Mixology Quotes

When he was done adding sloe gin and grenadine, Danny shoved the glass across the counter to Drew. "Try that and tell me what it needs." Drew took a sip, then coughed and set the glass down. "That's awful." Danny scowled and tossed a dripping tablespoon at him. "You're awful. I'm looking for constructive feedback, asshole. What does it need?" Drew threw the tablespoon back. "It needs to be taken out and shot." "Make your own damn drink, Mr. Mixology.

Sophara scrawled orders on a slate and handed it to one of the libationarians, whose encyclopedic knowledge of the contents and locations of all the bottles kept the bar running.

Difficult conversations are always uncomfortable. But with the right person, you can have those conversations.

Learn to laugh when others will cry, darling, and nobody will ever be able to faze you.

now I have a choice. I can let life control me, or I can grab life by the cojones and be a boss.

He might move like a jaguar, but I moved like a drunken elephant.

I pleaded with Norman to use my first name, and he always agreed to do so: “Okay, Mister Regan, I’ll remember in the future,” he’d say with a wicked grin on his face. Eventually Norman explained that he had a reputation for remembering all his customers’ names, and that if he had to learn first names as well as surnames, his workload would be doubled, so I backed down. All would have been well with this had I not introduced Norman to Roy Finamore, who was the editor of the first edition of this book, some six months later; Mister Finamore joined the ranks of thousands addicted to Norman’s wit and his cocktailian skills. A few months thereafter I was informed that Norman had taken to using Roy’s first name at the bar, and I was livid. This called for action. I made the pilgrimage to Norman’s bar. “I hear that Roy Finamore is a regular here now.” “That’s right, Mister Regan, he’s here three or four times a week.” “And what do you call him, Norman?” “I call him Roy.” “And why is that, Norman?” He leaned over the bar until our noses almost met. “Just to piss you off.” It had taken Norman months to set up this one glorious moment. In my opinion, I was looking into the eyes of Manhattan’s best bartender.

Intellectual discussions of matière philosophique or matière esthetique kept their basic form (and more of their high intellectual flavor) in English discussions of matters philosophical and matters aesthetic. It has that same fancy sheen when extended to jokey phrases that never occurred in French at all, as in “I’m an expert in matters mixological.

Those were simpler times, or so it certainly seemed now.

The proper drinking of Scotch Whisky is more than indulgence: it is a toast to civilization, a tribute to the continuity of culture, a manifesto of man’s determination to use the resources of nature to refresh mind and body and enjoy to the full the senses with which he has been endowed.” David Daiches

I still couldn’t make up my mind on whether to make him die at the end or not, but exercising such power of life and death, if only over a character who existed only in my mind, was one of the fringe benefits of being a writer, even an unpublished, aspiring wannabe like me.

Why do people only want to hear the story of how a future celebrity got all mixed up and knocked around in the big martini shaker of youth, until something—ambition, resilience, a lucky break, a dear friend’s death—poured out a famous person, alchemically mixologized into a perfect cocktail, refreshing and delicious?

The middle class of 1920s America loved a cocktail party. Stores began selling tools and accessories for home mixology, like shakers, serving trays and cocktail glasses. Since middle-class Americans didn’t have the money for a bottle of champagne, they usually drank lower-quality bootleg liquor. These spirits really needed to be mixed into a cocktail to be palatable, a cocktail being the best way to mask the harsh flavor.

Craddock is also credited with saying that the best way to drink a cocktail is “quickly, while it’s laughing at you!

Speakeasy bartenders used fruit juices, sometimes from canned fruit, as well as ginger ale, cream, honey, corn syrup, maple syrup, and even ice cream to make palatable the harsh flavors of spirits that Mencken described as “rye whiskey in which rats have drowned, Bourbon contaminated with arsenic and ptomaines, corn fresh from the still, gin that is three fourths turpentine, and rum rejected as too corrosive by the West Indian embalmers

Crockett wrote that Martinis were the most popular pre–World War I cocktail at the Waldorf, with the Manhattan running second

The American bartender of the ‘Gay Nineties’ was an institution. His fame spread to the four corners of the globe, and visitors to our shores from the continent bowed before his skill in concocting tempting mixtures of ‘liquid lightening.’ He was and still is in a class by himself. We may go to Europe for our chefs, but Europe comes to us for its bartenders,” wrote W. C. Whitfield in his 1939 book Just Cocktails.

