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The Laowai

“Never go with a hippie to a second location.”

February 21, 2012 The Oddfellow Cocktail

I was just messing around in the kitchen this evening and made a surprisingly interesting cocktail.  So I thought I would share it.  It’s a bit of an elaboration on the classic “hanky-panky cocktail” but with a little extra.  There is no citrus in this one and it is all booze, so it is stirred, as opposed to shaken.  Also, I switched over to cocktail coupes, instead of classic martini glasses.  I look high and low to find these things but ultimately found them at Sur La Table, (which always makes me laugh thanks to South Park).

I am calling it the Oddfellow, just because I had no idea the ingredients would actually work as well together as they did.

3/4 oz. Sweet Vermouth

3/4 oz. Old Liquor Store Green Tea Liqueur

1/2 oz. Fernet Branca

2 eyedropper vials Orange Blossom Water (found in spice aisle of decent grocery stores)

2 oz. London Dry Gin

Stir and garnish with orange peel.

 

The Green Tea liqueur is a little minty and goes nicely with the Fernet but adds a little sweetness.  The orange blossom water is faint but adds a great floral undertone, and the vermouth provides a nice bridge between the biting gin and bitter Fernet (AKA the Hanky Panky).

 

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February 15, 2012 Boulder, CO

I’ve been working a lot lately on my graduate applications.  One of which is for a program called the Brandcenter, and the app is very writing intensive… so I thought I’d post a snippet of it here:

I applied to the University of Colorado and committed to attending without ever seeing the town in which it resides.  Before living there, I was under the impression that Denver/Boulder was high up in the mountains, pretty much a ski area with switchback roads and gondolas everywhere.  This isn’t quite the case.  Denver and Boulder might as well be Kansas.  There happens to be a whole bunch of mountains nearby, but if you have some type of strange medical condition that prevents you from ever looking West, you’d never know it.  Another quick beef I have with Denver/Boulder is I don’t quite understand how it got this reputation of being a skier’s paradise.  Sure you are close to skiing… but it still takes two and a half hours to get to it.  Can’t you pretty much drive two and half hours outside of any city and be close to a ski resort?

Boulder shaped me in several ways.  Where before I moved there, I considered myself an outdoorsy person (I am an Eagle Scout after all), now I loathe outdoorsy people.  Where before I considered myself a dog person, now I cannot stand dog people.  Boulder is chock full of people who don’t just like to go on hikes from time to time; they buy wind-resistant Everest climbing pants, special sun blocking hiking glasses used on the most recent Kilamanjaro expedition, and bumper stickers that say things like “I’m a really good hiker and you’re not.”

In Boulder, like Scottsdale, it’s very much a culture of “keeping up with the Jonses.”  But in Boulder, it’s more like “keeping up with the Rosenberg-Wellsmith-Running Bears.”  I’ve never been in a place where the people try so hard to make you think they are really truly happy.   It’s a world of forced relaxation where you can sense an inner emotional collapse bubbling up under every huge smile and utterance of the phrase “No Worries.”

Living in Boulder for so long nurtured an independence that few other cities could have cultivated.  It has made me more comfortable in myself, and showed me the danger of identifying too closely with any one thing, whether it is rock climbing, cycling, or a Subaru Outback.

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February 10, 2012 The Perfect Aviation

My favorite cocktail, without a doubt, is the Aviation.  I especially love them when I am in Arizona, as I am now, because I have a lemon tree… and I pluck that thing mercilessly.  Why do you love Aviations in Arizona, you ask?  That was a really poorly written sentence, but rather than fix it I thought it would be more clever to just describe its awfulness in a subsequent sentence, as I am doing now.  Anyway, an Aviation is very simple, yet you can’t just head on over to 7-11 and pick up the ingredients like a chump.  The aviation makes you work.

When I first got all the ingredients for my home bar (thanks honey), I made the rookie mistake of going equal parts on everything.  Sure, this might be fundamental to a pro but not me.  I quickly realized that higher proportions of gin the better… The recipe:

 

 

3 oz. Beefeater Gin (Or Hendrick’s for a more floral twist, but Beefeater is classic)

3/4 oz. Creme de Violette

3/4 oz. Luxardo Maraschino Liqueur

Half a fresh squeezed lemon

Shaken well to add ice and water and served up

 

 

 

A lot of recipes call for simple syrup.  I say “pish posh” sweet drinks are for occupy wall streeters and they give you a headache anyway.  Also a real aviation absolutely has to have Creme de Violette, as without it you cannot achieve the beautiful color seen in the picture here.    It should be faintly blue, like the color of the sky (hence the term aviation).  If it is too purple it is likely too sweet, and if it is clear then your bartender didn’t do the extra leg work to search out the somewhat hard to find Creme de Violette… and if your bartender is lazy in procuring the proper ingredients, he is most likely lazy in other things.  Like cleaning your glass.  The same glass that all those other dirty people fondled with their mouths.  Just sayin’.

