I’m going to have to punt a bit on this Mixology Monday. I didn’t get around to experimenting with anise or to shopping for some true French pastis, so I don’t have much more to add from my recent post on anise liqueur. In general, I’m still learning to acquire the taste. To that end, I find that citrus helps cut the sugary sweetness. A lot. If you can’t find the limon dulce I referenced before, here’s a simple drink to make with readily available ingredients:

Anise Rickey

1 jigger anise liqueur (I used ouzo)
juice of one lime
Club soda

Fill highball glass with ice. Squeeze in lime and add liqueur. Top with club soda and garnish with lime wedge.

Unorthodox maybe, but not bad. I’m more eager, however, to try the more exciting offerings of the fellow mixologists. And that Henri Bardouin sounds amazing, even if I am a sucker for Ricard’s image and packaging.

As a restaurant bar, Stella’s, on the edge of Blackstone Park in the South End, is in many ways ideal. There’s enough room in their front area to accommodate destination bar patrons, and on Tuesday night the mostly gay clientele filled the area. The bartenders are friendly, and the crowd has a real neighborhood camaraderie to it.

Some would praise the scene and the decor, but I found it too LA in spirit. Lots of off-white Corian surfaces and beige fabrics; heat lamps outdoors for those wanting to pretend we’re living in a warm climate; and half the bar patrons chatting away on their cell phones. Rather than have a full-stocked bar, the powers that be had put long glass shelves with underlighting to feature brand name bottles of vodka, whiskey, etc. It’s a mentality inherited from the 80s (let’s call it Absolutism) that prefers conspicuous consumption over quality; I find it affected and antithetical to fine drinking.

Given the limited stock of the bar, I went simple in my order and got a gimlet. The prices were reasonable for Boston ($7.50 for Bombay gin cocktail, $9.50 for top shelf). Unfortunately, the bartender made it with sour mix instead of strictly Rose’s lime. Bleh. To his credit he noticed a mint sprig floating in the drink and remade it, with a complimentary upgrade of liquor (what’s up with stray mint leaves these days?), but that didn’t save an unappetizing gimlet. The manhattans were better, but with too much of an unrounded bite, I’d put it in the OK rather than great category.

The affectations cut across other areas, too. Stella’s used a tub of crushed ice to chill the cocktails glasses, putting them top down in the ice until they needed one. Great idea, I thought, until I saw them pull glass after glass out, large bits of wet ice clinging to the inside of the glass and watering the cocktails down. The glasses didn’t even seem all that cold for all that fuss.

It seems that Stella’s has some atmosphere going for it, but is trying way too hard. Like the reviews that call the area SoWa, even though Stella’s is clearly north of Washington.

Stella’s is located at 1525 Washington St., in the South End.

If you’re in Massachusetts, tomorrow is Tax Day, which means it’s time to whip up those Income Tax Cocktails. As Rick pointed out in the comments to my post on the Bronx Cocktail, the Income Tax Cocktail is a Bronx with bitters added. Actually, I sometimes prefer a drier Bronx (i.e. more gin) but always enjoy the vermouth-heavy Income Tax Cocktail as traditionally made. I first saw it in the Savoy Cocktail Book (above). Here’s Ted Haigh’s transcription:

Income Tax Cocktail

1 jigger dry gin
1/2 jigger dry vermouth
1/2 jigger sweet vermouth
juice of 1/4 orange, squeezed directly into shaker
2 dashes Angostura bitters

Shake in iced cocktail shaker and strain into chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with orange wheel.

Some friends gave me as a present Ted Haigh’s Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails. Fantastic book. What’s remarkable is Haigh’s research – how to obtain those ingredients for vintage drinks, what liquors have changed their recipe over the years, or what obscure terms like gomme syrup refer to. It’s a must have, though less as a bartending guide or reference for recipes than for a sensibility. It’s as much about bringing quality of spirits back as reviving forgotten recipes.

One thing that struck me was his manifesto in the opening. After lamenting the lack of knowledge among (most) professional bartenders, he writes:

We, as modern consumers, also still have some work to do. As a culture, we are quickly forgetting how to gain acquired tastes. If something taste bitter or sharp it is bypassed for an easier-to-contemplate taste sensation. The majority of modern drinks are designed to utterly hide any tang of alcohol, much less the sharp piquant acquired taste of gin – and it’s not just gin we’re talking about either. It’s brandy, whiskey, and tequila, too.

One of the major beefs I have – you may already have noticed – is the stifling fashion these days for clear, sweet vodka cocktails. It’s not simply my purism about what gets called a martini. And it’s not a snobbery about fruit or sweetness per se. The reason I detest this trend is that it treats spirits as simply a neutral basis for whatever flavor, natural or artificial, people want to toss in.

