The people at the Lagunitas Brewing Company want us to know that there is little if any holiday cheer warming their hearts or glowing in their faces this holiday season. It seems that this year they were unable to produce any of their famed Brown Shugga’ seasonal ale. They have instead had to make do with a stopgap seasonal ale, the “Lagunitas Sucks Holiday Ale Brown Shugga’ Substitute”. The copy on the bottom of the package takes an interesting approach to promoting the product:

This sad holiday season we didn’t have the brewing capacity to make our favorite seasonal brew, the widely feared Brown Shugga’ Ale. You see, we had a couple of really good years (thank you very much) and so heading into this season while we are awaiting the January delivery of a new brewhouse we are jammin’ along brewing 80 barrels of IPA and PILS and such every 3 hours. A couple months back we realized that since we can only brew a mere 60 barrels of Shugga’ every 5 hours, that we were seriously screwed. For every case of Shugga brewed, we’d short 3 cases of our favorite daily beers. It’s a drag. This year, we brewed something that we think is also cool and brews more like our daily brews. The new brewhouse will help insure that this kind of failure never occurs again. It’s a mess that we can not brew our Brown Shugga’ this year and we suck for not doing it. There is nothing cool about screwing up this badly and we know it. Maybe we can sue our own sorry selves. There is no joy in our hearts this holiday and the best we can hope for is a quick and merciful end. F$@& us. This totally blows.

The front artwork features their mascot dog saying, “we suck.”

Nevertheless, I was curious enough to buy the beer, and it was the last six-pack at Safeway, so apparently I wasn’t alone.

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Not only do you give an unforgettable hour with the Lushes in Love, but we provide you with a beautiful gift certificate boxed with a martini glass to put under the tree.

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Our great friend and neighbor Jeremy hosted the first ever Oakland Nights LIVE!

Hosted by Jeremy and Julia, the show was part talk show and part variety show. We were honored to be featured as guests among such local stars as Christi Ginger, Chris Garcia and Yesway.

Here we are preparing to go on.

Before we knew it, we were live. Check out the awesome set!!

Jeremy offered us a glass of scotch. What a host!

We made Jeremy and Julia our best Sidecar

And chatted a bit about the history of maraschino cherries and the such.

It was a blast. Thanks for having us, Jeremy and Julia!

For those of us now wishing we had a Sidecar in front of us, learn how to make a Sidecar.

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Weeks ago Jen said that we ought to have people over to “salons” on the first Friday of each month. The idea was that we would share delicious cocktails, catch up, and then walk down to Art Murmur. In theory, this should work.

Our first “salon” last month was too successful. We had a huge number of attendees, and my drinks were a hit. But I spent the whole thing frantically making drinks for people! I hardly had time to chat with anyone. Also, we didn’t leave and go to Art Murmur, because everybody was having a good time  and getting free drinks at our apartment.

In preparation for the second salon, we assumed that it would go exactly as the first had. I thought it would be smart to make whole pitchers of three cocktails. That way I could just mix them the one time and could relax. (The three cocktails: the Income Tax, the Manhattan, and the Whiskey Sour).

But this time, fewer people wanted cocktails. Most of the guests were fine with beer or wine. One guy drank nothing but water! One day later, we still have three pitchers of drinks in the fridge. D’oh! This is clearly the most ill-fated instance of backward-looking planning since the Maginot Line.

The experience made me think: what is it that people like about bartenders? It is not merely the drink that results from his or her skill and labor, it is the attention. People like the spectacle of the drink’s preparation, just for them, and they like that as far as the bartender is concerned, their own preferences have absolute sovereignty. Appearance is often in contradiction to what is actually going on, and thus the pitcher of Manhattans — which objectively should have the same value as an equal quantity of Manhattans prepared individually — is treasured less than the specially prepared drinks. Go figure!

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Our great friend Rosalie hosted a pumpkin carving party last night complete with our favorite holiday drink, Hard Cider.

Can you guess which pumpkin was ours??

(Hint: it’s not the honeydew though Tammy’s boobies really stole the show!)

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Angostura bitters in their natural setting

Angostura bitters are one of the most fundamental components of any bar, crucial as they are to the Manhattan, the Old-Fashioned, the Pink Gin, the Income Tax, and the Hobo’s Delight. I have also made many refreshing sodas using them. They have a distinctive flavor and aroma that add something special to a drink.

