The Cocktail Issue

WORD FROM THE PUBLISHER

You’re Cordially Invited A

By Joe Tetro

I heard the phrase “quaint little fishing village, with a drinking problem” many years ago. I thought it was a cute saying, and even bought the tee shirt one spring break in the Florida Keys. What I did learn over time was, several places describe themselves this way

A quick Google search pulled up towns in NY, Florida, and Alaska that all lay claim to the description. I think this begs the question: are fishing and drinking synonymous? Or can it mean that sun, salt water and a relaxed lifestyle just invite a refreshing beverage of the alcoholic variety?

We at TableScape Magazine do not suggest or condone anyone drinking to excess, and we beg you to be safe at all times. But we also feel the calling to imbibe occasionally, and where better to have that cocktail than on the beaches of Gulf Coast?

Join us as our Allison Marlow shares the history of everybody’s favorite milkshake, the Bushwacker. We visited with Fairhope’s Tongue & Groove, a craft cocktail bar with its finger on the pulse of what the locals are drinking. Our Pamela Brown even shares a mocktail from Kardea Brown's book entitled, The Way Home.

So, join us as we celebrate the beauty the Gulf Coast has to offer because as our good friend Julia Child said, “people that love food are always the best people.”

Salute’

J.Tetro

Bushwacker

A Signature Drink Named After A Dog

By Allison Marlow

Once upon a time, nearly 50 years ago, on a slow, wind-blown evening in a Caribbean bar, a gal named Angie crafted a tropical variation of the White Russian. As the bartender at the Ship's Store in Sapphire Village on St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, Angie served up her new concoction to anyone who would try it.

Weeks later, two tourists stopped by with their dog, named Bushwack. They fell in love with the drink and Angie fell in love with the dog. Her frothy, cool island gulp now had a name. The Bushwacker. Or so legend says. As does the website for www.Bushwacker.com

But the important part of this story is that the delicious cocktail grew to more than just a beachside novelty at the Ship's Store. It is now the signature drink of Alabama's beaches.

Never had one? Grab a napkin for this next part. We're gonna make your mouth water. Often served frozen, the Bushwacker usually includes rum, coffee liqueur, crème de cacao, cream of coconut and ice cream or milk and ice. Once blended and topped with whipped cream or chocolate syrup, it's a bit of heaven on a hot beach day. Over the years bartenders have crafted different variations, adding in an ingredient or two.

We humbly suggest you try our personal favorite take on the drink at Doc's Seafood Shack in Orange Beach which serves up a salted caramel variety with Blue Chair Bay Vanilla Rum. Heaven. Just heaven. But, why try just one? You'll be today years old when you learn that there is an official Bushwacker Trail in Gulf Shores in Orange Beach.

Whaaaaaat? Oh, yeah, there is!

Here's part of the lineup, courtesy of Gulf Shores and Orange Beach Tourism. It's three days of Bushwacker cocktails and Bushwacker inspired foods.

Start with breakfast on day one at Southern Shores Coffee in Gulf Shores for a Bushwacker-flavored cup of joe. At lunch, pair your Bushwacker with southern barbecue at Moe's Original Bar B Que. During a Gulf-side dinner at Cobalt at Caribe Resort, try the Bushwacker here served with chocolate syrup and a cherry on top. If you ' re still out when the moon rises, head to Pink Pony Pub for a late night Bushwacker crafted with Malibu rum, Irish creme, dark creme de cocoa and vanilla creme.

On day 2 order your Bushwacker and your dessert first! Coast AL in Orange Beach serves Bushwacker tiramisu all day long. Sail in to Yoho Rum & Taco's Boat Bar at the Wharf for lunch and pair your meal with this restaurant's chocolate version of the drink.

End your day with more dessert and have Bushwacker cheesecake at OSO at Bear Point Harbor. The dish includes an espresso and coconut cheesecake topped with a vanilla rum sauce.

The next morning as you head home, and can't bear to leave that deliciousness behind, grab a bag of Bushwacker coffee at The Southern Grind. It will inspire you in the days ahead.

