Tag: Happy Hour (Page 57 of 81)

Drink of the Week: Hot Buttered Rum

December 16, 2011 / Bob Westal

Butter…mmm…not the most common of classic cocktail ingredients but hot buttered rum is not your ordinary cocktail. A Christmastime favorite in many places, the history of today’s DOTW likely goes back as far as prior to the U.S. Revolutionary War, when New England was awash with rum due to the deeply unfestive Triangle Trade.

Now, I have to admit that, prior to this week, hot buttered rum existed to me only as an occasionally referenced warmer upper on 1970s sitcoms and 1950s rom-coms. The good news is that, I have to say, I’m sold on it. This version is simple and sweet and pretty surefire, though it’s definitely best if you can get it all down while it’s still hot.

One proviso: some ultra-purists may sniff at this recipe since it doesn’t call for you to heat this drink with, get this, a red hot poker removed directly from a fireplace. (I used a microwave.)

Hot Buttered Rum

2 ounces dark rum
2 teaspoons sugar, preferably dark brown or raw
5-7 ounces boiling water
1 pat of butter (unsalted or salted)
Ground cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice and/or cloves to taste

Put butter, sugar, and a dash or two of any or all of the suggested seasonings in mug, ideally pre-heated. Pour about 1-2 ounces of your boiling water in. Stir until the butter is melted and the sugar and spices have dissolved. Add two ounces of room temperature dark rum and top of with your remaining not-quite boiling but still extremely hot water.

Stir again and sip gingerly. It should be about the perfect temperature but better safe than sorry. Try not to spill any on your Snuggie.

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A couple of quick notes. Most recipes call for unsalted butter, but I was too lazy, cheap and hateful of waste to run to the store for a product I would never use for any other purpose. Salted butter worked fine, though I would stay away from any other obvious substitutions. (“Hot margarined rum”?) Also, most recipes say to add the butter last, but I found it melted easier my way and I still got a nice buttery coating on top.

As usual, there are an enormous number of ways to make hot buttered rum. A lot of recipes substitute super-hot apple cider for water, which I’m sure is pretty tasty but adds a lot of calories. Some versions throw ice cream into the mix, which just kind of blows my mind. Seriously, though, if you use a nice dark rum and dark brown sugar or raw sugar — both of which include molasses, the stuff they make rum out of — this drink should be plenty sweet.

Speaking of dark rum, you may find that with all the light, amber, and spiced varieties available, regular dark rum might be a bit harder to find in your price range than you’d think. BevMo here in California’s OC offered only two varieties of true dark rum. Myer’s Rum which was about $19.00 for a fifth and Whaler’s Original Rum, which was about half that price and turned out to be perfect for getting all hot and buttered.

Food & Drink, Lifestyle, Vices

BevMo cocktails dark rum Drink of the Week Happy Hour Myer's Rum rum Snuggie Whaler's Original Rum

Friday Video – Danger Mouse, “99 Problems”

December 16, 2011 / David Medsker

Over the last decade, we’ve seen some curious new pathways to success or, at the very least, fame. (They are not always one and the same, you know.) The most notorious one, of course, is the sex tape. Kim Kardashian may have a gigantic empire now, but it wasn’t long ago that she was just the daughter of a defense attorney and BFF of tabloid staple Paris Hilton. Then, one day, she had a thought: “I could make a videotape of myself having sex with a guy, then leverage my friendship with Paris for maximum exposure. What’s that, honey? You want to pee on me? Yeah, whatever, as long as it makes me famous.”

Then there is the path forged by one Brian Joseph Burton, whose debut album didn’t contain a lick of original production or content. Instead, he took the rhymes from Jay-Z’s The Black Album, and put them to the instrumental tracks from the Beatles’ The Beatles (aka The White Album), and poof, The Grey Album was born. And really, once you heard about this project, was there any question which song Danger Mouse would use to back up “99 Problems”? Hell to the naw. Of course it would be “Helter Skelter,” which is still one of the most hard-rocking songs ever recorded.

Have a good pre-Christmas weekend, everyone. May your problems be fewer than 99.

