With the family encamped in beautiful Fullerton, California for the Thanksgiving week, I was away from my home bar. So I took the week off last week. I hope you were too drunk to notice.

The Jack Rose

For this drink, The Essential Cocktail quotes a huge paragraph from The Sun Also Rises. What it doesn’t do is explain who the hell Jack Rose is. So I Googled him. There’s a contemporary American guitarist, a Wing Commander in the RAF during WWII, and a physiology professor at Idaho State University. Okay, the Wikipedia entry for Jack Rose the cocktail indicates that it is a favorite of Rachel Maddow. That’s good enough for me. Real, smart lesbians are HOT.

I hate that I was reminded that the main characters in that abomination of a movie, Titanic, were named Jack and Rose. Yech.

Anyway, the Jack Rose features applejack, a kind of apple brandy that is pretty much only made by Laird & Company, reputedly America’s oldest distillery..since 1780. The Essential Cocktail also indicates equal parts simple syrup and freshly squeezed lemon juice, a bit of grenadine, an apple slice and cherry garnish.

And now to taste it…good gravy! Why wouldn’t you want it? It’s like drinking a Granny Smith apple. You probably can’t order this in a bar…applejack may not be on the shelf at The Drawing Room. I’ll bet you could get this at a good hotel bar, though. A nice hotel in a genteel part of town probably has to be prepared for all manner of thirsty traveler. Again, the picture in The Essential Cocktail is a lie. It shows this drink presented in a rocks glass with ice. Probably because it goes better with the Hemingway story DeGroff gushes about in the description. Hemingway would never drink out of a cocktail glass. This definitely goes on the list of Drinks I Would Make Again. It even might make the list of Cocktails I’d Take A Bath In.

Expert Tip I Thought Of That Dale DeGroff Doesn’t Mention: Take a little left over lemon juice and splash the apple slice with it so it doesn’t oxidize and turn brown while you quaff. Am I a genius? (No, you’re an asshole!). Wow, I drank that rather quickly. It’s not too powerful of a drink since it’s only 1 1/2 ounces of an 80 proof spirit mixed with almost 2 ounces of non-alcoholic ingredients. That’s my excuse.

The Black Rose

Basically you take a big shot of bourbon, put it in a glass with ice, and then wave grenadine and Peychaud’s bitters at it. It’s bourbon. I get a little sharp dryness from the bitters, but the grenadine is a no-show, of course. I used a long butane lighter instead of a match for flaming the lemon peel and it worked much better. Though it could just be an oilier lemon, I suppose. This is supposed to be some kind of variation on the Sazerac but I’m not seeing the point. The Sazerac was kind of sublime. This is just…bourbon. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Let the ice melt a little and the lemon peel steep for a while. It gets better.