What’s shakin, cocktail fans?
Welcome to Episode 171 of The Modern Bar Cart Podcast!
Thanks for joining us for this interview episode, where we track down the best and brightest minds in the spirits and cocktail world so that we can share their secrets with you. This time around, we have the perfect guest to help you get ready for making cocktails this holiday season. We’re joined by Aaron Goldfarb, author of the books Hacking Whiskey and, most relevant to this interview, Gather Around Cocktails: Drinks to Celebrate Usual and Unusual Holidays.
Aaron has been one of the most prolific spirits and cocktail writers of the past two decades, and he’s a self-professed eggnog fanatic, so you can imagine all the fun stuff we get into during this interview. You can reach him on Twitter @aarongoldfarb, and you can purchase his books wherever good books are sold.
In this convivial and wide-ranging chat, some of the topics we discuss include:
Aaron’s experience writing for major publications in the drinks space beginning in the early 2000s straight through the cocktail renaissance to today, including his recent Tales of the Cocktail Spirited Award for “Best Cocktail & Spirits Writing.”
The story of Gather Around Cocktails, which started with an Eggnog obsession, and grew into a book that’s on a mission to make parties more fun and less lame.
Of course, we do dig into eggnog a bit – talking about the most important tools and techniques for batching this rich, creamy drink and even some of the surprising ingredients you can use as dietary substitutes (lookin’ at you, avocado).
Then we take a trip around the calendar year, dipping in and out of seasons and occasions for drinking and learning about the little things you can do to crank your most festive occasions to 11.
We talk about everything from my yearly tradition of wearing tricorn hats and drinking colonial era punch while watching The Patriot every 4th of July to the innovative cocktails that Aaron and others have designed to complement traditional Jewish holidays, which can sometimes be solemn occasions.
Along the way, we cover why the gimlet is the perfect quarantine drink, how to order a frozen daiquiri in the style of Hunter S. Thompson, and much, much more.
But first, let’s pause for a moment so that you can make yourself a drink. This episode’s featured cocktail is the Gobbler, which is a cheeky culinary riff on your favorite boozy, stirred drinks. According to Aaron:
Eating a gigantic, gluttonous, tryptophan-laden meal is always fun. The only problem is that you don’t get to celebrate with friends. That’s why the last few years have seen the emergence of “Friendsgiving.” It’s a Thanksgiving but with the family you chose. It’s usually held a weekend or two before the real Thanksgiving, and I wanted to give it a cocktail with a little more oomph, one that mimics the flavors in everyone’s favorite leftovers sandwich, The Gobbler.
To make this large format cocktail, you’ll need:
1 ½ cups (i.e. 12 oz, i.e. half a bottle) of Wild Turkey 101 Bourbon
4 oz Laird’s Applejack (which is an American Apple Brandy)
4 oz spiced cranberry syrup (which we’ll cover in a second here)
24 dashes of celery bitters (there’s a lot of versions out there, but Aaron calls for a product by The Bitter Truth)
Now, the first thing you’re gonna want to do is make your cranberry syrup. For the full recipe, I’m going to refer you to the book, but it’s basically a combination of cranberries, sugar, dry white wine, and traditional holiday spices reduced to a delicious syrup on the stovetop, then strained and cooled.
Once you’ve got your syrup made and cooled down to at least room temperature, add it to a pitcher with the bourbon and the applejack and give them all a good stir. You’ll serve this drink on the rocks by pouring 2.5 oz of your booze and syrup mixture into the glass and then topping with 3 dashes of celery bitters and the coup de gras – a stuffing cube garnish.
You’re also gonna want to make those ahead of time, but they’re super easy. According to Aaron, all you need to do is preheat your oven to 400 degrees, mold and cut your favorite stuffing recipe into 1” cubes, place them on a baking sheet and drizzle with olive oil. After 10 minutes, you’ll flip them over, drizzle them with GRAVY this time, then bake until they’re dark brown and crisp. Once they’re cool you can serve these garnishes in your Gobbler cocktails on a cocktail pick, but if you don’t have those lying around, a toothpick will do just fine.
