Recently, I had been thinking about the Benedictine-Cynar combination that I last tried out in a coworker's recipe at Drink and I wanted to expand on that. I opted for a 3:1 split base of Rittenhouse Rye to mezcal that I learned from several Death & Co. recipes. As a final touch, I added in the apricot rinse "bell-ringer" that was the signature move of James Maloney, for I have been making a few drinks from his 1900 The Twentieth-Century Cocktail Guide for Mixing Fancy Drinks at work including the Martinez Bell-Ringer. The combination of Cynar and apricot has been a delight in several drinks, so that was on my mind. The Benedictine and apricot one was less on my mind despite it working well elsewhere. For a name, I dubbed this the Death on the Installment Plan after Louis-Ferdinand Celine's 1936 book. I had bought the book in the late 1990s but never read it for I got stuck reading his earlier Journey to the End of the Night and had to put it down to avoid the effects which that level of nihilism had on me as I was trying to wrap up my graduate studies.

USS Texas: Pintles and Gudgeons.

A riff on Sasha Petraske's Cosmonaut. The name is a reference both to the absinthe and that I wanted to find a unique way to pair the lime juice and bourbon, since that's an uncommon combination in sours.

At Drink in Boston one night, I made the Giuseppe's Lady (gin, Cynar, grenadine, lime, Angostura) for a guest who wanted gin, citrus, and bitter. When I got home, I was inspired to take those flavors in a Martini riff akin to an embittered Atta Boy from The Savoy Cocktail Book such as what was what was done in the Atta Girl with Fernet. For a name, I had still been thinking about my Lyft driver moments before who was talking to me about Aristotle that began with the theory on the three kinds of friendship: friendships of pleasure, of utility, and of virtue. Therefore, I dubbed this one Hope is a Waking Dream after one of Aristotle's sayings.

I'd been looking for a decent use of my long neglected bottle of Cocalero. After trying the Improved Chartreuse Swizzle, I realized that a larger amount of Overproof Rum might balance out the substitution of the weaker (but still decidedly green) Cocalero in place of Chartreuse.

Named for the drink being able to visually pass for its original inspiration while using a less distinguished base ingredient. Also, CHARlatan/CHARtreuse.