The end result? The Arizona Gimlet, which I’m really quite happy with. It’s got a real citrus kick, but the vermouth helps smooth things out and keeps the gin from being overpowering, and the agave syrup, when used with a light touch, avoids the cloying sweetness that Rose’s lime sometimes delivers. I’ve even come up with two different preparations, depending on what mood you’re in. Give it a try!

The Recipe

2 oz gin
1 oz dry vermouth
1 oz fresh lime juice
1/3rd oz Agave Nectar (raw, amber, light … whatever kind you want)

Preparation 1: Combine ingredients with ice in a shaker, shake like crazy, strain into a chilled cocktail glass, and serve with a twist of lime. Delicious and potent!

Preparation 2: Combine ingredients with ice in a shaker, shake like crazy, strain into a rocks glass over ice, top with club soda and stir. Serve with a lime wedge. Refreshing!

Dart Publishing

Dart Publishing, Ltd. is the official name of the business I’ve been trying to get started with my friend for a while now. We’ve made huge leaps recently, thanks in part to having some extra time due to the Crispy Gamer implosion. I’m very nearly done with the first draft of the business plan, and will be sending it out to a few folks I know with way more business experience than I have, in order to get their feedback on it. From there, it’ll be revisions, and then probably applying for some local grants. Investor money is good, but free money is even better. Might as well look for that first, right?

Writing

Last month I finished not one, but two novels — my NaNoWriMo projects from 2007 and 2009, “The Broken God Machine” and “Morgan Skylark and the Monster Hunters,” respectively. If anyone out there wants to read the first draft of The Broken God Machine, it’s ready for criticism. Just get in touch. I still need to make some tweaks to Monster Hunters before I open it up for critique from the outside world, but that should be happening soon. I’m also making some progress on the second draft of the sequel to The Blood That Bonds, currently titled “Blood Hunt.” I expect work on that to speed up significantly once I’m no longer spending my coffee shop time filling out competitive analysis forms and burn-rate spreadsheets for Dart. Speaking of TBTB …

The Blood That Bonds

I haven’t had too many responses in my agent search, and so far the responses I’ve had haven’t been positive. I’m not particularly discouraged — people are still reading the eBook and sending very positive feedback — but I’m beginning to wonder if I should revise the first chapter a little to make it a bit more attention-grabbing right from the start. There’s a little too much opening exposition and I think it’s turning agents off. We’ll see.

Photography

Unfortunately, the broken 18-55mm lens that I fixed with superglue for a while has broken again, so we’re stuck only using a distance lens on our camera, which is a pain in the ass, so we’re not taking many pics at the moment. I need to get off my ass and either re-fix the lens using a better piece of plastic (and more superglue), or just cough up the ~$140 it costs to buy a new one. Why does everything have to be so damn expensive these days? Blargh! Rotten kids … GET OFF MY LAWN!

Cocktails

I went on a bit of a beer kick the past few months, trying lots of craft beers and really strengthening my understanding and appreciation of the different types available (turns out I am way more of an ale guy than a lager guy, with a particular fondness for brown ales, porters, and stouts). I’m coming out of that now though and getting back to crafting new cocktails. I’m still experimenting right now, but when I come up with something good, I’ll post it here.

Video Games

I went out and picked up BioShock 2 the other night at my wife’s urging (one of many reasons why I married her!) and have been playing through it. I’ll post a full review here when I’m finished, but I’m pretty far in and while I’m enjoying it, I’m kind of disappointed in how much more they’ve chosen to focus on combat. You’re constantly being swarmed with enemies, and while I’m not dying a lot, it’s just not a whole lot of fun to be in non-stop firefights. After BioShock 2, I’ll be picking up Mass Effect 2, and Assassin’s Creed 2 … apparently it’s all about the sequels right now.

Reading

Sadly, given how many activities I have going on, I haven’t done much reading since Christmas, when I burned through Bill Simmons’s Book of Basketball in a week or so. I’ve got three novels and a short story collection all waiting for my attention, not to mention a non-fiction book on real estate investing that I really should finish

French

Mon francais n’est pas superb … but it’s getting better. I do a half an hour of studying per day almost every weekday, and Charlotte and I are beginning to try to speak to each other more in French. We’ve also found some French cultural events to go to around town, and I’m about to start in on French grammar in addition to speaking/listening. It’s still a halting, frustrating process — I don’t like being bad at things — but all these little steps should hopefully add up to me being able to hold something of a coherent conversation with her friends and family back in the homeland, sometime within the next couple of years. Hopefully!