The first part of our conversation with Aaron revolves around his writing career. He began writing booze articles while he was on a quest to become a novelist in the early 2000s. Although Aaron did publish a few novels, he found a unique and innovative voice in the spirits and cocktail space. He initially spent a lot of time in the craft beer space, and then evolved into tracking the whiskey boom in the US, including its secondary online markets.
This year, he was honored by Tales of the Cocktail with a Spirited Award for “Best Cocktail and Spirits Writing” in response to his retrospective article on JaNee Nyberg’s 100-cocktail-video stint for Mahalo.com.
Then we transition into Aaron’s latest book, which was initially designed to be a book exclusively about eggnog, which is one of Aaron’s personal passions. It evolved into a 48-recipe book designed to celebrate the “usual” and “unusual” holidays in our culture that don’t necessarily have an official cocktail.
Gather Around Cocktails is both a self-renewing annual encyclopedia of custom (and often large-format) cocktails, and a technical guide to making great drinks for friends without a whole lot of sophisticated bar equipment. The recipes really do an excellent job of bridging the gap between fine culinary art and DIY punk drink recipes that celebrate an occasion without making the occasion too solemn.
According to Aaron, eggnog is one of the most fun and versatile cocktail formats out there. The combination of booze, sugar, and fat is always a winner. The keys to making it well, according to him, are plenty of space, a stand mixer (unless you have the forearms of Roger Federer), and some patience with the process.
If you’re trying to put together an eggnog for a crowd that has dietary restrictions or ethical preferences, Aaron suggests looking to avocado and aqua faba (chickpea water), respectively, as replacements for the fat and protein structures in eggs that give egg drinks their texture and consistency.
We mention a cocktail that didn’t quite make it into Gather Around Cocktails.. It’s a Bloody Mary garnished with a bagel & lox as featured at Buffalo & Bergen in Washington, DC (see below, right).
Regarding seasonality in cocktails, Aaron is of the opinion that spirits tend to be constants. You can drink gin and the winter and whiskey in the summer. But in his opinion, it’s the mixers and modifiers that really herald the season. For Thanksgiving, you use cranberries, and rosemary, and thyme. In the summer, you might turn to peaches, and cucumbers, and mint.
Regarding cocktails designed for traditional Jewish holidays, Aaron would like to clear the record by stating that Jews do like to drink. However, many Jewish holidays tend to be serious affairs where you fast for a whole day or spend many hours in temple. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t get creative with the constraints. In Gather Around Cocktails, Aaron sources and develops cocktails for holidays like Purim, Passover, and Hanukkah.
During the pandemic, I’ve been drinking a lot of gimlets. I’ve long had the daiquiri as my favorite cocktail, and the gimlet is basically a gin daiquiri. To me, it’s like alcoholic lemon-lime Gatorade.
I’m a big fan of egg whites. It turns some people off, but it adds so much beauty and texture to drinks without adding any flavor. I’m not sure what that says about me.
I once read a story about Tom Wolfe going out to dinner with Hunter S. Thompson, and Thompson just kept on ordering rounds of frozen daiquiris and he’d go: “another round!” I think I’d like to swap with Tom Wolfe there.
I never got around to tasting those activated charcoal cocktails. They kinda grossed me out, and it seems like their time has passed.
I hate canned cocktails, and I cannot believe this trend is catching on. We’ve spent the last 20 years rebelling against non-fresh ingredients, and now all of the sudden everyone is putting canned cocktails on the market and people are acting like we should be celebrating them.
This episode was produced by Edie Frederick, with editing and sound design by Samantha Reed, holiday cocktail insights courtesy of Aaron Goldfarb, and a little bit of interview magic by yours truly.
This has been a Modern Bar Cart production, copyright 2020.
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