by Pink Lady

They say Irish whiskey is the fastest growing spirits category in the U.S. these days, which is great news. The spirit sure has seen its share of dark days.

No one knows the full story, but Celtic monks are the likely fathers of Irish whiskey.

Whiskey-making was popular enough among innkeepers and laypersons to require a license by 1556. By the mid-17^th century, the King was also charging duties based on quantity.

The vibrant aqua vitae business took a major blow when the Act of 1779 taxed Irish whiskey-makers by the still. One quarter of legal distilleries closed or went underground owing to this tax. Their remaining distilleries’ solution? Build bigger stills.

Then there was a famine, a major blow to the amount of Irish grain available for distilling. Then a World War, then a war with England and trade embargoes on all Irish goods, closing off the British export market. Then American Prohibition came, cutting off another important market across the Great Pond. During World War II, the Irish government closed distillation down completely.

But these days, Irish luck seems to be working for whiskey makers once again. The spirit is popular with younger drinkers and because of its smooth flavor and mixability, is allegedly a big hit with ladies.

Of course, we LUPEC ladies have always been fans, especially when sampled in one of these, a classic from the Waldorf-Astoria circa 1910 introduced to us by David Wondrich.

THE BLACKTHORN
1 oz Irish whiskey
1 oz dry vermouth
3 dashes Absinthe
3 dashes Angostura bitters

Stir ingredients with ice in a mixing glass. Strain into a chilled vintage cocktail glass.

CIN-CIN!

by Pink Lady

Who doesn’t love a good race? When it comes to cocktails we couldn’t be happier to discover a bartender who can mix us up a drink cocktail super swiftly. So we are thrilled to announce the next Monday, Speed Rack will be coming to Boston.

Invented by our New York sisters Ivy Mix and Lynnette Marrero, Speed Rack is a national cocktail competition that features top female bartenders in key cocktail markets and puts them head to head in timed challenges as part of a 10-city tour to find the fastest female bartender in America while raising funds for breast cancer charities.

The inaugural Speed Rack competition was held in New York City in May by the local chapter of LUPEC (Ladies United for the Preservation of Endangered Cocktails) and raised $3,500. (To see how the girls smoked it and for a taste of what’s to come in Boston, visit http://www.speed-rack.com/.)

Speed Rack Boston will be held Monday, October 10, 2011 at Villa Victoria Center for the Arts (www.villavictoriaarts.org). During the competition small bites from The Citizen, The Franklin Café, The Franklin Southie, Toro, Coppa, Myers and Chang, and Trina’s Starlite Lounge will be served as guest judges Jackson Cannon, of Eastern Standard and Island Creek Oyster Bar, and Misty Kalkofen of Drink and LUPEC Boston President critique the drinks. Ticket price is $20 for this event and includes all food and beverage. You can buy online at www.speedrack.eventbrite.com  or pay $20 at the door day of. OR, you can order a ticket, a Speed Rack tee-shirt and a Speed Rack Coozie all for just $35. Win, win, win. All proceeds will benefit breast cancer charities.

Ready, set, go! We hope to see you there. In the interim, mix up one of these at home. Time yourself to see how you would stack up.

SPEED

Invented by Laurie Ross

1/3 brandy

1/3 apricot brandy

1/6 orange juice

1/6 lemon juice

Shake ingredients with ice in a cocktail shaker. Strain into a chilled vintage cocktail glass. Garnish with an orange peel.

by Pink Lady

We’ll bet you a round that the question of how this morning tipple got its eerie name has crossed your mind at least once. Barman Fernand “Pete” Petiot is credited with inventing this cocktail in 1921 at Harry’s American Bar in Paris.

The drink was an exciting blend of two then-new products: vodka, which had recently arrived in France via refugees from Russia, and canned tomato juice, an unsurprisingly American invention fresh off the boats from the States after World War I.

According to one theory, the drink’s haunting name makes reference to Mary Queen of Scots via a lonely regular often found drinking alone at Petiot’s bar. Sipping in solitude for long, lonely hours as she awaited her beloved, she reminded barguests of an imprisoned Queen Mary, who was also known by the sobriquet Bloody Mary.