It’s more than possible that the world’s first mixed drinks were created in order to mask the bad flavors of the base ingredient. Alcoholic potions of our dim and distant past were far inferior to the technologically clean products we enjoy today. Archeological evidence shows that the ancient Egyptians used dates and other fruits to flavor their beer, and that Wassail, a spiced drink originally made with a base of hard cider, dates back to pagan England—it was served to celebrate a bountiful apple harvest. We also know that the Romans drank wine mixed with honey and/or herbs and spices. The practice could have arisen from the inferior quality of the wine, but it probably also had roots in the medicinal, restorative, or digestive qualities attributed to the various ingredients.

At some point close to the year 1800, somebody created the world’s first cocktail.

On May 13, 1806, the Balance and Columbian Repository of Hudson, New York, answered a reader’s query as to the nature of a cocktail: “Cocktail is a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters—it is vulgarly called a bittered sling.” The cocktail had been born, it had been defined, and yet it couldn’t have been very well known by the general populace, or the newspaper wouldn’t have considered it a fit topic for elucidation.

Where does the word cocktail come from? There are many answers to that question, and none is really satisfactory. One particular favorite story of mine, though, comes from The Booze Reader: A Soggy Saga of a Man in His Cups, by George Bishop: “The word itself stems from the English cock-tail which, in the middle 1800s, referred to a woman of easy virtue who was considered desirable but impure. The word was imported by expatriate Englishmen and applied derogatorily to the newly acquired American habit of bastardizing good British Gin with foreign matter, including ice. The disappearance of the hyphen coincided with the general acceptance of the word and its re-exportation back to England in its present meaning.” Of course, this can’t be true since the word was applied to a drink before the middle 1800s, but it’s entertaining nonetheless, and the definition of “desirable but impure” fits cocktails to a tee. A delightful story, published in 1936 in the Bartender, a British publication, details how English sailors of “many years ago” were served mixed drinks in a Mexican tavern. The drinks were stirred with “the fine, slender and smooth root of a plant which owing to its shape was called Cola de Gallo, which in English means ‘Cock’s tail.’ ” The story goes on to say that the sailors made the name popular in England, and from there the word made its way to America. Another Mexican tale about the etymology of cocktail—again, dated “many years ago”—concerns Xoc-tl (transliterated as Xochitl and Coctel in different accounts), the daughter of a Mexican king, who served drinks to visiting American officers. The Americans honored her by calling the drinks cocktails—the closest they could come to pronouncing her name. And one more south-of-the-border explanation for the word can be found in Made in America, by Bill Bryson, who explains that in the Krio language, spoken in Sierra Leone, a scorpion is called a kaktel. Could it be that the sting in the cocktail is related to the sting in the scorpion’s tail? It’s doubtful at best. One of the most popular tales told about the first drinks known as cocktails concerns a tavernkeeper by the name of Betsy Flanagan, who in 1779 served French soldiers drinks garnished with feathers she had plucked from a neighbor’s roosters. The soldiers toasted her by shouting, “Vive le cocktail!” William Grimes, however, points out in his book Straight Up or On the Rocks: A Cultural History of American Drink that Flanagan was a fictional character who appeared in The Spy, by James Fenimore Cooper. He also notes that the book “relied on oral testimony of Revolutionary War veterans,” so although it’s possible that the tale has some merit, it’s a very unsatisfactory explanation. A fairly plausible narrative on this subject can be found in Famous New Orleans Drinks & How to Mix ’em, by Stanley Clisby Arthur, first published in 1937. Arthur tells the story of Antoine Amedie Peychaud, a French refugee from San Domingo who settled in New Orleans in 1793. Peychaud was an apothecary who opened his own business, where, among other things, he made his own bitters, Peychaud’s, a concoction still available today. He created a stomach remedy by mixing his bitters with brandy in an eggcup—a vessel known to him in his native tongue as a coquetier. Presumably not all Peychaud’s customers spoke French, and it’s quite possible that the word, pronounced coh-KET-yay, could have been corrupted into cocktail. However, according to the Sazerac Company, the present-day producers of Peychaud’s bitters, the apothecary didn’t open until 1838, so there’s yet another explanation that doesn’t work.

