My mashup of the Oaxacan Old Fashioned and the Poet's Dream.

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.