The Cocktail Chronicles
 In a world dominated by "Sex and the City" cosmos and James Bond "shaken, not stirred" martinis, Paul Clarke might be something of an anachronism. But he's not the only one. In just two years, his urbane and witty site dedicated to obscure drinks such as the Blood and Sand and the Ramos Gin Fizz has created a lively online cocktail party. Bellying up to the bar are dozens of fellow drink-related bloggers who join him on Mixology Mondays, where they pick a cocktail theme and toss a few back at the keyboard. We bought a virtual round and had a chat with the bartender.
Hey Paul, why did you start blogging about drinking? The blog came about because I had all of this information I'd accumulated, and I was looking to do a bit more with it than simply sending out emails to my friends with recipes and interesting historical tidbits. I'm also a working journalist, and by setting up the blog I hoped to have an outlet to exercise my writing chops, as well as to explore a topic I hadn't really had the chance to touch upon in my professional work. OK, we can't help but ask—what's your favorite drink or spirit? I'm a major fiend for rye whiskey. Most people have never heard of rye, or they think it's some old-time thing that their grandpa drank. And it is, kind of; rye is a classic American whiskey that has a longer and richer history than bourbon, and a leaner, spicier flavor than bourbon -- think of the difference in flavor between corn bread and rye bread, and you'll have some idea of what I mean. Most classic whiskey cocktails like the Manhattan were developed using the drier, spicier taste of rye. The first time I had a Manhattan made with rye instead of bourbon, it was like the clouds opened up and a golden ray of sunlight came through—I understood how the Manhattan became one of the world's greatest drinks. Fortunately, there are plenty of people like me who are rediscovering rye, so the range of available ryes has blossomed exponentially in just the past couple of years. Now, some of the best whiskies being made in America are ryes. I guess my desert-island drink would be a good Manhattan. The Manhattan used to be more popular than the martini, and when you have one made right, it's easy to see why. Right now my favorite way to make them is to take two ounces of a nice, spicy whiskey like the Rittenhouse 100-proof Kentucky Straight Rye, and match that with three-quarters of an ounce of Carpano Antica, a complex, slightly bitter Italian vermouth. To this I add a couple of dashes of these rich, aromatic bitters that you have to special order from a pair of bartenders in Germany who make tremendous artisan-crafted cocktail ingredients, and stir the whole mix with cracked ice. If I'm feeling really old school, I'll dribble in a few drops of French absinthe—with this, the Manhattan tastes like it was made by a New York bartender with a handlebar mustache and arm garters, back in the days of Boss Tweed and bowler hats. It's absolutely fantastic. What do you think is the most overrated liquor right now? I'm constantly amazed, and dismayed, by the popularity of vodka. Vodka is to a spirit like gin what tofu is to bacon—it has little virtue of its own. Vodka is, by definition, flavorless and odorless, so flavor-wise it contributes nothing to a cocktail. To me, part of the whole appeal of enjoying a civilized alcoholic beverage is enjoying the taste of the drink, whether it's a good microbrew, a decent glass of wine, or a well-made martini. When you build a cocktail around vodka, you're only tasting the mixers you're putting in the glass, and you're not really creating a well-balanced libation. When you use a spirit with flavor, however, like a decent rum or gin or whiskey, you're not only introducing more flavor and depth into the drink, but you're giving yourself and your guests an opportunity to enjoy the distiller's art. The entire point of a cocktail is to take a spirit and mix it with ingredients that complement and contrast with that flavor; with vodka, you're merely fortifying your mixer with flavorless alcohol, and I find that to be an unsatisfying drinking experience. Do you drink wine and beer too? Or do you just stick to cocktails? I live in Seattle, so there's no shortage of well-made microbrews or locally made wines, and I'm a big fan of a hoppy IPA or a crisp Pinot grigio. Ultimately, though, I find the world of spirits and cocktails to be absolutely fascinating—there's such a rich history to the story of cocktails, and it's an American history, too. When researching vintage cocktails, you come across all these stories about colorful people and bygone places, and it really provides an interesting outlook not only on the types of things people tasted in years past, but on the history of America and the way people lived their lives. That's why I find the topic so fascinating. The choices are more varied, too—with beer or wine, if you want to taste something different, you have to go out and buy another bottle. With cocktails, as long as you have a reasonably well-stocked home bar, you can always mess around with different combinations, proportions, uses of different mixers, and so on. There's just so much to choose from, it's hard to get bored with it. Why early- to mid-20th century classic cocktails? What makes those the prime potables? The late 19th and early 20th century was really the golden era for cocktails. You had these old drinking palaces like the bar at the Waldorf Hotel in New York, or the El Dorado in San Francisco, that were temples to the creative minds behind the bar. In