The once and future cocktail class (reprise)

~ DBCouper ~ Leave a comment

A Coupe Tales reader requested another round of Bay Area cocktail classes, and it’s a great time to revisit Bay Area options. This round of imbibulous education is for you, Glenn!

Nothing justifies a drink like a little simultaneous learning. May your cups and your brains never be empty.

Women Movers & Shakers: Spring Cocktails of the Farmers Market from CUESA
San Francisco, April 18, $65
If you don’t have your ticket, woe unto you and your unchecked FOMO. These are my favorite events: not classes, but highly educational if you make it so.

Forgotten Favorites Cocktail Workshop from Trader Vic’s
Emeryville, April 20, $65
It’s not the original Trader Vic’s location, but Emeryville lays an admirable claim to Trader Vic’s part in tiki history. Learn some obscure tiki drinks and go home with some swag!

ForageSF doesn’t have cocktail classes on the schedule but the keen Oakland spirits devotee will notice that sustainable seaweed foraging makes a fine gin.

Various classes from SFMixology
San Francisco, various dates, $199-$300
SFMixology offers intro-level courses that cover a broad range of spirits and topics, each ranging from two to six hours.

Agave and American whiskey from Bourbon & Branch’s Beverage Academy
San Francisco, April 24 and 30, $95 and $100
My line in the sand is that $100 is too much for a 101-level cocktail class. But two and a half hours from industry experts might tip the scales for you.

Various classes from The Cocktail Camp
San Francisco, various dates, $299-$499
The Cocktail Camp promotes a full-fledged bartender certification program, so classes are a series of progressive education rather than individual courses. They even offer mentoring and apprenticeships.

DIY Mixology: Limoncello, Atholl Brose, And Absinthe Infusions from WorkshopSF
SF Workshop, San Francisco, May 24, $48
Limoncello? A great skill to add to a drinkmaker’s repertoire. Absinthe? Well, making an abinsthelike infusion at home is pretty neat. But Atholl Brose is what really popped my cork. Atholl Brose (or Athol Brose) is an obscure Dickensian detail whose mysterious origins leave a lot of room for ingredient interpretation.

Also check out WorkshopSF’s Whiskey Picks Not Whiskey Dicks: Pickling With Beer And Booze class. May 25, $60.

Making Cocktail Syrups & Shrubs from Preserved
Oakland, June 10, $50
Syrups and shrubs are among the fastest ways to personalize cocktails at home. And bottles of house mixes can make you look like an alchemical wizard or a Betty Crocker.

Somm’s Class: Cocktails with a Twist from by CIA at Copia
Napa, June 20, $30
The Culinary Institute of America promises delicious spins on classic cocktails, and I feel that $30 is a very reasonable price to discover what mysteries they have in mind.

10 Essential Bay Area Gins For Every Home Bar

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Over at San Francisco’s cocktail-loving UpOut blog, I have a piece about essential Bay Area gins.

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Local craft distillers’ gins garner acclaim on the national stage, but we’re lucky enough to appreciate them not just as fine spirits but also as the flavorful glimpses of home. These ten Bay Area gins embody the flora and flavor of the region.

St. George Spirits :: Terroir

You can’t go wrong with any of St. George’s gins, but this one is the distillery’s “ode to the wild beauty of the Golden State” and to the forage-rich wilderness of Mount Tam, in particular. St. George Master Distiller Lance Winters recently told PUNCH “Six years after its release, the fact that it functions so well as an olfactory snapshot of the Northern California coastal landscape still moves me.” Locally sourced bay laurel, fir, coastal sage, and juniper reflect our local mountain terroir while a little toasted coriander evokes the dry, scented chaparral of the southern part of the state. Terroir is California in a bottle.

Oakland Spirits Company :: Automatic Sea Gin

If St. George Terroir is the mountain, this is the sea. Miles of California coastline harbor flavorful seaweed, but only Oakland Spirits Company (OSCO for short) seized upon the idea of adding it to gin. Sustainably foraged nori adds distinct brine to a spirit also flavored with bay leaf, sage, lemongrass, and juniper.

You might have tasted it in the Bigfoot, part of Trick Dog’s recent Mural Project menu. But don’t order it with tonic! Distiller Mike Pierce claims it’s better suited to still cocktails rather than bubbles.

Want to know more about Sea Gin? Check out “5 Secrets About OsCo Automatic Sea Gin.”

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Watermelon Rose

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…Watermelon Rose
Raise my rent and take off all your clothes
With trench coats, magazines, a bottle full of rum…

If I don’t commemorate it, I will forget. That’s how infrequently I create new cocktails.

The Watermelon Rose is a simple rum sour with some infusions in the mix. I don’t like watermelon, see, and when one arrived in my CSA I just looked balefully at it for a few weeks until the 11th hour. Compost or consume? I decided to drink it.

Threw cubed watermelon into a mix of rum (mostly Kirkland with enough Smith & Cross to make it funky).

While it steeped I decided to use up some dried cranberries in muffins. For more tender fruit, I soaked them for a day in Pierre Ferrand Dry Curacao (80%) and Luxardo Maraschino (20%). This left me with a sweet fruit liqueur.

Gomme syrup adds mouthfeel, orgeat adds flavor. Add fresh citrus and baby, you got a sour going.

After days of puttering around the house chanting “watermelon rum” in my best Tom Waits growl, I actually looked up the lyrics I thought I was singing. Bother! He doesn’t sing “watermelon rum,” he sings “Watermelon Rose” and “bottle full of rum.” And so my drink found its name.

