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Excerpted from
An Autobiography, by
gaz regan
Continued from last week
As I remember it, the only time I got close to getting
lucky in this period was with the younger sister of one of the regulars at the
pub whose name escapes me. He and
his wife threw a party, and I ended up staying over and spending the night on
the living room floor with this girl who might have been 17 to my 15, but I
don’t really have a clue how old she was, what her name was, or what kind of
activities we actually indulged in that night.
I remember only that the lads applauded me when I next met up with them
for a pint, and that I kept my mouth shut about not remembering what had gone
down.
The long arm of the law never did catch me at my under-age drinking game,
but I had strict instructions on what to do if I was ever collared.
In the sixties, the law exonerated whoever served a minor as long as they
went to the trouble of asking the customer how old he was.
If the kid said he was 18, then it was legal to serve him.
Simple as that.
“If the police ever catch you,” Vi told me in real serious tones, “You
tell them that the landlord asked how old you were.
You don’t go getting other people into trouble.
Okay?” Vi didn’t lay the law
down too often and I had a pretty freewheeling youth, so when she threw stuff
like this at me I knew I’d better listen.
She’d never ever have laid a hand on me, but disappointing Vi would have
been way more painful than a beating.
My grades at school, as you might imagine, were not too
good, but I didn’t really care too much, either.
I was passing most of my exams but only by the skin of my teeth, and I
got some wonderful comments from my teachers on my report cards.
“Cheerful, helpful, and noisy,” was, perhaps, my favorite.
It came from Doctor Roberts, the headmaster.
I was pretty popular at Bolton County Grammar School, and I played drums
in a band called The Sons of Adam, along with Stephen “Hoss” Hey (bass), Johnny
Nichols (the tough kid who was also a Mick Jagger-wannabe), Pete Vickers
(keyboard), and Roger “Tosh” Ball (lead guitar).
I was probably the worst musician of this motley crew, but I had a drum
set and Vi and Bernard allowed us to practice in the pub on Saturday afternoons,
so I was a shoe-in for the job. We
played one gig, at a high-school dance.
We were the opening act for The Rebels, a pretty good band in which our
classmate, Chris Whitham, played guitar. The Sons of Adam were not well
received.
I had a few girlfriends during this period.
Linda Barlow, a girl in my class, was the first, and she was followed by
Judy Roper, who was one year older than I.
I had a fling with Pam Hulme on a school vacation to
Italy, and although she dumped me when we got
home, the fling was pretty fabulous while it lasted.
Eventually, the beer stared to give me a belly, and although I wasn’t
turning into a real fat kid, I was overweight, and that didn’t help when I was
looking for a date.
Continued next weekBack to Top
Also Excerpted from
Mindful
Mixology
“Mixed
drinks might be compared to music; an orchestra will produce good music,
provided all players are artists; but have only one or two inferior musicians in
your band, and you may be convinced they will spoil the entire harmony.”
The Flowing Bowl by William
“The Only William” Schmidt, 1892.
If mindful communication stems from an awareness of the
other person, which may well be based on your intuition or a hunch, mindful
mixology is based in an awareness of flavors and an intuition about which ones
might blend harmoniously. Mindful bartenders combine this knowledge of flavors
and trust their intuition to create balanced cocktails that suit their
customers’ palates and preferences.
It’s unrealistic to think that any of us will ever know the flavor
profiles of every ingredient under the sun, though the consummate professional
will try to keep as up to date as possible in this respect.
That said, let’s spend a couple of minutes to think about what the phrase
achieving balance means.
The flavors of every ingredient in any given drink will be
discernible in a well-balanced cocktail, but let’s not take the word
discernible too literally here.
I’d challenge anyone to list the ingredients in, say, a Mai Tai if the
drink was presented to them in a blind tasting, but the Mai Tai is a good drink
to look at when we discuss balance.
After all, it might be hard to pinpoint the curaçao in a Mai Tai, but if you
make the drink without the curaçao, you’ll immediately know exactly what that
ingredient brings to the party.
A well-balanced drink might come to you in the form of a
recipe written by a good mixologist, who has detailed specific amounts and
bottlings of each and every ingredient. But how do you go about achieving
balance if you’re presented with a more generic formula, calling merely for,
say, tequila, ginger liqueur, and lemon juice, or if you’re trying to create a
new drink and you have some ingredients in mind but you’re not sure what ratios
to use?
Also continued next week
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Ada "Coley" Coleman was a celebrated early
twentieth-century bartender at London's Savoy Hotel, and she was a woman who got
her fair share of the limelight.
When she announced that she was about to retire, in 1925,
The Daily Express quoted her as saying, "I made cocktails for Mark Twain when he
came in the Savoy, Diamond Jim Brady, Prince Wilhelm of Sweden, James Corbett,
'Mr A.', the Egyptian Princess - yes, and the Prince of Wales," and noted that
she was "known to thousands of men all over the world."
In "Coley's Corner," then, we bring you links to stories
about bartenders all over the place.
We think it might make Coley smile.
In this issue we're featuring:
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New Inductee:The
Sidecar
You can access the
Institute for Cocktail Excellence HERE
And we're encouraging all members of the Worldwide
Bartender Database to think about submitting an entry for consideration in our
super-duper competition for the Ardent Spirits Innovative Cocktail of the Year
Award.