What gets lost are the spirits themselves. Consider the range of flavors and qualities that spirits at their best bring to the cocktail:

• Body: Brandy, whiskey, and aged rum all have a warmth and mellowness. Isaac at DC Drinks explains: it’s the oak aging. “While it’s a normal part of developing the drinker’s palate to start with the colorless and odorless stuff,” he writes, “once you’ve had a taste of the complexity imbued by oak its hard to return to the watery, clear substances.”
• Herbal notes: I wouldn’t go as far as Isaac in eschewing all clear liquors. Gin is probably my favorite basic spirit; it’s highly distilled, but I love its dryness and its juniper flavor. It never ceases to surprise me in its ability to support other flavors in a cocktail. Liqueurs like Chartreuse or amaro have the complexity of oak-aged bourbon, just not its mellowness. Pimm’s even simulates the color and body of an aged spirit despite being made from gin.
• Complexity: Even fruit liqueurs gain from well-crafted production. Whereas cheap liqueur and even infusion can reduce fruit flavors to a two-dimensional axis of sugar and acidity, a good fruit-based spirit is a reminder that fruit flavors are more than sweet and tart. Some, like Cointreau, give a whole bouquet of aroma to what would otherwise be simply “orange” flavor. Others, like maraschino liqueur, take the fruit into unexpected directions.

Why should one bother going through the trouble to acquire tastes? Because it lets you enjoy the taste of the spirits instead of covering them up. Because drinking for the flavor can be a part of drinking more moderately; as Haigh notes, the oversized cocktail came part and parcel with the neutral spirits trend. Because an inspired flavor combination, made with quality ingredients, is more sophisticated than something which needs the special glass to tart it up.

Of course, even with effort, not all tastes can be acquired. No matter how I try Fernet-Branca - with tons of soda, smothered in lemon; mixed with other amaro; or in some vintage Fernet-Branca cocktail - well it still tastes awful to me. But for every Fernet-Brance, there’s a maraschino liqueur or a Campari… something that’s odd or offputting at first but that soon I grow to love.

Today I went to an Easter brunch, and the hosts were serving bellinis. It wasn’t the first time I had the drink – essentially a mimosa with fruit nectar, traditionally peach, instead of orange juice – but today it really hit the spot and seemed fitting for a spring brunch. It’s definitely a nice change of pace if mimosas seem too tired or predictable.

I’m never a fan of peach flavored stuff that’s not actually fresh peach – and I’m sure it’s just divine with fresh peach juice – but they were using a Goya peach nectar that was quite good and made an excellent drink. You can try other nectars, too… guava, apricot, pear, mango, or whatever you fancy. As always, avoid the misnamed extra-dry champagne, which is just too sweet.

Bellini

1/3 champagne flute filled with peach juice or peach nectar
2/3 flute topped with champagne or sparkling wine

As my friends know, I like to have a drink of the season. Something that captures my mood and complements the climate. Maybe even that uses seasonal ingredients. A drink for which I can have the ingredients on hand for company or for myself.

Well, after my trip to B Side, the drink of spring for me is the Last Word. Its fruity-dry balance, its pale green color, its perfect alchemy that needs no garnish: I can’t think of a better spring cocktail. It was popular among my friends too, who couldn’t remember the cocktail name so kept calling it the L Word.

It’s not in most guidebooks, even the encyclopedic Trader Vic’s. Thankfully, Paul at Cocktail Chronicles comes to the rescue. I urge you to go read his post for the history of this long-forgotten Prohibition-era drink (that’s half the fun), but for convenience I’ll reproduce the recipe:

The Last Word

1/2 jigger dry gin
1/2 jigger maraschino liqueur
1/2 jigger green Chartreuse
1/2 jigger fresh lime juice

Put ingredients with ice in a shaker and shake well. Strain into chilled cocktail glass. No garnish.

I only see a couple of drawbacks. First, some people don’t like Chartreuse. I love the stuff myself and have a hard time keeping a bottle around, I like it on the rocks so much. But to some, the herbal flavors will remind them of a Ricola cough drop. To them, I’ll just say that in the Last Word, the interplay holds everything in balance; like a Long Island Ice Tea, you don’t so much taste the individual liquors, as the sum is greater than the parts.