Music, Videos

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Drink of the Week: The Hot Toddy

December 9, 2011 / Bob Westal

Have you ever found yourself wondering exactly what a hot toddy is? I know I have. I’ve had them in bars maybe once or twice at most and occasionally messed around with heating up some whiskey and water with a little sugar or something else, but I’ve never quite had a handle on what makes a toddy a toddy. The funny part is that after working with them a bit more earnestly the last week or so, I’m still wondering what a hot toddy is.

The problem is that every recipe I’ve found seems to bear relatively little relation to every other recipe, to the point where I’ve determined that there is no baseline recipe for hot toddies there way there might be for other cocktails. Beyond involving hot water, sweetener, and some form of hard liquor that’s usually is whiskey but could also be brandy or rum, there’s nothing very much in common between any two recipes, though a lemon usually comes into play and some people, who may tend to be from the U.K. or British commonwealth countries, use tea instead of hot water. Figuring out the “classic” hot toddy seems to be a fool’s errand.

Therefore, I’m presenting, instead, my own personal hot toddy. Of the various combinations of boiling water, whiskey, and sugar that I’ve experimented with this week, this is the one that’s worked out the best for me.

The Hot Toddy

4 ounces boiling water
1.5 ounces bourbon or Scotch whiskey
2 teaspoons of sugar, preferably brown
1/4 ounce fresh lemon juice or lemon slice or peel
1 cinnamon stick as optional garnish.

Place sugar in a small coffee or tea cup. Pour in boiling water and stir to dissolve sugar. Add lemon juice — or don’t and substitute a very thin lemon slice garnish with your cinnamon stick. Based on personal preference feel free to increase or eschew the juice entirely. Add your booze, stir, and sip. (If you have a heat sensitive like me, don’t worry. The room temperature booze should cool the drink down to a reasonably drinkable temperature.)

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Feel free to experiment with your favorite brandy, rum, or another type of whiskey. The sweetness of bourbon seems to appeal to me the most here, though using a decent single malt scotch was also very nice. You can boost the booze up to 2 ounces if you want or maybe reduce the water though it will get cold faster. I should add I was using Old Fitzgerald’s 100 proof bourbon, but I suspect 1.5 ounces of 80 proof Jim Beam or what have you would be good and potent enough for most people with 4 ounces of water.

Just watch the lemon juice and/or lemon slice as a little can go a long way. If you go the lemon slice route and want to warm up your drink, remove the lemon before nuking it in the microwave. On that road lies nastiness.

Toddies are nice. It’s actually fairly hard to mess up whiskey, a bit of sugar, and some water and wonderful for warming up on a cold night. You might find you don’t need that sweater or sweatshirt after consuming one of these.

On the other hand, the docs tell us that, contrary to what some of us have been told, it’s really not the absolute best thing if you’re actually sick, especially with a fever. The dehydrating diuretic properties of alcohol makes momma’s chicken soup better for cold of flu sufferers, leaving aside the whole issue of drug interactions. (For starters, booze and anything containing Tylenol/Acetaminophen should not really mix in your body. It’s a liver thing.) On the other hand, if you’re simply sick from worry or stress on a cold winter evening, there is no simpler remedy.

Food & Drink, Lifestyle, Vices

Bourbon brandy cocktails Drink of the Week Happy Hour hot toddies hot toddy Jim Beam momma's chicken soup Old Fitzgerald's Scotch whiskey

Friday Video – Dandy Warhols, “Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth”

December 9, 2011 / David Medsker

Click here to listen to the Dandy Warhols’ …Come Down on Spotify

Happy holidays! This song’s about drugs.

Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth” rocks on a number of levels, but here is our favorite level: while singer Courtney Taylor is clearly unhappy about the song’s subject turning to hard drugs, it’s the reason for them turning to hard drugs that has him so annoyed – he got into drugs because he thought it was the hip, trendy thing to do. “Shouldn’t you have got a couple piercings and decided, maybe, that you were gay?” Taylor pleads in the second verse. It’s a double-edged insult: his friend is both weak-willed and a trend-hopper. Actually, it’s a three-pronged zinger, because the friend is also out of touch with what’s cool. And heroin is definitely not cool. This song is, though. Love those tweaked out dancers, not to mention all of the prizes that await the “winner” of the game show. Puking! Flaming car! Death! Man, what’s not to love?

