4 tips for bargain boozing

Last week, Financial Post reporter Melissa Leong interviewed me for an article, “Five things you can do to have a boozy time on a budget,” which ran over the weekend. (It’s part of a yearlong series on extreme personal finance, including amusing videos called “Save Your #@%* Money,” which I fervently hope becomes the title of the book she’s clearly meant to write).

Our conversation got me thinking about ways to drink more inexpensively — but still drink well.  Some of these tips appeared in the article, some did not.

1. It’s always less costly to drink at home vs. out at a bar. The mark-ups that go into cocktails can be staggering. Think about it:  two $14  rye Manhattans (plus tip) = a 750ml bottle of good rye + a 375ml bottle of vermouth. That yields far more than two cocktails.   (Or, yes, you can find less expensive drinks at another bar. The  alcohol mark-up still will be significant.)

2. Make your own ingredients. You can purchase a 750 ml bottle of Monin cane syrup for $6 or more.  Or you can buy a box of granulated sugar and make your own simple syrup. By the same token, you can also DIY grenadine and Maraschino cherries.  Raw ingredient costs are low; what you’re paying for in these products is labor, packaging, and distribution costs. When you go to a bar, you’re paying for labor again, plus real-estate and other expenses too.

3. Choose your booze wisely. Armagnac is often better value than similar Cognacs; yet both are grape brandies from France with similar flavor profiles. American-made whiskies are often better value than imported whiskies.  And for god’s sake, save the top shelf and longer-aged stuff for drinking straight, not for mixing into cocktails.

4. You don’t have to buy expensive glassware. Punchbowls and glassware in multiples have been on my mind ever since I started researching Cocktails for a Crowd. Sure, I’d love to drop a bundle at Crate & Barrel for pitchers and punchbowls and a few dozen new glasses every time I throw a party. But it’s not necessary:  you’d be surprised what can be used to showcase large-format drinks.  Vases. Fish bowls. Fondue pots. Mason jars. Not to mention all the gorgeous vintage glassware to be scooped up at flea markets and yard sales. A word of caution, though:  whatever vessels you use for serving drinks, make sure they are thoroughly clean.

I’d love to hear your tips for drinking/entertaining on the cheap. If enough ideas come in, I’ll publish a follow-up to this post.

Behind the book – my guest post on Life of Spice

I admit it:  When Monica Bhide asked me to write for her lovely “Life of Spice” blog about how I came up for the idea for Cocktails for a Crowd, I considered fibbing. 

“I could always spin some thirsty story about how I threw a party, and…”

“Well, I guess I could throw together something about how I was inspired by bartenders, and…”

Although there would have been elements of truth to both (hey, I said fibbing, not outright lying!) instead I opted to tell the truth. Here’s how I came up with the idea for the book, as posted on Monica’s blog. I guarantee, it’s not the pretty story you expect.

Kind words for Cocktails for a Crowd

As the unofficial start to the summer entertaining season, Memorial Day weekend is a big deal. I was psyched to see my still shiny-new book featured prominently in Memorial Day food & drink coverage — and so honored to read these kind words. Please click through to read the full articles.

The Wall Street Journal, Recipes for Party Punches:

Don’t be fooled by the book’s slim size and bright cover. This is a serious, sophisticated guide to crafting drinks, not just a frothy collection of party size “-tinis.” With a can-do attitude and plenty of smarts, Ms. Newman offers readers rules of thumb culled from some of the country’s leading drink-slingers.

Seattle Magazine, Four Cocktails Perfect for a Crowd:

 A great resource for creating crowd-ready beverages is Kara Newman’s new book Cocktails for a Crowd, which has well-tested recipes for groups of many sizes and an intro section full of tips and advice.

Kansas City Star, Cocktails for 8 or more? These books help you figure out the servings

…the book that makes me actually want to throw a party is Cocktails for a Crowd by Kara Newman. … An insightful and well-crafted book.

Cheers!  I’ll drink to that.

Negroni Sbagliatos for a crowd

Image courtesy Manhattan Cocktail Classic

The Manhattan Cocktail Classic has officially drawn to a close. This is one of those epic events where bartenders serve hundreds — in some cases thousands – of cocktails at a go.  There were plenty of mediocre offerings, to be sure. But there were a great many memorable drinks too. And this was perhaps the most memorable drink of them all.

