Professor of Cocktail Studies

Up your game with that midnight New Years toast. Instead of (yawn) champagne, go with Kir Royale. It’s classier and almost as easy to make. Into a champagne flute, pour: 1/2 oz Crème de Cassis Top with champagne (or sparkling wine) Garnish with a lemon twist. (One caveat: Cassis doesn’t have a high enough ABV to be shelf stable, so refrigerate after opening.)

  No joke. For a brief, shining moment in 2021, the Miller High Life online shop actually sold a gingerbread dive bar kit . Sadly, that is no longer the case. Gingerbread Dive Bar, we hardly knew ye.

  As I’ve said before, Cocktail Codex , written by the key players at the famous Manhattan bar Death & Co., maintains that there are only six cocktails: the Old-Fashioned, the Martini, the Daiquiri, the Whisky Highball, the Sidecar, and the Flip. All others are simply variants on these “root recipes.” If you’ve never heard of the Flip—I certainly had not—its name derives from an obscure colonial practice I don’t feel the need to describe. It can be made in different ways, provided each way involves a whole egg. Egg whites are used in a number of cocktails, mainly for the sake of creating an appealing frothiness, but as far as I know, only the Flip mandates using the yolk as well. Here’s the Cocktail Codex recipe: 2 oz oloroso sherry 1/2 oz Demerara gum syrup 1 whole egg “Dry shake” these ingredients in a tin shaker (that is, without ice) to integrate the egg whites and yolk, then add ice and shake again to chill. Double strain into a small wine glass. Garnish with grated n...

Today is the Army-Navy Game, which matters mainly to alumni of the US Military Academy (West Point) and the US Naval Academy (Annapolis) and which the rest of us are supposed to care about but mainly don’t. Not even officers who got their commissions via ROTC or NROTC. Nevertheless, in honor of that, we have… The Army & Navy Cocktail Its origins are vaguely related to the Army and Navy Club in Washington, DC (which allegedly popularized the Daiquiri). The Army & Navy Cocktail consists of the following: 2 oz dry gin 1 oz lemon juice 3/4 oz orgeat 1 dash Angostino bitters Add ingredients to a Boston shaker. Add ice and shake vigorously. Double strain (Hawthorne strainer and fine mesh strainer) into a coupe glass—or Army- or Navy-related wine glass. If you really care, which frankly I didn’t, garnish with a grapefruit peel.

  The 21st Amendment was ratified 90 years ago today, repealing the 18th Amendment and thereby ending Prohibition.