Travel

Speaking of the homeland, Charlotte and I will be making another France trip in May. Her sister is getting married in the south of France, which gives us the opportunity to fly into Barcelona in Spain, and spent the next week driving to Toulouse (actually, the nearby town of Albi), where we’ll attend the wedding, hang out for another day or two, and then I’ll fly back while she goes to Paris to take her finals for the French Lit program she’s working on. We’ve also got a trip to Florida happening in March, to visit my parents and sister, and a trip to Syracuse happening … sometime. Then as summer rolls into fall, we’ve got a wedding in New York City and a wedding in New Hampshire (I think) to attend. Yeesh!

… So that’s what’s up with me, in case anyone was wondering!

We awake bright and early (for Charlotte and I, at least … so 8:45am) and find that the heavy cloud cover from the previous day has lifted, and the sky is clear and blue. This means it’s going to be a bit warmer out, which is good, because we end up spending quite a bit of time outdoors, as it turns out.

We grab breakfast with Gabe and Brett — Starbucks again, and then head off on the fairly lengthy drive to the Maker’s Mark distillery. This takes us west out of Lexington, a drive which will continue until we’re south of Louisville, which is kind of nice since it shaves a bit of time off the trip home. Also, we get to drive through some very pretty country on a nice fall day. Not bad!

We eventually leave the Bluegrass Parkway and turn onto rural route 555, which is also pretty and takes us past a weird combination of golf courses, gigantic mansions, and trailer homes. I guess when you go where the land is cheap, you find all sorts of people willing to take advantage of that fact. On our way to the distillery we start seeing signs for “Historic Lincoln Birthplace” and decide that we might as well stop. This turns out to be a minor detour in terms of actual distance, but eats up close to an hour of our time, which is a good thing since we otherwise would’ve been incredibly early for the first distillery tour.

The “Lincoln” in question turns out not to be Abraham, but Abraham’s mother and father, who were born and lived within a mile of each other out here in roughly the middle of nowhere, Kentucky. The Lincoln family log cabin has been reconstructed on its actual spot, while the Hanks family cabin (Abe’s mom) is original, but was picked up and moved in order to create the historic site. We stop in at the gift shop and pay the $2 per head to tour the grounds, then wander around. The Lincoln cabin is one big room with a small and inaccessible upstairs section. The Hanks cabin is practically a mansion by contrast, having four defined rooms downstairs and a big sewing room upstairs. Both cabins are decorated with period antiques. Both are also freezing, dank, dim, and depressing. As Brett put it succinctly after a few minutes in the Lincoln cabin: “Okay … this would suck!”

We spend some time checking out the cabins and the grounds, which butt right up against a golf course upon which a bunch of guys are driving their golf carts in a most hazardous fashion. This proves amusing, as do the remains of what appears to once have been a well, but is now a creepy stone cavern with a spring at its base. Done exploring, we head back off toward Maker’s Mark.

We eventually arrive at the distillery, which is somewhat larger and a bit more industrial-looking than Woodford Reserve, but still pretty quaint and picturesque. We hang out in what used to be the owners’ house, which has now been turned into the central tour location, waiting for things to get started. Eventually we’re herded together and begin our tour. It’s similar to the Woodford Reserve tour, albeit in somewhat larger numbers. Where Woodford has three fermenting vats and stores about 5000 barrels, Maker’s has something like 36 fermenting vats and stores a correspondingly higher number of barrels. They’re still “small batch” though, because they only bottle using 160 barrels at a time. Oddly, given that it has so many more barrels, their aging warehouse doesn’t smell as good as Woodford’s. Maybe the stone walls do a better job of trapping in the scent?

At the end of the tour we get to do a tasting, which includes a small glass of Maker’s and a bourbon ball, but also includes something interesting: a small glass of “White Dog” (aka: White Lightning, aka: un-aged whiskey). It has an odd, ferment-y smell … like a combination of corn and yeast with an alcohol finish. On the tongue it lacks much flavor, and burns a bit more than the aged product. Overall, I wouldn’t recommend it compared to the finished version!

Gabe and Brett buy a small bottle of Maker’s to hand-dip in wax at the gift shop. Charlotte and I go for a full 750 ML bottle, which has a horrible label featuring the founder’s face on it, but is otherwise identical to a regular maker’s bottle. Gabe dunks theirs, Charlotte dunks ours, many pictures are taken, and I buy a bourbon-dipped cigar that I will probably forget to smoke until it is dried out and revolting. WOO!