Don't that sound swell?
Click
HERE to read all about it.
If you'd like to be an adjunct judge for the Institute of
Cocktail Excellence, here's how to do it:
1) Go
HERE
2) Click on the link to Register at the bottom
3) Complete the brief form.
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Copy and paste these babies to get yerself a very complete cocktail book.
John Collins
The John Collins
was named for the head waiter at
Limmers, a joint in London that Dickens was known to visit on occasion.
75 ml (2.5 oz)
oude genever
30 ml (1 oz)
fresh lemon juice
22.5 ml (.75 oz)
simple syrup
club soda
Shake everything
except for the club soda, and strain into an ice-filled collins glass.
Top with club soda.
The Tom Collins
and the John Collins: A Discussion
Excerpted from
the Bartender’s GIN compendium by gaz
regan.
Much has been
written about the origins of the Tom Collins, and it was George Sinclair,
bartender, drink historian, blogger, and all-around mischief-maker, who
uncovered some previously unknown the facts about it in a 2006 article that he
penned for Class magazine in the U.K..
The drink, according to George, was
seemingly named after a practical joke, and the joke, which was the talk
of the town in New York and other cities in 1874, had grown men roaming the
streets looking for Tom Collins, a fictitious character who, they were told by
pranksters of the nineteenth century, had been saying nasty things about them.
Strange how things such as a sense of humor, things that we think of as
being basic and ingrained, change over the years, right?
This, though, was the great Tom Collins Hoax of 1874, and the drink known
as the Tom Collins began to appear in cocktail books shortly after this.
Prior to the
Sinclair article everyone thought that the Tom Collins was a drink that was born
of John Collins, a drink seemingly named for the head waiter at Limmer’s, a
joint in London. John Collins was,
in fact, the narrator of the following verse from a poem by Frank and Charles
Sheridan:
“My name is John
Collins, head waiter at Limmer's,
Corner of
Conduit Street, Hanover Square,
My chief
occupation is filling brimmers
For all the
young gentlemen frequenters there.”
Later in the
poem gin punch is mentioned: “Mr.
Frank always drinks my gin punch when he smokes.”
So it’s long been presumed that the John Collins gin punch originated at
Limmer’s in London, but Sinclair’s findings seemed to put paid to this theory.
Indeed, Sinclair as much as dismissed the theory, and more than a few
people were inclined to agree with him at the time.
But it seems that he was wrong, after all.
When Imbibe, Dave Wondrich’s book, was released in 2007, things got a
little more clear.
While the Tom
Collins Hoax of 1874 seemed feasible to some folk as being responsible for the
name change, it just ain’t so. The
Tom Collins seems most definitely to have gotten its name when Old Tom gin
replaced the genever gin in the John Collins.
Wondrich cites a gin punch known as a John Collins as being introduced to
bartenders in New York in the 1850s, and although the recipe is lost to history,
if it was anything like the gin punches being served at other London
clubs—specifically The Garrick Club—during the first half of the nineteenth
century, Wondrich says that it would have called for gin, lemon juice, chilled
soda water, and maraschino liqueur.
Wondrich is a
little evasive in his book, but when asked flat out, “Do you know for sure that
a gin punch known as John Collins was around prior to the 1870s?,” his reply
was, “Yeah, it's in the 1869 Steward & Barkeeper's Manual, and George Augustus
Sala [a well respected British writer/reporter/editor] found people drinking it
here during the Civil War.” he told us.
A few weeks later dear David came up with a quote from a Canadian
publication, dated 1865, that goes like this: “The last time I saw [John Wilkes
Booth] was at Montreal, in October, 1864, at a place called ‘Dolly’s,’ next door
to the St. Lawrence Hall, and much frequented by the amateurs of ‘Mint Juleps’
and ‘John Collinses.’”
In 1904 an
article entitled The Last of Limmer’s, written by John Morley, a British
journalist and politician, appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine, and here we find a
little more information about the drink: “Through the bustle and confusion of
Limmer’s John Collins trotted serenely in his noiseless pumps . . . mixing
pick-me-ups of the kind named after him for the dejected revelers . . .
This world-renowned beverage, still popular in America, and not forgotten
on this side of the Atlantic, was compounded of gin, soda-water, ice, lemon and
sugar,” he wrote. Later in this
piece Morley mentions that after Collins retired from Limmers, Dickens visited
him In Hempstead. Collins was quite
an important man, it seems.
So where does
all that leave us? Well, since the
first recipe for the Tom Collins turned up in Jerry Thomas’ 1876 book, The
Bar-Tender's Guide or How to Mix all Kinds of Plain and Fancy Drinks, and Thomas
called specifically for Old Tom gin to be used, the name change—from John to
Tom—seems appropriate. This theory
also makes sense when you see that Louis Muckensturm detailed both drinks,
calling for Hollands—genever—in the John Collins, and Old Tom in the Tom
Collins. This can be found in his
1906 book, Louis’ Mixed Drinks.
In conclusion,
then, it seems incontrovertible that the John Collins was named for the head
waiter at Limmer’s in London, and that the Tom Collins is the same drink but
made with Old Tom gin rather than Genever.
Q.E.D. Now let the matter
rest, please.
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Mindful
Bartending