In the United States, the demand for well-constructed mixed drinks grew steadily during the latter half of the nineteenth century until, in the 1890s, the Golden Age of Cocktails arrived. It would last right up to the enactment of Prohibition in 1920, but don’t think for a moment that every bar in America was serving masterfully mixed drinks.

[A]ccording to Hell’s Best Friend, by Jan Holden, if you were unfortunate enough to order a Manhattan at the Humboldt in Grays Harbor, Washington, the owner, Fred Hewett (who apparently didn’t much care for anyone who drank cocktails), would pour a mixture of whiskey, gin, rum, brandy, aquavit, and bitters into a beer mug, top it up with beer, and stir it with his finger before handing it to you.

Certain dives on New York City’s Bowery offered as much as you could drink from a rubber hose connected to a liquor barrel until you had to stop to take a breath; this would set you back a mere three cents. For two cents more, however, certain places would provide a shot of whiskey and a woman to go with it.

[S]ome bars of the period catered to the man who didn’t want to waste time when he had some serious drinking to do—for convenience’s sake, urinals were installed at the foot of the bar.

Violence was not uncommon in nineteenth-century bars. Customers at the Tiger Saloon in Eureka, Nevada, bore witness to a knife fight between “Hog-Eyed” Mary Irwin and “Bulldog” Kate Miller, and the owner of a joint in lower Manhattan, Gallus Mag, not only bit the ears off customers who got out of control but she also kept the trophies in jars of alcohol on display behind the bar.

The people who went to watch men butting heads at New Orleans’ Buffalo Bill House would likely have felt out of place at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, which opened in the 1890s on the site where the Empire State Building now stands. The bar at the old Waldorf Astoria was the scene of the sort of decadence we often associate with the decade that became known as the Gay Nineties.

Colonel William F. Cody, otherwise known as “Buffalo Bill,” was also a regular at the old Waldorf Astoria, and he was well known for never refusing a drink on another man’s tab—when asked, he would say, “Sir, you speak the language of my tribe.

Ten cocktails are contained in the recipe section of Thomas’s 1862 book, and all of them contain bitters. Indeed, it would be decades before anyone dared give the name cocktail to a drink made without this ingredient.

[T]wo drinks from the nineteenth century that did stand the test of time emanated from this side of the Atlantic: the Sazerac and the Ramos Gin Fizz are both New Orleans creations.

The majority of the drinks popular at the turn of the nineteenth century were, by and large, sweeter than they would become over the next twenty years. Something else happened, though, in the last decades of the 1800s. Something momentous. Something that left us with a range of drinks that must now be considered the capos of the cocktail family: Vermouth became popular among the cocktailian bartenders of America.

There can be no doubt that vermouth changed the face of mixed drinks in the twentieth century. The Manhattan, the Martini, and the Rob Roy might be considered to be the Triple Crown of cocktails, and you can’t make one of them without vermouth.

The serious bartenders of the 1800s gave us the mixed-drink bases with which cocktailians still work today. The masters of the craft during the first century of cocktails formulated sours and the majority of other categorized drinks, and they learned to use liqueurs and other sweetening agents as substitutes for simple syrup. These barkeeps understood the importance of bitters, and they knew that balance was the key to any well-constructed drink.

