Happy Anniversary to Me!

Tonight makes it the First Anniversary of this little ol' cocktail blog. And so far, I've not made any Cosmopolitans. And I've not used any wire hangers. And I aim to keep on with that.

But for tonight, I thought I'd go back to the early days of this endeavor and correct a horrible wrong I did to a poor, defenseless drink. The very first drink I posted, in fact. I mixed up, on the morning of March 30th, 2009, the day after I created the blog and posted the introductory entry, a makeshift version of a cocktail from David Wondrich's "Esquire Drinks" wherein I substituted bourbon for brandy, dropped the amount of dry vermouth in accordance with what I had on hand, and added lemon juice. Yeah. That turned out to be okay...but it was not the drink that it purported to be.

So I thought tonight I'd rectify that, and post a properly made version of this drink tonight. So that you can see what it should be, rather than the strange, mutant bourbon sour it wound up being. And so, I give you the proper version of the Metropole Cocktail. Named after a "somewhat lively" hotel in New York that went bankrupt in 1912, a scant week after it saw one of its regulars murdered. Morbid as that is, it always makes me think of The Happiness Hotel from "The Great Muppet Caper." Only without Muppets getting killed (we'll leave that to "Meet the Feebles").

The Metropole Cocktail

1 1/2 oz brandy
1 1/2 oz dry vermouth
1 dash orange bitters
2 dashes Peychaud's bitters
cherry for garnish

Stir all save cherry with cracked ice and strain into chilled glass. garnish, if desired, with cherry.

I'll admit to not being much of a brandy connoisseur...my uncle drinks it like it's going out of style, and my home state is one of the biggest consumers of brandy, per capita, in the US. We even make Old Fashioneds with brandy and mashed up fruit. But I digress. Despite the rosy hue, this is not a girly drink. Nor is it sweet. It winds up being quite a dry drink...very acerbic, not sweet at all, but very layered...there's the vermouth and the faint anise notes from the Peychauds, and a touch of sweetness from the brandy, a little citrus from the orange bitters, but nothing really dominates the drink. I think that makes it really interesting, frankly. It's complex and sort of mysterious. I like it!

Thanks for sticking with me for this first year of blogging, everyone, and I hope that I'll continue to hold your interest. If I don't, well, it's not like I'm puttin' a gun to your heads or anything. You'll just miss out on all sorts of new and interesting drinks.