Episode 289 – The Bartender’s Pantry with Jim Meehan

Play Subscribe

Listen On:

Previous Episode

Episode 289 – The Bartender’s Pantry with Jim Meehan

What’s shakin, cocktail fans?

Welcome to Episode 289 of The Modern Bar Cart Podcast! I’m your host, Eric Kozlik. Thanks for joining me for this interview episode, where I track down the best and brightest minds in the spirits and cocktail world so that I can share their secrets with you.

This time around, I’m joined by Jim Meehan (@mixography), he’s an OG leader, mentor, and steward of the cocktail renaissance, which I think can best be traced through some of the accolades he’s received over the years. In 2009, he was honored by Tales of the Cocktail with a Spirited Award for “American Bartender of the Year” and his program at PDT in New York City was named “World’s Best Cocktail Bar.” In 2012, the James Beard Foundation also honored PDT as its “Outstanding Bar Program,” and Tales awarded his first publication The PDT Cocktail Book as its “Best New Cocktail Book.” In 2018, when his second book, Meehan’s Bartender Manual, was published, he was once again recognized with a flurry of awards.

But as great as his past publications are, we’re here to talk about a brand new book! In this wide-ranging conversation with cocktail expert and bar mentor Jim Meehan, author of The Bartender’s Pantry, some of the topics we discuss include:

How ingredient sourcing and processing ties into the exercise of integrity–not just in sourcing the highest “quality” ingredients, but also exploring how your purchasing power plays into our larger agricultural and economic systems.
The way that Jim and his illustrator, Bart Sasso, used procedural graphics to create a four-dimensional rendering of the ingredient prep recipes. I’ve never seen illustrations as clever as these in a cocktail or a cookbook, and I think you’ll love them.
Why the process of being a good cocktail generalist actually forces you to become a micro-specialist in many different facets of cooking and mixology.
The importance of taking ingredients and recipes seriously while also preserving the magic of fun and playfulness in cocktails.
The fascinating, delicious gray area that opens up when you realize that the ingredients you’re transforming in the kitchen are also transforming YOU
And much, much more.

Episode 289 – The Bartender’s Pantry with Jim Meehan

Featured Cocktail: The Malabar Silver Corn Fizz

This episode’s featured cocktail, courtesy of The Bartender’s Pantry, is the Malabar Silver Corn Fizz. To make it, you’ll need:

1 ½ ounces Mellow Corn bonded corn whiskey
1 ounce Corn Water (which is the water from a can of corn enhanced with a little bit of salt)
½ oz Malabar Honey Syrup (a spiced syrup, the recipe for which can be found in the book)
1 large egg white
1 ounce dry sparkling white wine

Add the whiskey, corn water, syrup, and egg white to a Boston shaker. Shake without ice. Add a scoop of ice cubes and shake again. Add the sparkling wine, then double strain through a Hawnthorne and a fine-mesh strainer into a chilled 8-ounce coupe.

According to Jim:

“Using spices to enhance a syrup is a simple but impactful strategy to employ during recipe development. The original version of this recipe–the Silver Corn Fizz, created in the summer of 2009 for PDT–used honey syrup and a Tennessee whiskey with a corn-forward mash bill. When I began exploring how I could amplify the cocktail’s “corniness,” chef Wylie Dufresne steered me toward canned corn because it’s easier to work with and just as good (or better, in his opinion) than fresh kernels. I enhanced the elemental honey syrup in the original recipe with a Malabar infusion.”

I love this cocktail for a number of reasons. From an efficiency standpoint, it can be made at all times of the year thanks to the stability of its ingredients (both the canned corn and the spices). This is a huge win whether you’re running a big ol’ cocktail program or a humble home bar. But The Malabar Silver Corn Fizz also shows how the different ingredient categories featured in The Bartender’s Pantry (in this case, both spices and vegetables) can braid into one another and create these amazing little fusion moments in the glass.

An interest in cocktails is, after all, a journey more than anything else, and this evolution of a cocktail that graced the menu of one of the world’s best cocktail bars a decade and a half ago is living proof that there’s always room to tinker and build on what you already know.

This episode was made possible with editing and sound design by Samantha Reed and cocktail ingredient and bar pantry insights courtesy of Jim Meehan. This has been a Direct Fire Studios production, copyright 2024.

Featured Cocktail: The Malabar Silver Corn Fizz

Leave a Reply Cancel reply