Sidney E. Klein, a union organizer in Manhattan during the twenties, says that cocktails just weren’t the point when bibbers of the time went out on the town, and that most people just wanted the “straight stuff.” Although this doesn’t mean that Martinis weren’t made and Manhattans left the face of the earth, it certainly wasn’t a period when bartenders could be very creative. The new drinks that did appear during this era were mostly fashioned in Europe, where at least a few American bartenders fled to pursue their careers. Harry Craddock was one such man. He started work as a bartender at the Savoy Hotel, London, in 1925, and compiled The Savoy Cocktail Book (1930), in which he admonished bartenders, “Shake the shaker as hard as you can: don’t just rock it: you are trying to wake it up, not send it to sleep!” Craddock is also credited with saying that the best way to drink a cocktail is “quickly, while it’s laughing at you!

Of course, Americans did travel to Europe during Prohibition, and Craddock’s bar at the Savoy was a popular destination for them. While it’s more than likely that some new drinks created in Europe made their way back to the States during this time, one new creation stayed at home in Paris until the bars of America legally reopened their doors. That drink was a significant one. The Bloody Mary was first made in the 1920s by French bartender Fernand “Pete” Petiot, who first married vodka and tomato juice behind the stick at Harry’s New York Bar in Paris.

The Drunk’s Blue Book, written by Norman Anthony and O. Soglow in 1933, for instance, details what the authors call the Drunk’s Code: Free lunch. Free speech. Free cheers. Five-day week. Every third drink on the house. Lower curbstones. Overstuffed gutters. More lampposts. Rubber nightsticks and rolling pins. More keyholes for every door. More farmers’ daughters. Colder ice. Two cocktails for a quarter. Bigger and better beers.

By the time the 1940s arrived, Americans had been introduced to the Bloody Mary. Vodka was being made in the States, though not many people knew much about it until around the middle of the decade, when Jack Morgan, the owner of the Cock and Bull Tavern in Los Angeles and an executive from the company that was making Smirnoff vodka, got together to create the Moscow Mule. Vodka would never look back.

Embury was the first true cocktailian of the modern age, and he took time to analyze the components of a cocktail, breaking them down into a base (usually a spirit, it must be at least 50 percent of the drink); a modifying, smoothing, or aromatizing agent, such as vermouth, bitters, fruit juice, sugar, cream, or eggs; and “additional special flavoring and coloring ingredients,” which he defined as liqueurs and nonalcoholic fruit syrups. Embury taught us that the Ramos Gin Fizz must be shaken for at least five minutes in order to achieve the proper silky consistency, suggested that Peychaud’s bitters be used in the Rob Roy, and noted that “for cocktails, such as the Side Car, a three-star cognac is entirely adequate, although a ten-year-old cognac will produce a better drink.” In the second edition of his book, Embury mentioned that he had been criticized for omitting two drinks from his original work: the Bloody Mary, which he described as “strictly vile,” and the Moscow Mule, as “merely mediocre.” On the subject of Martinis, he explained that although most cocktail books call for the drink to be made with one-third to one-half vermouth, “quite recently, in violent protest of this wishy-washy type of cocktail, there has sprung up the vermouth-rinse method of making Martinis.” He describes a drink made from chilled gin in a cocktail glass coated in vermouth. Embury didn’t approve of either version, and went on to say that a ratio of seven parts gin to one part vermouth was his personal favorite. While Embury was taking his drinking seriously, many Americans were quaffing Martinis by the pitcher, and Playboy magazine commissioned cocktail maven Thomas Mario and, later, Emanuel Greenberg to deliver cocktail news to a nation of people who drank for fun, and did it on a regular basis. Esquire magazine issued its Handbook for Hosts as early as 1949, detailing drinks such as the Sloe Gin Fizz, the Pan American, the “I Died Game, Boys” Mixture, and the Ginsicle—gin with fruit juice or simple syrup poured over chipped ice in a champagne glass. A cartoon in the book depicts a frustrated bartender mopping his fevered brow and exclaiming, “She ordered it because it had a cute name.” The world of cocktails was tilting slightly on its axis, and liquor companies lobbied long and hard to get into the act. In the fifties, Southern Comfort convinced us to make Comfort Manhattans and Comfort Old-Fashioneds by issuing a booklet: How to Make the 32 Most Popular Drinks. By the seventies, when the Comfort Manhattan had become the Improved Manhattan, they were bringing us Happy Hour Mixology Plus a Primer of Happy Hour Astrology, presumably so we would have something to talk about at bars: “Oh, you’re a Virgo—discriminating, keenly analytical, exacting, and often a perfectionist. Wanna drink?

