Before I visited Portland to meet bartender extraordinaire Jeffrey Morgenthaler, I visited his blog. One distracting post, now two years old, offered video of a man giving the health department all the reasons it needs to send an inspector. In the post, titled “How to Make a Daiquiri – The American Bartending School Way,” Morgenthaler recaps “the way” with a 10-point breakdown, including steps like: 1) Chill an 8-ounce cocktail glass; 2) Pick your nose, and wipe the resulting findings on the back of your hand; 5) Wipe nose on back of hand for four full seconds; and 10) Enjoy! Morgenthaler’s subtle jabs make a sharp point about his craft.
Along with descriptions of new products like Xanté Pear Liqueur — headline: “Not A Sex Toy!” — Morgenthaler uses his blog as a platform to announce what he’s doing at the bar in Clyde Common, a Portland restaurant. The drinks and styles he writes about tend to become cocktail-world trends.
When I met him the morning after a guest-bartending gig at a strip club (Oregon permits liquor sales in such establishments), Morgenthaler reminded me of an old friend who had started an Internet company, whose founding precepts seemed to be that he wear a baseball cap and Birkenstocks at all times, and who then sold his startup for a ridiculous amount of money. He may have a style reminiscent of a gravelly-voiced blues singer prone to long harmonica solos, but Morgenthaler’s got an impressive ability to cut through the nonsense and pour a million-dollar drink.
He came to bartending-world prominence in 2010 after he aged Negroni cocktails in barrels for several weeks, uncorking a barrel-aged trend that’s still riding the top of the cocktail-nerd wave in bars around the country. Drinking the aged and unaged versions side by side is a fun experiment — fresh-made is appetizingly bitter, exposing the knees and elbows of the ingredients as they jockey for space on the palate, and is a fantastic, appetizing drink. Barrel aging gives it a rounded, blended flavor that would make it just as good an after-dinner sipper as an aperitif.
“In the barrel, you get mushroom, nut, apple and earth flavors,” he said. “The vermouth is supposed to oxidize, and you know what oxidization tastes like — it tastes like cherry … It gives you some wood.” (Whether Morgenthaler meant this literally or in a slangier sense is left to the reader.)
Now he’s pouring and writing about carbonated cocktails, a trend he and his colleague Craig Schoettler at The Aviary in Chicago are bubbling about.
With just $60 worth of specialized equipment (links to the gear are on his site), it’s surprisingly easy to put fizz in an alcoholic beverage. Morgenthaler pours the components of an Americano — sweet vermouth, Campari, water, orange zest — into an iSi carbonator, screws on the lid and whoosh! instant carbonated cocktail.
There was a bit of tweaking involved. Morgenthaler counted on the added zing from the carbonic acid made when carbonated water hits the tongue, scaling back on the Campari in the classic recipe to balance it out and soaking grapefruit peel in the pre-carbonated mix overnight give it a bit more crisp. The whole thing is remarkably refreshing — a real-time, alcoholic version of the little Sanbitter sodas sold in Italian bars and cafés.
It doesn’t work for every drink — “I’ll be damned if I want my Sazerac full of bubbles” he writes on his blog — but when it works, it puts him on a happier plane. It’s also more clever than it seems.
“We’re not a cocktail bar, we’re a restaurant,” he said, gesturing out at Clyde Commons’ expansive two-level dining room. “You have to tailor the program, or nobody’s getting a drink. Anything we can do to keep my guys from dry-shaking five egg-white cocktails every 10 minutes.”
Instead of prepping a gin fizz, which certainly gives a particular and necessary shake-a-shake-a flash to a bar but also gobbles up minutes, all a busy bartender has to do with the carbonated Americano is pull a bottle from the fridge, pop the cap and set it on the bar with a smile. Genius.
The nutty thing is that all of his secrets are online. Along with recipes and links to the specialized gear, Morgenthaler even shares the spreadsheets he uses to make sure he’s making a buck at the bar.
“Chefs never do that kind of thing, because it’s so competitive or whatever,” he said, “but I always liked the open-source software community ethos where we’re all going to figure this out together.”
Morgenthaler started his blog when he was an isolated bartender in what some might call the hippie-redneck college town of Eugene, Ore. (Which bar? “Like, all of ’em.”), with a copy of Paul Harrington’s “Cocktail: The Drinks Bible for the 21st Century” under his arm.
“The blog was a way to connect with others in the industry,” he said, summing it up as a sort of peculiarly structured correspondence course. Now, the ideas for his cocktails are born in his head.