 

 

 Wow.  Brings a tear to your eye, don’t it?

 

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February 9, 2012 Dismal Failure

Well I bottled up the pine bitters… and unfortunately I’ve yet to find out what to do with them.  The other day I thought I’d try gin, a few hefty splashes of pine bitters, and some fresh squeezed orange juice.  I guess I thought the orange’s sweetness wouldn’t outdo everything else… I was wrong.  Boy howdy it was bad.  Back to the drawing board on that.

One tried and true pine-y recipe though, was concocted the other evening out of:

2 oz. Right Brothers (peppery) Gin

1 oz. Zirbenz Stone Pine Liqueur

1 oz. Fernet Branca

Dash of mango bitters

Shaken, served up.

The mango bitters sounds weird but it worked out, and it was extremely subtle.  It was very dry, and very much an acquired taste… but to me the spicy gin was miraculous with the minty Fernet and pine-y Zirbenz.  Put my home concoction to shame.

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February 6, 2012 Another article about the Facebook IPO

Oh man, this is the big one.  Facebook is going public.  If you can get in on this it will be just like that one episode of Family Matters when Carl Winslow goes back in time to buy Microsoft.  That’s kind of an obscure reference, sorry, but you get the idea.  Facebook is experiencing every real investor’s worst nightmare: hype.  Hype is bad, irrational, and most of all, it’s fleeting.  The $100 Billion valuation is huge, of course, and how much of it is hype?  How much is actual value?

Facebook’s value is in its 845 million monthly active users.  They have us, but how can they extract our money?  So far, according to the S-1, their best guess is advertising.  This is the source of about 85% of their revenue.  I, personally, have never clicked on a Facebook ad.  An informal poll of other twenty-somethings agreed that they, like me, avoid clicking on ads like the plague.  I can recount many times when I have told my parents to NOT click on something specifically because it is an ad, and therefore unreliable.  Not surprisingly, Click Through Rates (CTR) by demographic are pretty tough to find.  One study, published in August 2011 by SocialCode, a Washington DC based social media agency, found that Facebook users aged 50+ were 28.2% more likely to click on an ad.  Another study, by WebTrends in January of 2011, discovered that users who had not attended college were almost twice as likely to click on ads than those that did.

What can be gleaned from this? The boomers are dying out and the unsavvy (this is a big, perhaps unfair assumption, but I think most can agree that those who did not go to college are, on the whole, less internet savvy) will become savvier.  With such a huge market penetration already, the low hanging fruit of more warm bodies has already been picked.

Anyway, of the ads that are actually clicked on, Facebook’s CTR (as of 2010, the latest reported by the January 2011 WebTrends study) is half of the industry average , .051% vs. .1%.  This has actually declined, from .063% in 2009.  While the CTR declined, the Cost per Click (CPC) actually increased, from $.27 to $.49.  Comparatively, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) is even more dependent on advertising, at 97% of revenue, with AdWords making up the bulk of that.  AdWords has an average CTR of 2%, with a CPC of $1.24.  Google shares currently trade at around 20 times 2011 net income, and the $100 Billion Facebook valuation would imply 100 times net income.

A little spendy, no?

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February 2, 2012 Flavor Country

I’ve been making a westward migration over the last few days, from Washington to Arizona, with a stopover in Boulder, where I currently am.  Boulder happens to be the site of one of my favorite bars in the country, and I always stop in when I am here.  It is here, the Bitter Bar, where I was first introduced to good cocktails, not the kind that give you headaches and wrinkles and have sugared rims and chocolate syrup as ingredients.  These drinks are classics and one of the few things the US can truly call an invention of its own.

The best part about the Bitter Bar is the flexibility of the bartenders and their willingness to create.  I remember going in and saying I wanted a drink that was reminiscent of the movie American Psycho.  This request was not met with a laugh and a roll of the eyes, but rather with a thoughtful grin and an earnest attempt to accommodate.  And 9 times out of 10 the drink tastes exactly like my intention.