Likely, I was particularly attuned to this drink because of the Cocktails for a Crowd book. No doubt I was paying closer attention than ever before to how batched drinks were presented, ranging from the punch served in painted ceramic punchbowls at Dead Rabbit to colorful pink and orange Palomas decanted into swing-top glass flasks and arrayed on silver platters during a seminar.

But Campari topped them all, offering wee cans of Negroni Sbagliato cocktails. It’s a relatively simple classic cocktail:  Campari, sweet vermouth, and dry sparkling wine, like Prosecco. I first heard of it after Frank Bruni wrote about it a couple of years ago; it started popping up on drink menus shortly thereafter, though it’s still lesser-known vs the Negroni (Campari, sweet vermouth, and gin).  The cans were handed out at the splashy MCC gala, as well as at a party thrown by the brand a couple of nights later.

Apparently, the genesis of this canned cocktail began at last year’s gala, where Negronis were pre-batched, carbonated and bottled. At the event, bartenders merely popped off the bottle caps and inserted a straw. It was on-trend — arguably, ahead-of-trend– fun to drink and speedy to serve. The canned cocktails had been floated for the 2012 gala, a PR rep told me (as we sipped Sbagliatos, natch), but tabled until 2013.

Apparently, a great deal of effort went into those canned cocktails. They had to be specially made, the cocktail had to be made in large quantities, and they had to be shipped over. The red-and-white striped plastic straws (not paper, which disintegrate quickly), were sourced from Etsy.

Everyone noticed them. From a drinker’s perspective, it was a good cocktail — truly, the most important part of this equation — and it was fun to drink, so people actually walked around and drank from the cans. It wasn’t too big and it wasn’t too boozy, so it was one of the few cocktails I actually finished at the Gala. From a marketer’s perspective, it was clearly branded — no mistaking the distinctive Campari red, and it was labeled in big letters anyway, identifying the brand and the name of the drink. It was memorable and everyone asked where to get one. It was clever and not too ostentatious. Even the straws reinforced the branding, but in a tasteful way.

Now here’s where things fall apart. Despite this marketing coup, no one can buy this product. And I heard many people say they would gladly purchase a six-pack of Sbagliatos (I was one of them). You can buy a cans of Pimm’s at convenience stores in the UK, yet in the United States, the Ready-To-Drink category is limited to pouches of awful slushy Margaritas made with fake lime flavoring. If Campari brought the canned Sbagliato product to market, I would consider it to be an outright marketing success. If not, it was just a clever flash-in-the-pan that will need to be topped again next year.

4 Batching Secrets from the Cocktail Pros

Rounds of peel cut from oranges during prep for Manhattan Cocktail Classic

As of this week, Cocktails for a Crowd is officially out there in the wild!

As I’m gearing up for the Manhattan Cocktail Classic this coming weekend and many of my favorite bartenders are winging their way into town, I’m thinking about one of my favorite parts of working on the book:  gathering advice (and recipes) from bartenders.

By design, this book owes a lot to mixologists. Many of the recipes are bartender originals, of course. But I got a kick out of asking bartenders to spill their secrets about batching (creating large batches of drinks), which often happens behind the scenes at events, cocktail conferences (like MCC) and bars, too.

Here are some of my favorite tips — some of this info is in the book, some not.

You can never have too much ice. That’s not a secret, of course. But Portland bartender Kelley Swenson explained how to figure out how much ice is enough:  for each 750 milliliters (3 1/4 cups) of cocktail (the size of a standard bottle of liquor), allot 7 pounds of ice.   Another useful metric: allot 1 to 1.5 pounds of ice per person. Either way, get what you need and then get some more, because (say it with me!) you can never have too much ice.

Mise en place is your best friend. The French culinary term mise en place means “putting in place.” If you’re throwing a soiree, before your guests arrive, put everything you’re making drinks with in place.  EVERYTHING! Squeeze the citrus, set the glassware where you can reach it, make sure you have all the liquor you need (and all the ice too)! When you go to a bar early in the evening and they’re bustling about even though you’re the only guest at the bar, that’s what they’re up to back there — mise en place. You should do it too.