“I’m not super prolific, but I don’t have to tinker too much because I roll it around in my head first,” he said. “Then again, I’ve had great ideas that tasted terrible. You can try to shoehorn in lots of stuff to make it better, but if it doesn’t work, I just throw it in the sink and forget about it.”
Joe Ray is a food and travel writer and photographer based in Brooklyn.
Along with descriptions of new products like Xanté Pear Liqueur — headline: “Not A Sex Toy!” — Morgenthaler uses his blog as a platform to announce what he’s doing at the bar in Clyde Common, a Portland restaurant. The drinks and styles he writes about tend to become cocktail-world trends.
When I met him the morning after a guest-bartending gig at a strip club (Oregon permits liquor sales in such establishments), Morgenthaler reminded me of an old friend who had started an Internet company, whose founding precepts seemed to be that he wear a baseball cap and Birkenstocks at all times, and who then sold his startup for a ridiculous amount of money. He may have a style reminiscent of a gravelly-voiced blues singer prone to long harmonica solos, but Morgenthaler’s got an impressive ability to cut through the nonsense and pour a million-dollar drink.
He came to bartending-world prominence in 2010 after he aged Negroni cocktails in barrels for several weeks, uncorking a barrel-aged trend that’s still riding the top of the cocktail-nerd wave in bars around the country. Drinking the aged and unaged versions side by side is a fun experiment — fresh-made is appetizingly bitter, exposing the knees and elbows of the ingredients as they jockey for space on the palate, and is a fantastic, appetizing drink. Barrel aging gives it a rounded, blended flavor that would make it just as good an after-dinner sipper as an aperitif.
“In the barrel, you get mushroom, nut, apple and earth flavors,” he said. “The vermouth is supposed to oxidize, and you know what oxidization tastes like — it tastes like cherry … It gives you some wood.” (Whether Morgenthaler meant this literally or in a slangier sense is left to the reader.)
Now he’s pouring and writing about carbonated cocktails, a trend he and his colleague Craig Schoettler at The Aviary in Chicago are bubbling about.
With just $60 worth of specialized equipment (links to the gear are on his site), it’s surprisingly easy to put fizz in an alcoholic beverage. Morgenthaler pours the components of an Americano — sweet vermouth, Campari, water, orange zest — into an iSi carbonator, screws on the lid and whoosh! instant carbonated cocktail.
There was a bit of tweaking involved. Morgenthaler counted on the added zing from the carbonic acid made when carbonated water hits the tongue, scaling back on the Campari in the classic recipe to balance it out and soaking grapefruit peel in the pre-carbonated mix overnight give it a bit more crisp. The whole thing is remarkably refreshing — a real-time, alcoholic version of the little Sanbitter sodas sold in Italian bars and cafés.
It doesn’t work for every drink — “I’ll be damned if I want my Sazerac full of bubbles” he writes on his blog — but when it works, it puts him on a happier plane. It’s also more clever than it seems.
“We’re not a cocktail bar, we’re a restaurant,” he said, gesturing out at Clyde Commons’ expansive two-level dining room. “You have to tailor the program, or nobody’s getting a drink. Anything we can do to keep my guys from dry-shaking five egg-white cocktails every 10 minutes.”
Instead of prepping a gin fizz, which certainly gives a particular and necessary shake-a-shake-a flash to a bar but also gobbles up minutes, all a busy bartender has to do with the carbonated Americano is pull a bottle from the fridge, pop the cap and set it on the bar with a smile. Genius.
The nutty thing is that all of his secrets are online. Along with recipes and links to the specialized gear, Morgenthaler even shares the spreadsheets he uses to make sure he’s making a buck at the bar.
“Chefs never do that kind of thing, because it’s so competitive or whatever,” he said, “but I always liked the open-source software community ethos where we’re all going to figure this out together.”
Morgenthaler started his blog when he was an isolated bartender in what some might call the hippie-redneck college town of Eugene, Ore. (Which bar? “Like, all of ’em.”), with a copy of Paul Harrington’s “Cocktail: The Drinks Bible for the 21st Century” under his arm.
“The blog was a way to connect with others in the industry,” he said, summing it up as a sort of peculiarly structured correspondence course. Now, the ideas for his cocktails are born in his head.
“I’m not super prolific, but I don’t have to tinker too much because I roll it around in my head first,” he said. “Then again, I’ve had great ideas that tasted terrible. You can try to shoehorn in lots of stuff to make it better, but if it doesn’t work, I just throw it in the sink and forget about it.”
Joe Ray is a food and travel writer and photographer based in Brooklyn.
PHOTO: Joe Ray for The Daily
Morgenthaler's carbonated Americano cocktail is prepared beforehand and stored in bottles.
