Your Cosmos are so country. Your Old Fashioneds way too 21st century.
Your Manhattans stuck in the Midwest.
You pour and stir with pride, but those homemade cocktails still don’t taste as good as that Mojito they serve at
the Cuban restaurant down the street.
That’s because you’re not a pro like the folks who work behind the bars you so eagerly belly up to during happy hour.
Bartenders – good ones, anyway – know their stuff. Just as your auto mechanic is a wizard with a ratchet wrench and electricians can find logic in a tangle of wires, there’s a reason imbibers put their faith in the folks behind the pine.
So we asked some of Denver’s well-respected drink makers to share their secrets. Guess what: They have plenty.
Take the muddler.
The muddler, says Denver’s Mizuna bartender Lynn Whittum during a demonstration of one of her specialties, the Lemon Drop, “is my favorite tool.”
The muddler smashes together that bright red maraschino cherry with an orange wedge, a splash of soda water and a sugar cube. It punches the fresh mint, bleeding its flavors into the liquid. The muddler is essential; it’s the bartender’s answer to the carpenter’s hammer.
The muddler invokes flavor, but the foundation of many cocktails is made out of something else, a universal secret shared by all members of the bartender cult: They place their faith in frigid. The chillier, the better. All praise cold.
“It’s not cold enough unless you can scrape the frost off the side of the shaker,” says Ryan O’Brien, the longtime bartender at Barolo in Denver. O’Brien is married to Whittum, making for a two-bartender family.
To demonstrate the value of the deep freeze, O’Brien prepared a Vesper, a drink introduced in 1953 in Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel, “Casino Royale.” O’Brien says the cocktail is experiencing a mild renaissance.
O’Brien filled a pint glass with ice. He added half an ounce of Lillet, then 3 1/2 ounces of Bombay Sapphire gin, 3 ounces of Belvedere vodka and a thick orange slice. He fixed the stainless steel cocktail shaker over the glass and commenced shaking.
Thirty seconds later he stopped and dragged his fingernail across the metal. Frost had gathered. He poured the elixir into a frozen martini glass, garnishing it with a long, twisting peel of lemon and an orange slice.
Sip.
Snow slides, spreads.
Sip.
Warmth, somehow, blossoms.
Smile.
Had the Vesper not been downright arctic, it would have tasted stale and stuffy.
In addition to the muddler and the gospel of glacial, O’Brien and Wittum embrace the power of presentation.
When a drink calls for a twist, he doesn’t just hack a patch of peel from a lemon and plop it in the glass.
No, no, no.
First, he cuts the ends off a lemon.
He takes a spoon, presses the edge between the fruit flesh and the peel, and saws back and forth, gently flensing the skin from the fruit. After removing the sleeve of skin from the ball of citrus, he cuts the circle of peel so he can spread it like a ribbon, rolls it up, and holds it together with a toothpick. When he’s ready for a twist, he slices off a thin piece. Before plunging it in the liquor, he uses it to swab the rim of the cocktail glass.
Terrific margarita
Another bartender secret?
You’ve had plenty of margaritas consisting of fluorescent syrup and cheap tequila. And so maybe you never cared for the margarita.
You will love the cocktail, however, after tasting one of Graham Murty’s, the bartender at La Sandia Mexican Kitchen and Tequila Bar in northeast Denver.
Ask him: “How did you do that?”
The answer: homemade sweet-and-sour mix, from lemons, limes, and simple syrup (recipe follows).
“It’s not like these are complicated drinks,” Murty says of the bar’s specialties, all of them hailing from Latin America. The trick is fresh ingredients: no mixes, no bottled sweet-and-
sour, no juice from little plastic bottles shaped like citrus fruits.
Few bartenders have more secrets than Lisa Johnson, the bartender for 19 years at the Cruise Room in The Oxford Hotel in downtown Denver. Like Murty, Johnson eschews all cheap shortcuts in her bar and the attached McCormick and Schmick’s restaurant.
Unlike most bartenders, she prefers stirring drinks rather than shaking them.
“It’s called bruising the alcohol,” she says. “It gives you a watered-down drink.”
Johnson is a master bartender, and one of her secrets is the importance of the “build,” the steps involved in making drinks.
Take the Old Fashioned. It’s an intimidating blend of fruit and liquids because its fans are particular.
Here’s Johnson’s routine:
Plop a sugar cube into a pint glass, and color the cube with three dashes of Angostura bitters. Add a twist of lemon, a slice of orange, a cherry, and a splash of club soda.
Muddle for 15 or 20 seconds.
Fill the glass with ice, then add 2 ounces of a premium bourbon.
“You’ll taste the alcohol, versus a vodka martini,” she says.
Stir. Pour through a strainer into a chilled glass. Garnish with an orange slice, and a cherry.
Sip.
Eyes flutter and shut briefly. Happiness arrives.
Sip.
Another smile.
“Thank you, Lisa.”
Staff writer Douglas Brown can be reached at 303-954-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com.