Control the dilution. Watery drinks suck. This is one reason bartenders consider their ice so carefully. If you can use a large block of ice to chill a punch or even a pitcher of drinks, that’s ideal. It melts more slowly than a handful of ice cube tray ice cubes, which seem to dissolve in record time while your guests are still shrugging off their coats.

Jason Asher, head mixologist at Young’s Market of Arizona, was one of the first to flag for me that for batching purposes, you can add the water yourself, and then chill a drink in the refrigerator or set it on ice. “My rule of thumb is 25% to 30% water comes from dilution” caused by shaking a cocktail, he explained. (I worked with 20% to 25% as my baseline for the drinks in the book.) “For a stirred cocktail, I like to add ice, then stir it, taste it, and when it hits the right amount, then strain the ice out.” You wouldn’t want to do this too far in advance — but a few hours ahead, and it works beautifully.

Learn how to make oleosaccharum. I swear it’s the difference between a good punch and a great punch. Try it and see.  In brief, you muddle citrus peel with sugar, and then the magic ingredient is time. Wine Enthusiast recently published an oleosaccharum primer if you’d like more how-to detail.

Thanks for the advice, barkeep!

Introducing my new book – Cocktails for a Crowd!

On May 14, my new book, Cocktails for a Crowd, will officially hit the shelves!

This one has been in the works for a while. It’s all about batching cocktails for large groups — a concept that professional bartenders know well, but few at-home bartenders do.  If you’ve never heard of “batching” before, it’s what goes on behind the scenes at cocktail conferences and other events:  I have seen bartenders stirring up drinks for 200 people in giant plastic vats, stirring with what look like rowboat oars….and yet, when they’re dispatched into glasses and garnished with care, it looks (and tastes) like the drink was painstakingly made just for one.  So I asked some of the smartest bartenders I knew how that gets done — and how people can do it at home.

This book, which spans punches, pitchers, bottled cocktails and other large-format drinks,  includes updated classics as well as original cocktails from bartenders. (PS, I think this may be the first book to include a range of bottled cocktails!) The lovely photos were taken by Teri Lyn Fisher. I’m going to highlight some of my favorite drinks and techniques in coming weeks.

If you want to be one of the first to get your hands on a copy, it’s available for pre-order now. Perhaps you’re already thinking about summer entertaining or thinking about host/hostess gifts  – if so, I hope you’ll pick up a copy. Cheers!

Celery-spiked cocktail recipe: Green Hornet

My article, “Put A Stalk In It,” about celery-spiked cocktails, is in the May/June issue of Imbibe Magazine.

Although it may seem like an obscure ingredient for cocktails, once I started looking around, I found myself spotting celery everywhere, in various forms. Erick Castro has a Paloma riff at his new bar, Polite Provisions, subbing Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray soda in place of grapefruit Jarritos. Celery foam tops Bloody Marys.  A Celery Gimlet is on the menu at Saxon + Parole, one of my new favorite bars — with celery juice and Maldon sea salt. Celery shrub here. Celery bitters there. Celery seed-infused syrups. Housemade celery cordial at Dead Rabbit. In researching a separate article on Rock & Rye, I came across a 1902 reference to “La Rue’s Celery Rock & Rye.”  

It’s enough to make you want a good drink.  So here’s one to try. Although it didn’t fit into the Imbibe article, it’s a mighty refreshing cocktail nevertheless.

Green Hornet

Tona Palomino, Trenchermen, Chicago, IL

The menu description reads simply:  celery gin and tonic. “A lot of people thought it was celery gin,” notes Palomino. “Rather, it’s a celery-flavored gin and tonic.”

1.5 oz. gin

1.5 oz. fresh celery juice

3/4 oz. simple syrup

3/4 oz. lime juice

I dash  Bitter Truth Celery Bitters (optional)

1 oz.  tonic water

Measure everything but the tonic water into a cocktail shaker. Cover with ice and shake. Strain into a 12-ounce Collins glass filled with fresh ice. Top off with the tonic water.