Posted on

Whiskey Wisdom: How to be the Smartest Person in the Bar

(The following is excerpted from Whiskey Wisdom: A Bartender’s Guide to Living Ravenously)


screen-shot-2016-09-20-at-1-52-36-pm


You can spot her from a mile away, the smartest person in the bar — or, if not quite from a mile away, nonetheless from very far.

She doesn’t necessarily think of herself as smart.

Still, her brain is carefully crafted — self-crafted and stylized — like a work of art.

Her eyes are alert and bright and lively. They twinkle.

She’s relaxed and polite, with a well-modulated voice that speaks to you in the appropriate tone.

Her smile glows like expensive stone.

You do not quickly forget that smile.

She walks purposefully, and yet not aggressively, or with an overbearing style.

She has a sense of humor.

You can see that she knows there’s a kind of dignity in loneliness. She doesn’t go out of the way to seek friends or groups or any kind of crowd.

In general she prefers quiet to loud.

She gives and receives compliments gracefully, can be strong and assertive, quick to stick up for herself, but she can also speak of her shortcomings and accomplishments with an equal ease which you envy.

When communication or clarification is called for, she’s never dismissive or inexplicably silent — never, of course, in any way aggressive or violent.

What’s her trick?

What’s the secret?

The secret is this:

First, develop a total disregard for where you think your abilities end.

You must aim beyond what you believe you’re capable of.

Do things you think you’re not able to do.

Nothing is impossible, in this regard. The will to believe is the most important ingredient in becoming what you want.

The discipline to follow through is next. It is also the most difficult.

Why?

Why most difficult?

Because it requires hour-after-hour, day-after-day practice.

It requires diligence.

Second — unless you’re in a technical discipline like medicine or mechanical engineering — drop out of college immediately.

College stunts the mind.

It’s a breeding ground of mindlessness and unoriginality, and an exercise in non-thought. It’s a snake-infested swamp of dogma — and, like all dogma, it will corrupt you and scar your soul irreparably.

College is conformity.

The cost of conformity is colossal.

Individuality, on the other hand, is a prerequisite of genius.

Genius is the cultivation of your living potential.

The deeper your cultivation, the deeper your genius.

Cultivate, therefore, a purpose around which you can construct your life.

Passion is largely willed: the more you do something, the deeper your understanding of it grows, so that after time your passion for that thing develops and spreads like a gorgeous soft surge of water-ripples.

Third, whatsoever thy hand findest to do, do it with all thy might.

What, after all, does it mean to be smart?

It means to self-stylize your brain, like a work of art.

It means to be intelligent — like you.

Intelligence is your mental capacity to deal with a wide range of thoughts and ideas.

That’s why it never mattered to you when you were voted least likely to succeed — why it never fazed you when they called you a misfit, a malcontent, alienate, disaffiliate, deviant, recalcitrant. And it’s why your natural-born predilections and proclivities and predispositions are and always have been irrelevant: because intelligence is an acquired skill.

It must be developed by each person’s own desire and activated by each person’s will.

It must be habituated and automated by each person’s own mind.

Which is why it’s quite rare and beautiful, and rather difficult to find.

This, incidentally, is true for both children and adults: the cultivation of intelligence requires effort — or, to put the same point in a slightly different way: thinking is an act of choice.

Thought requires work.

Whereas to be stoopid is relatively simple: all you have to do, in essence, is do nothing. If you do nothing, stoopid will naturally occur.

Being smart, however, requires a different sort of action.

It’s not passive.

On the contrary, thinking is an entirely active process the undertaking of which is, when you think about it, massive.

She’s intelligent, yes, but in a highly unorthodox way, they say, hard to pinpoint why: bookish but not book-smart, introspective, certainly, and everything she does — yes, everything — she does with all her heart.


whisky-2



Posted on

Wodka!

This article first appeared, in slightly altered form, in the Coloradoan newspaper.

Screen Shot 2016-06-17 at 2.44.48 PM

The Polish call it wodka.

The Russians call it vodka.

