One thing this country has always enjoyed is a good drink. Whether it was rum on the Atlantic, bourbon at the races or that Bloody Mary at Sunday Brunch, alcohol is the American Drink.

Meet the Drinkers—

23 notes

In the early days of the Dry Era, nobody on the Federal Prohibition Bureau infiltrated and took down more NYC speakeasies than master-of-disguise agent Izzy Einstein and his partner, Moe Smith.

But sometimes it took more than clever deceit to fool a wary bootlegger. Sometimes it took cold, calculated honesty.

One of Izzy’s first assignments was to bust a Manhattan speakeasy that had a reputation for spotting revenue agents. With his badge affixed to his coat, he asked the proprietor, “Would you like to sell a pint of whiskey to a deserving Prohibition agent?”

The bar owner laughed and served him a drink. “That’s some badge you’ve got there,” he said. “Where’d ya get it?”

“I’ll take you to the place it came from,” Izzy replied, and escorted the man to the station.

Click through for a real nifty read from Smithsonianmag.com.

(Source: Smithsonianmag.com)

Posted at 8:22pm.

45 notes

Posted at 11:41am.

29 notes

If you’re thinking about making a batch of Christmas gin, now would be an excellent time to raid your neighbors’ juniper bushes. See those blueish-grayish berries? That’s what you’re looking for. Shake a branch and the ripe ones will fall right off. 

For some reason, government landscapers seem to love this shrub. If you’re having trouble finding a good one, try the nearest public school (after hours, lest your motives for lurking in the bushes be mistaken) or courthouse (same). 

posted by irreverend

Posted at 1:00pm.

38 notes

“Tell it to me again,” Robin said. They were sitting in her kitchen with an open bottle of something called Black Maple Hill on the table between them. It was the color of very good, very expensive mahogany furniture and it tasted of cherries and caramel and wood smoke. They apparently aged the stuff for 21 years in white oak barrels down in Kentucky, and Albert paid about two hundred dollars a bottle for it. So far they’d downed a good hundred bucks’ worth. Finney had never cared much for bourbon, but he thought it was pretty much the most delicious thing he’d ever tasted.

That’s the introduction Ray Finney gets to Black Maple Hill bourbon in my just-published crime novel, Thanks for Killing Me. Finney’s a con man, and he’s good at it, but you could say he lacks what the professionals call “emotional intelligence.” That is, he’s the kind of guy who can be undone by a pretty face, and in Robin Tandy he’s more than met his match. Finney doesn’t know it yet, but Robin’s about to outsmart him, and all she needs is her brains and a bottle.

Not just any bottle, though. This is kind of a turning point in the story, and when I got to it in the writing I knew I needed a particular kind of spirit to make it turn. It needed to be smoothly, compulsively drinkable; it needed to be somewhat rare; it needed a flavor profile complex enough that Finney could plausibly spend a pivotal chapter trying to figure it out. There was really one spirit for the job, and I knew almost immediately that Black Maple Hill was it.

It’s almost incidental to this story that Black Maple Hill was the bourbon that turned me into a bourbon lover, because really, who cares? What’s much more relevant, and what made it a key player—the third character, in a way, in chapter five of my book—was this: Here was a drink that could plausibly mesmerize a guy who didn’t know anything about bourbons, as I hadn’t before I discovered it. 

A good bourbon can do that to you. Black Maple Hill can do it in spades. Even in its base version, which is aged about eight years and sells for right around $40 a bottle, it’s smooth going down and rich in the sweetness that corn brings to its grain bill. There are also 14- , 16- and 21-year-old versions. (I picked the 21 for the book because it’s the top of the line, hard to find now, and would have plausibly been the choice of the guy who bought it, a fatuous oligarch named Tandy.) Really, any of the bottlings is delicious. Bourbon lovers will argue about whether the additional years in white oak give the 14 a perceptible edge over the 8, the 16 over the 14, the 21 over the 16. Discussions like these are, of course, part of what’s fun about a devotion to spirits. What all the bottlings have in common, though, is a satiny finish, a pleasantly light burn on the tongue (there seems to be less than the usual complement of rye, which gives some bourbons a more peppery character), and a balance of flavors and notes that can keep your palate enjoyably occupied for hours, or until you pass out. I taste vanilla, caramel, and something fruity that suggests apricot or black cherries. You might taste butterscotch, or honey. We might argue about it, in an amiable way.

“Are you getting, like, a hint of apple in this bourbon?”

“A little,” she said. “Keep going.” 

“Right,” he said, slugging a big mouthful back. Maybe it wasn’t apples at all. Maybe it was apricots. There was also a definite burnt-nuts thing going on. You could spend your life trying to figure this stuff out, he thought.

