COCKTAIL TIMES

THE EDITOR OF THE NEWLY RELEASED THE NEW YORK TIMES ESSENTIAL BOOK OF COCKTAILS, ELEVATED AND EXPANDED SHARES HOW THE COLLECTION CAME TO BE—AND THE ROLE NORTHERN MICHIGAN PLAYS IN HIS LOVE OF MIXOLOGY.

BY ELIZABETH EDWARDS

His work as deputy editor of The New York Times International Edition w rapped for the day, Steve Reddicliffe is carefully mixing four Mezcal Negronis at the kitchen counter in his Glen Arbor home—the once-upon-atime family summer place where he has lived and worked since the pandemic. The fortunate recipients of the sexy, burnt-orange-colored cocktails are his wife, Connie, photographer/editor Allison Jarrell here to shoot this story, and me. As he hands them out—one c hunky cube clinking in the middle of each rocks glass—we all slip out to the deck with its breathtaking view of Sleeping Bear Bay. While the sun lowers into sheer clouds, casting diffused sparkles over pewter water, Reddicliffe talks about his long career in journalism, and the cocktails that have been stirred, shaken and sipped throughout it.

Back in 2012, when Reddicliffe was the deputy editor of The Times Travel section, his friend and fellow editor, Michael Winerip, asked him to write a column called “A Quiet Drink.” It ran with the tagline: “Bars and restaurants where one can have grown-up conversation over a good drink.” Reddicliffe obliged, indulging in careful research primarily throughout the NYC area, but in one case, while visiting his in-laws at their Glen Arbor cottage, he departed, writing about Trattoria Stella in Traverse City. “It must have looked like I got hammered and went on an incredible jag to Michigan,” Reddicliffe says with a laugh. “I love that bar.”

A year or so later, Reddicliffe was asked to edit a definitive tome on cocktails for Th e Times. He agreed and launched into a two-year deep dive of the paper’s cocktail coverage, beginning with mint juleps in 1886 and including recipes from the renowned food editor, Craig Claiborne—a man who loved a good cocktail as much as a fine dinner. The first edition of The New York Times Essential Book of Cocktails was released in 2015. Five years later, the ne wspaper asked Reddic liffe to refresh it. Released last year, the “Elevated and Expanded” edition is packed with beautiful pictures of great drinks as well as a slew of new recipes.

In the meantime, the transition from New York life to Glen Arbor has been an easy one for the Reddicliffes; the colorful bar scene up here helps, they say, and they both love making the cocktail recipes from this very magazine, pulling inspiration from the seasonal, freshpicked ingredients. The couple has even been inspired to do a bit of Up North foraging. “This is a beautiful place with many cocktail possibilities,” Reddicliffe says. “Yes, snipping at dusk,” he says with a chuckle, recalling a lilac bush at the edge of the woods that he passed recently and a lilac cocktail syrup he wanted to make.

Over the decades, Reddicliffe has enjoyed cocktails around the world at places famous and not-so famous (an Amore Amaro at Bar Sotto in Paris, The Victorian at Billy Sunday in Chicago, a Black Manhattan at Alice in Omaha all pop to his mind). Cherished also are his memories of the fine martinis he and Connie enjoyed with his parents, Violet and Don Reddicliffe, on this deck, when they owned the cottage. “Cocktails are a ritual. A punctuation at the end of the day,” he says. “They are fun to drink, fun to make and fun to drink with other people—people are just happier when you give them a good drink in a pretty glass.”

Mezcal Negroni

Yield: 1 drink

Americans have been ordering classic cocktails with mezcal instead of the typical spirits. One of the most popular is the mezcal Negroni, in which the gin is replaced with the smoky agave spirit. The switch works well because mezcal is as assertive in its flavors as gin is, and can stand up to flavorful tough customers like sweet vermouth and Campari. A number of different mezcals work well in this mix; Del Magueys Vida brand is a good place to start in your experimenting.

—By Robert Simonson

1 ounce mezcal

1 ounce sweet vermouth

1 ounce Campari Orange twist, for garnish

1. Combine liquid ingredients in a mixing glass three-quarters filled with ice. Stir until chilled, about 30 seconds.

2. Strain into a chilled coupe glass.

3. Squeeze the orange twist over the surface, then slip it into the drink. Alternately, this drink can be served in a rocks glass over ice, also with an orange twist.