It’s important to understand that, back in the mid-sixties, there were few, if any, New York bars where single women felt comfortable—bars in New York were mainly beer joints for men. And so, all of those stewardesses and models back then simply partied at, well, house parties. Stillman was about to change all that when he opened a bar called TGI Fridays, which welcomed both men and women, thus creating the first singles’ bar—one that felt like a cocktail party.

The Margarita (this page) had been around since the thirties, forties, or fifties, depending on whose story you believe, but tequila didn’t really catch on in this country until the Swinging Sixties arrived, when hippies and would-be hippies alike heard a rumor that the spirit might act as a hallucinogen. By the seventies all bartenders knew how to fix a mean Margarita,

By the mid-1980s the health craze had swept the country, and the cocktail scene was all but dead.

Bartenders revolted against the elevator-music drinks of their elders and created noisier potions of their own. This phenomenon was exactly what was needed to make potential cocktailians rethink their craft.

Dale DeGroff took over the bar at New York’s legendary Rainbow Room in 1987, and a star was born. DeGroff brought us classics such as The Ritz—cognac, Cointreau, maraschino, lemon juice, and champagne—and the Fitzgerald: gin, lemon juice, simple syrup, and Angostura bitters. He worked tirelessly for his well-earned reputation as the consummate craft bartender. His perfectionism caught the eye of the media, and eventually thousands of bartenders would hold Dale up as a shining example of how to tend bar in the classic mode. Now he is probably the best-known American cocktailian of our time.

Dale is the man who mentored Audrey Saunders, who went on to open The Pegu Club in New York—one of the world’s most renowned craft cocktail bars. Audrey has given birth to such delicious potions as the Gin-Gin Mule and the Old Cuban, both cocktails that have become global phenomena. DeGroff and Saunders have a lot to answer for.

My belief is that it didn’t take too very long for the marketing mavens in the big drinks companies to recognize that bartenders are their best brand ambassadors, and since these companies tend to have deep pockets, they quickly started putting their money where it worked best for everyone concerned. They launched competitions with fabulous prizes, flew bartenders around the world to strut their stuff in all manner of exotic locations, and hired bartenders as educators and as marketers. In my opinion, without the support of the liquor industry, the craft cocktail revolution might well have died early.

Why do people choose to adulterate fine wines, beers, and spirits?

Why do people choose to adulterate fine wines, beers, and spirits? For variety’s sake. It’s the very spice of life.

[H]e cannot be drunken or dirty; the slightest dubiousness is quick to exile him to the police force, journalism, the oyster boats or some other Siberia of the broken.

Most people enjoy being put into the role of adviser, and often they will take care of the situation for you by departing with their friend. A phrase that has helped me on countless occasions is, “I need your help,” and you might want to think about using it yourself next time you’re trying to convince someone to act a certain way. Asking for help seems to disarm people, and the majority of folks become putty in your hand when you ask them for help.

As far as I was concerned, Sex on the Beach was a Highball comprising vodka, peach schnapps, orange juice, and cranberry juice. It’s a fairly simple affair, and in its heyday it’s possible that it was ordered more for its name than for the quality of the mixture. But I found recipes from bartenders nationwide who were using melon liqueur, raspberry liqueur, and even scotch in their rendition of this drink.

Mixed drinks of all kinds should glide down the throat easily, and since most cocktails have a spirit base, the addition of ingredients containing less or no alcohol is needed to cut the strength of the drink and make it more palatable. In most cases, the base spirit, be it gin, vodka, whiskey, or any other relatively high-proof distillate, makes up over 50 percent of the cocktail, and its soul must be soothed if the bartender wants to achieve balance.

[T]he vast majority of drinks called for in any bar are simple Highballs such as Scotch and Soda, as well as Martinis, Manhattans, Margaritas, and other perennial favorites that are quite easy to master. Every bar also has its idiosyncratic cocktails, such as house specialties or weird potions peculiar to that one particular joint. Most bartenders will tell you that it’s seldom necessary to know how to make more than a couple dozen drinks in any one bar.

