It’s Marlon Brando’s Birthday! Celebrate With A “Godfather” Cocktail!

It’s Friday, April 3rd in the year of COVID-19 two-thousand-and-twenty and it also happens to be Marlon Brando’s birthday today.

I almost wrote “the actor Marlon Brando,” but, really, what other Marlon Brando is there in the history of the world!? And if you’re only nominally familiar with the man, it’s probably from his portrayal of Vito Corleone, the “Don” and paterfamilias of the Corleone family in the 1972 film and cultural milestone “The Godfather.”

Of course, by now, it’s probably evident by the headline, the fact that it’s Marlon Brando’s birthday and that lead-in about the Francis Ford Coppola flick that the point of this post is to write about The Godfather cocktail.

About This Drink

A simple, understated scotch cocktail that adds slight sweetness and almond flavor to your favorite scotch.

And to think, I’ve already been drinking scotch this week!

In terms of the scotch going into your Godfather cocktail, grab whatever your go to scotch is — or call in a curbside pickup for a nice workhorse scotch whisky like Monkey Shoulder.

Ingredients

Search Google for Godfather recipes and you’ll come up with everything from scotch-heavy recipes with just a drizzle of amaretto to overly sweet recipes calling for equal parts spirit and liqueur.

I like to split the difference with this drink, skewing closer to the 2:1 proportions of a drink like the Manhattan, but without the bitters — though the addition of bitters, like Fee Brothers old fashioned bitters, would suit this drink just fine for me.

So for my Godfather cocktail I’ll be sipping tonight:

• 2 oz scotch
• .75 oz amaretto
• Orange peel garnish

Preparation

• Add all the ingredients into a rocks glass with ice cubes. Stir and garnish with a swath of orange peel.

Further Drinking:

•The Spruce Eats calls for 1.5oz whisky to .5oz amaretto: Link

•Esquire calls for 2oz whisky to .5oz amaretto: Link

•Many sites source the drink as having appeared in the 70s and cite that there’s no confirmed origin or creator: Link

•The Godmother cocktail: Link

•The French Connection cocktail: Link

Customer Appreciation Post — Blood & Sand

The Reg Lenna is showing Jaws tonight at 7 p.m. and the organizers gave me a little shout-out in some of their social media promotion:

  

The Dash Hammett Cocktail

Yesterday, I wrote a post about Dashiell Hammett’s birthday.

Today’s post is just a quick photo post of the cocktail I made:

 
About This Cocktail

The Dash Hammett is a smoky martini I read about in Mark Kingwell’s book called Classic Cocktails: A Modern Shake. It doesn’t specify brands or have any exotic ingredients, or even really all that many ingredients.

Ingredients

• 6 parts gin
• 1 part dry vermouth
• 1 teaspoon smoky scotch
• Lemon twist for garnish

Preparation

Shake all ingredients over ice and strain into a chilled martini glass, or first rinse the glass with scotch — not shaking it with the gin and dry vermouth. Garnish with a lemon twist, expressing the oils over the drink and around the rim of the glass.

Happy Birthday, Dashiell Hammett!

Ever want to drink like all the hard-boiled detectives and rogues depicted in classic pulp and noir stories?

Well, today is a perfect day for doing just that. Today is Dashiell Hammett’s birthday. He was born May 27, 1894.

There’s no official “Dashiell Hammett” cocktail that I know of, but the writer contributed more than a few things to drinking culture throughout the years.

His characters Nick and Nora appear in a series of mvoies, though Hammett wrote only one Thin Man novel. And then, of course, there is the Nick and Nora glass itself! 

Plus, Dashiell also gave us Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon and Ed Beaumont in The Glass Key, among many others.

Want to kill a few minutes? Click this link for a montage of booze-related scenes from the Nick and Nora movies.

The montage kicks off with Nick Charles instructing a group of guys on how to appropriately shake different drinks:

“The important thing is the rhythm. Always have rhythm in your shaking. A Manhattan you shake to foxtrot, a Bronx to two-step time. A Dry Martini you always shake to waltz time.”

The scene where Nick marks time with the cocktail shaker isn’t in the original  novel,  but it is a part of Nick and Nora’s larger cinematic world — which will now be forever entwined with Hammett in general.

As I wrote earlier, there’s no official “Dasheill Hammett” cocktail that I know of, but in the book Classic Cocktails: A Modern Shake by Mark Kingwell, the last chapter (entitled “Spygames”) does conclude the book with a drink the writer dubs the “Dash Hammett.”

Kingwell writes the following passage about the drink:

In a final tribute, then, to an American original who appreciated a cocktail — if ultimately rather too many of them for his own good, a worthwhile note of caution here at the end — let’s stipulate a name change. There is no Spade, Hammett, or Thin Man cocktail that we know of. There is, however, an excellent drink that combines gin and scotch, the two favourite quaffs of the Hammett hard-men. We mean the so-called Smoky Martini. That’s six parts gin, one part dry vermouth, and a teaspoon of scotch, shaken with cracked ice and strained  into a chilled cocktail glass, lemon twist to garnish. (You can also dilute the scotch by washinbg it around the glass and discarding, rather than mixing in: the Scotch Wash.) 

It may never catch on with the rest of the world, but this drink will always be, for us, better known as the Dash Hammett.

About This Cocktail

The Dash Hammett is a smoky martini I read about in Mark Kingwell’s book called Classic Cocktails: A Modern Shake. It doesn’t specify brands or have any exotic ingredients, or even really all that many ingredients.

Ingredients

• 6 parts gin
• 1 part dry vermouth
• 1 teaspoon smoky scotch
• Lemon twist for garnish

Preparation

Shake all ingredients over ice and strain into a chilled martini glass, or first rinse the glass with scotch — not shaking it with the gin and dry vermouth. Garnish with a lemon twist, expressing the oils over the drink and around the rim of the glass.

Further Reading:

— Here’s a write-up about Hammett and San Francisco Noir.

Beer & Shot Pairings

Liquor and beer go together quite well, especially in the right combinations.

That was the thought behind this pairing list which I put together recently for the bar where I work in Jamestown, N.Y.

This is just the one side of it. There’s another four pairings on the back.

Here you’ll see three scotches and a rye whiskey, but on the other side are a couple of nice bourbons paired with some of the quality microbrew that we stock. I did a lot of reading (wherever I could find info) about classic pairings and what other bars throughout the country are doing, then just tried to take that info and apply it to what we stock at my bar. I think it came out alright. Or at least, I’m enjoying the fruits of my labor!