I just read in yesterday's Food Matters column in the Statesman that Rebecca Rather's new Pastry Queen Parties book is out. Why is the Tipsy Texan shilling for a cookbook, you ask? Because the Tipsy Texans are IN this cookbook--we wrote many of the cocktail recipes for this book, which features six different cocktail parties staged at locations around Texas. One might wonder why Texas culinary royalty like Rebecca would want to pal around with scamps like us. Same reason why we get invited most places: Because we show up with the booze!

This is a busy week for Tipsy Texan/Co-Op Coffee. If you're out and about this week you might find us at any of the following events:

Thursday--La Dolce Vita, the 20th anniversary of this spectacular fall fundraiser for the Austin Museum of Art, held at Laguna Gloria. Tipsy Texans serving specialty cocktails for the VIP pre-party and in the Scotch & Cigar Lounge. We will be debuting the new Brown Witch cocktail--a brown butter-infused Macchiato with Strega and St. George absinthe. I got a message yesterday that all 1800 tickets are sold out to this event.

Friday PM & Saturday AM/PM--Austin Stringband Festival, the 4th installment of this annual music festival put on by the Austin Friends of Traditional Music at Camp Ben McCullough (Co-Op helping people keep warm and awake with specialty coffee drinks)

Saturday AM--Tune into KXAN's Morning Show to see Tex mix up a new Treaty Oak Rum fall cocktail. At 8:30 am (yikes!)

Saturday AM--Co-Op Coffee at the Sunset Valley Farmer's Market, 9am-1pm every Saturday. Rolling out some new hot drinks for the cooler weather.

Saturday PM--HELM launch party, invite-only preview of HELM shoes, the latest venture of Progress Coffee's Joshua Bingaman

Sunday--Oyster Club at the Plant in Kyle, benefitting Rude Mechs

Dolce Vita was a raging success tonight with a sell-out crowd showing up for the 20th anniversary event. As far as crowds go, the Tipsy Texans entertained a sizable line of party-goers in the Scotch & Cigar Lounge, which was a $20 upgrade to the regular ticket--a steal, in my opinion, because that means you get to drink high-proof hooch instead of just wine.

We originally planned to do the Debonair Cocktail but there appeared to be a shortage of scotch, so we switched gears after the first hour and focused our attention on the case of Paula's Texas Lemon that they'd given us to work with. Tipsy came up with a refreshing Port punch.

I didn't get a glamour shot of the Debonair but Jennie Chen managed to catch me drinking one

Paula's Porto Punch
2 oz Paula's Texas Lemon
3/4 oz Port
3/4 oz Fresh Squeezed Lime
Angostura bitters
Shake all in a cocktail shaker and strain into a bitters-rinsed glass

We were also fortunate to have a guest barista at our table, none other than Dan Streetman of Cuvee Coffee. He brought his La Marzocco espresso machine and did some great coffees. We debuted a new coffee cocktail that I have been working on, a brown butter-infused Macchiato with Strega and absinthe:

The Brown Witch

The Brown Witch
1/2 oz Brown Butter
4 oz Whole Milk
1 oz Espresso
1/2 oz Strega
Barspoon (scant) St. George absinthe
Pour spirits into a demitasse. Steam the brown butter and milk, pour artfully into demitasse. Serve.

Dale/David Project? What Dale/David Project?! It has been so long since I updated this thread that I had to dig through the archives to figure out what number we're on.

The Debonaire Cocktail has such a vintage ring to it that you'd think it had been around since before the "noble experiment." Come to find out, the cocktail was invented in comparatively recent years by Gary and Mardee Regan, the authorly couple who pen the Ardent Spirits Web site and newsletter. I compared two recipes for this evening's tasting.

The recipe in Dale's book:
2 1/2 oz Highland Malt Scotch
3/4 oz Canton Ginger liqueur

The ingredients as the recipe occurs in Gary Regan's Joy of Mixology:
2 1/2 oz Oban or Springbank
1 oz Original Canton Delicate Ginger Liqueur

Since the recipe calls for Canton Ginger Liqueur, and since both of these books came out before the re-introduction of Domaine de Canton, I am curious how this cocktail tastes with the original incarnation of that cordial. I have scoured liquor stores in locales far and wide searching for a bottle of the original stuff. In Breckenridge, CO, I found a proprietress who had just recently thrown out some bottles because they were so old! If anybody would like to share a taste from their personal archives, I would greatly appreciate it.

I didn't have a bottle of Oban or Springbank, and get easily confused by Scotch, so I reached for a bottle of Highland Park that we had; little did I know the whiskey was bottled at cask strength and so my cocktail came out super boozy. Not that that's a bad thing...

It occurred to me that I've been so busy since I left Annie's on Congress that I haven't taken the time to post that I'm not there anymore!

The weekend before my last day, we had a going away for Ryan Ffrench (skinny tie). Ryan was head of the unofficial St. George Austin Ambassadorship Program, so we decided to do a night of cocktails with St. George Absinthe and Single Malt Whiskey. Since there are no pictures from my going away party I will use this picture from his.

The bar at Annie's received high marks from pretty much every publication in town, much of which I have posted about here. Needless to say I am very proud of what we accomplished, but I have another opportunity that I am pursuing at the beginning of the year; in the mean time the Tipsy Texans have been booking up for parties public and private through the holidays.

Email info AT this url for more details.

This was the eponymous cocktail of the Embassy Club in Hollywood and according to Dale dates from 1930. (Editor's note: this date falls into that inconvenient time period known as "Prohibition", so either this date is an approximation, or the Embassy Club was a speakeasy!)

