After a long hard day of work, sometimes all you want is a beer and a smoke. Unfortunately it’s no longer possible to enjoy those two pleasures simultaneously if you’re in a bar (at least in most American cities), so Jim Meehan of PDT devised a clever way of joining them together in a drink that’s aptly named Beer and a Smoke.

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Although summer doesn’t technically end until the autumn equinox on September 21, New Yorkers generally regard Labor Day as the unofficial end of summer. This week’s cocktail, the Beachbum, is thus quite appropriate because I can’t think of a better way to bid adieu to beach season than with this tikified tipple.

John Deragon, who still tends the bar at PDT a couple nights a week, created this drink during the speakeasy’s early days, as a tribute to Jeff “Beachbum” Berry.

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When it comes to knockoffs and variations, perhaps no cocktail has been the subject of more unflattering imitations than the classic Daiquiri. As with most cocktail crimes, the origins of these transgressions trace back to Prohibition, when an entire generation lacked access to quality alcohol, as well as to the talented barmen (and a few women) to pass on the knowledge of proper techniques and recipes.

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Once you understand basic cocktail recipe structure (without going off on too deep a tangent, it boils down to two general categories: sours and aromatics, first outlined in detail in The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks by David Embury), you can take any classic cocktail and in the words of Mr. Embury, “roll your own.” The Airmail is a prime example of this, whereby you take a classic cocktail and swap out one or two ingredients for other ingredients in the same category in order to create a new classic.

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March, as the idiom goes, comes in like a Lion, and goes out like a Lamb. This month may bring us spring-like temperatures, but also one more blizzard for the road. Winter’s last blast requires a libation celebrating the flavors of the season and is worthy of the ferocity of the month’s namesake, Mars, the Roman God of War.

Meet the Lion’s Tail, the last winter cocktail you will order.

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“Slash sat me down at his house and said, You’ve got to clean up your act. You know you’ve gone too far when Slash is saying, ‘Look, you’ve got to get into rehab.”
- Charlie Sheen

What do you do when you have trouble coming up with a name for a cocktail you’ve created? Well, in these situations it pays to recall the solid gold advice of Dionne Warwick who noted, “that’s what friends are for.” So I decided to summon the help of a friend who has no trouble coming up with creative cocktail names, fellow cocktail wizard and NYC bartender Hal Wolin (who also publishes the spirits and cocktails blog A Muddled Thought). 

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I recently read an article by Gary Regan about a couple of modern cocktails he predicts will eventually become classics, and it made me think about exactly what makes a cocktail a classic. The answer may seem fairly obvious in that it just needs to taste awesome, but I’ve had many newly created cocktails that were quite awesome tasting and yet I wouldn’t even think to categorize them as classics.

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