This is exactly what I love about bourbon: It’s a puzzle of flavors. It spawns argument and analysis. At that, Black Maple Hill is more puzzling than most. There’s even controversy among aficionados about whose distillery actually produces the stuff. My friend Ron Givens, author of Bourbon at its Best, one of the indispensable texts on the subject, directed me to this post on Chuck Cowdery’s whiskey blog about Black Maple Hill’s provenance. Bottom line: It may or may not be produced by the distillers of Heaven Hill, which produces a wide variety of specialty bourbons. Ron further speculates that it may have been produced by other hands at other times.

Could there be a better spirit to use as the maguffin in a mystery novel? I can’t imagine there could. I only know that if it works at all in my book, and I encourage you to buy the book and judge for yourself, preferably in enormous quantities (the holidays are coming), it works because it’s a prime, delicious exemplar of the bourbon distiller’s art. Which is to say: You can study it, savor it, deconstruct it, as Finney does…

He was almost positive he was tasting a dash of brown sugar. And wasn’t that what butterscotch was, basically—brown sugar? But they melted it or something, he was pretty sure. The bourbon felt like a bolt of liquid velvet sliding down the back of his throat. Clearly, his palate was getting more and more sophisticated the more of the stuff he drank. There was only an inch or two left in the bottle, which struck him as very sad.

And maybe you’ll kill the bottle. But you’ll never get to the bottom of it. 

Bill Barol’s Thanks for Killing Me is available now in paperback and ebook at Amazon, and also at the iTunes Music Store and barnesandnoble.com. More information can be found at thanksforkillingme.com.

Amazon and iBooks affiliate links

Posted at 10:00am and tagged with: Special Guest Star, submission,.

Reblogged from ourpresidents|134 notes

ourpresidents:

Repeal of Prohibition - Elephants and Donkeys Celebrate Over a Barrel of Beer

During his 1932 presidential campaign, FDR promised to end Prohibition. The 18th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1921, prohibited the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors within the United States.

When Roosevelt took office in 1933, a constitutional amendment to repeal Prohibition was already making its way through the state legislatures. Roosevelt acted immediately to ease Prohibition with the Beer-Wine Revenue Act. Passed on March 22, 1933, this act legalized the sale of alcoholic beverages containing no more than 3.2 percent alcohol (this level was declared non-intoxicating). Prohibition was officially repealed by the 21st Amendment on December 5, 1933.

This large, glass bowl commemorates the end of Prohibition with a series of seven vignettes imprinted in white, including a “G.O.P.” elephant and a “D.E.M.” donkey celebrating over a barrel of beer.  The etched caption reads, “At Last!”

-From the Roosevelt Library.  More at Today’s Document.

posted by seoulbrother

Posted at 1:49pm.

Reblogged from jasonpermenter|58 notes

jasonpermenter:

1950. Cocktail hour at the Spencer residence in Santa Monica. Note the mirror-view television sunken into the table. Architect: Richard Spencer. Color transparency by Julius Shulman. (found at Shorpy.com)

posted by seoulbrother

Posted at 12:56pm.

Reblogged from kellydeal|133 notes

superseventies:

1970s Canadian Mist advertisement.

Update: Turns out Canadian Mist’s “Misting” campaign was groundbreaking for liquor advertising.

(Source: redscharlach)

posted by seoulbrother

Posted at 12:40pm.

Reblogged from gordonshumway|83 notes

gordonshumway:

I may never leave this restaurant.

Not sure where this was taken, but here’s how they make a Bacon Old Fashioned at New York’s PDT. 

posted by irreverend

Posted at 11:25am.

Reblogged from oldhollywood|632 notes

oldhollywood:

Dean Martin performs at the Copa Room (1957). That’s Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, Debbie Reynolds, & Jack Benny at the front table (click to enlarge) (via)

“In 1969, Orson Welles told me that he’d been backstage in his own Dean Martin Show dressing room when, before the taping, Dean knocked, then came in, drink in hand. ‘Hey Orson,’ he said, holding up his glass, ‘you want one of these before we…?’

Orson shook his head. ‘No, no, Dean, I’m fine, thanks.” Martin looked shocked. “You mean you’re gonna go out there alone?!” Welles roared with laughter when he told me the story. ‘Alone!’ he repeated loudly. ‘Isn’t that great!?’ Orson went on, ‘That’s the best definition of addiction I’ve ever heard.’”

-Peter Bogdanovich (via)

posted by seoulbrother

Posted at 3:35pm.

49 notes

Posted at 1:06pm and tagged with: Old Fashioned,.