Consisting of brandy, Cointreau, Appleton Jamaican rum, and lime juice with a little bitters, this cocktail has a punch-like structure that is both classic and a little trendy right now. I really like the flavor and even more I like that it has one of those Negroniesque recipe of equal parts of each spirit, which makes it easy for partially brain-dead barkeeps like myself to remember ( I catch myself selling a lot of Last Words and Blood & Sands for this reason.) This is a cocktail that I think would be fun to experiment with as you substitute various rums, or even combinations of rums. Enjoy!

Has anybody ever heard of Ojen? It is an anise liquor from Spain that I learned about a few weeks ago at the restaurant. One of my regular customers came in with a family friend of his who had told me about this absinthe-like product that she'd always picked up in New Orleans. I was not familiar with the product, so she said she'd bring the bottle with her on her next visit.

I asked the woman when she'd bought it last, and she said she picks it up every year when she goes to New Orleans. But one look at the bottle would tell you it was not likely from recent vintage. I was dubious and thought perhaps her memory had lapsed and her most recent trip was 10 years ago...

When I got home, I did a little digging, and found the (very sad) explanation in an article on NOLA.com. It turns out that Ojen, like king cake and CHOP-a-toul-as, has a unique and unexplainable relationship with the Crescent City. The spirit gained considerable popularity in New Orleans, and the Ojen Cocktail (recipe below) was the official Mardi Gras tipple of the Krewe of Rex. Apparently, however, the spirit's popularity declined so much in its native Spain that the manufacturer decided to cease production in the late 1980's. The proprietor of Martin Wine Cellar in New Orleans convinced the distiller to run one more batch, on the condition that Martin purchase all 6,000 bottles of the 500 case run. And so he did. And that stockpile lasted, apparently, until this summer when Martin sold its last retail bottle of Ojen. So my guest was right--that "new" bottle of Ojen was 20 years old!

Ojen Cocktail, how I hope to taste you again some day

Ojen Cocktail
2 oz Ojen
Dash Peychaud's bitters
Barspoon simple syrup
1/2 oz water
Stir with ice to chill, serve

What a bittersweet experience it was to discover Ojen, to learn about a product only to find out that I will never be able to get my hands on it! What's worse is I was there in July just before they sold that last bottle. It could have been me...

Maybe Ojen will become a pet project of some Paleomixologist like David Wondrich, or Eric Seed. In the mean time I guess I will be satisfied by the entire shelf full of other anise spirits we have at the bar...

A couple of Saturdays ago I appeared on the KXAN Morning Show and prepared a cocktail for all of those people who are up and at 'em and in need of a stimulating seasonal cocktail at 8:30 am. As it happens, exactly one of my friends/colleagues called me to congratulate--shows what kind of crowd I roll with. Even my mom was out of town and could therefore not be relied upon to check the local news. Because of the the earliness of the hour, I didn't take it too seriously but I chanced to look at the stats for our Web traffic today, and noticed this tremendous spike in visits a few Saturdays ago. It was the day of the news broadcast! I so didn't think anyone was going to come visit, that when I said, "Check the Web site for the recipe," I didn't think anyone would really do it. But they did. Early-risin', hard-drinkin' mofos looking for a cocktail. Sorry I let y'all down, here's the drink if you're still interested.

Harvest Punch
1.5 oz Treaty Oak Rum
1.5 oz Fresh pressed apple cider
.5 oz fresh squeezed lime juice
.25 oz simple syrup
Bar spoon St. Elizabeth's Allspice Dram
Dash Cruzan Blackstrap rum
Combine ingredients in a mixing glass and strain into a rocks glass over fresh ice, or serve "up" in a cocktail glass or punch cup

The Dale David Project was temporarily hijacked last night by dinner guest/junior-ninja-bartender-in-training Jenna Noel, of Edible Austin magazine. Apparently I was too distracted by my dinner preparations to adequately keep cocktail glasses full, so Jenna took matters into her own hands.

She picked up the Dale and began mixing drinks at record speed for a junior ninja. I was amazed to find out that we had not covered some very basic drinks that one would assume we'd covered ages ago.

*I apologize for the crappy iPhone photos, we couldn't find the charger for the real camera

The Adonis is a cocktail that, like the Blood & Sand, I thought sounded gross when I first read about it. Sherry, vermouth, orange juice and bitters. It's actually quite refreshing. Like a lower proof Blood & Sand.

The Manhattan! I can't believe we'd not done the Manhattan for this project yet. I chose Michter's for this picture, but usually use Rittenhouse 100 proof. The main thing is that it has to be Rye whiskey (bourbon is a latter-day development and more southern in character); the vermouth needs to be fresh and plentiful; and the bitters are a must. We garnished with an authentic Maraska cherry, but a lemon twist is also acceptable (what is not acceptable is a chemical bomb "maraschino" cherry from the grocery store). For a great instructional video on Manhattan construction, please see my colleague Bobby Heugel's video at DrinkDogma.com

The Dark & Stormy, the classic Goslings cocktail which we made with Maine Root Ginger Beer.

The Gin Gin Mule is an evolution of the Moscow Mule, developed by legendary New York bartender Audrey Saunders. Her version substitutes gin for the vodka, and adds mint. It also calls for house made ginger beer, which we do not have, so we polished off the Maine Root ginger beer for this cocktail.

You've heard of Meaty Monday, and Mixology Monday. Last night we created a hybrid with Meaty Mixology Monday. Boudin, Full Quiver Farms pork chops & pork bratwursts, roasted sweet potatoes and sauteed green beans.