About
This site is an homage to Dr. Cocktail’s Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails recipe book. I set out to make every cocktail in his first edition.
I started in the Autumn of 2014 with the Corpse Reviver #2 and finished with the Champagne Cocktail in November of 2016. I enjoyed it so much I kept making drinks and writing about them, and along the way discovered a number of other great cocktail recipe books.
I used to be mainly a beer drinker. I travel a lot for my job and I’ve been able to experience the great variety of beer around the world. Plus it tends to have less alcohol content than cocktails and given that where I live in the southern United States I drive to the places that serve drinks, it was just safer to stick with beer.
Another reason I stayed away from cocktails was that what most people refered to as a “cocktail” is actually a specific type of cocktail called a “highball”. While I like highballs like a Gin and Tonic in the summertime, there wasn’t any subtlty or art to making them.
My love affair with cocktails was a perfect storm of a number of events.
First, in the South most houses have a space called a “formal living room”. This is a room for receiving guests, but in practice it turns out to be a large room with expensive furniture that is rarely used. I don’t like them. The first house we bought didn’t even have one, but the second one did. For years it remained empty and we called it “the ballroom” as a joke.
Then one day my lovely bride found a wooden bar in a thrift store. This had a back bar with a large mirror, a front bar and a large wooden top that held glasses. It was awesome and we got it for a steal. So now we had a use for our “ballroom” and we called the bar the “the entertainment center”.
Turns out that having a bar in your house encourages people to give you wine and liquor as gifts. The bottles began to pile up.
Then some friends of mine in Florida introduced me to modern mixology cocktails via the restaurant bluezoo. These drinks were much more than a highball, some times requiring weeks of preparation. As I love to cook it was wonderful to combine the skills of preparing a meal with the wonderful combination of tastes that a good cocktail can provide. I began to collect cocktail recipes.
Finally, I was visiting Chicago and sitting in my friend Demetri’s apartment when I picked up a copy of Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails and started reading it. That’s when I decided to pull a Julie and Julia (more of a “Tarus and Ted”) and make all of the drinks in the book. I wasn’t going to do one a day so it took more like two years.
In 2019 two things happened.
In July I was working in Pasadena, and managed to meet Ted Haigh for drinks.
It was an amazing evening. He told me that he was working on a new edition of his book marking the 100th anniversary since the start of National Prohibition in the US. I mentioned that he left out one of my favorite cocktails, the Last Word and he agreed that it was a good one.
The second thing that happened was that I was in a bad car accident. It took me quite awhile to recover, then in 2022 my mother died, and then in 2023 we moved. We sold the bar when we moved (sniff).
So I haven’t really been focused on this blog. But as I write this it is the start of 2025 and I plan to get back at it. I’ve updated the index to list all of the cocktails in the extended edition and I will be making those this year.
Oh, turns out I don’t have to make two of them. I had already found the Ward Eight on my own, and he included the Last Word and gave me a little shout out on the bottom of page 93.
A final note for folks new to this site:
I rate all of the drinks on a five point scale:
In case you were wondering, the picture on the site is of the back of my old bar, and the three face jars were made by Vadim Malkin. They are named Edgar, Allan and Poe.