In 1936 the Astor family coaxed Petiot to move to New York to become head barman at the St Regis Hotel’s King Cole Bar, where his drink evolved further. Vodka was not yet available stateside and the St Regis’s swanky management wanted to lose the gruesome name. The new gin-based version was given the tamer-sounding name Red Snapper and earned a spot on hotel’s cocktail list. The cunning marketers at Smirnoff saw opportunity in the Bloody Mary while trying to penetrate the market with vodka in the 1950s.

They brought the original Bloody Mary back to its roots, making it a lynchpin of their legendary campaign to introduce vodka to the American marketplace. And it worked: Vodka holds forth on drink lists today, with modern brunchers asking for call-brand Bloody Mary’s by name.

But the original Bloody Mary recipe was quite simple. As such, the drink lends itself to delicious invention, and is a great template to play with until you’ve got your preferred recipe just right. As Imbibe! author David Wondrich says, “the small, idiomatic differences … are the mixographer’s delight!” Add celery salt, horseradish, and who knows what else.

BLOODY MARY

1.5 oz vodka
2 dashes Worcestershire
4 dashes Tabasco
pinch of salt and pepper
.25 oz fresh lemon juice
4 oz tomato juice

Build in a mixing glass. Roll back and forth in a tin. Strain into an ice filled glass.

CIN-CIN!

by Pink Lady

Sometimes it’s the flavor that draws you in to a cocktail’s mythical orbit, sometimes it’s the lovely hue. In some cases, curiosity is piqued by a beverage’s name. Death in the Afternoon, for example: What in the heavens could that drink taste like? What could a cocktail with such a name possibly contain?

Leave it to Ernest Hemingway to slap such a chillingly intriguing name on a drink (and a novel). The beverage was allegedly born after he and three officers of the H.M.S. Danae spent seven hours overboard trying to get a fishing boat off a bank where it had blown in a storm. He subsequently submitted the recipe to a humorous book of celebrity cocktails, So Red My Nose, or Breath in the Afternoon, edited by the journalist and author Sterling North and Carl Kroch, published in 1935.

The drink is an unusual one to be sure and was not possible to recreate in the states for many decades, owing to the absinthe ban. Legal once again, we enjoyed sampling this drink with the robust Vieux Carre Absinthe, a brand distilled in Philadelphia and named for the French Quarter in New Orleans. Jade Liquors’ Lucid Absinthe is also a delight, and if you can get your hands on a bottle of their Nouvelle Orleans, do yourself a favor and combine it with some fine champagne for a fancy take on this cocktail with a morbid moniker.

DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON
As imbibed by Ernest Hemingway

1.5 oz Vieux Carre Absinthe
Chilled Champagne

Pour one jigger absinthe into a Champagne glass. Add iced Champagne until it attains the proper opalescent milkiness. Drink three to five of these slowly.

CIN-CIN!

by Pink Lady

Ever sampled a Zombie, Suffering Bastard, or anything served in a skull mug or Scorpion bowl? With out-there names and kitschy vessels, Tiki drinks are apt to inspire a giggle among cocktail neophytes. In their original incarnation these were balanced, palatable drinks built upon rum, fresh juices, and flavorful syrups—legitimate cocktails that would make modern bar snobs swoon.

The roots of the Tiki craze stretch back to Prohibition, when thirsty Americans took to the Caribbean seas (where rum flowed freely) for rum cruises. There they developed a taste for exotic island cocktails, making the market ripe by the time Ernest Beaumont-Gannt opened his “Don the Beachcomber” bar in Hollywood in 1934, just after repeal. Victor Bergeron soon followed suit, revamping his Oakland eatery into “Trader Vic’s,” complete with South Seas décor. Post World War II the Tiki phenomenon blossomed into a true craze that lasted well into the 1950s, longer than any other cocktail fad to date. This weekend we’ll be raising a glass to the Tiki Craze.

