Author: Bob Westal

I’ve said this before, but claiming that you’ve created a cocktail is usually a questionable proposition. Sometimes it’s just that all you’ve really done is taken a preexisting classic and added, subtracted, or switched out one or two ingredients. Sometimes, it’s just something so self-evident that somebody, somewhere pretty much had to have done it. In fact I feel pretty sure that somebody, somewhere, must have come up with the idea of taking a daiquiri and adding a bit of cold seltzer and egg white. Even so, I don’t think I’ve seen it anywhere, much less had it. Now I have! It’s…

It’s almost been three years to the day since my last go at a Mojito variation.  I guess the middle of this very hot summer is a good time for another. Today’s drink is an adaptation of a recipe provided by an anonymous Food Network mixologist, which departs from the more typical preparation method of simply adding fresh juice and instead utilizes heavy duty muddling to extract the juice, much in the manner of a Caipirinha  Also, as you might have gathered from the name, this one throws some oranges into the mix. Let’s get to it. The Orangey Mojito…

If you had told my Silver Age eighth-grade self that someday they’d make a movie about, say, Green Lantern or a super-villain team-up flick that included the Joker, and I wouldn’t even bother to see them, I’d have been offended and argued that superhero comics were a legitimate form of entertainment I would never outgrow. But here we are in a world where superhero movies are actually crowding out other types of movies to the point where semi-recovering fanboys like myself are kind of beyond blasé, especially if they relate to DC Comics. Back in the dark ages of bowdlerized, non-violent,…

With Comic-Con finally behind me, a very hot week ahead of me and the busted shell of a 40 year old air conditioner above me, it was mandatory to continue my exploration of that most refreshing of all cocktail categories: the fizz. There’s something about the combination of milky emulsified egg white and chilled soda water that can make a mixed alcoholic drink far more refreshing than any booze has the right to be. I started out intending to do an apple brandy based recipe I had found, only to realize that I had run out of the stuff. It…

It was a good thing I decided to keep with the cooling power of the fizzes this last week, because just as the very worst of what could well be an epochal heatwave had passed, so did my AC. Heaven spare me! In any case, while I wither in the warmth of the LA’s SFV, we’re moving on from last week’s simple adaptation of a Negroni, to doing almost exactly the same thing with the Negroni’s tougher brother, the Boulevardier. I’m throwing my first name into the name of this fizzy variation to distinguish it from another, very decent sounding drink available…

I don’t know about where you live, but here in Greater Los Angeles we’ve been having some brutal weather. Out here in the San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles, temps have gone north of 112 Farhrenheit. Over the hill in coastal Los Angeles, where temperatures can sometimes be as much as thirty degrees cooler close to the Pacific Ocean, things were only marginally better last weekend, with highs over 100. Worse, we Angelenos are used to having nice cool evenings in the mid-60s to help balance out the heat of the day. Last Friday, though, we had lows in the…

Staying with my historical theme from last week, I found the Coolidge Cooler in a seemingly exhaustive 2014 New York Post article claiming to cover the favorite beverages of every US president up to that point. I have no idea what the writer’s sources were, but the article offered some decent observations. It also reminded me that it looks as if we’ve only had two teetotaling commander in chiefs: Honest Abe Lincoln and — as the Post writer was blissfully unaware four years back — our current orange-hued POTUS. For some reason, it took me until just now to realize that the drink…

It’s going to be July 4th, 2018 next Wednesday. It’s clearly time for us to ask not what our holiday can do for us, but to ask how we can make that holiday a bit more meaningful.  As I write this, I think it’s clear to people across the spectrum that things are happening — very bad things in this drinker’s opinion — that kind of go to the core of what this country is all about. A drink named for treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton, whom musical theater super-whiz Lin-Manuel Miranda and author Ron Chernow have turned into founding father…

If you try Googling “whiskey fizz” you likely won’t find another specific cocktail recipe with that name, but that doesn’t mean I can claim to have invented today’s beverage. Substituting whiskey for gin in last week’s Silver Fizz is so self-evident, apparently no one who’s online has thought to write an actual whiskey variation down in recipe form, though you can find endless elaborate fizzes in which some type of whiskey is often a key ingredient. Still, I think using whiskey instead of gin changes the flavor enough, and is definitely tasty enough, to claim it’s very own drink of the week. See if you…

In most places, summer is supposed to start right after Memorial Day, but here in SoCal, weather wise, it usually doesn’t really kick in until mid-July or later. However, our traditional June gloom has taken a powder for now, and it’s starting to feel a little like summer. In Las Vegas, where I’ll be by the time you read this, they are having temps around 107 right now, but it should be cooling down to an Arctic 100 or so before my arrival. So, yes, it’s the perfect time to start messing around with the chilliest, most refreshing of cocktail genres –…