We finished up our tour by visiting the Maker’s Mark cafe, where we acquired various bourbon-barbecue sandwiches, along with some sides and drinks. Pretty tasty for cheap cafe food. Charlotte and I each bought a bourbon cookie for the road, and I decided to eat mine while driving fifty-five on a twisty rural route. This caused a bit of a problem when we came up over a hill and I had a moment of indecision when faced with a fork in the road, finally decided to slam on the breaks and screech around to the left, still hanging precariously on to my cookie with one hand and turning the wheel with the other, all the while bumping over potholes and road debris, since we were now on a median rather than on the expected road surface. Ah, road trips.

Eventually we found our way to 65 north, and spent the next three hours or so making our way home. Our trip to Kentucky was over, but it will remain forever in our hearts. And our livers … at least, until that bottle of Maker’s is gone.

» Links: Lexington Trip Day 2 Pics

Lexington’s a pretty town, not too huge but big enough to feel like a city. There’s a nice touch of Southern Hospitality without it being grating or overbearing. The presence of the UK campus right in the center of things helps keep a fairly youthful, modern feel to the populace. It’s also currently responsible for a LOT of construction … apparently UK hasn’t heard that we’re in a recession, because they’re putting up new buildings like crazy. Also, there is plenty of sausage gravy to be had which, from my point of view, is a definite plus.

On Friday night we stopped by a local UK pizza joint and had some dinner before retiring to the aforementioned deluxe accommodations to crash for the night. The next morning we got up, ate breakfast, and headed out to the Woodford Reserve Distillery, where they make some of the most delicious bourbon ever to grace this green earth. They are a small batch distillery, working with only 140 barrels at a time and storing only about 5000 barrels at once. Each barrel holds about 120 liters of bourbon, or about 160 standard-sized bottles, so each batch is about 22.4 thousand standard bottles. To give an idea of why that’s “Small Batch,” the largest bourbon producer in Kentucky stores about 1.8 million barrels at any given time. 5000 is damn near artisan level by comparison.

We toured the mixing and fermentation building, the distilling building, the aging warehouse (aka: the best-smelling place on earth), and the bottling facility. Then we went up for a free tasting and a bourbon ball. Delicious! We bought some bourbon-chocolate-cherry candies in the gift shop, and headed for our next stop: Keeneland, a gigantic horse-racing track.

We arrived and, after looking for a free parking spot for about twenty years, finally managed to get inside the building. Two things needed to be accomplished before the fifth race began. One: Charlotte and I needed to put some money down so we could say that we’d officially bet on a horse race. Two: we needed to get some food up in us, because we were all starving. I put ten bucks on horse #6, “Artisan” to win, and Charlotte told me to put ten bucks on Horse #3 to show … but I got flustered at the betting window and accidentally put it on horse #2, “Irish Ridge” to show. Oops. Next we went upstairs and acquired stew, a brat, a burger, and a couple of beers. After wandering around trying to find a place to eat them AND see the race at the same time, we finally managed to procure a bench just minutes before the race started.

And they’re off! The horses go running as we shout encouragement in between bites of food and sips of Bud Light (it was all they had). #6 – Artisan – My horse immediately falls into second to last place and never contends. Sonuva … fortunately #2 – Irish Ridge- the horse we accidentally put ten bucks on to show, ends up winning the entire thing. We make $12 on that $10 bet, so we’re  down $8 for the day at the end of race five. We decide to stick around for race six even though it’s freezing out, and head off to place one more bet. This time, Charlotte sees horse #7 – CS Silk – nuzzling one of the others as they’re walking on to the track, and decides she wants to bet on him because “he’s nice!” … seems as good a reason as any other, so we put five bucks on him to show.

Race number six goes off, and our horse manages to win it in a fairly thrilling victory, holding off a few last-minute pushes from other horses. Gabe and Brett are also happy, as their bet moved up from dead last to #3 right at the end. Charlotte and I end up winning $14.50 on our $5, putting us at a grand total of $26.50 won for $25 spent, or a net profit of $1.50. Woohoo! Judging by this sample, I am prepared to declare her a gambling genius. Our future wealth will no doubt be prodigious.

After watching some more horses wander around, we decide that it’s simply too cold out (okay, I actually wuss out first and beg everyone else to leave). It’s late afternoon and we decide we need to be someplace warm, with beer. This leads us to an irish pub in downtown Lexington, where we hang out for about an hour, nursing our beers / ciders and watching a college football game whose outcome we don’t really care about. We then split to go back to the hotel, relax for a bit, and meet up again for dinner.

