For Loyal Nine's Yacht Rock Sunday, I was inspired by a guest's call for a Zucca Spritz akin to the more common call for an Aperol one. In thinking about amari and carbonation, I decided to go in the direction of Michael McIlroy's Rome with a View . In the end, my formulation took the shape of a Zucca and dry vermouth Daisy replete with citrus, orange liqueur, and soda water. With nothing all that Italian sounding in yacht rock playlist song titles, I opted for an A-ha moment with Take on Me.

So it's definitely fall where I live, and the animals know it. Trees are starting to turn, deer are wandering on the hillside, and a boy's thoughts turn to cooler weather drinks. I imagine this to be something you might drink out of a flask while out hunting. It certainly brings to mind damp cold mornings and forced stillness and quiet while the animal world wakes up.

As a cocktail enthusiast, Dave wanted to learn how to make a great, balanced, cocktail, and this is one of his experiments created in 2020 that became popular.

I've been intrigued by how to use Creme de Violette outside of a few tried-and-true cocktails, but find it pretty florally aggressive. I decided to try something different - one of the main flavor compounds in violet is alpha-anole; I tried combining different elements of a ~sort-of Daisy that all included alpha-anole as part of their chemistry. (Celery, grapes, blackberries, grapefruit.)

Named after a french song of Sacha Distel, very relaxing...

At the gin bar that I was working at, I created this after having recently made a guest The Drink of Laughter and Forgetting. I thought about how well Green Chartreuse and Cynar pair, and my mind then lept to how both liqueurs partner well with curaçao. For a structure, I considered a sweet vermouth-gin direction akin to the Bijou, and for a name, I dubbed it after our location in the Continuum Building -- a newly built apartment complex with stores and restaurants on the first floor and across from Harvard Business School.

For a private holiday party yesterday, the two bartenders working the event were tasked to come up with a drink to serve to 150 guests. Since the other bartender went with a shaken drink, I went with a stirred one. I had just added St. Elizabeth Allspice Dram to the back bar, and that made me think about how well it worked with gentian liqueurs. I took the combination in a Manhattan direction. For a name, I paid tribute to one of the East Cambridge characters who we have dubbed Son of Santa from early on; now that the Christmas season was upon us, Son of Santa lived up to our name for him by wearing a red and white Santa hat. While I was trying to keep it simple given the volume we would be dealing with, I kept thinking that the drink needed a garnish of some sort and freshly grated nutmeg was the answer.

I was inspired to riff on the Poet's Dream after thinking about how well Benedictine and apricot go together. Besides adding apricot liqueur to the classic, I swapped the dry vermouth for a dry sherry. For a name, I kept the poet theme and dubbed this one Not Even the Rain after a line from an ee cummings poem.

I built my first draft of this cocktail in 2017 to showcase an infusion I had made using a noble fir cone found while on my first backpacking trip with my future wife along the exceptionally beautiful Eagle Creek trail in the Columbia River Gorge. Later that year my family (along with most folks in our region) mourned as the Eagle Creek fire decimated 50000 acres of lush, exceedingly scenic, and personally meaningful forest and rained down the ashes upon us for weeks. The original name I had picked out for this drink, "Forest Fire," felt abhorrent, and I stopped making the it altogether. Early in 2021, the Eagle Creek trail was finally reopened to hikers, if only briefly, and this semi-consciously prompted me to take another look at this cocktail, tweak it a bit (substituting Zirbenz for the now gone infusion) and renamed it as a dedication to the former beauty and ongoing rebirth of that special place.