The Big Guy’s Last Drink

Blake the bullmastiff, R.I.P.

Before he passed away last Friday, Blake, a.k.a the Big Guy, was a regular at my basement bar.

He helped me hone drinks for this newsletter, which mostly meant listening to me mutter about ratios and flavor profiles. He wasn’t much of a talker, but he probably knew a lot about Cynar and syrups and Negroni specs. More than most dogs, anyway. 

One of Blake’s favorite commands was: “Go to the bar.” When he heard these words, he’d rush to the basement door, bolt down the steps — often with a leap at the bottom — and then sit, at attention, until I arrived to give him a treat.

He would sometimes hang out behind the bar, as if he had a mind to mix me — or himself — a drink.

But he spent most of the time on the big, comfy, half broken leather couch nearby, staring at my various concoctions, sometimes with a bit of well-deserved side-eye. Really? You’re drinking…that?

After Blake learned what “go to the bar” meant, he tried every now and then to reverse the command.

Instead of waiting for me to tell him to go to the bar, he’d nose open the door to the basement, then wait by the bar, sitting up straight like a very good boy, hoping that he could compel me to give him a treat.

Often, it worked.

Like me, Blake was a night owl. We often stayed up late together, long after the gals were off to bed.

Several times a week, I’d get home late from a movie screening or some after-hours work event, and he would come running to greet me, then demand to go down to the bar and hang out.

He loved going down to the bar. We spent a lot of time there together, just the two of us, drinking, reading, listening to music, and silently enjoying the company of another dude. He was my friend. He was my drinking buddy. He was my constant companion.

On his last night, after a difficult day at the vet and the animal hospital, the ladies of the house retreated to bed after dinner. 

But Blake wanted to go down to the bar with me. He was sick. He wasn’t eating, not even treats, but he trotted down the stairs and then sat at attention next to the bar anyway, politely declining to take the bacon-thing I offered him. 

He then went over to the couch and sat down, leaving a spot so that I could sit next to him.

We shared one last drink together, just him and me. The last photo I have of him at home shows him on the couch, in his usual spot, considering me and the cocktail I’d made. 

The final drink I shared with him was a new one to me — a slight twist on an Old Fashioned made with honey syrup and a new-to-me Japanese whisky, Iwai 45. 

Like Blake, it was strong, elegant, beautiful, just about perfect in every way — and over far too soon. 

The drink didn’t have a name. At first I thought about calling it The Big Guy.

But then I realized that a better name would be the other nickname I used for him, because it described both him and the drink so well — 

Big Handsome

• 1 dash orange bitters

• 2 dashes Angostura Aromatic bitters

• 1 fat tsp 3:1 honey syrup*

• 2 ounces Iwai 45 Japanese whisky

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Combine all ingredients in a mixing glass. 

2. Add ice, then stir until chilled. 

3. Strain into a rocks glass over a single large piece of ice. 

4. Garnish with a twist of orange peel. 

*3:1 honey syrup: Combine three parts honey and one part water, by volume. Whisk until combined, about 30-60 seconds. Bottle and store in the fridge.

I would give anything, anything at all, to share another drink with him. But at least the last one was a good one.

R.I.P Blake, the Big Guy, my very best boy. 

A Spiced Pear Black Walnut Manhattan and the Lego Theory of Cocktails

Rye, rum, vermouth, black walnut, and spiced pear in yet another example of the fruited Manhattan.

In last week’s newsletter, we made a fruited Manhattan variation with apricot liqueur, and then another riff on that same idea using one of my weird-ingredient favorites, banana liqueur. The idea was to take the fruited Manhattan as a subcategory and show how you can use that concept to make a wide array of cocktails. 

There are a lot of different ways you can take a drink like this beyond apricot or banana liqueur. Indeed, for most home bartenders, the only real limit to this particular subcategory is access to fruit liqueurs.

So I was delighted to peruse the comments section and see readers describe making variations with totally different fruit liqueurs, like cherry. While I make an effort to test these sorts of ratios and formulas pretty robustly, I obviously can’t try every single permutation with these structures, or really anywhere close. It’s a real pleasure to see these formulas and concepts put into action in ways I might not have tried or imagined myself. 