They also have a distinctive label, which keeps on going up after the bottle tapers off into a neck. This label is unusually thick with text, which many people probably never bother with. Let’s have a look at it.

Most prominent is the lore that surrounds Angostura’s origins: it was the creation of Dr. J.G.B. Siegert, surgeon general in the army of Simon Bolivar, the Liberator. He concocted it to settle the mal de mer of naval men, as a competitive advantage against the enemy. So the story of Angostura contains both an element of the historical epic and of the banally pharmaceutical.

Having conveyed the romance of the product’s origins to the reader, the label goes on, promoting its use in just about every beverage and comestible you can imagine:

Because of its delightful flavor and aroma [Angostura] has become popular for use in soft drinks, cocktails, and other alcoholic beverages and it imparts an exquisite flavor to soups, cereals, salads, vegetable [sic!], gravies, fish, grapefruit, fresh, stewed or preserved fruits, jellies, sherbets, ice cream, many sauces, puddings, mince pies, apple sauce and all similar desserts*, regulating the quantity according to taste.

It then doubles down on the claim that we should be putting bitters in our every meal, attempting to micro-manage our consumption:

FOR COOKING AND TABLE USE…ANGOSTURA MAKES FOOD MORE APPETIZING !

Fruits: For cooked or canned fruits add 2-3 dashes Angostura or flavor to taste.

Salads: Blend 2 0r 3 dashes Angostura with each cup of mayonaise, French, or other dressing.

Pies: Add 4 or 5 dashes per cup of mince meat or pumpkin filling. 1 or 2 dashes to apple or other fruit.

Soups: Add 1 or 2 dashes Angostura to each serving of canned or frozen soups, fish chowder, bisques and chicken soups. Stir in at last minute.

Can they really be serious? Bitters in our salads? In meat pies? In soup?! The first time I happened to read these surprising claims, I happened to have some chicken soup on hand. I followed the label’s advice and added some bitters to it. It pretty much ruined my bowl of soup. On the one hand, you can’t blame them for trying to get people to consume more of their product by using it liberally. On the other, we can perhaps read this as a lagging commentary on how bad food was in the 50s and 60s (the copy has the air of having been written that long ago): perhaps adding bitters couldn’t have made it any worse.

The label contains three languages, none of which is the Spanish that Angostura’s first users probably spoke. Most of the text is in English. There are also two enigmatic seals with German words on them. The bottle also bears the seal of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the second — the Angostura company is based in Trinidad — which includes the national motto of England, “Dieu et mon droit.” Although the English people speak English and have historically loved their freedom, this slogan is in French and means, “God an my right,” where “my right” is the monarch’s absolute right to do whatever he or she wants. History sometimes produces strange results.

If any readers have had positive experiences adding Angostura to items other than cocktails and sodas, please weigh in! I do commend the Angostura people for giving us such a thought-provoking label.

*They think apple sauce is a dessert?! What?

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[Imagine a nice photo here!]

1 1/2 oz. rye whisky

1 sugar cube

several dashes Peychaud’s bitters

1 swish of absinthe

Muddle the sugar and bitters in a mixing glass, add whisky, and stir on ice. Swish a small amount of absinthe in an old-fashioned glass, just enough to coat the walls. Strain the drink into the glass, garnish with an orange peel.

The Sazerac is the New Orleans version of the old-fashioned cocktail, and was served at Antoine Peychaud’s hotel in that city throughout the nineteenth century.

Absinthe is expensive and probably hard to find outside of the cosmopole, so it may be more practical to replace it with Pernod, Herbsaint, or another pastis. The history of the rise, fall, and rebirth of absinthe is interesting and instructive. Absinthe became so popular in fin de siecle France that it began to rival wine in its sales. The French wine industry thus lobbied to have it banned and, on the basis of completely fictitious stories claiming that absinthe caused insanity, they succeeded. This ban spread to other countries, and was both a precursor and a twin to the Prohibition that the United States attempted a few years later. But in recent years entrepreneurs have discovered that there were huge holes in the ban the entire time and, a mere century later and with no changes to the law, have resumed production of the product on a completely legal basis. Pernod, Herbsaint and the rest are the ghosts of absinthe that arose when it became illegal: anise-flavored liqueurs that are more cheaply produced and lack any particular complexity.

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