Gabe and Brett take us to a favorite hangout of theirs in college, Ramsey’s.They promise us good food, lots of it, and spectacular pies. We are not disappointed on any of those counts. I get a broiled pork sandwich with pinto beans, Charlotte gets a plate of fried chicken livers with corn oysters, fried green tomatoes, and summer squash. Brett gets a “hot brown” and Gabe gets a country-fried steak with macaroni & cheese, potatoes & gravy, and fried green tomatoes. The entrees are delicious, but the pie is definitely the star. I get a chocolate brownie / peanut butter cream combo. Charlotte and Brett get slices of the chocolate pecan pie, and Gabe enjoys a coconut cream pie simply because he knows that coconut grosses me out!

Stuffed ridiculously full, we head back to the hotel to crash for the night. Tomorrow: a big drive out to the Maker’s Mark distillery, along which we will encounter the home of Lincoln’s parents, and after which I will nearly kill us all while trying to eat a bourbon cookie and drive at the same time!

» Link: Day One Pictures at My Flickr Page

Berry in Paradise

2.5 oz white rum
1 oz coconut rum
1 oz raspberry liqueur
half a small lime
heavy dash bitters

Cut the lime half into wedges and muddle in bottom of a shaker with the bitters and raspberry liqueur. Add the two types of rum and shake vigorously over ice. Strain into a martini glass and garnish with a brandied cherry and a twist of lime.

The coconut rum really backs up the lime, which is the star of the dish, while the raspberry liqueur adds enough sweetness to counterbalance the acidity, and the white rum gives it the kick that any good cocktail deserves. I actually add more than a half a lime to mine … but I’m addicted to citrus and don’t recommend that for most people!

Thanks to PhilipRobbins for the picture!

14oz light rum
6oz coconut rum
4oz blue curacao
16oz pineapple juice
16oz orange juice
4oz lemon juice
24 oz lemon-lime soda (regular or diet)
.1oz bitters

Mix all ingredients together in a large bowl. Stir well and serve over ice. Garnish with maraschino cherries, pineapple wedges, and little umbrellas. Turn on some beach tunes and watch the sun set!

Thanks to ring2 for the picture!

I wanted to produce something which was bold but not overpowering, not too sweet, and could be made by the glass or by the pitcher. I decided on a whiskey-based concoction which used Cherry Heering for sweetness, lemon juice for a bit of tang, and dry vermouth to smooth things out. Here’s the recipe:

The Bossman

2 parts Canadian Whiskey (I used Seagrams VO)
2 parts OJ (glass) or 3 parts OJ (pitcher)
.75 parts Dry Vermouth
.75 parts Cherry Heering
.5 parts Lemon Juice
Generous dash of Angostura Bitters

Shake or stir with ice, and serve over ice in a rocks glass. Goes very well with birthday cake!

Hope you enjoy the drink. Incidentally, this is the 100th post to this blog (since I redesigned and switched over to wordpress). Hooray!

This drink uses Applejack, which I’d never had before trying the Applejack Cocktail. It’s rather similar to calvados, the French apple liqueur, which I suppose is not particularly surprising. Still, it’s got more of a whiskey kick to it — there’s something less refined happening there, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Combine it with some dry vermouth, some orange juice, and some lime … and you get my latest cocktail:

Spring Break Jack

2 oz Applejack
1 oz Orange Juice
3/4 oz Dry Vermouth
1/2 oz Lime Juice
1/4 oz Simple Syrup
Dash of Bitters

Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker, and shake briskly with ice for a long ten count. Strain into a chilled cocktail/martini glass, and garnish with a twist of orange and a brandied cherry.

I know that “Jack” is typically used to refer to Jack Daniels, but I think it works in this case. After all, Florida is home to many an orange, and to many a spring break party destination!

Anyway, give the drink a shot, let me know what you think. I’ll be back with more, soon.

Things have been quiet on the cocktail front of late, not because I’ve stopped enjoying them, but rather because I received a terrific book for Christmas: The Craft of the Cocktail by Dale Degroff. I highly recommend it. The first half is interesting and informative, tracing the evolution of the cocktail over the years and giving advice and information on specific liquors, mixers, ingredients, and techniques. The second half is a list of 500 cocktails, and I’ve been taking the opportunity recently to stop experimenting and instead try my hand at replicating some of those recipes. The results have been largely successful, but I can’t entirely stifle my creative side, and in the past few weeks I’ve come up with two cocktails that I’m really happy with. One of them is based on a cocktail from the book, and the other is a creation that was born after my lovely wife picked up a bottle of cranberry juice concentrate, which makes an interesting mixer, though you have to be careful to keep it from overwhelming things. Anyway, check these out, and if you’re into mixing cocktails like I am, pick up a copy of that book. You won’t regret it.