The word itself comes from the slavic voda — meaning “little water” — and, like water, vodka is colorless, odorless, and often enjoyed ice-cold.

Distilled from fermented potatoes, or fermented grains (like rye or wheat), or sometimes even grapes, vodka is a deceptively simple spirit that consists primarily of ethanol and water.

Here’s a little known fact about vodka:

Grain vodka because it’s distilled from grain is actually whiskey.

It is, to be sure, underaged and heavily filtered whiskey, but it’s whiskey, nevertheless. One of the chief differences is that vodka is usually filtered through charcoal, whereas whiskey is usually filtered through wood.

Both the Polish and the Russians lay claim to the invention of vodka.

To the Polish people in particular, this subject is significant and contentious — a question of national pride — and on this subject, the historical record is unclear. Certain sources do say the first distillation of vodka took place in what is now a part of Russia, in the 9th century, but there are other historians, just as venerable, who date it in 8th century Poland.

Neither of these prototypical vodkas, however, were anything like the vodka we know and love today — nor, incidentally, were they particularly strong, weighing in at a preposterous 30 proof. Like gin, most of these early vodkas were medicinal rather than recreational. Today, we know better.

Prior to the 1940’s, vodka was virtually unknown in the United States.

The vodka martini — also known as the Kangaroo Cocktail or the Vodkatini — isn’t generally accepted by so-called purists (i.e. snobs and classicists with whom I stridently disagree) as a true martini, but in fact the vodka martini has a more legitimate claim to this title than most people realize. That, though, is another story for another time.

One thing is certain:

In Casino Royale, when James Bond ordered his now famous Vesper cocktail, he did much to popularize the vodka martini.

Here’s how the passage appears in Ian Fleming’s famous novel, published in 1953:

“A dry martini,” Bond said. “One. In a deep champagne goblet.”

“Oui, Monsieur.”

“Just a moment. Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?”

Got it.





Posted on

Putting the Cock Back in Cocktail: Sazeracs & Manhattans

A reader writes:

In your last video (which I enjoyed somewhat) you said the Old-Fashioned isn’t the oldest cocktail on written record, and you are correct. The Sazerac is. When will you do a vid featuring that one, bud?

Here you go, bud — though, for the record, it’s not actually known if the Sazerac is the “oldest cocktail” on written record. Everyone says it is, but history is mute on the matter.





Thanks for watching.



Posted on

Bleach-Haired Honkey Bitch

I am, as many of you know, a writer by day and a bartender by night — and yet, as many of you may not know, I’m not merely a bartender by night: I’m also a very passionate man.

As such, the creative spirit I strive to pour into my literature occasionally spills over into my work as a cocktologist, so that every once in a while, when I’m lucky, one of those cocktails will, if I may say so, transcend the quotidian and fall squarely within the precincts of the eternal. The Bleach-Haired Honkey Bitch (2 parts Tito’s vodka, 3 parts Tang) is, I believe, just such a cocktail — and evidently I’m not the only one who feels this way.

The following photo was recently emailed to me:

resize_bleach haired hb
In case you can’t quite make it out, that’s a T-shirt I had made which says:

ACE GILLETT’S: CHANGING LIVES, ONE BLEACH-HAIRED HONKEY BITCH AT A TIME

To whoever you are out there, staring philosophically across the eternal surf and the beautiful San Francisco Bay, thank you. You’ve touched my heart.

Thank you for wearing my Bleach-Haired Honkey Bitch shirt, and thank you even more for enjoying the Bleach-Haired Honkey Bitch cocktail. You are very clearly a woman of a rare and sophisticated palate.





Posted on

Putting the Cock Back in Cocktail (Part 4): Whiskey

whiskey_2(2)

Whiskey — or whisky, if you prefer — is a distilled spirit that’s usually made from corn, rye, barley, wheat, or, very often, a cross combination of some or all those.

Whiskey is almost always aged in wooden casks which almost always consist of charred white oak.