Batched 50/50 Martini

Yield: 6 (3 ¾-ounce) drinks

Martinis are bound to kick up strong opinions that tend to intensify as more martinis are consumed. Gin versus vodka. Shaken versus stirred. Dirty? How dirty? Olives, lemon twist or both? This batched recipe makes the biggest decisions for you: Gin — the spirit of choice — is paired with vermouth in equal measure, a ratio that means you and your guests can and should pour freely. From there, the drinker has full control to dirty and garnish to their heart’s content.

—By Rebekah Peppler

9 ounces dry gin

9 ounces dry vermouth

4½ ounces filtered water

Lemon twists, green olives, olive brine, cocktail onions and orange bitters, for serving

1. Combine the gin, vermouth and water in a spouted measuring cup or pitcher, or a medium bowl. Pour the cocktail blend, using a funnel if needed, into a 750-milliliter bottle; seal, and chill in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours or up to 2 weeks. (You can also freeze the 50/50 martini for several hours before serving.)

2. To serve, pour 3 ¾ ounces into a coupe glass and serve immediately with assorted garnishes.

Frozen Tom Collins

Yield: 6-8 drinks

Think of this frozen drink as a Tom Collins meets Italian lemon ice: It’s refreshingly sweet-tart, boozy and fully capable of giving you brain freeze in a painfully nostalgic way. Since colder temperatures can shift the way we perceive sweetness, frozen drinks read less sweet on the palate and thus require a bit more added sugar to balance flavors. This recipe employs a final flourish of syrupy maraschino cherries, stirred in to taste. If you’re skipping the cherries or don’t have time to run out to stock up, you can simply add a bit more simple syrup to taste while blending. You’ll lose the brilliant color contrast—and the outright fun of snacking on ice-cold, candylike cherries— but, like most good drinks, this one’s adaptable.

—By Rebekah Peppler

8 ounces gin

6 ounces fresh lemon juice (from 3 to 4 large lemons)

4 ounces simple syrup

5 to 6 cups cracked or crushed ice cubes Maraschino cherries and syrup, preferably Luxardo, for serving

1. In an airtight container, combine the gin, lemon juice and simple syrup. Seal and refrigerate until thoroughly chilled, at least 4 hours or overnight.

2. Transfer the chilled mixture to the blender, add the ice and blend until smooth and slushy.

3. Divide the mixture among 6 lowball glasses; garnish each with a few cherries and a drizzle of cherry syrup. Serve immediately, and store any extras in the freezer in a covered container until ready to enjoy.

Simple Syrup

Sugar is called for in many cocktails, both new and classic. While plain sugar can certainly be used to make these drinks, simple syrup—which is nothing more than sugar water—often leads to a better integration of ingredients and consistency of texture, with no stray granules lingering at the bottom of the glass.

—By Robert Simonson

1. Simmer equal parts sugar and water over a low flame until the sugar has dissolved.

2. Let the solution cool. It will keep for a week. Store it in the fridge in a sealed container.

3. If you’re in a hurry, shake the sugar and water in a sealed container until the sugar disappears.

Gin Cidre

Yield: 1 drink

Bright, botanical and lightly bubbly, this cocktail is an ideal entry point to fall drinking—and one that can easily take you straight through to spring. Look to a cider that’s dry, light and not overly powerful in acid or funk here: You want the botanicals of the gin and the salinity of the sherry to play an equal role in balancing the drink.

—By Rebekah Peppler

¾ ounce gin

¾ ounce fino sherry

½ ounce orange liqueur

½ ounce fresh lime juice

2 dashes orange bitters

Ice

2 ounces light, dry cider, chilled

1. In a shaker, combine the gin, sherry, orange liqueur, lime juice and bitters. Add ice, cover and shake vigorously until the drink is well chilled, about 15 seconds.

2. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass and top with cider.

Nonalcoholic: Chamomile Lime Rickey

Yield: 1 drink

A floral twist on a classic, this delicious fizzy limeade is the perfect front-porch sipper on a warm afternoon. The chamomile adds some sunshine to this refresher, and little ones will love it as well. You just might find yourself making — or craving—this every summer weekend.