Just last night I was telling Emily how cool it would be to have a drink called “The Horcrux,” and what ingredients that would entail.  We thought dark and green and smoky, pretty Voldemort-y.  So this would mean maybe a good Islay Scotch or Mezcal for the smoke and Absinthe for the eerie green.  We went to the Bitter Bar, told Mark our idea, and he was immediately on board.  Instead of Absinthe, though, he used Sambuca, to give essentially the same flavor.  He did use Mezcal, but reflecting I think the Islay might have been better.  Still it didn’t look the way we thought it should.

So, here, dear reader, is the drink that I think should have been made:

1/2 oz. Black Sambuca

1/2 oz. Smoked Tea Liqueur, Qi Black is best

1 oz. Absinthe, mixed with 1/4 oz. chilled water to create signature cloudiness

2 oz. Islay Scotch

The scotch, black sambuca and tea liqueur should be shaken together and strained first, the absinthe should then be chilled and layered over the top by pouring slowly over the back of a spoon.  The density of the sambuca and tea liqueur should be enough to allow the absinthe to sit on top, thereby creating the eerie black and neon green.

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January 18, 2012 Spectra or Spectrum?

I shared this with the Motley Fool and got some interesting replies.  I can’t really re-post this content here so I will just link to it.

More China posts to come.

January 15, 2012 Foolish

I recently had the good fortune of getting an article syndicated by the Motley Fool.  You can check it out here.

Also, pine bitters are coming along nicely.  I was in Philadelphia this weekend and found a great spice store at the Italian Market.  I picked up some orange blossoms, hibiscus, dried rose petals and lavender and am looking forward to something floral.  Herbal and Floral, that’s what I’m all about.

January 7, 2012 Pine Bitters

A while back I had a cocktail that changed my life.  It challenged my core values and made me want to move to the woods and make art.  The drink was the Douglas Fir Gimlet, and I had it at the legendary Pegu Club in New York.  Since then, I have asked nearly every bartender (ahem, “mixologist,” or “cocktailian”) to make me something “pine-y.”  Unfortunately, I am often disappointed.  The flavor of the Douglas Fir Gimlet comes from Zirbenz Stone Pine Liqueur, which is nearly impossible to find.  Sometimes I find Fernet Branca to be a nice substitute, but the minty aftertaste still isn’t quite right.

I want to have a cocktail that re-creates the last flavor Sonny Bono must have had in his mouth… (too soon?)  That is, I want to feel the pine.  So, I decided to try my hand at a little bit of cocktail wizardry and create the flavor myself.  Since I don’t have a distillery in my house and I hear bathtub hooch has a tendency to explode, I decided the best route to take was to make a batch of pine bitters.

This is a very fortuitous time of year to want to make pine bitters, seeing as how I had an unused Christmas tree lying around.  I am using the whole twig with the leaves.  To that I added cedar wood chips and a sprig of rosemary.  I originally wanted to steep this in gin, given that its herbal and botanical properties would complement the other raw ingredients.  But, in the interest of not meddling with the pure pine flavor I am going for I decided a high-proof vodka might work better.  We’ll see.

And now I play the waiting game…

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January 5, 2012 A Clarification

I spent the night of January 3, 2012 watching the Iowa caucus results at a bed and breakfast in Union Pier, Michigan.  Lovely town.  We stayed right on the lake and paid only a fraction of the regular price thanks to Groupon.  During the day we walked along the beach and enjoyed the strange juxtaposition of snow and sand.  A winter storm raged outside.  There was a fire.  And wine.  But I, unfortunately, was full of bubbling rage.

Ron Paul came in a very respectable, and not distant, third and yet he is still not considered an actual candidate.  His name was barely mentioned.  Rick Perry and Michele Bachman, 5th and 6th, respectively, received far more coverage in my very non-thorough and unscientific study conducted while only watching one channel: CNN.  But it was very evident.

The next day, when driving back from Michigan to Chicago, we listened to a Mr. Ed Schultz accuse Ron Paul of “psycho-talk” because of something he said.  And this has been echoed by several other talking-heads of all political ilk.  What he said was, “We are all Austrians now.”

Now, someone with a cursory knowledge of economics, or at the very least, an internet connection, could figure out what this means.  Essentially:

Austrian:  Free Market all the way

Keynesian: Government needs to spend money to grease the economy

Not that you’re reading this or anything, Mr. Schultz, but if your intern stumbles upon it why not take a minute to clarify something you don’t understand before calling someone a psycho.  This is nothing more than backwoods high school “I’m proud to be ignorant” talk that revels in being dumb and popular.

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