The Bitter Stork

Based on the Stork Club Cocktail, first created by Nathaniel Cook of the Stork Club, and brought to my attention by the aformentioned Dale Degroff. I didn’t have all of the ingredients for the traditional Stork Club Cocktail, so I improvised with what I had, and turned out a cocktail that ranks among my wife’s favorites, of those I’ve created. I’m pretty fond of it too! Just the right level of bitter, sweet, and tart.

1.5 oz Gin
.5 oz Triple Sec
.5 oz Lime Juice
1 oz Grapefruit Juice
.25 oz Simple Syrup
Dash of Angostura Bitters

Shake all ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled martini glass. Garnish with a brandied cherry, and a lime twist.

Tart in Tennessee

I wanted to create a long drink that took advantage of the cranberry concentrate that my wife bought me, so I played around and found something that I think works very nicely. Not too strong, not too tart, and the Tennessee Whiskey plays very well with the cranberry, bringing some vanilla notes to it.

2 oz Tennessee Whiskey
.5 oz Cranberry Concentrate
.5 oz Simple Syrup
4 oz Club Soda
Dash of Angostura Bitters

Combine all ingredients in a collins glass with ice, and stir gently until combined. Garnish with drunken cranberries, if you can get them (it helps if you married someone who makes them!).

While I will always love cocktails, and the art of making them, more than any other type of alcohol, my enjoyment of things drinkable by no means begins and ends there. I like wine in all of its varieties, and I enjoy beer from time to time. Though I am not yet at a point where I could tell an ale from a pilsner by taste alone, I’ve at least reached a level where I’m beginning to identify specific flavors and types of beer that I enjoy.

On Saturday night a friend of mine decided to host a beer tasting. He’s a lot more versed in beer than I am, and has been collecting bottles from a Top 100 list. Several people (myself included) brought some bottles that we’d never had before, to complement the ones he’d been storing up, and we all had tastings. A typical tasting in this case was one or two shots worth of the beer, depending on the size of the bottle.We had snacks and water available as palate cleansers, and the entire evening  took quite some time, so nobody got crazy intoxicated or anything. It was just a fun, low-key, educational evening.

In case you’re curious, here’s what the list looked like, in the order we drank them (which starts with the stuff others had brought, then at #6 switches to my friend’s bottles, which were ordered by ABV%, lowest to highest).

1. Some Crazy Russian Beer
2. Some Other Crazy Russian Beer
3. Stone Vertical Epic 8
4. Harpoon Dark Munich
5. Harpoon Chocolate Stout
6. Harviestoun Old Engine Oil
7. Bear Republic Racer 5
8. Bear Republic Hop Rod Rye
9. Meantime Scotch Ale
10. Private Weissbierbrauerei G. Schneider Aventinus
11. Great Divide Yeti Imperial Stout
12. Hair of the Dog Adam
13. Great Divide Old Ruffian
14. Brouwerij St. Bernadus Abt 12
15. Southern Tier Choklat Imperial Stout
16. Schmaltz (He’Brew) Jewbelation 12

We also had one other, but I can’t remember the name of it. You’ll have to forgive me! We left a bottle of Dogfish Head 120-minute IPA unopened, because several of us have already tried it, and we didn’t want to end the evening by whaling down a 20% ABV beer. Just seemed a bad idea!

All of those that we tasted were high-quality beer, and there wasn’t a single one I didn’t like, but some struck me more than others. My favorite of the night was the Aventinus, but I have a note  – yes, I took notes – that it could definitely get overwhelming in large quantities. It’s a spicy beer that’s almost reminiscent of spiced rum, but with the malt taste of beer and a hoppy finish. Very good, but … probably not the kind of thing you want more than one bottle of in an evening.

I gave high scores – yes, I scored them – to the Racer 5 (VERY hoppy), the Adam (dark, strong and chocolaty), and the St Bernadus (also spicy, with lots of brown sugar and apple flavors). Oh, and of all the chocolate stouts I’ve ever had, and I’ve had several, the one from Southern Tier was by FAR the most chocolaty, so much so that it caused me to shout “holy shit!” after my first sip. Charlotte and the others at the tasting agreed that it was pretty amazing. So if you’re into chocolate stouts … it’s highly recommended.

Coming tomorrow: a tale of woe and sorrow that will surely make you appreciate your own life more.