Water rations: check.  Food rations: check.  Aviation cocktail rations: check.  Just another lazy Saturday at the Flaherty household.

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Booker’s Bourbon, Dolin Sweet Vermouth, Angostura Bitters.  Oh hells yeah.  The weekend begins.

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As I sit here looking down on the bright lights of the Las Vegas Strip from my 40th floor perch in the sky, December seems like a blur. As anyone who works in the food & beverage industry can attest, the month of December is no short of an all-out waterboarding session.  The hours, the […]

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All the birds sing words and the flowers croon.  In the Tiki, Tiki, Tiki, Tiki, Tiki Room. That’s how the song went.  And really that’s all I remember of the words, but the Enchanted Tiki Room at Disneyland still sticks with me vividly.  Images of singing robotic birds, steamy jungles and Polynesian gods made into […]

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Forgo the hearty breakfast and start your day with a cocktail before plowing the fields. Who needs an injection of coffee when Bourbon and mint are on hand?  For some hardy southerners in the late 18th century, the Mint Julep was part of their morning ritual akin to shaving and pulling on the trousers. John […]

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“Daisy had a hint of bedrooms upstairs more beautiful and cool than other bedrooms…of romances that were not musty and laid away already in lavender….It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy – it increased her value in his eyes.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby I’ve read The Great Gatsby many […]

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1920-1933.  Prohibition sucked the nightlife out of the scene like one does an oyster from a shell. But the party raged on…albeit behind secret doors and fueled by often dangerous concoctions of bathtub gins and white lightning.  And so, many American simply crossed the border to Havana, Cuba where the party heated up in broad […]

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The sight must have been incredible. A whir of flashing metal cocktail shakers streaked the bar from end to end as the crowd crushed in around you. There they stood.  Thirty-five “shaker boys” all earnestly focusing as their arms screamed from the pain of ceaseless shaking. It is said that to properly make a Ramos […]

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“Miner’s lady, stranger to blue water.  Dark and dusty, painted on the sky.  Misty taste of moonshine, teardrops in my eye. Country roads, take me home.  To the place where I belong.” -John Denver Every country has it’s hillbillies.  Its backwaters where the yokels live by their own rules.  For Brazil, these people are called […]

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“Oo la la…who is that dashing American in the leather jacket?” “Why that’s Captain Sidecar, mademoiselle.  But you be careful with his kind.” The Hôtel Ritz is one of the grandest, most opulent hotels in the world.  Built in 1898 in the heart of Paris, its bar saw the likes of Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest […]

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As the Gulf Coast wakes up to another morning of promises from their good friend, BP, the world waits to see if their latest containment cap scheme will finally stop the gushing oil. After 83 days of being pounded by black crude, the Louisiana Bayou has been sent through the ringer.  Add to that, the […]

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There was a time when pilots were heroes and the nation was fascinated by their exploits in the sky. Captain Sully Sullenberger aside (you are a prince among men, sir), we’ve moved into a new realm of hero.  Like Justin Bieber, for instance–I mean, like, wow, how does he get those bangs so perfect?  But […]

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A bullfight is the most hypnotically awful event I have ever seen.  I’m glad I went that hot afternoon in Seville, but have no desire to return. Strangely elegant in its mismatched death, one of the haunting images that has stuck with me is that of the bull’s blood being mixed in with the sand […]

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Originally created in Florence at the Baglioni Hotel in the 1920’s, the Negroni was the regular drink of a bar customer named Camillo Negroni. Italians are nuts about bitters and Camillo couldn’t get enough of the mouth-watering sensation of Campari.  So much so, that his name lives on in bars around the world. Campari is […]

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