As part of menu development at La Brasa, I was inspired by the honey-rabarbaro combination that worked so well in the Shipwrecked. Our bar's blended Scotch sadly gets neglected save for except at weddings, and I thus recalled how well rabarbaros like Zucca pair with Scotch such as in the Caustic Negroni. The rest fell into place as I used lemon juice to cut the sweetness, and Angostura and Peychaud's Bitters to donate darker and brighter levels of bitter herbal complexity and spice, respectively. For a name, I dubbed it after Somerville's mayor, Joe Curtatone, although Joe is more of an Averna guy from the times that I have served him elsewhere in town.

On New Year's Day, I became inspired by the Streets of Gettysburg's coffee-Benedictine combination and the 1910 Cocktail's Cognac-mezcal duo. I dubbed the creation the Delores del Rio named after the Mexican actress taught by French nuns in Mexico City that mirrors the split-based spirit.

In 2018, I submitted a recipe to the USBG Cocktail Classique sponsored by Lucid Absinthe. It ended up making the cut to compete in the New York semi-final round, but it was not a convenient time for me to travel, so I bowed out. My drink idea began with considering how Tiki drinks are very absinthe friendly, and I selected the Mai Tai as a starting place. Instead of swapping pure absinthe in place of one of the rums in a Mai Tai, I opted to swap in the delightful New Orleans treat, the Absinthe Suissesse, in place of that rum. My rational was that both drinks contained orgeat as a common ingredient, and how the creamy, rich, nutty, citrus, and grassy combination in the mashup would complement the herbal spice notes in absinthe.

I became inspired by the classic Colleen Bawn Flip and a few recent drinks with the Ciociaro-banane combo such as the After School Special and Goldilocks, and I began to scheme. Besides the whole egg aspect, I took the flavor combination in a pineapple rum direction for something a bit more tropical. The rum, banana, and pineapple notes led me to name this after something nautical in nature, and I dubbed it the Paulsgrave after Paulsgrave Williams, a pirate active from 1716-23 in the Caribbean, Eastern seaboard, and the coast of Western Africa.

After spotting Misty Kalkofen's Joe's Fashion that paired Punt e Mes with Chinese five spice syrup, I decided to tinker. I opted for the spirits mix from the Bombay Government Punch of Cognac and Batavia Arrack to make a drink split between ingredients from the East and the West. Since it felt very punch like, I dubbed this the Five Elements – partly because the recipe had that many ingredients but also because the word 'punch' may derive from the Hindi word 'panch' meaning five: spirit, citrus, sugar, spice, and water.