Of course, you can create your own trail as you wind your way through Alabama's beach communities, too. Nearly every restaurant serves their version of the fabled frosty treat. In fact, there are enough varieties to blaze a new trail every time you visit. So set your heading and sail toward the seas. The most delicious summer drink awaits.

Mint Julep

INGREDIENTS

1 1/2 PARTS BOURBON

2 BUNCHES mint

1 PART simple syrup

1 SPLASH soda

DIRECTIONS

• In a julep cup, mix the mint sprigs with simple syrup and a splash of soda.

• Add fine crushed ice and pour in the bourbon.

• Lift out two mint leaves for garnish.

• Add powdered sugar over mint to add an optional frosted appearance

Old Fashioned

INGREDIENTS

• Whiskey

• Bitters (3 to 4 shakes)

• A Sugar Cube (1 teaspoon granulated white sugar)

• Large Ice Cube

• Orange Peel (optional)

• Luxardo Cherries (optional)

DIRECTIONS

1. Mix. Add the whiskey and a large ice cube. Stir vigorously for 10 seconds or until the liquid is chilled.

Muddle the sugar. If you’re going the classic sugar cube route, add it to a lowball glass, top with the water and bitters, and use a muddler (or the end of a wooden spoon) to muddle and stir the mixture until the sugar is nearly dissolved. If you’re using a liquid sweetener such as maple syrup or simple syrup, you can skip this step and stir the sweetener and bitters directly into the bourbon.

2. Garnish. Add a maraschino cherry or two, if desired. Gently twist the orange peel* directly over the glass, in order to express its oil, then drop the orange peel into the glass.

4.

3. Serve. Serve immediately and enjoy!

Moscow Mule

INGREDIENTS

• Vodka: Moscow mules are traditionally made with vodka.

• Lime: You'll need the juice for the drink and a wedge for garnish.

• Ice: Moscow mules are cold served over ice.

• Ginger beer: Not to be confused with ginger ale

DIRECTIONS

Making a Moscow mule is as simple as it gets.

Just add the ingredients to a mug and stir to combine

Book Nook

withPamelaBrown

FoodThatStaysHome

Nothing tastes better on a sweltering hot summer Southern day than a cool, refreshing cocktail. Kardea Brown, contemporary Southern cook and author of The Way Home: A Celebration of Sea Islands Food and Family with over 100 Recipes, offers some tasty ideas. But, as she writes in her book, “I am not much of a drinker. I never really developed a taste for wine and alcohol. But the South Carolina hostess in me loves the vibe of a fresh cocktail -- with or without the likka, as they say. ”

Kardea, host of the hit show Delicious Miss Brown on the Food Network, shows you how to put a non-alcoholic spin on cooling down with Ma's Blueberry Mocktail, a delightfully satisfying and thirst-quenching beverage for all ages. It features a homemade blueberry-honey-lemon syrup mixed with sparkling apple cider topped with sugared blueberries. In addition to the mocktail, in her new cookbook, Kardea offers alcoholic recipes for Lowcountry Mint Julep, because, as she says, “Who doesn’t enjoy the looks of a classic Southern julep.” You’ll also find Spicy Watermelon Sangria and Peachy Lemonade, that can also be made non-alcoholic.

The Way Home, Kardea’s first cookbook, features 125 original recipes with full-color photos for starters, main courses, sides, beverages, breakfast, desserts, and more. Some of the flavor-packed dishes include Seafood Potato Salad, Peach Dump Cake, Low Country Spaghetti, and Sweet Potato Cheesecake. In addition, Kardea shares family anecdotes, favorite memories, cooking tips, and more.

Growing up on South Carolina’s Wadmalaw Island, Kardea’s Ma was a strong influence on the celebrity chef, who appreciated watching her mother cook on Sundays in the kitchen. Her grandmother was also an influence. “Family was and is central to my soul,” writes Kardea who resides in Charleston. From those days watching her two matriarchs, Kardea went on to pursue a career in the food industry after working as a social worker and opened her first restaurant, the New Gullah Supper Club where she paid homage to the dishes her grandmother and mother passed down to her. After appearing on the Food Network, she became a star, appearing on hit shows such as Beat Bobby Flay and hosting Cupcake Championship. It was her Southern charm and down-home personality that captured people’s hearts and led her to her own show, Delicious Miss Brown, now in its 9th season, filmed at her Edisto Island estate. She also hosted The Great Soul Food Cookoff on OWN.

