Happy Birthday cocktail

The local napkin that passes itself off as a newspaper had a fluff article declaring today as the birthday of the Negroni cocktail.  Equal parts Campari, sweet Vermouth, and gin.  This is not a kiddy cocktail and our 20-something nieces

decided after a taste that this was not a cocktail for them unless they were allowed to sugar it to death.  This image shows how the Phactors wait for relatives, in a totally appropriate manner in a sidewalk café in Florence.  If you substitute bourbon for the gin you have a cocktail called Boulevardier, and actually TPP likes it a bit better.  But when in Rome...(or Florence, or Genoa, or Levanto).

Old fashioned cocktails

As TPP has mentioned before one of his favorite cocktails is an Old Fashioned, and he is not particularly impressed by supposed new fangled twists on this cocktail using tequila, or gin & Campari,  or other spirits.  When you drastically change the basic ingredients the drink actually becomes something else, call it what you will, but an Old Fashioned is made with bourbon.  Would you take a tomato soup recipe, leave out the tomatos, substitute some other fruit, and then still call it tomato soup?  Would you change the beef to chicken and still call it beef stew?  The thing about an old fashioned Old Fashion is its utter simplicity.  The best Old Fashioned TPP was ever served in a bar or restaurant was at the Girl and the Goat in Chi-town.  They made two minor, but excellent changes to the recipe; they used orange bitters and rubbed the rim of the glass with a strip of orange peel rather than muddling the fruit.  Being a bit hard core, and not liking things overly sweet, TPP suggests you try one without the sugar or simple syrup.  A dash of club soda is a waste of time and water, and although colorful, maraschino cherries are nothing but a sweet, red-dyed zombies of the former fruit.  Nothing is left except the "skeleton" of the cherry.  Creepy!  The cocktail craze is actually rather a refreshing trend of late, and Mrs. Phactor is having fun trying various recipes to find drinks to her taste.  The latest involved muddled tangerine and campari.  It was not to my taste at all.  Perhaps she'll share some of the better recipes.  Check the comments after this post for the recipe for very nice Aperol cocktail, or reading on, its Campari counterpart.   

Cocktail Quiz

Now after just offering my primary safe drinking tip yesterday, it only seems symmetrical to see if TPP, Mrs. Phactor, and friends, who will remain unnamed to protect their reputations, violated the rule.  After dining in the remarkably grotty, but original, Arthur Bryant's, a KC BBQ legend, we decided something a bit more upscale, something a bit more elegant, something in a very different neighborhood, was needed, and thus our 4-some left this BBQ icon (almost said mecca, but with all that pork, that just doesn't quite seem right) far behind to enjoy the semi-pleasant weather with an after dinner drink on a delightful patio populated by much younger, and much less sophisticated, drinkers.  So here's your cocktail quiz challenge.  What are the four cocktails?  And for a bonus point, which one belongs to TPP?  Hint: one person may have violated the funny name rule, but perhaps it was just a bit of whimsy inspired by a drink story generated by a recent visit to a less sophisticated city.  It's always good to have a bartender who knows that when you ask for a "wet bar towel" that it's really just a wet bar towel you want, not an unusual cocktail ("Take a wet bar towel; wring the liquid into a low ball glass, add ice, ...") .  As always, employees of this blog, as well as relatives are not eligible to win.   

What should bourbon taste like?

An advertisement caught my attention for cherry, spices, and honey tea flavored bourbon.  Having struggled to control my gag reflex, here's my take on this.  In some sense the Phactor understands flavored vodkas.  Ethanol is a colorless, flavorless, clear liquid that mixes totally in any proportion with water, another colorless, flavorless, clear liquid, so adding some sort of flavor to vodka makes a little bit of sense.  On the other hand bourbon tastes like bourbon, and some taste better than others, and some are better values than others.  Now if you do not like bourbon, fine, but apparently the whole point of flavoring bourbon is to get people who don't like bourbon to drink bourbon, and the assumption must be made that if the bourbon was any good to begin with, people would drink it for the bourbon flavor, not some other flavor.  And when it comes to flavored spirits, the Phactor doubts that these flavors are subtle. 
Great minds must think somewhat alike because over at the Garden Rant, someone is also in a tizzy about cocktails and what has happened to them when they become too, too fashionable.  We are on the same page; they call it an old fashioned cocktail that because it is, so don't mess around with some infusion of orange blossoms and cucumber slices. 
So this makes two problems to deal with.  First you have spirit makers trying to cater to a generation that grew up on sweet, fruity drinks, and then you have overly fashionable cocktails.  How the Phactor hates ordering a margarita and then being asked if it is to be frozen, sugar or salt rimmed, or on the rocks.  A margarita is served on the rocks with a salted rim.  Anything else is another drink which is why they call frozen margaritas frozen margaritas.  It's a different drink.  But some purveyors do get it.  One of the best small, locovore, farm to table, creative restaurants in our area always features a couple of classic, we-didn't-mess-with-it cocktails.