—By Cassie Winslow

¼ cup freshly squeezed lime juice, plus more to taste

2 tablespoons Chamomile Simple Syrup (see below), plus more to taste

Ice

8 ounces seltzer water

Thin lime slices or a fresh organic edible chamomile flower, for garnish

1. Combine the lime juice and chamomile simple syrup in a large (16- to 18-ounce) tumbler and stir to combine. Taste and add more lime juice or syrup, if you’d like.

2. Fill with ice, top off with the seltzer and gently mix to combine. Garnish with lime slices, or an organic edible flower, if you are feeling extra fancy.

Chamomile Simple Syrup

Yield: About 1 cups

Chamomile has a sweet, earthy flavor, and makes a lovely simple syrup that may soon become a staple in your refrigerator. Not only is this syrup delicious in a cocktail or mocktail, it is also wonderful drizzled on French toast, or vanilla ice cream with fresh berries. You can even use it to sweeten iced coffee.

1 cup granulated sugar, preferably organic ½ cup filtered water

3 individual bags of chamomile tea a liberated landscape

1. Place sugar and filtered water in a small saucepan and set over medium heat. Bring to a simmer, stirring occasionally, until the sugar has dissolved, about 5 minutes.

2. Remove from heat and add the chamomile tea bags. Steep for 10 minutes, then discard tea bags.

3. Let cool to room temperature, then transfer to an airtight container and store in the fridge for up to 2 weeks.

/ Seven years ago, Megan Gilger came close to letting her popular Fresh Exchange lifestyle blog wither on the vine. Instead, she dug deeper, put down new roots and weeded out what she didn’t value until she grew what did.

/ by Lynda Twardowski Wheatley

ffor megan gilger, 2009 was the best of times and the worst of times. Newly graduated with a design degree and unemployed—thanks to a job offer that had tanked with the Great Recession—Gilger found her great post-grad expectations dashed, and herself, like her packed and previously bound-forCalifornia boxes, rerouted to Traverse City for an extended layover in her parent’s basement.

The situation wasn’t all bad. It was summertime Up North. Her boyfriend, Mike, similarly degreed and likewise unemployed, opted to join her in the basement rather than head home to Texas. And in between applying for jobs and freelancing, Gilger worked in her dad’s garden.

Playing among the plants was a comfort. After nearly two decades away, Gilger got to recapture a bit of her childhood Up North, when her grandpa’s Harbor Springs home was her daycare and his one-acre garden their playground.

Kneeling in the dirt as a grown woman, yanking weeds and wheedling robust stalks from gangly sprouts as her grandpa had taught her, Gilger felt the worrisome what-ifs and restless what-nexts fall away like fistfuls of loam through her fingers.

It wasn’t long before uncertainty and basement living were in the rearview. She and Mike ultimately bucked traditional employment, formed their own design studio—logos and branding mostly—and rented a little house off M-72. Megan started a new garden. They married, traveled, moved to North Carolina for a few years, started a garden there. Moved back to Michigan, started another.

Along the way, Gilger documented their experiences on Fresh Exchange, a blog she had started in early 2010. “It was just this fun thing, like, ‘We went on a hike,’” she says. “It wasn’t anything super serious.”

Until it was.

Following a series of photo drops chronicling a trip to Paris, Gilger’s blog readership boomed. Sponsors came calling. By 2016, Fresh Exchange had evolved into a lifestyle blog—a full-time, fully monetized one.

It’s a feat many decades-long bloggers would cut off both index fingers to achieve, except for one thing: This particular lifestyle blogger no longer wanted the world watching her life.

Like her grandpa before her, Gilger is a big believer in bringing kids into her garden, chaos and all. “I’ve just embraced it. Their story here is as important as mine,” she says. “It’s not about me controlling the garden. My grandfather never did. I would bite the heads off his broccoli, and he never got mad— he thought it was funny. He never approached it in a way where, ‘This is my space,’ and I never approach it that way either.”

Behind Fresh Exchange’s serene garden scenes, there are countless stories about the chickens tearing out veggies Gilger just planted, a toddler who lived to climb and collapse her bean trellis, a baby who loved to wake up early from her naps the moment Mom got knee-deep in a garden project. Gilger drops the occasional blooper reel to keep the lush life real and remind fans that, “There’s always something. You’re just human, and it’s nature. It’s going to be messy in some way. I think it’s just about finding the beauty among that.”

Kneeling in the dirt as a grown woman, yanking weeds and wheedling robust stalks from gangly sprouts as her grandpa had taught her, Gilger felt the worrisome what-ifs and restless what-nexts fall away like fistfuls of loam through her fingers.