Using different fruit liqueurs will, of course, give you very different flavor profiles, in the sense that you’re not just making the same drink over and over with different ingredients.

But that’s sort of the point. With this sort of fruit liqueur structural swap, you’re not trying to make the same drink. You’re trying to make something new that relies on the same formula and structural principles.

As a kid, I spent a lot of time playing with Legos. I suspect, given the tinkerer’s nature of this newsletter, that most readers are at least a little bit familiar with Legos, but on the off chance you’re not: Legos are sort of universal building blocks that come in a bunch of standardized shapes (mostly basic blocks) plus some more specialized pieces with, say, hinges or other unusual features. 

Typically when you buy Legos, you buy a set that contains the pieces and instructions to build a very specific something — a spaceship or a pirate ship, for example. You will probably not be surprised to discover that I was very much a Space Legos kid. 

My typical approach to these sets was to build the specific thing once, then tear it down, dump all the Legos in a bin with a bunch of other Legos from other sets — and then see what I could build myself using the same fundamental building blocks. A different space ship! A different pirate ship! A space pirate ship! A pirate spaceship! You get the idea.

A lot of the things I made were constructed out of very basic, very common building blocks. But some of the most fun custom creations were built using the really unusual, one-off pieces, access to which allowed for more unique builds. Sadly, it was the 1980s, so no pictures remain.

Point is: Cocktails are a lot like Legos. You have a bunch of basic building blocks and you can do a lot with just a handful of standard components. But access to some of those specialty items allows for more unique creations. 

The more unique parts you have in your bin, the cooler and weirder and more unusual your space pirate ship. And the more fruit liqueurs you have on your bar cart, the more fruited Manhattans you can make. 

For example, over the past year or so, I’ve been making a fruited Manhattan variation using St. George Spiced Pear liqueur. This is obviously not a standard ingredient in most home bars, and unless you’re a must-have-everything type or a fruit liqueur/pear booze fanatic,¹ I don’t know that I’d necessarily recommend it to anyone with serious space constraints.

But you might rotate it in if you’re on a bottle in/bottle out system. It’s been one of my favorite fruit liqueurs to work with: The sweet, fruit, and spice levels come in just right, so that it can almost swap for a syrup but doesn’t overpower a drink with vermouth. The spice and pear notes are a little bit unusual, but not weird or offputting, so folks not familiar with cocktails tend to enjoy it.

And it combines well with a lot of basic Lego-type bottles — the ordinary building blocks of cocktails made at home. Like, for example: Rittenhouse rye and Appleton Signature Jamaican rum, both of which come into play in this split base rye/rum Manhattan. This drink also provides yet another example of the ever-useful rye-rum-brandy triangle. 

It’s rich, fruity, spicy, warming, and deeply pleasurable, especially on a grey and rainy day. 

Although I’ve adjusted the structure somewhat, this is still fundamentally an adaptation of the Slope cocktail.

It is, however, an adaptation that has, er, slipped a fair bit from the original, to the point where you might not even immediately recognize the Slope as the starting point.² So I’ll take an excellent suggestion from last week’s comments and call this one the…

Slippery Slope

• 1 dash Angostura Aromatic bitters

• 1 dash Fee Brothers Black Walnut bitters

• ¼ ounce St. George Spiced Pear liqueur

• 1 ounce sweet vermouth, preferably Carpano Antica Formula

• 1 ounce Jamaican rum, preferably Appleton Estate Signature

• 1 ounce rye, preferably Rittenhouse

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Combine all ingredients in a mixing glass.

2. Add ice, then stir for 20-30 seconds, until thoroughly chilled. 

3. Strain into a coupe or Nick & Nora glass.

4. Garnish with a Luxardo maraschino cherry. 

Double Dog Dare You

1. Are there pear booze fanatics? I mean, I’ve never met one. I doubt there are a lot of them. But one of my baseline assumptions about the world is there are all types of people.

2. With the 1:1:1+ split-base structure, you could probably argue that this is a Vieux Carré variation too.