Then there’s the ingredients: maraschino liqueur isn’t too cheap and can be a pain to find; and Chartreuse is expensive, often topping forty dollars a bottle, though Martignetti’s currently stocks it for 34 bucks. If you’re unsure about committing to the liquor, or are leery of odd-tasting liqueurs, go try a Last Word at B-Side for a test run. I predict that many of you, even the gin-haters, will fall in love with this one.

I continue to be impressed and humbled by the other cocktail sites I stumble across.

• Darcy at The Art of Drink has a rundown of some sites; check out his post, too, on Drinks Bartenders Hate to Make.
• Rick’s Kaiser Penguin has been posting an incredible series on tiki drinks.
• Bar Mix-Master has been quiet lately but has great stuff in the archives.

Paul of Cocktail Chronicles surveys the growth of cocktail blogging and proposes a blog carnival, i.e. a day of posts devoted to a given topic. So he’s instituted Mixology Monday, the first one which will take place on April 24, on the topic of pastis, anise liqueur. As Darcy of TAoD explains,

“Mixology Monday”… is based on other weblog community projects like “Is My Blog Burning?” and “Wine Blogging Wednesday”. The basic idea is that anyone interested can write an article on the selected topic (this week it’s Pastis, i.e. anise flavour) and publish it to their blog. You don’t even need to have a cocktail related weblog, nor does the topic need to be about drinking the selected product. It can be about your bad experiences in college, your good experiences while travelling through France, or how you used it in a pudding recipe. After you’ve published your article, you email the topic host and they will publish a list of participants on their blog. Make sure you put a link in your post to the hosting weblog so people can jump in on any discussion.

He’s even concocted a terrific logo:

Mike, of Days that End in Y, has a general drinks-related blog carnival planned, which I’ll have more details on as I find out (or check out the initial post). I look forward to the vibrant online discussion on fine drinking.

As of yesterday I’m a year older and wiser, and my friends were kind enough to treat me to birthday drinks last night at the B-Side Lounge in Cambridge. It’s been open for a good while, and it’s a place people have always been telling me I need to go to - but it was my first time there. It won’t be the last. It should be the destination of anyone who likes fine cocktails done right.

The drinks menu runs the gamut from revived vintage cocktails to their own inventions. Their martinis were excellent, the sidecars not weird (this is the chanciest drink to order out), but the winner for me was a drink called the Last Word, a combination of gin, Chartreuse, maraschino liqueur and lime juice. It was one of the best cocktails I’ve ordered out. The bar staff are professional: after he noticed a stray bit of mint when pouring a sidecar, our bartender whisked away the drink and made a new one from scratch. The prices are reasonable, 8 dollars for most cocktails. The only negative was that the music played a smidge too loud; it was like they were trying too hard to play up the rock-and-roll diner theme. They should just let the drinks speak for themselves.

B-Side Lounge is located at 92 Hampshire Street, Cambridge, between Kendall, Inman, and Central squares.

Say what you will about Whole Foods, but they sell handy little cans of tonic water and club soda for a reasonable price. If I’m making a round of gin and tonics for company, I’ll go ahead and get a bottle or two of tonic water, but most of the time you pour a couple of drinks and the rest go flat. Or you buy the Schwepps six pack of mini-bottles and pay an arm and a leg. With cans, I get enough for two drinks (or at least drink and a half) and only have to open as much as I need. Or, if a guest wants that mojito but everyone else is drinking manhattans, just pop open a can of soda water that’s tucked in the back of your fridge. Easy.

Similarly, cans of Coke, Sprite and Ginger Ale are good for a home bar to have on hand. Since I’m not normally a softdrink fan, if I buy a two-liter bottle it’ll go to waste. But I can get 12 oz. cans at the Hi-Lo Supermarket for 25 cents each. I stock up on a couple to be prepared for when someone asks for a rum and Coke.

Whole Foods’ many locations can be found online. Hi-Lo is located at Centre Street in Jamaica Plain.

Back in the comments, a reader recommends Luxardo’s triple sec liqueur as an acceptable substitute for the exquisite but expensive Cointreau. I’ve yet to stumble across a bottle here in Boston. I’ll keep looking, but it’s possible it’s not distributed here. But one acceptable substitute - at least in standard cocktail recipes - is a Mexican knock-off, Patron’s Citronge. Actually, there are at least a couple of Mexican Cointreau knock-offs, one of which I’ve tried coming in a green bottle. But Citronge is readily available here, sold at Blanchard’s and other fine establishments.

Consumed straight, you’re likely not going to mistake Citronge for Cointreau. It lacks the dry undernotes beneath the sweetness. But neither does it taste candy-like, as the mass-market Triple Secs do. It actually tastes like Cointreau. And for twenty dollars a bottle, that’s a great thing.