The blog page for Smart Guy In A Tie. We explore topics from cocktail trends to creativity to branding, and everything in between.
There are many stories in history of the wrong thing happening at the right time. According to Andrew Friedman in Gary Regan's book The Negroni, grabbing the wrong bottle while making a Boulevardier added apple brandy to the cocktail instead of rye whiskey. A star was born in the Mela d'Alba, and the subject of Day 41's of #100DaysOfCocktails.
You expect fall cocktails to have apple and cinnamon components in them. But tequila? Devlin DeVore of Centro in Boulder, CO could imagine it, and did, when the Manzarita was created. Add in a little elderflower liqueur as a sweetener, and you have a little slice of fall in a glass, as #100DaysOfCocktails discovered.
On a fateful night in the late 1990's, Audrey Saunders met Dale DeGroff. That did not just change the trajectory of Saunders' career, but the path of the New York City cocktail scene. She updated many restaurants bar programs, creating a path of inspiration to her opening the Pegu Club in 2005. The Gin-gin Mule, something she created at the Beacon Restaurant, adds a little extra flavor to the traditional mule recipe, as #100DaysOfCocktails discovered.
The speak easy has been a mainstay of the American cocktail scene since Prohibition. When cocktails became fashionable again, the speak easy returned with the culture. Bourbon and Branch in San Francisco is housed in an old speak easy, and maintains its 1920's ambiance. The Agave Cocktail falls at the intersection of modern and classic.
Sex and The City made the Cosmopolitan a staple of the late 1990's and early 2000's bar scene. It was polished up by Dale DeGroff in the Rainbow Room and served to stars like Madonna, but it has its roots far before those luminaries put there hands on it. #100DaysOfCocktails ends the classic period with a very modern classic.
October is a month for scary things; what is scarier than an animated corpse? There are two versions of the Corpse Reviver. One is gin based, and very common on cocktail menus. The other is cognac based, and you are lucky to find it in the wild. Corpse Reviver #1 is the focus of today's #100DaysOfCocktails.
When it was apparent that the three mile international border was being used as a staging ground for drunken revelry during Prohibition, Congress pushed the border out to twelve miles. This discouraged small boats from smuggling, but encouraged Tommy Millard to create the Twelve Mile Limit cocktail.