The Way Home is Kardea’s love letter to her family with multigenerational recipes and celebrates the Gullah GeeChee, a distinct group of African Americans living in the coastal areas of South Carolina and Georgia who have preserved much of their West African language, culture, and cuisine. Calling her cooking style “New Gullah,” Kardea keeps the tradition of her slave ancestors alive, uniting West African herbs, spices, and grains with her own modern Southern cooking.

Proud of her heritage, Kardea hopes The Way Home inspires home cooks to bring a taste of the Lowcountry South into their own kitchens. “Gullah people laid the foundation for Southern cooking. Before farm-to-table was a fad, it was what Gullah people did,” she explains. “I want to show the world that soul food is not monolithic. It’s so much more than fried chicken and vegetables cooked in pork. It’s seasonal, fresh, and delicious!”And a refreshing beverage perfectly caps off the meal!

Ma’s Blueberry Mocktail

SERVES

4

INGREDIENTS

1 cup frozen or fresh blueberries, thawed

½ cup water

½ cup honey

Juice of 1 lemon

1 750-millileter bottle sparkling apple cider

Fresh blueberries, for garnish (optional)

⅓ cup honey, for garnish (optional)

⅓ cup sugar, for garnish (optional)

INSTRUCTIONS

Place the blueberries in a small saucepan. Add the water, then stir in the honey. Heat over medium-high heat until the mixture comes to a low boil and the blueberries just start to break apart. Turn the heat down to low and simmer until the sauce is nicely thickened, 2 to 3 minutes. Remove from the heat and stir in the lemon juice. Strain through a mesh strainer. Set aside until ready to serve. Place 1 tablespoon of the cooled blueberry syrup at the bottom of each champagne glass. Top with the sparkling apple cider.

To make the optional sugared blueberry garnish, coat fresh blueberries in the honey, then roll in the sugar. Place 3 sugared blueberries on a metal skewer or toothpick and use to garnish a mocktail. Repeat for each mocktail.

Excerpted from

Martini

INGREDIENTS

2 1/2 ounces gin

1/2 ounce dry vermouth

1 dash orange bitters

Garnish: lemon twist

DIRECTIONS

• Add the gin, dry vermouth, and orange bitters into a mixing glass with ice and stir until very cold.

• Strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

• Garnish with a lemon twist.

3 5 0 W I T H M A T T B A

N F I E L D

In this edition of 350 , we had an opportunity to sit down with Matt Banfield, of Tongue & Groove Drinkery in Fairhope, Alabama.

TS: What do you see going on in the craft cocktail business today?

MB: For the past three years or so, espresso martinis have been big. Coffee cocktails in general. Many bartenders now are tired of making the same old espresso martinis so they’re branching out, trying new things. That’s one of the main things I see going on. And then Old Fashioned as well. We’re known for our Old Fashioned here, there are a lot of bad Old Fashioned out there, so I tell first timers “Hey, try ours, if you don’t like it, I’ll make you whatever you want.” And they try ours and immediately they love it. Everyone has their take on a classic drink like that, so I suggest you try them in multiple establishments.

TS: So, like food, is the quality of your cocktail based on the quality of your ingredients?

MB: For the most part, yes. We use fresh ingredients here. Lemon and lime juice, are juiced in house. All of our syrups are made in house. We don’t buy any pre-made syrups. Our different fruit syrups are made with fresh fruit, cooked down, we add sugar and water, strain the pulp out, and then that’s what we use as our fruit syrups here. So, yeah, we don’t go buying stuff from the grocery store.

TS: What’s the difference between making a cocktail at home and making a cocktail here?

MB: Oh, at home I stir with my finger

TS: What does your average person do differently, or that they can improve upon, at home?