Watermelon Rose

2 oz. watermelon infused rum
.75 oz fresh lime (lemon is pretty good, too)
.25 oz orgeat (I like Small Hands)
.25 oz gum syrup (again, Small Hands is perfect)
.25 oz cranberry-infused curacao and maraschino mix

Shake with ice and serve.

Sour Flower Power Shaddock

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Playing around with my signature cocktail, the Shaddock, resulted in this Sour Flower Power Shaddock.

flowersourshaddock
Sour floral Shaddock. Equal parts St. Germain, Aperol, gin, and fresh citrus juice (usually lemon). Tonight I added a touch of acid phosphate to play up the grapefruit notes of the drink.

I wanted to taste what happened with fresh citrus plus a few drops of acid phosphate. To soar above that sour punch, I used Geranium Gin for its strong geranium distillate.

Et voila! The Sour Flower Power twist on a shaddock.

Sour Flower Power Shaddock
.75 oz Aperol
.75 oz St. Germain
.75 oz Geranium Gin
.75 oz lemon juice

(I know, I know: better to shake than stir. But the mixing glass was at hand while the shaker was entire feet away.

Time Out Bar Awards Finale and the best spritz yet

~ DBCouper ~ 1 Comment

The low-ABV trend stirs nothing more in me than polite disinterest. Brunchtime day drinking elicits a shrug. Frankly, I thought no spritz could move me. But at Time Out’s Bar Awards Finale at the Chapel in San Francisco, I found the lesson I needed to make me a spritz believer.

thedivinespicewoodspritz
Spicewood Spritz from Firehouse Lounge in Austin, TX. I don’t like spritzes. I loved this spritz.

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Evolution of the Walker Inn: an enthusiast’s perspective

~ DBCouper ~ 1 Comment
thebarlineup
Kumquat toddies off Walker Inn’s Winter Citrus menu, served with dry spices and tinctures of cardamom, cinnamon, and star anise for a personalized cocktail. The foreground sunken ice bar chills juices and garnishes.

Writing about Los Angeles’ Walker Inn has been, since this blog began, both an imperative and an impossibility.

The Koreatown bar’s menus, themes, and approach to cocktails are of history-making importance in West Coast drinking. (As far as this amateur is concerned, they are California’s Aviary. Let more knowledgeable drinkers dispute that.) Writing about the Walker Inn, like drinking there, is obligatory.

But my three visits differed so wildly that I abandoned my unfinished story every time. What I loved about my first time at that unique bar was miles away from what mattered on the third visit.

Recently, Walker Inn staff themselves provided the key to finishing this story. Their “Bar Indepth: The Walker Inn, USA” seminar at Tales of the Cocktail laid out details from architectural design to lab equipment to income. Missing pieces fell into place as they explained the service evolution that allows them to serve more cocktails to the ideal number of drinkers at a pace that shows off their carefully planned menu and exquisite presentation.

In return, I know what the consumer gains and loses in this service evolution.

It turns out that the story I wanted to write — the loving paean to the place that gave me my benchmark for superlative hospitality — is an ode to a place that no longer exists. The Walker Inn still exemplifies theme, scientific creativity, and spectacle like nowhere else west of the Mississippi, and my admiration is largely unchanged.

But I have one critique.

Just one.
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Top 5 cocktails at Tales of the Cocktail

~ DBCouper ~ 4 Comments

Over the course of one week at Tales of the Cocktail I sampled approximately 100 cocktails/spirits. (Why so few? I was a volunteer as well as an attendee, which meant no drinking for 15 total crucial conference hours.)

Acknowledging that every attendee’s list will differ, here are the cocktails that struck me most deeply:

#1 : Dale DeGroff’s Abeja Limeña

Event: Make It, Eat It, Drink It from the Trade Commission of Peru in Miami

Abeja Limena

This take on a pisco sour highlights the torontel grape’s aromatic notes against just the right citrus zing. Aromatic pisco (brand unknown, possibly Founding Farmers but I think DeGroff said it was a single-grape pisco), honey syrup, lime, yuzu, and a red shiso garnish. My goal in the next six months (hell, I may be haunted my whole life) is to find the right pisco and the right proportions of other ingredients to recreate this memory.
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Tales

~ DBCouper ~ 1 Comment

My flight to Tales of the Cocktail leaves Sunday morning.

I’m pleased to be a part of the Education Fellowship program, which I’m pretty sure is the fanciest euphemism for “volunteer” I’ve ever heard.

This is my first year at Tales. I’m a little overwhelmed. The schedule is almost 80 pages long.

But I’m armed with freshly printed business cards. My seminar tickets will take me places I only dreamed about when I jokingly wrote my way through this piece. And it’s high time I learned how to navigate high-volume all-day cocktail tastings. Restraint, temperance, self-control, abstemiousness: time for a workout.

Check out my trip on Instagram and I’ll see you back here for write-ups.

-D.B. “Coupe Tales of the Cocktail” Couper

 

 

 

 

5 secrets about OsCo Automatic Sea Gin

~ DBCouper ~ 2 Comments

Count yourself lucky. I almost wrote “sea-crets.”

OsCoTasting
OsCo tasting at Alchemy Bottle Shop, Oakland, CA, April 2017. The nori is in the tallest jar near the squirrel.

Sea Gin uses sustainably foraged nori and sea salt.

Up Mendocino way, OsCo’s nori hunters at Sully Farms roam Californian beaches for a certain type of seaweed. They spread their harvest on the beach to dry in the sun and salty sea air. The resulting seaweed — black, ruffled, and dense — adds distinct brine and rich vegetal notes to a spirit also flavored with bay leaf, sage, lemongrass, and “other stuff.”

OsCo’s gins and brandies are grape-based for a more unctuous mouthfeel. You can practically taste the slick seaweed on your tongue.

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