[Y]ou should know that certain garnishes are also ingredients. Lime and lemon wedges and any citrus twist (a strip of peel from limes, lemons, oranges, and the like) are the “ingredient garnishes.

[A]s a generalization, drinks containing eggs; fruit juices; cream liqueurs, such as Baileys; or dairy products (cream, half-and-half, or milk) should be shaken, while clear drinks, such as the classic Martini or Manhattan, are usually stirred.

as a generalization, drinks containing eggs; fruit juices; cream liqueurs, such as Baileys; or dairy products (cream, half-and-half, or milk) should be shaken, while clear drinks, such as the classic Martini or Manhattan, are usually stirred. It’s fairly easy to determine why some drinks should be shaken: It’s far easier, for instance, to thoroughly combine a spirit with heavy cream or a fruit juice by shaking rather than stirring, whereas the Martini and the Manhattan, made with a spirit and vermouth, are easily mixed when stirred.

[A]s a generalization, drinks containing eggs; fruit juices; cream liqueurs, such as Baileys; or dairy products (cream, half-and-half, or milk) should be shaken, while clear drinks, such as the classic Martini or Manhattan, are usually stirred. It’s fairly easy to determine why some drinks should be shaken: It’s far easier, for instance, to thoroughly combine a spirit with heavy cream or a fruit juice by shaking rather than stirring, whereas the Martini and the Manhattan, made with a spirit and vermouth, are easily mixed when stirred.

The amount of ice needed to make any specific frozen drink is in direct relationship to the size of the serving glass, so if you’re in doubt, simply build the drink in the glass and then pour the whole thing into the blender. You’ll find that this results in a full glass with a slightly convex dome, which is visually appealing.

Dr. Siegert stayed on in Angostura (renamed Ciudad Bolívar in 1846) to study native botanicals and determine if they could be used medicinally. By 1824, he had developed a tonic known as amargos aromáticos, which he marketed commercially. Now called Angostura bitters, the product is made in Trinidad, and is the best-known cocktail ingredient of its kind in the world. The Angostura company claims that the product gained worldwide renown when, shortly after its creation, it became a staple of ships’ provisions; it was used to treat seasickness, fever, and scurvy. The recipe for this potion, though, remains a well-guarded secret.

Angostura bitters can help cure hiccups. Coat a lemon wedge with granulated sugar and douse it with Angostura bitters. The person suffering from the malady should then bite down on the lemon wedge.

The booze and lemon pledge Buchanan who choked lyrics, called it singing since guitar strings and vocal cords are made from different kinds of wheat.

Being a color in Texas is to wake stressed from being.

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The second most important cocktail bitters, Peychaud’s is an integral ingredient in the Sazerac cocktail and can be used as a substitute for Angostura in many drinks, especially such cocktails as the Manhattan. The resultant cocktail will not duplicate the same drink made with Angostura, but Peychaud’s will add its own nuances and complexities.

Caper berries also make good Martini garnishes, and I’ve even seen regular capers added to the drink, but the most common “other” Martini garnish is the pearl onion, again packed in brine, which turns the Martini into a Gibson. The only real rule of thumb when using any of these berry-type garnishes is that an odd number of them must always be used: One olive is standard, three are acceptable, but two are verboten. This, I believe, comes from an old superstition, but I can’t find a good reference to it. The same rule, incidentally, applies to coffee beans when added to a glass of sambuca.

One practice that faded from fashion about a hundred years ago is the custom of topping drinks, especially those made with crushed ice, with mounds of berries and small slices of other fruits, such as strawberries and bananas. In the days when these drinks were served at first-class bars, the customers were provided with short spoons with which to eat the fruit—it’s a practice I’d love to see return to the barrooms of America.

