Like a cocktail? How about a dried octopus sour?

Singapore mixes unique cocktail culture https://t.co/6i9m0f8zIA

— Nikkei Asian Review (@NAR) April 14, 2018

When Elex Ng was developing the menu for his new cocktail bar, Nanyang Club, he sought inspiration in a nearby Chinese medicine store. His early experiments with dried mushrooms and herbs were underwhelming. "Then I saw this whole dried-out octopus. I was like: 'Okay, why not?'" he said.

The result is the Fisherman's Wife, a very local twist on the classic whisky sour that cuts the flavors of dried octopus and oysters with ginger and citrus. It is the kind of idiosyncratic drink that Ng, who fell into bartending after leaving the army, thinks may come to define the cocktail scene in Singapore, which remains heavily influenced by western and Japanese bar culture.

The fine Japanese art of mixing drinks

This is a "should read" for cocktail lovers.And how about that recipe for the Line Cocktail!

Good libations: Examining the evolution of Japan's rich cocktail culture | The Japan Times:

The Japanese way of bartending is like “a time-capsule of 1930s international bartending,” [ cocktail historian David] Wondrich says. But given its foreign origins, how on earth did Japanese bartenders gain such outsized influence in worldwide mixology? And are they really keepers of the flame for some long-forgotten school of cocktail arts?
To answer those questions, let’s first turn back the clock to 1860. This marks the appearance of Japan’s very first Western-style bar, inside the Yokohama Hotel, also known as the Hotel Hufnagel after its Dutch owner. It was a hastily constructed affair surrounded by a tall fence designed to keep locals out. Perhaps this was for the best: The Hufnagel’s guests were a crusty lot of seamen, merchants and adventurers whose drinking games included firing their revolvers at a clock on the bar’s wall.
“There wasn’t much to do, other than drink,” says Kazuo Ishikura, a writer specializing in the history of Japan’s cocktail culture. “Foreign residents were told by the authorities to stay inside at night. If they ventured out, there was a high chance they’d be surrounded by samurai with a grudge against foreigners.”
A recipe for needing a stiff drink, to be sure. But the Hufnagel offered only beers, wines and liquor — straight up.

“The first bar to serve actual cocktails opened in Yokohama’s International Hotel in 1874,” Ishikura says. “The bartender, Mr. Purvis, was so popular that he was caricatured in the English-language humor magazine Japan Punch.”

Line Cocktail (1924)
All but forgotten today, this represents one of the very earliest cocktails known to have been created locally, by a Japanese bartender named Yonekichi Maeda.

⅓ oz dry gin
⅓ oz Benedictine
⅓ oz Italian vermouth
Two dashes of bitters

Shake over ice, strain and serve. And here’s the trick: Garnish with a small portion of pickled rakkyo onion, slightly crushed. It’s a — how to put this kindly — uniquely local touch.

 

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The price of a presidential cocktail

The cheapest cocktail at Donald Trump's new D.C. hotel is $24 https://t.co/wCsgcfr3Pj

— Grub Street (@grubstreet) January 7, 2017

We got drunk and invented America

A Survival Guide To Colonial Cocktails (So You Don't Die Drinking Them) : The Salt : NPR:

"Colonists, transplanted to a New World, were faced with the task of re-creating old recipes, often with unfamiliar new ingredients. Alcohol was a godsend in the Old World, sipped by adults and children alike. In the New World, imbibing called for experimentation. There was plenty of trial and error, and, in Grasse's view, an unexpected recipe for democracy.

"Before democracy, there were spirits, and from spirits we created taverns," writes Grasse in the book, "and it was in those taverns that we laid out the blueprint for a new kind of country. ... In other words, we got drunk and invented America.""



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Who could take only a sip or two of a Tom Bullock mint julep?

Tom Bullock’s ‘The Ideal Bartender’ Offers Words of Advice - NYTimes.com:

"In 1913, former President Theodore Roosevelt, countering a report that he was frequently drunk, testified in a libel suit that one of the few drinks he had had since leaving the White House was a mint julep at the St. Louis Country Club. And, he said, he took only a sip or two.

 The St. Louis Post-Dispatch found this claim outrageous enough that it printed an editorial basically calling Roosevelt a liar. “Who was ever known to drink just a part of one of Tom’s” juleps, the newspaper asked incredulously.

“Tom” was Tom Bullock, the longtime bartender at the St. Louis Country Club and the first African-American bartender to publish a cocktail manual.

That 1917 book, “The Ideal Bartender,” has just been republished in an exact facsimile of its original form by Cocktail Kingdom, a Manhattan publisher that has turned resuscitating old cocktail books into a cottage industry."



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