that era, bartenders were seen as professionals, and were well-respected men around town. Their professional approach was apparent in the drinks that came out of that era, and that exist in vintage cocktail manuals. They didn't have things like artificially flavored liqueurs or radioactive-green apple schnapps—they had honest-to-god spirits and fortified wines that were examples of the highest art of the distiller, and they worked with them to enhance the flavor of each ingredient, and to produce tasty, well-balanced drinks. Even after Prohibition, in the drinks that you see from bar menus and cocktail guides from the 1940s and '50s, you see a sense of this creativity. It wasn't until the 1960s that vodka really started to gain traction as a cocktail spirit, and that was about the same time that people were turning away from cocktails as being too old fashioned—they were what your parents drank, and who wants to drink like their parents? Today's emphasis on using artificial flavors, or on taking something flavorful like a mango and using it as an alcohol delivery vehicle to mask the burn of a shot of vodka, is several steps behind what these guys were trying to do. The craft of the cocktail has never truly recovered from Prohibition, and when you taste a drink as designed by one of the old masters and compare it to something you find in your average bar today, that's sadly apparent. Fortunately lots of people are rediscovering this art, and there's an increasing number of bars around the world where you can go and find one of these perfectly crafted drinks. Do you have fancy cocktails shakers, vintage barware, and the like? Seems like those would go well with the hard-to-find brands in your liquor cabinet. I have a tendency to collect and hoard unusual things, and I'm trying to keep that under control. Right now, that means I've been focusing on spirits—I lost track somewhere, but I believe I have close to 200 different spirits in my home bar. I also compulsively collect cocktail and bartending manuals, especially those published before 1960; I think my collection is between 150 and 200 books by now, including things like old temperance songbooks from the 19th century. To keep this interest from totally taking over my house and my bank account, I try to limit the collecting to spirits and books, though I have noticed a gradual creep in the types of glassware now on my shelves. Tell us about Mixology Mondays. What's the response been like? The response to Mixology Monday has been really surprising. We started out in April 2005, with an idea to take blog events like "Is My Blog Burning," which is a food-blogging event, and "Wine-Blogging Wednesdays" for the wine crowd, and do something similar for spirits and cocktails. At first, I expected maybe three or four of the dedicated drink-bloggers to join in, and that first round we had about eight participants; it's picked up ever since. We keep running the events every month, with a different host each time, and we'll typically have 25 or 30 people participate. Right now it seems like it's still on the upswing, and with the continued growth of interest in fine cocktails and the increase in the number of drink blogs out there, I think it'll only continue to grow for the foreseeable future. What Mixology Monday theme was the most popular? Did one turn out to be a dud? We've had several hits. A couple of the most popular have been the Mixology Monday event that focused on tequila cocktails, and another from last December that focused on holiday drinks; that one, especially, brought out the festive nature in our bloggers. A couple of the themes have been a little lackluster—one time a host wanted to focus on shooters and the kind of joke drinks you see in college bars; that event never really took off—even the host didn't participate. How has writing this blog changed things for you? When I first started the Cocktail Chronicles, it was a very personal kind of exercise, and I thought maybe a handful of people would stop by. Two years later, I can say that starting the blog was one of the best ideas I've ever had. Blogging has put me in touch with literally hundreds of like-minded folks, including some of the top bartenders and spirits professionals in the world, along with some of the most knowledgeable and articulate writers and historians whose work I've found so inspiring. It's also paid off for me in other ways. This July, I'm heading to New Orleans for the annual Tales of the Cocktail conference, a five-day event that attracts some of the top figures in food and spirits. Thanks to the blog, I've been asked to organize and moderate a seminar on cocktails and blogging, and to participate in another major panel on "lost" and forgotten cocktail ingredients, which is a topic that's of major interest to me and that I've blogged about extensively. In addition, I'm co-hosting a special dinner at the Delachaise, one of the city's top restaurants, with another drink blogger; between us, we came up with cocktails that pair with each of Chef Chris DeBarr's creative courses. My writing on the Cocktail Chronicles has also helped lead to a regular gig as a contributor to Imbibe magazine, where I've written about topics ranging from rye whiskey to vintage cocktail ingredients to profiles of some of the most interesting people in the cocktail renaissance. It all started with a laptop and a little free time, and it's paid off in so many ways. For you and for us, Paul. Thanks for all the great cocktail tips and lore. Cheers!
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