BITTERS BOTTLES: Commercial brands of bitters are fitted with a device known as a dasher that ensures only small amounts can be released from the bottle. Antique bitters bottles are available from various sources and are very pleasing to the eye. Empty commercial bitters bottles, once they are thoroughly washed and their labels removed, can be used to dispense absinthe, Bénédictine, and other strongly flavored ingredients called for in small quantities. Antique bitters bottles, of course, can be used in this fashion, too, or you can use small bottles fitted with an eye-dropper, easily available online, if you like.

The purpose of grouping these drinks together, though, is not merely for the sake of giving them somewhere to hang their hats. In many cases, listing these drinks and their ingredients one under the other—as you will see in the various charts beginning on this page—makes whole strings of drinks far easier to memorize. Once you know the formula for, say, New Orleans Sours, the family in which you’ll find the Margarita and the Sidecar, you will understand that the Kamikaze is just a vodka-based Margarita and that the Cosmopolitan, using citrus vodka as a base, follows the same formula, with just a little cranberry juice thrown in for color.

Drinks included in the French-Italian family all contain vermouths, either sweet, dry, or both, or sometimes brand-named products, such as Lillet, an aperitif wine that’s closely related to vermouth. The name of this family of drinks is derived from the fact that people used to call sweet vermouth “Italian” and dry vermouth “French,” referring to their countries of origin (regardless of where specific bottlings were actually produced).

Bitters often come into play in French-Italian drinks, especially when whiskey or brandy is called for as a base, and the creative bartender should always bear that in mind when composing new formulas. By experimenting with Angostura, Peychaud’s, orange, or any other flavor of bitters, you can change the character of the resultant cocktail quite dramatically.

Simple Sours contain a base liquor, citrus juice, and a nonalcoholic sweetening agent, such as simple syrup, grenadine, or orgeat syrup.

Enhanced Sours call for a spirit, citrus juice, a sweetening agent of any kind, plus vermouth or any other aromatized or fortified wine.

New Orleans Sours call for a base spirit, citrus juice, and an orange-flavored liqueur.

At the street level, Sugar Fair welcomed customers into a bright, child-like fantasy. The architecturally designed enchanted forest was awash in jewel tones, and gorgeous smells, and the waterfall of free-flowing chocolate. But it was the Dark Forest downstairs that had proved an unexpected money-spinner, an income stream that had helped keep them afloat through the precarious first year. Four nights a week, through a haze of purple smoke and bubbling cauldrons, Sylvie taught pre-booked groups how to make concoctions that would tease the senses, delight the mind... and knock people flat on their arse if they weren't careful. High percentage of alcohol. It was a mixology class with a lot of tricks and pyrotechnics. It had been Jay's idea to get a liquor license. "Pleasures of the mouth," he'd said at the time. "The holy trinity--- chocolate, coffee, and booze." With even her weekends completely blocked out, Sylvie had almost made a crack about forfeiting certain other pleasures of the mouth, but Jay had inherited a puritanical streak from his mother. Both their mouths looked like dried cranberries if someone made a sex joke. The sensuous, moody haven in the basement was a counterbalance to the carefully manufactured atmosphere upstairs. There were, after all, reasons to shy away from relentless cheer. Perhaps someone had just been through a breakup, or a family reunion. A really distressing haircut. Maybe they'd logged on to Twitter and realized half the population were a bunch of pricks. Or maybe the'd picked up the Metropolitan News and found Dominic De Vere indirectly thrashing their entire business aesthetic in a major London daily. Whatever the reason--- feeling a little stressed? A bit peeved? Annoyed as fuck? Welcome to the Dark Forest. Through the bakery, turn left, down the stairs.

My insides warmed, and to my dismay, the unfamiliar prick of tears in my eyes startled me. I hadn’t cried in years. There’d been nobody to comfort me and, therefore, no reason to cry. But

for a teacher, there is no greater joy than finding a student with the willingness to learn, the capacity to do great things, and the natural ability to succeed.

To forgive is to take the high road. To forget is to be foolish. If you forgive someone just one more time than they betray you, the bitterness stays away.

There’d been nobody to comfort me and, therefore, no reason to cry.

only the victors wrote history.

As somebody smarter and more famous than me had once said, only the victors wrote history.