Making Craft Cocktails Happen Fast: an Example

So, the other day I did some writing about the tension between the care and time involved in making craft cocktails and the realities of putting a drink in front of everyone in the room that wants one. I did a lot of talking about how you need to figure out beforehand how you’re going to do that, and I figured an example might be helpful. So let’s talk about the Southside.

The Southside is a classic summer cocktail with gin, mint, lemon, orange, simple syrup and soda. It’s delicious and refreshing, the kind of thing you could kick back quite a few of on a warm afternoon and find yourself in a very convivial headspace. It’s also a tremendous pain in the ass to make. Here, I’ll run you through it:

Pour a half-ounce of simple syrup into a mixing glass. Add eight leaves of mint and press them with the muddler. Add one slice orange and one slice lemon and press again. Pour one and a half ounces of gin and cover with ice. Shake and (micro)strain over fresh ice. Top it with soda and garnish with a fresh mint sprig.

A few months ago, when the place I work redid the house cocktail list for spring and summer, the Beverage Manager for the company put the Southside on it.

Continue reading “Making Craft Cocktails Happen Fast: an Example” →

Underpants Gnomes: The Craft Cocktail Thing vs Production

My daily internet meanderings led me to this today, which got me to thinking some things I’ve thought a long time, being as I am intimately acquainted with the particular tension that can occur between the time it takes to make a craft cocktail and the number of people a room can accommodate (we’ll leave out, for the present, the x-factor of how thirsty those people are). I was expecting the usual snark at the expense of the stereotypical craft bar hauteur (was in fact amazed at the subtlety involved), until I came across this:

I was at a hot new spot and the artisan cocktail I eventually ordered was worth every penny. Unfortunately, while the drinks lived up to the hype the poor service staff could only do so much. The place was packed, the cocktails on their menu are labor intensive, and it was really hot out so people were sucking them down faster than they could wash a shaker. Had there been a reservation policy in place, the three guys and one girl on bar would have been in a much better position to be accommodating, and creative.

Most people don’t get this. Many simply don’t care. They want what they want and they want it in a timely fashion, and if the staff is too overwhelmed to give them the service and attention they’re here for they’ll yelp your ass in a heartbeat. So it’s nice to see someone recognize our heartbreak as we soldier on in service to their good time. Much of the time it’s not our fault when we’re overwhelmed. The people in charge just didn’t think it through. I’ll give you a couple of examples: Continue reading “Underpants Gnomes: The Craft Cocktail Thing vs Production” →

Dealing with Aggressive Drunks (and, to some extent, everyone else) Part 1of a Series

One of the less-than-wholly-awesome upshots of alcohol’s disinhibiting effect is that it makes people who are angry on the inside angry on the outside, too, and one of the lesser joys of the mixological craft is that you’re going to have to deal with those people face-to-face. I’ll give you an example. This happened to me last night.

A fellow came in and sat at the bar near the end of the dinner rush. The other bartender (a woman) got him water and a menu. She ID’d him, as I’ve taught her to (see here for why). I was in the main well filling server orders when she came up to me. She told me he vibed a little weird to her, and showed me what he’d given us for ID, which, while it had his picture and date of birth on it, was not one of the six forms of ID that Washington state liquor law says we can accept (it was, in fact, issued by the Department of Corrections, for what that’s worth). I told her to follow her intuition and refuse him service, on the grounds we can’t accept his ID, and she did, quite graciously, I later gathered. From what she said, he was gracious in turn, and declined a seat in the dining room, where we would serve him food but not alcohol.

On his way out he stopped by my well, fixed me with a rage-filled let’s-fight glare, and exchanged the following words with me (as close to verbatim as I can remember, and not edited for content): Continue reading “Dealing with Aggressive Drunks (and, to some extent, everyone else) Part 1of a Series” →

Agent Contest

I’ve decided to enter Writer’s Digest’s Dear Lucky Agent Contest, which is currently accepting YA and Science Fiction novels. I’ll be submitting the first two hundred words of my novel The Redemption of Lee Victorius, formerly known as The Victorius Revolution, for those of you who keeping score at home.

A gritty, almost impressionistic near-future noir, the book is, among other things, an exploration of a trope that I’ve always found particularly fascinating, the bad man who does bad things in the service of good. Despite the gravity of its themes (race, class, the nature of power and the uses of violence), it was a lot of fun to write. It started as a Clarion Write-a-thon project, and I gave myself permission to really cut loose in terms of the prose composition.

I hope Victoria Marini likes it.

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It’s November 1st, All Saints’ Day and the anniversary of my mother’s funeral. I originally wrote this about three weeks after the fact, and every year on this day I like to repost it, both to honor her memory, and because something happened that day that was truly, genuinely magical. At least for me it was:

There’s much in this world that’s savage and horrifying, that will break your heart and confound your understanding and shake your faith in the justice and beauty and rightness of things. But there is also magic and wonder and days when the sun bursts through the clouds and suddenly the grey is silver and the silver becomes gold as the gathered clouds are scattered and flee beyond the horizon. Days when levity overcomes gravity’s ineluctable pull and loads are lightened for reasons the conscious mind isn’t really equipped to understand or make sense of.

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