Join us at The Franklin Southie on Sunday, September 18th, from 7pm-11pm, for an evening of exotic Blender Drinks on the Patio. We’ll have a delicious array of frozen favorites made with Hendricks Gin and Sailor Jerry Rum, the freshest ingredients, and maybe a few guilty pleasure favorites as well.

This event is open to the public, and there is no cover charge to enter. And, as with all LUPEC events, boys are welcome, and we’ll be donating a portion of the night’s proceeds to a local women’s charity.

Mix up one of these at home as you get in the spirit.

COCOANUT GROVE

1 oz fresh lime juice
.5 oz Lopez Coconut Cream
.5 oz orange Curacao
2 oz Sailor Jerry Rum
1 cup crushed ice

Put everything in a blender.
Blend for 30 seconds or until smooth.
Pout into a cocktail or saucer champagne glasses.
Serves 2.

CIN-CIN!

COCKTAIL PARTY

TIKI PARTY AT FRANKLIN SOUTHIE

SUN 9.18.11
152 DORCHESTER AVE.
BOSTON
617.269.1003
7PM-11PM/21+/FREE
@FRANKLINCAFE
FRANKLINCAFE.COM

by Pink Lady

Though most of us have been out of school for a while now, it’s hard not to feel all back-to-school-y when September rolls around here in Boston. As the seasonal bounty turns from summer fruits to apples, so does our hankering for a bit of the sweet stuff … such as delicious and delightful applejack.

Applejack, America’s oldest distilled spirit, is an apple brandy that first became popular during colonial times, with Laird’s & Company as the first commercial producers. William Laird was a Scotch-maker in his native Scotland before crossing the pond in 1698 to settle in Monmouth County, New Jersey. Apples were abundantly available in the region, so he used them to keep making hooch.

In the 1760s Robert Laird served under General George Washington in the Revolutionary Army, which he kept supplied with the “cyder spirits”. General Washington even borrowed the Laird’s family recipe to try his own hand at the distilling.

Aside from the “apple” part, Laird’s Applejack has little in common with other “apple products” in the marketplace, such as apple schnapps and (yech) Pucker, and drinks like whiskey with an apple-y finish. Modern Laird’s Applejack is also considerably different from the colonial stuff, blending real apple brandy with neutral grain spirits to smooth and reduce the alcohol content for our delicate modern palates.

Applejack is as American as apple pie and happens to be helmed by a very cool LUPEC-loving lady, Lisa Laird Dunn. She’s the 9^th generation Laird to head up the company. We’ll drink to that!

JERSEY LIGHTENING

.75 oz fresh lime juice

1.5 oz applejack

.5 oz sweet vermouth

Shake in iced cocktail shaker; strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Take that, Sour Apple-tini!

CIN-CIN!

FOR MORE GREAT COCKTAIL RECIPES VISIT LUPECBOSTON.COM.

by Pink Lady

“Mixologist”: it’s a term we hear bandied about quite often these days in the height of the Cocktail Renaissance, usually as reference to a cadre of bartenders that are exceptional at their job. But what does it mean, exactly? And how is a mixologist appreciably different from a regular bartender?

The term “mixologist” dates to a period described by David Wondrich in Imbibe as “The Baroque Age” when the role of the bartender and the beverages served across the mahogany evolved into sophisticated tipples. Good, fresh New England ice became widely available no matter how hot the season. American tipplers, with their rugged individualistic spirits, grew keen on individual cocktails mixed to order rather than the communal cup that was the punch bowl. As beverages and tastes evolved, so did the skill set of the man behind the pine and his palette of flavors: fancy syrups, bitters, and liqueurs from across the pond began to flow into the glass along with liquor, with elaborate fruit garnishes to topping them off.

“Mixologist” first appears in 1856 as a tongue-in-cheek reference to this new breed of bartender in a humor piece penned by Charles G. Leland for the Knickerbocker Magazine. The narrator describes a sporting man’s reference to the bartender as “a ‘mixologist of tipulars’ and ‘tipular fixings’”. Before long the term evolved into sincere definition describing a bartender, as The Washington Post put it, who was “especially proficient at putting odds and ends of firewater together.’”

