Robert Simonson - Modern Classic Cocktails : 60+ Stories and Recipes from the New Golden Age in Drinks

Jeffrey Morgenthaler, a bartender who worked at Clyde Common in Portland, Oregon, for many years, is the shepherd of unloved drinks. There are no bad drinks, only bad bartenders, he has said, and he means it. As good as his word, he has devoted his labors to rescuing dclass drinks like the Grasshopper, Blue Hawaii, and Long Island Iced Tea. But his most successful salvage job has been the Amaretto Sour.

I always liked Amaretto Sours, he said. I drank them in college sometimes. Then, when everyone started getting super serious about drinks, it just kinda got left by the wayside. I remember seeing other bartenders talk about the dark days of cocktails, and theyd always mention the Amaretto Sour as an example of how terrible the drinks were back in the day. So, around 2009, he went about improving it. His chief innovationand the one that took the drink from tacky to terrificwas the addition of nearly an ounce of quality overproof bourbon.

He put the recipe on his popular blog around 2012. By 2014, he bravely put it on the menu at Clyde Common. But it was at Pp le Moko, a kitschy subterranean bar that opened beneath Clyde Common in 2014, that the cocktail became a star.

It was probably our number one seller along with the Grasshopper, he recalled. People seemed kinda relieved that they could go to a fancy cocktail bar and have fun drinks for once. The drink has since become the default recipe for the Amaretto Sour at craft cocktail bars around the world.

1 ounces amaretto

ounce bourbon, preferably Bookers

1 ounce lemon juice

1 teaspoon simple syrup (2:1)

ounce egg white, beaten

Lemon twist for garnish

Brandied cherry for garnish

Dry shake all the ingredients except the garnishesthat is, shake them up without icein a cocktail shaker. Add ice to the shaker and shake again, about 15 seconds. Strain into a rocks glass filled with ice. Garnish with a lemon twist and brandied cherry.

The Ancient Mariner is tiki evangelist Jeff Beachbum Berrys early effort to re-create the Navy Grog, his favorite cocktail by tiki icon Victor Bergeron, aka Trader Vic. The task was not an easy one. In the 1990s, when Berry began his journey of discovery, the tiki world of Los Angeles was a diaspora of bartenders who held, but would not share, the recipes to the bygone cocktail glories of Trader Vic and his tiki archrival, Donn Beach of Don the Beachcomber. Published recipes were all but nonexistent, as tiki bartending had always been a proprietary, secretive art. (The super-unhelpful recipe for the Navy Grog published in a sales pamphlet called only for Trader Vic Navy Grog Rum and Trader Vic Navy Grog Mixtwo extinct products.) Berry resorted to guesswork and reverse-engineering to create his version of the drink. A crucial key to unlocking the recipe came when fellow L.A. cocktail nerd Ted Haigh uncovered a stash of bottles of the discontinued Wray & Nephew Pimento Dram at a liquor store in Costa Mesa called Hi-Time Wine Cellars. Tasting it for the first time was an aha! moment for Berry; pimento (aka Jamaican allspice) was the secret flavoring used in Vics Navy Grog mix. Two veteran tiki bartenders, Tony Ramos at Madame Wus and Mike Buhen at the Tiki-Ti, confirmed Berrys hunch.

Further tinkering got Berry to the recipe offered here, which is not strictly a Trader Vic Navy Grog, but his interpretation of it. Stripped away were honey and the white rum. The entire process took years. I called it the Ancient Mariner partly because by the time I finished with it, thats how old I felt, Berry said.