In about two and half days, 2017 will be, literally, history. Trust me when I say that I’m convinced it could have been much, much worse. (We Americans have no idea how bad things can get when make the worst person in the kingdom the king.) Even so, it’s pretty clear that 2017 was not actually a good year or one many of us will be unhappy to see the back of. So, when I started looking for New Years-appropriate cocktails in which I could use my bottle of Byrrh Grand Quinquina, a revival of a long lost, quinine spiked,…
Author: Bob Westal
Bob Westal
Writer guy Bob Westal was literally born in Hollywood and has commented on the worlds of movies, popular culture, politics, and food ever since. His interest in cocktails is more recent, but he made up for lost time with hundreds of “Drink of the Week” blog posts for Bullz-Eye. In addition to writing and editing, Bob also talks a lot.
Last week I said I was going to do something in particular here at DOTW. I canned that idea for the time being when I remembered that this would be my last post before Christmas of 2017 and something more festive was in order. I adapted this week’s restful and sweet, but also pretty punchy, milk punch from…I can’t remember. You see, a week or so back, if you googled “Christmas cocktails” you got a few listicles with many suggestions,. A tequila milk punch recipe very similar to today’s drink was in one of them. However, as the holiday drew…
There’s a sort of subgenre of cocktail that names itself for a widely used base spirit or predominant ingredient. Offhand, I can think of the Bacardi Cocktail, and the Champagne Cocktail. I’m sure there must be others. The Applejack Cocktail, which I stumbled over online, is definitely one of them. I’m kind of obsessed with apple brandy these days, and this drink was seductively simple to make but, I have to say, most versions of it simply didn’t come together…though I got close enough for rock and roll a few times. However, take heart, for there is another. We’ll look…
For those of you who weren’t with us last week, all you really need to know is that I went to Boston, visited people you don’t know, and spent one very nice weekend drinking at bars. And that was only my first weekend of my fortnight long trip. It was time to start seeing other parts of autumnal New England (Note: ‘m leaving out the eating and touristing parts. Though, I could easily write long and lousy tone poems on the area’s seafood, Italian fare, and easily one of the best breakfasts of my life.) Uncasville, CT. Bobby Flay’s Bar…
The truth is that, to paraphrase Captain Louis Renault, I’m only a poor dissolute cocktail blogger. So I naturally took advantage when I realized I could spend ten beautiful fall days in New England by imposing on the hospitality of family and a very old friend. Bookended by two great weekends in Boston, my trip took me to the exurban southern edge of Massachusetts, into the small but mighty State of Rhode Island, and to super-casinos of Connecticut. Naturally, I drank in all of those places, and a great deal of it was worth talking about. We’ll begin at the…
It takes two to tango. I have to resort to that wildly over-used cliche because this week’s drink is the Savoy Tango, presumably so named because it is comprised of two evenly matched ingredients. It’s also one of only three drinks in Harry Craddock’s magnum opus, “The Savoy Cocktail Book” to actually be named after the world famous high end lodging where Mr. Craddock tended bar. “This cocktail is a very great favourite at the Savoy Hotel, London, where it was invented,” he adds in a rare commentary below the recipe Savoy Stomp proprietor Erik Ellestad, expressed some skepticism about whether…
I began life as a pretty awful scaredy-cat. Not long after the time my mother lost patience one day at Disneyland and all but forced me to go on “The Haunted Mansion,” a flip switched in my brain and I learned that just the right amount of scary could be fun. I began to watch the classic Universal monster movies on afternoon TV and found that creature features from the 1930s and 1940s, like “Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man” and “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (in which the monster was a guy in a gorilla suit), were just the right level of…
If you’re wondering what makes my pre-Halloween Drink of the Week so seasonably bloody, well, this is the firs cocktail ever to include actual human blood. Okay, no. That would be gross, incredibly unsanitary, and I’m pretty sure illegal. Also, I have this really weird relationship with fake movie blood and gore, never mind the real thing. (We’ll get that to that later.) The purplish red stuff in this drink is actually beet juice and while I know there are some people who’d almost rather drink human blood than consume anything in any way derived from beets, it works beautifully in…
Last week this cocktaill blog took one of it’s not so unusual political turns, but harder than usual, which I know is weird. On the other hand, drinking is a part of life and so is politics. Indeed, it’s possible to stay out of drinking but politics will get you, whatever you do. And the most salient kind of politics are those of war and peace. We who are lucky enough to live in peaceful surroundings where sudden death, hunger, and thirst, rarely enters the picture don’t really appreciate what we’ve got. When a certain non-entity asked us “What the hell…
At this particular Friday the 13th, it might seem odd — distasteful or creepy even — to discuss a drink saluting an American president. Indeed, even though this is nothing but a cocktail blog, I haven’t been super-shy about expressing my own liberal political convictions since I started doing this. However, since the election, it’s bled more into this column than I would have considered beforehand. It’s not because of who lost, but who won. Suffice it to say that we have a president who’s done more to drive decent and/or intelligent people to drink than any other human being in…