Heads up, gentle reader. These four cocktails make it an even 100 cocktails in 100 days as promised. That means, of course, that I’ll be taking some time off from the drinking & mixing. I’ll keep this blog afloat by trying new recipes, inventing new cocktails, reviewing bars and their fare. But you’re not gonna get it every day. Keep checking in, though, to see what else I’ve gotten myself into.

Hawkeye Pierce Approved Barware

The Dry Martini

In The Essential Cocktail, Dale DeGroff has written a marvelous section on martinis. He relates the reputed Winston Churchill suggestion that one should simply wave at an unopened bottle of vermouth across the room while drinking the cocktail. I prefer Hawkeye Pierce’s recipe for the perfect martini: “You pour six jiggers of gin and drink it while staring at a picture of Lorenzo Schwartz, the inventor of vermouth.”

4 dashes French vermouth
2 1/2 ounces London dry gin
Pitted olive for garnish
Lemon twist for garnish

First, the requirement of 4 dashes of vermouth. In The Essential Cocktail‘s measurements table, a dash is 6 drops. Big drops? Small drops? DeGroff doesn’t say. So I have to engineer 24 drops of vermouth. Realizing that I couldn’t pour 24 drops from the bottle with any consistency and that I didn’t have an eyedropper or straw on hand, I took a bamboo chopstick, and lowered it into the vermouth bottle. Extracting the chopstick, I was able to gather about 3 drops at a time that I then deposited into a jigger. I wanted to be able to see how much 24 drops was for future reference. It was nearly insignificant. It looked like 1/16 of a teaspoon. When I emptied the pittance into the shaker glass full of ice, the vermouth all but disappeared.

DeGroff makes a fuss about olives in the book and I wanted to oblige. I had a devil of a time locating a jar of olives that remained un-stuffed. In fact, I never found one. Instead, I ambled up through the rain to the Olive Bar at my local Whole Foods Hipster Disco and Singles Mart. There I found unstuffed green olives. About 45 seconds before making the Martini, I pulled 9 olives from the bucket and dropped them into a ramekin with an ounce of French vermouth. I put them back in the refrigerator to chill whilst I crafted the drink. DeGroff suggests such a technique although he indicates mineral water to de-vinegar-ify the olives. I figured “Why not use the vermouth?” Genius.

I made this as close as I could to exactly how DeGroff prescribes. I was certain what would result would be a bitter glass of cold gin. Perhaps I am under its trance, but I was wrong. This is a magnificent cocktailian experience. How could 24 drops of vermouth, tumbled down amidst seven full-sized iced cubes have any effect at all on the gin? It must have because I will fight to the death to defend the fantasy that this is more than meets the eye.

It’s beautiful. The lemon twist hugs the little olive down in the depths of the frosty, crystal clear liquid. The beads of condensation form on the outside of the glass like tiny round diamonds. The crisp, citrus tinted smell. The bright and sharp juniper of the gin sizzling cold along my tongue. The aftertaste, just the right duration and strength, spurring my desire for another sip.

The Dirty Martini

This cocktail’s origin is traced back to the time of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, if not directly to FDR himself.

Dash of French dry vermouth
2 1/2 ounces gin
3/4 ounce olive brine
Cocktail olive, no pimiento, for garnish

I wanted to love it. I think I hate it. Give me a minute. I think the concept suffers from the wild variations in olive brine. DeGroff, and really what would this project be without another ridiculous suggestion by him, writes to not use actual liquid from a jar of cocktail olives but instead something called Dirty Sue. It’s olive brine. In a jar. Just for making Dirty Martinis. I applaud the ingenuity but man, that’s just going too far. I thought since I bought these gourmet olives from a gourmet olive bar that the brine they were in would be sufficiently gourmet. I still hate it. I’m going to take one more drink and call it a failure. Maybe in the weeks to come I’ll buy some Dirty Sue and try it again. After all, Dirty Sue’s website has John Corbett as a spokesman so that makes it okay in my book.

But this brings up an interesting point on martini snobs. You can fuss and suffer over minute details, going so far as to measure the vermouth with an eyedropper, use ice from thrice-boiled distilled water, use gin that’s been filtered through virgin lamb’s wool, but then put the whole thing into question by tossing in an olive whose origin and processing is beyond your knowledge. Unless you grow your own olive tree and brine them yourself…
 

The Gibson

This is a Dry Martini with an onion instead of an olive and lemon peel garnish. The origin story in The Essential Cocktail is that it was invented for Charles Gibson, illustrator and creator of the Gibson Girl. The Gibson Girl was the early 20th century American ideal of feminine beauty and fashion. Gibson’s illustrations of aloof yet approachable, confident and pretty “modern” girls inspired women and men of the early 1900s alike. Women wanted to be a Gibson Girl, men wanted to be near one.

None of this explains why, as a 12 year-old I named my newly acquired kitten Gibson. Certainly I had no knowledge of the Gibson Girl, and The Sure Thing was still five years from being released. I didn’t know anyone named Gibson and we didn’t own any Gibson appliances or guitars.

Anyway, for twenty years she went by Gib mostly (again, no reference to John Cusack’s character in The Sure Thing) and was an even tempered yet eccentric cat. She had a litter of kittens who were quickly and happily adopted by friends. She was uprooted many times. Five different addresses in Arizona, then a move to the San Francisco Bay area where she had three residences, and finally a move to Southern California where she made three new homes. She had been my buddy for over half my life when she died on July 2, 2000.

I just poured a little Gibson out on the ground for my homie…

Gibson

The Martinez

This is the grandfather of the Martini. Reputedly invented sometime in the late 1800s by Jerry Thomas, it is the first popular gin and vermouth (albeit sweet) cocktail. Here’s The Essential Cocktail‘s cockamamie 1800s style recipe:

2 dashes Angostura bitters
2 dashes curaçao
1/2 glass (?) gin
1/2 wineglass (??) Italian sweet vermouth

Discouraged by DeGroff’s vague measurements in this recipe, I went looking through my other books and online. In no more than two minutes I found 9 different recipes. I finally figured out that a “glass” was 2 ounces and a “wineglass” was 4 ounces. What is even more maddening here is that many of the other recipes that I found online, even old ones, use Maraschino liqueur where DeGroff indicates curaçao. Elsewhere and often in this book DeGroff espouses Maraschino liqueur like it was angel piss… Here he’s given the opportunity to justifiably command its use and doesn’t. What a scamp.

It tastes like sweet vermouth, which I have to say I like. I am so relieved to actually enjoy the last cocktail on this project. What a downer it would have been to have the climax taste like an industrial solvent or foot fungus spray or lark’s vomit. But no, it’s sweet with a bit of kick and I love it. Speaking of loving sweet vermouth, Groundhog Day is coming up and I hope you’ll join me in a tradition…watching Groundhog Day, a comic masterpiece starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell, written by Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis, and directed by Harold Ramis.

As always, if you are over the age of 21 please be careful trying these drinks. If you are under the age of 21, don’t try them at all! Leave SOME dumb mistakes for us old folks!

That’s it, kids. Stay tuned for a Top 10 Cocktails List from all that I have made and consumed, as well as new recipes, drinks, and stories in the days to come.