MB: I’d say, learn proper technique and get a good set of tins. People have asked how we get our Cold Brew Martini so frothy. I tell them a good set of tins and a good hard shake. Most people don’t know the proper shaking technique. They just think, “I just need to shake it up a little bit.,” and that’s it. There’s really technique in how hard you shake certain cocktails and how long you shake certain cocktails that get the aeration and the texture that you get when you come to a place like this.

TS: So, the old story of “bruising the gin” that’s actually true, or no?

MB: Well, so, I’m not a scientist in that regard I don’t believe it’s true. I don’t think you ’ re going to damage the spirit by over-shaking it, especially gin. I mean, traditionally, a gin martini is supposed to be stirred, and it’s mostly so you don’t have those ice crystals in your drink. That’s the bruising part — when you break the ice up into such fine pieces that it ends up in your drink.

TS: Talk to me about your liquors. What are the big sellers these days?

MB: Tito’s, always. Our well vodka is Tito’s we don’t have any of the no-name, knockoff stuff that many people use in their rails. That’s why our well vodka soda is $10, not $3 because we ’ re using premium products here. Tito’s is a big seller. Whiskey-wise, we ’ ve got a pretty extensive whiskey selection. The biggest sellers are probably Woodford and Basil Hayden and Elijah Craig is a big seller. And we ’ ve got some really cool allocated stuff that. They have a higher price tag, but they still move pretty well.

TS: Can you tell our readers what allocation really means? What it amounts to?

MB: Yeah, so, essentially, these distilleries, they have these products that are aged 10, 12, 15, 18 years, and when you ’ re holding on to a product for that long, when you release it, there’s only so much available. So, they allocate certain amounts to the different states and, here in the state of Alabama, everything that we get behind the bar, or even any mom-and-pop liquor store, has to come from the state store the Alabama ABC Store. So, the Alabama ABC gets allocated a certain number of products and then each store in the state gets allocated a certain amount of that product.

Therefore, if we have a distributor who, say, has Tito’s in their portfolio, and then, say they also have Buffalo Trace in their portfolio. If we go through enough Tito’s, they make sure that some of that allocation of Buffalo Trace that comes through our Fairhope store gets assigned to us. That’s the basics of how it works.

TS: So, I’ve seen people line up outside the ABC Store, and that’s because there’s a limited amount of the premium stuff?

MB: Yeah, and I know it’s changed in the state a few times, but my understanding now is that it’s a lottery. I talk to people who come in here, and they tell me about how long they waited and what they were able to get. You know, it’s all wonderful stuff. And then they don’t open it, you know? I’m like, open it. Take a sip. Try it, it’s not going to go bad.

TS: What advice would you give somebody about drinking well? If somebody came in and said they weren’t a big drinker, but they’d love a cocktail, what would you talk to them about?

MB: So, I’d start out especially if it’s somebody who’s new to it I’d start off asking a few basic taste questions. I’ll ask them some basic flavor profile questions. So, like, do you like something a little more fruity? Do you like something sweeter? Do you like something not sweet? If it’s somebody new to drinking, they probably don’t want an Old Fashioned because that’s going to be booze-forward, maybe a little too heavy for them. But, yeah, I’d try to ask them a few of those basic flavor profile questions to see where their taste lies, and then make them something that, hopefully, they’ll enjoy.

I didn’t start drinking until I was probably about 26 I’m 39 now, and when I started drinking, I was drinking Redd’s Apple Ale, then I got into drinking more craft beers, and then one day I went back to try Redd’s Apple Ale because I hadn’t had it in a while, and I couldn’t drink it. It was just sugar water to me. Your tastes change.

So, yeah, with somebody new, I might start them with something lighter, easier to drink, not super booze-forward. And then, eventually, gradually, they’ll potentially get into, like, a martini or an Old Fashioned or a Manhattan something stirred, boozy, more effective, I guess.

TS: What do you like to drink?

MB: Customers constantly ask me to, “Just make me your favorite drink,” and I’m like, “I’m sure you don’t want a shot of Jameson and a Michelob ULTRA,” because that’s my go-to.