Nowadays the term is used to describe pretty much the same thing, but we LUPEC ladies feel that all too often it becomes a harbinger of pretense. There are many, many breeds of fine bartender out there and so much more to the job than concocting showy cocktails with esoteric ingredients. As summer slowly retreats, we suggest you raise a glass to all who’ve chosen this profession and their continued commitment to keeping us pleasantly buzzed in a myriad of ways with an Imperial Royale. It’s a delightfully refreshing sip, perfect for the beach or porch, and so profound it took not one but two mixologists to concoct.

IMPERIAL ROYALE

by the Mixology Twins

1.5 oz St-Germain

1 can/bottle Bud Light Lime

Combine ingredients in a pint glass with ice. Stir twice gently to combine. Garnish with one market fresh raspberry.

Cin-cin!

To learn more about the misadventures of the Imperial Royale & the Mixology Twins, fan us on Facebook & follow us on Twitter!

by Pink Lady

August 26 marks Women’s Equality, the anniversary of passing of the 19th Amendment, granting American women the right to vote in all public elections.

This super-momentous occasion took place behind closed doors at Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby’s private residence in 1920, “without ceremony of any kind,” according to the New York Times. “Unaccompanied by the taking of movies or other pictures, despite the fact that the National Woman’s Party, or militant branch of the general suffrage movement, had been anxious to be represented by a delegation of women and to have the historic event filmed for public display and permanent record.”

The moment was 72 years in the making, the culmination of a long and ceaseless campaign by American women and their male supporters.

50 years later, congress deemed August 26 “Women’s Equality Day” during the height of the Second Wave Women’s Movement, both as a nod to women’s enfranchisement and to women’s modern efforts toward full equality. To paraphrase, the Joint Resolution was passed because “the women of the United States have been treated as second-class citizens and have not been entitled the full rights and privileges, public or private, legal or institutional, which are available to male citizens of the United States … the women of the United States have united to assure that these rights and privileges are available to all citizens equally regardless of sex.”

This August 26, we raise a glass to voting rights for women, and to the long hard road our forebroads marched to enfranchisement.

PERFECT LADY COCKTAIL
2 oz gin
1 oz peach brandy
1 oz fresh lemon juice
Egg white

Combine ingredients in a cocktail shaker without ice and shake vigorously to emulsify. Add ice and shake long and hard. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

CIN-CIN!

by Pink Lady

With the long days of August upon us, the ladies of LUPEC can think of few things more enjoyable to sip than a Pimm’s Cup. Born in England and reinterpreted in New Orleans, the Pimm’s Cup is the perfect cocktail to sip on a lazy afternoon. Also, it pairs well with civilized games like croquet, cricket, and bocce.

And thanks to its low alcohol content, you still stand a chance at winning, even if kick back your first one at lunch.

Invented by oyster bar owner James Pimm in London circa-1823 (or 1840, according to some), the original Pimm’s Cup mixed gin, quinine, and a secret blend of herbs and spices. It was offered to guests as a “digestive tonic”, but most likely invented to mask the bitter flavors inherent in the gin of the day.

By 1851 the drink was in such high demand that Pimm stepped up production, expanding the Pimm’s Cup concept to include different versions based on other spirits. The next century saw the invention of six different Pimm’s Cups, ranging from whiskey to vodka as their base. Only Pimm’s No. 1 is widely available in the U.S today

The modern Pimm’s Cup is an iconic British cocktail, and the drink is to Wimbledon what Mint Juleps are to the Kentucky Derby. It also has a home stateside, as a classic New Orleans cocktail prepared with nostalgic expertise at the Napoleon House. We tried them while in NOLA for Tales; you should try them on your porch.

The Napoleon House Pimm’s Cup

Fill a tall 12 oz glass with ice. Add 1.25 ounces Pimm’s No. 1 and 3 ounces lemonade.

Top off with 7up.

Garnish with cucumber.

CIN CIN!