“When my son was born, I questioned it all,” she says. “I was encouraging people to buy things, and that’s how I made money. I didn’t feel good about that. It’s easy to enjoy in some way, but there’s no deeper value to it. I wanted to be able to tell my son … ‘This is what I do,’ and for it to have an impact on the world in a positive way.”

During those first bleary-eyed post-partum months, Gilger says she didn’t know what she wanted, but she was clear on what she didn’t: “I didn’t want to take sponsored content anymore. I didn’t want to do graphic design. And I didn’t want my kids to grow up in a photo shoot.”

While Mike headed up the studio, Gilger decided to tighten Fresh Exchange’s field of view, whittling down its wide capture of her entire life to a narrower, but perhaps more revelatory, look at life itself at its most basic and accessible: the interplay of sun, soil, seeds and water.

The shift wasn’t so abrupt. As in Gilger’s own life, gardening and nature had always had a place on her blog. So, while finishing out her contractual obligations with Fresh Exchange’s sponsors, she began devoting more blog content to food, its origins, farmers markets, the changes that come with each season. She volunteered on a farm in Leelanau, picked the brains of local chefs and digested more and more about growing native plants and food in ways that regenerate the soil rather than deplete it.

Around the same time, she and Mike were building their first home, on a hillside south of Cedar. Conveniently—or perhaps not—it wasn’t the lush, fertile ground her 50,000-plus Instagram fans and blog subscribers gape at today.

Save for a few trees and a two-track, Gilger says, “This land was just gravel. It was gross. There was nothing here. There weren’t even birds, only hawks. It was almost silent.”

To see what crowns and cascades from their hilltop today is to first experience awe and, admittedly, next, envy. From a slope of scrub and sand, the Gilgers have liberated a landscape of native trees, shrubs, grasses and multiple gardens— perennial, kitchen, pollinator.

The scent of lavender wafts by on the same breeze that tickles tall fans of native bluestem and switch grasses, palmsized leaves of wayward grapevines. As butterflies, birds and bees bandy about clusters of strawberries and spinach, a harem of chickens cluck and scratch at the ground beneath sunflowers and anise hyssop.

What the idyllic scene doesn’t show but Gilger is quick to note is that Shugart Builders built the family a home without removing a single tree or sapling. The Gilgers then put in retaining walls and created a five-year plan for the property that, as Gilger hoped, “gave back to the ecosystem.”

And finally, there are the last five years Gilger has spent, back hunched and usually bone-tired in the dirt, over the keyboard, or in the kitchen, feeding and tending to the soil, the plants, the kids (her second child, a daughter, arrived after the couple installed the raised beds in 2019) to bring her sponsor-free vision for Fresh Exchange to life.

But growing Fresh Exchange’s membership community, writing an e-book, creating instructional courses (five and counting), drawing up pre-drafted and tailored-to-buyer garden plans, recording a bi-weekly podcast, hosting free online workshops and more—for Gilger anyway—has been and will likely continue to be a lot like gardening itself.

“My grandpa set a really strong tone in my life about the power of our connection to nature. And also taught me how fun and exciting gardening can be,” she says. “I really do try to have a good time with it. And that’s what I am always trying to instill in people because I think we need places that aren’t about achieving or controlling, that aren’t about any of that. It’s about connecting with yourself, connecting with nature and enjoying the process of what it is, more than anything.”

Lynda Twardowski Wheatley is an award-winning writer specializing in stories that showcase Michigan travel and recreation, history and the passionate folks who make this place so extraordinary. ltwriter.com

Mike Gilger is the lens behind Fresh Exchange and a product designer for Google. When not working, he can be found skiing, standup paddleboarding or wrangling chickens and kids with Megan.

Point Betsie’s glamour is undeniable. With her timeless beauty, miles of Benzie County shoreline and sprawling Lake Michigan views, this 1858 icon is a stunner any time of day, any season. Of Michigan’s more than 120 lights, Betsie is largely considered one of the most photographed, and we can see why—whether it’s a stormy sunset or a blue-sky afternoon, she’s the kind of romantic luminary worthy of wall art. Here, four photographers, drawn to Betsie’s magnetic charm time and again, tell us why a trip to this alluring muse isn’t just a one-and-done photo op—it’s an awe-inspiring experience that lingers with all who visit her shores.