As my fellow scofflaw Marshall mentioned in his write-up, bourbon has a special place in our hearts. If I had to pick a "desert island' liquor, it'd be bourbon. If I thought about what I drank the most in college - other than beer - it'd be bourbon (or even after college). Heck, my parents rubbed bourbon on my gums back as a kid to help with teething!
Well, for all that, I was excited to see the entries this month. We've got some doozies! It really makes me want to get back into the bar and make up some of these delicious sounding drinks.
So enough of all that, let's get into the recaps - but first, something else...
I received an e-mail last week from Mike Manning at Bulleit Distillery. I'd only ever had Bulleit in minis or the occasional mixed drink and he asked if I'd like to have a sample and some material about it. I, of course, said yes. Sure enough a package showed up on my doorstep on Monday (and was fortunately brought inside by my brother before the monsoons could wash it away). Inside was a 750 mL bottle of Bulleit and some papers.
If you haven't had it before you should give it a shot. I tried about half a shot of it first, just sipped it, and liked it better than I had remembered when I'd last tried it straight. The bottle is also just neat looking. I've been into Westerns for a long time and it just looks Western, and it seems they used it on the show Deadwood for that very reason. It's definitely more authentic than that "Wild Spirit" stuff I used to drink a while ago!
So I've gotta thank Mike for his donation. I used it in my drinks last night; I'm sure Marshall and I (assuming I let him have some) will have to see how it works out in some others.
One quick other thing: the Den is what we consider an "online speakeasy". With our new digs (see bottom of the post) we'll hopefully be able to work on the sense of community and camaraderie much better than our current host. As I see it, Marshall and I are your bartenders for the evening. Though most evenings there's only one or the other of us on shift; for instance, I handled this MxMo, but I know Marshall is chafing at the bit to host one of his own!
One last thing before the recap: if you're a blogger in the Washington, DC, area, leave a comment or drop me a line at seanmike -at- scofflawsden -dot- com. I've seen at least a couple of you out there and would love to see who we could get together for a
Mark Sexaur responded first with a post on his cocktail blog, back a solid week ago, with his drink, a Maker's Mark and Anti-Cola. He mentions how you can get a chance to get your own barrel of Maker's Mark and also provides the recipe for his "anti-cola" which he thinks is better than coke and, hey, sounds darn good to me! I might have to give it a shot sometime soon.Next up we have the Nickel Fizz from Max Heusler, the "editor in fly" of the FlyboyzNYC blog. This is a combination of bourbon, vanilla beans, and cherries, along with Boylan's black cherry cola - one of the flavors that I can find pretty readily in my local grocery stores. He doesn't say if he used sweet or sour cherries, but if I made it, I'd use sweet cherries because I've got a huge sweet tooth.
Because I'm a right awful bastard sometimes I even made Marshall follow the instructions I laid down and send me an e-mail with the URL of his beverage posting! Grumbling, he complied, posting about his Kentucky Orange Blossom, a drink that sounds better than it seemed to end up, and his variation of a Lynchburg Lemonade that he called the Front Porch Cooler. It is that lemonade variation that stopped me from doing my own, which was going to be primarily lemonade, bourbon, and orange Angostura bitters. But his sounds pretty good, too.
Oh, that Jamie Boudreau! He took the bourbon theme to heart SO HARD that he actually WENT to Bourbon county, Kentucky, and visited distilleries, such as my college nemesis Jim Beam and one of my current favorites Heaven Hill. He talks on and on about the wonderful things he got to do, with beautiful pictures taken, and finally gives us the Seelbach Cocktail, with two different kinds of bitters and a topping of champagne. I've got to decide if I'm just incredibly envious or what with the stories he had from that trip...
The Intoxicated Zodiac uses black tea, sugar, orange juice, and bourbon to make a drink called the Bourbon Freeze. This is a pitcher drink and Gwen says Aries can drink the entire pitcher by herself. I'm not an Aries, (I'm a Cancer, and I'll thank you for NOT making the usual joke, given my birthday is in 15 days!) but I think I could drink the whole pitcher, too, and I think it would make for a very fun pitcher to drink.
anavolena , she came up with the very neatly-named Purosangue cocktail, a variation of the Manhattan. She experimented with various vermouths and Ridgemont Reserve 1792 bourbon, but in the end went with Amaro Ramazzotti, something I've never heard of before but that sounds really good (and like something I'm going to have to buy now, gee, thanks!). I am glad her chief taster was so excited about a bourbon theme!
Experiment 33.2 had a "Frozen Hawaiian Fashioned", a drink that I had no idea what to think of when I heard the name but once I saw the recipe I thought to myself, you know what, Marshall should make this drink for me. It uses hibiscus and there's a couple of different routes towards making it in the post, plus some pictures that'll make you wish for tropical climes.
Chuck, over at Looka!, gave us a couple of different recipes. The first was his long-time favorite the "Fancy-Free Cocktail", a mix of bourbon, maraschino liqueur, and two kinds of bitters. The other one, the one he was afraid might be duplicated, involved bacon-infusing a bottle of Buffalo Trace bourbon and using that in an Old Fashioned with maple syrup. Well, there's at least one CLOSE to it so far...but we welcome everyone's contributions, no matter how many times they've come in! How many people stop with just one of a drink, eh?
My Brilliant Mistakes has a video, too, and has the cocktail called "Bitter Bourbon" - bourbon, Campari, and green Chartreuse. I can't view the video because I can't view YouTube at work, but I'm sure it's awesome. We did shots of Chartreuse after watching Grind House the other night and now I'm a big fan of it. I also note that Cynthia is from the Pittsburgh area, which makes her extra awesome (GO STEELERS!). 
Over at "Beers in the Shower" - and who doesn't take a beer into the shower occasionally? - he came up with a Hick Tipple, featuring bourbon, lime, simple syrup, and Fee's mint bitters, a bitter that I've really dug since I got. He rambles a bit about other stuff in there, too, but politely enough also provides a link to Jeffrey Morgenthaler's "Bourbon Renewal" post which now I need to re-read.Over at eGullet there were three responders to be included. Erik "eje" Ellestad, who organized the thread (and thank you!) recalled Murray Stenson's "Porteno". Tiare came up with something called a "Spiced Paprika Whiskey Sour" which sounds like it hits a number of my favorite things. Bostonapothecary came up with a drink from the Savoy Cocktail book called The Artist's Special.
Finally, I took advantage of Bulleit Bourbon's kindness and experimented a bit. First I hit the "Corpse Reviver No. 1" and replaced it with all American ingredients, dubbing it the Corpse Reviver No. 1976. Next, I fiddled around with the ingredients in the Scofflaw Cocktail to make it one that the two scofflaws here might enjoy more. Finally, to end off the night I grabbed my trusty shot glass and made a drink that I was certain wouldn't make anyone's cocktail list, the boilermaker.That's it for this month! I'm not certain who has it next month during the long hot days of July, when all the lucky bloggers are down in N'awlins and I'm stuck in LA at E3, but we'll see what happens!
And don't forget - Scofflaw's Den is moving! We are almost done with the site migration; soon, any of our domain names (scofflawsden.com, scofflaws-den.com, or .org, or .info) will go to the new site (right now only one of those does). And we'll be posting on there, too. For now I'll be trying to keep up with copying over our archives to the new site.