Oh, right, the puking, the flaming car, and the death. We’ll just listen to this instead.

For the record, the second level we love about this song is the backward snare drum hit in the breaks. That little bit is the biggest hook in the song.

Music, Videos

Dandy Warhols Dandy Warhols Come Down Friday Videos Happy Hour Heroin is so passe Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth video of the week

Drink of the Week: Irish Coffee

December 2, 2011 / Bob Westal

Give or take a few destructive and heat-increasing Santa Ana winds, relatively chilly weather is settling in, even here in Southern California. So, I suppose it’s finally time to take on what I consider to be the king of hot cocktails. Still, what a blow to my ego to discover that, not only have I had some difficulty pulling off this most delicious of drinks, but that I’ve mostly been drinking it wrong, too! I’ve finally learned that Irish coffee tastes even better if you don’t stir in that pretty layer of unsweetened cream floating on the top. And for all these years I thought floating the cream was just a presentation thing.

A true cocktail classic, Irish coffee might be hard for amateurs like me to pull off, but it’s also not so easy to provide a concise history. The most widely accepted version is that it was developed by chef Joseph Sheridan of Ireland’s Shannon Airport, who came up with the idea of adding whiskey to coffee to warm the cockles and other parts of travelers on bitter cold winter nights. Then, the story goes that Pulitzer Prize-winning travel journalist Stanton Delaplane brought the concept back home with him from an early 1950s trip to Ireland and reverse engineered the beverage with the help of the proprietors of San Francisco’s Buena Vista Cafe. Just to muddy the waters, though, L.A.’s temporarily closed Fairfax Blvd. landmark, Tom Bergin’s Tavern, also claims to be the American popularizer of the beverage.

No doubt people in San Francisco will hiss when they read the above, because that’s what they do in S.F. whenever you mention Los Angeles in any context. I can hardly blame San Franciscans, though, for wanting to claim credit. Irish coffee is an amazing beverage which I’ve greatly enjoyed in both Southern and Northern California, not to mention New Orleans and maybe I’ll have it in Ireland some day. There’s nothing like the combo of caffeine and alcohol and this tastes immensely better than vodka and Red Bull. So, enough vamping, here’s the wondrous but tricky (for me) to pull off recipe.

Irish Coffee

5-6 ounces very hot coffee
2 teaspoons sugar (preferably brown)
1.5 ounces Irish whiskey
Unsweetened, lightly whipped cream

Using a whisk or whatever device you have handy, lightly whip heavy cream until it is very frothy, which I admit is easier said than done. Set aside.

Get a glass coffee mug, but since you probably don’t have one, use a reasonably large wine glass, which also works beautifully. It’s best to heat the glass by putting in very hot water or holding it over steaming water if you’re afraid of breaking it. That may not be 100 percent essential if you do as I do and drip the coffee directly into the glass using a Melitta-style filter. Stir your sugar into the coffee thoroughly.

Then spoon — do not pour — the cream onto the top of the coffee. (You can also try pouring the whipped cream over the back of a spoon, but that didn’t work for me at all.) Sip the coffee through the layer of cream on top. And for James Joyce’s sake, don’t stir it!

*****

I’ve probably attempted this six times at home and I’ve managed to get this drink right precisely once. Getting that heavy cream whipped enough so that it sits atop the coffee and doesn’t simply combine with it has been tricky for me, to say the least. More than once I considered the coward’s way out — sugar-laden canned whipped cream. It would definitely be easier.

Some imply that if you simply pour heavy cream unwhipped over the back of a spoon it will somehow work. I’m here to tell you every time I tried the back of a spoon thing it failed to create the desired effect, whether or not I’d pre-whipped the cream. I’m not saying the results tasted bad, but they’re not nearly as heavenly as sipping the coffee through the cream. If you can manage to get it exactly the way I did that one time, it’s just the best warming pick-me-up/make-me-happy there is. If you’re really feeling lazy, though, a shot of Bushmills neat with a coffee chaser (or any chaser) isn’t so bad, either.

Food & Drink, Lifestyle, Vices

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