more Downton Abbey than Mar Lago.…