TS: Is that your favorite Irish Whiskey?

MB: Oh, yeah. I mean, I call it my Daily Driver. (Although, you probably shouldn’t call it a Daily Driver)… That’s my go-to because it’s the best thing for the price. We have to watch our pennies too.

The Luck of the Irish in a Cup

By Jax Petro

My friend Micky is proud of his Irish heritage. During Easter brunch last month he said, “the best Irish Coffee I've ever had was at the Slane Distillery, about an hour north of Dublin, in an old horse stable, now a cool bar.”

Irish Coffee often means a haphazard mixture of booze, cream, and coffee, something close to a hot whiskey milkshake. He said at Slane, the Irish Coffee was precisely what he needed on a chilly, drizzly day: a double shot of espresso cut with good whiskey and sweetened just slightly with vanilla-infused Demerara syrup, topped with a softly whipped cream and orange-flavored chocolate shavings. It sounded perfect to me and made me look at my sad little cup. He went on about it being the exact right proportion of coffee to cream and syrup, barely sweet, anchored by the notes of vanilla and sherry in the whiskey. He gave me the ammo I needed to write this article, and I’m glad I did.

Irish Coffee, like so many St. Patrick's Day culinary standbys, is more IrishAmerican than Irish. Like many cocktails, the origin story is somewhat murky, but the most popular version claims created in 1952 at the Buena Vista restaurant in San Francisco, after a patron wanted to recreate a popular coffee drink he enjoyed at the Shannon airport. The original cocktail features aged, frothed cream, two sugar cubes, hot coffee, and Irish whiskey, but as the drink spread, different formulations took hold. If you order an Irish Coffee today, you'll often get something much creamier and sweeter, sometimes including Irish cream liqueur or commercial flavored syrups.

Irish Coffee, made properly, doesn't just taste delicious, it can look like a beautiful layered cocktail. Jillian Vose, Irish Coffee expert and former beverage director of The Dead Rabbit (yes, think Gangs of New York) in Manhattan, notes that using too large a glass is one of the biggest mistakes she sees in making an Irish Coffee. The ideal ratio is one ounce of whiskey to six ounces of coffee a fairly small serving. "This should be a session drink. Using a large glass makes for a boozy, bitter coffee and under sweetened drink typically,” Vose said. “It'll also get cold halfway through with a larger serve. ”

Similarly, since coffee is such a big part of the drink, you want strong, freshly brewed stuff that you like to drink. Many inferior Irish Coffees go wrong from the start, using weak coffee and then trying to cover it up with too many additions. Instead, break out the good stuff, or at least coffee that you'd drink a fresh cup of without complaint. “Don't use old coffee,” Vose said. “It makes for a burnt taste.”

Using a small amount of sweetener is another opportunity to elevate the drink. “For example, we use a vanilla-infused syrup to highlight the vanilla notes that come from our virgin oak cask, one of the three casks we use when maturing our blend,” noted Alex Conyngham, the co-founder of Slane Distillery. At Slane, they use two-thirds part syrup to one part whiskey, but at home, use a teaspoon of simple syrup and taste as you go until you hit a balance with the coffee and whiskey that works for you.

The bartending team at Slane Distillery built the Irish Coffee around the whiskey itself. Use a whiskey you'd drink neat. Old standbys like Jameson and Bushmills work well, but there's a some newer Irish whiskies to consider, like Slane and Teeling.

The same goes for the whipped cream on top. Skip the stuff that comes out of a can, and opt for heavy cream, whipped until it has thickened but not yet stiff. To get the most out of this cocktail, you really need to drink it with lightly whipped heavy cream, trust me. Whip your cream until it bubbles, but before it peaks.

To achieve that perfect layer of cream, spoon it onto the coffee gently you want it to float on top, merging into the coffee slowly as you ' re drinking it, rather than blending in all at once.

Who knew that something as simple as a cup of coffee/ whiskey could be so transformative. Thanks to Micky and Martin Scorsese, I think a trip to Manhattan is in order. Dublin would be great, but it is baseball season and I hear the Bronx calling my name.