The word “whiskey” is an anglicized version of the Gaelic uisce beatha (in Scottish Gaelic: uisge beatha) which means “living water,” or “water of life.”

Irish whiskey, Scottish whiskey (i.e. scotch), Canadian whiskey, and American whiskey (i.e. bourbon) are by far the most popular whiskeys in the world. But these days virtually every country produces some sort of whiskey.

In bartending, whiskey is the new vodka. It has never been more popular.

So I made the following:








Posted on

Kevin


Unknown



My name is Kevin. I’m Kevin Mathew Haas.
My last name does not rhyme with moss.
It does not rhyme with floss.
To say so makes me cross.
Many regard me as the motherfucking boss.
I enjoy a little of the sauce.
In fact, my last name — Haas —
rhymes with gauze.
(This should give you pause.)
It also rhymes with laws.
I, Kevin Mathew Haas,
liked The Wizard of Oz
but did not particularly care for Jaws,
which I saw when I was seven.
My name is Kevin.


Editors note: the preceding was a poem I wrote about my co-worker Kevin — the Bob Ross of bartending, the Meatloaf of mixology, the William Shakespeare of sauce-slinging, the Kenny Chesney of the craft cocktail.

Posted on

Gin, The Martinez, And The Origins Of The Martini



In hell, said Randal Jarell, Americans tell each other how to make a martini.

A martini — “the elixir of quietude” as E.B. White described it — consists of gin and vermouth. The ingredients are chilled and then strained into a cocktail glass. That, at any rate, is the original martini, though vodka is now, somewhat grudgingly, accepted in the place of gin.

Gin is a strange and fascinating spirit, with a long and diverse history. It is in essence an admixture of grain alcohol and juniper-berry oil and was invented by a 17th Century Dutch medical professor named Francois de Boe Sylvius, who created it to relieve kidney disorders and, he said, “to purify the blood.”

Sylvius called his confection “Genever,” which is the Dutch word for juniper.

Gin is relatively easy and inexpensive to produce, and, in large part for this reason, it took England by complete storm.

Vermouth today — whether sweet or dry — is an entirely different deal from the vermouth that existed back in the days of Francois de Boe Sylvius. Back then, you see, Vermouth was a sweet(ish) digestif made from a myriad of things, such as: orange peels and flowers, juniper and nutmeg, cloves, coriander, cinnamon, marjoram, brandy, white wine, tree bark, and that’s not even the half of it. Today, however, vermouth is mediocre wine, usually white, with herbal-and-spice infusions and alcohol fortification. Sugar is often added.

The true origins of the gin martini are murky, though many stories do exist. Some, for example, say that back in 1912, a legendary New York bartender by the name of Martini invented the drink. Others believe it was first concocted much earlier and in prototypical fashion, back in 1850, in San Francisco, by Professor Jerry Thomas, who purportedly made it for a miner on the way to Martinez, California. The result: the Martinez cocktail, which is a gin-vermouth-maraschino drink, slightly different from the martini, but a venerable drink nevertheless, which still exists to this day. Yet the citizens of Martinez, California say that the martini originated right there, in 1870, and the bartender who first built it was a man named Julio Richelieu.

One thing that’s known for certain: The Martinez cocktail first appeared in The Bartenders Guide in 1887.

The Oxford English Dictionary, a usually impeccable source, tells us — incorrectly — that the martini was invented in 1871, but this was a full twenty years after Jerry Thomas’s drink came into existence.

The English, on the other hand, say that because of its kick, the martini comes from a strong British rifle called a Martini & Henry.

Many New Yorker’s would have us believe that a bartender at the Knickerbocker Hotel — one Martini di Arma di Taggia — invented the drink in 1911 for John David Rockefeller, who, by the way, took his martini with London Dry Gin, dry vermouth, bitters, lemon peel and a single olive.

But, whatever.

About the shape of the glass there is little dispute.
The ritual is really the thing,
holding the stem of the chalice to the light,
somewhat to bless the dying day.
But ever you are ready to begin,
Be extra careful not to bruise the gin.