#Great molasses flood corpse how to#

The latter is a rye-Chartreuse-vermouth mixture invented by Kalkofen at Green Street. He added that the drink was a riff on another Boston cocktail, the 3-2-1. He said the cocktail was a staple at the bar. While I was there, a regular I was chatting with ordered a 4-5-6, a strong Scotch sipper. The area’s numbers game haunted me again later that evening when I paid a call on Brick & Mortar, a long-standing second-floor cocktail bar in Cambridge. 43 if I wanted an autumnal Manhattan riff or No. “I always found it strange,” said Yarm, “until I felt an attachment to No. That made it the Chicago of cocktail bars, that imagination-starved rock band having named all its albums with Roman numerals: Chicago III, Chicago IV, Chicago V, etc. But, apparently, during its heyday, the cocktails were not named, but numbered in successive order. There also have been some quirky number drinks like the 11+2/12+1 and the 47%.” But, according to Yarm, the star of the local numbers game was a place called Hungry Mother in Cambridge. “Boston does have a lot of number drinks,” he agreed, “especially for years like 1820 for Bols Genever, 1836 for Mexican independence, and 1638 for the Kopke port winery founding, besides the 1919 cocktail and spin-off drinks. He probably knows more about modern Boston mixology than anyone. Yarm is general manager of Drink and, in addition to his books, he is one of the authors of the long-running cocktail blog Cocktail Virgin/Slut. But, as I paged through Yarm’s books (he has two, including Drink & Told ), it seemed Boston bartenders were positively goofy about digits. The French 75, 20th Century, Seven and Seven, Tuxedo No. Cocktails with numbers in their names has always been with us. Boston and Cambridge have a thing for numbered cocktails. The “‘36” part of the drink’s ungainly handle-order it and you’ll sound like a spy passing along a bit of code-refers to the year Kahlua was invented. In addition to the 1910, there’s the 1818 cocktail at Spoke wine bar, and 1919 ‘36 from Audobon, which runs this way: And the Maximillian Affair, a mezcal cocktail by Boston bartender Misty Kalkofen that is fairly well known (and is in my book), is an absolute byword in area bars.Īnd then there’s the 1919, a cocktail with a reputation big enough in that Boston area that it has spawned several other city cocktails. No bartenders anywhere else make this drink.

#Great molasses flood corpse how to#

Every bartender here knows how to make a Periodista, an obscure drink whipped by by Joe McGuirk in 1995. But every city that has played a part in the cocktail renaissance has its own idiosyncratic, provincial drink history, one known primarily to locals. I tend to take a broad view when I’m writing about the cocktail revival of the last quarter century, looking at global and national drinking and mixing trends and tracking their origins. But that was the way young, brash mixologists rolled back then, always reaching for obscure ingredients to amuse themselves and confuse their guests. The name is also a reference to the rum in the drink, which is Old Monk Rum, an Indian rum that is very popular in India, but not easy to find here. Which was a real thing that actually happened, on the North End of Boston on Jan. The drink was created by Ben Sandrof and named not after the year Prohibition began, as one might guess, but, well, the Great Molasses Flood. Sure enough, there it was in Frederic Yarm’s book about Boston cocktails, Drink and Tell, which, of course, Boston Shaker carried. The subject of the 1910 came up and someone pointed out that it was based on an earlier cocktail at Drink, a cocktail called the 1919.

I was in Somerville, at the bar-goods shop Boston Shaker, signing books and talking Boston cocktail history with some locals. But there was more to the 1910 backstory that I didn’t know.

For each drink in Modern Classic Cocktails, I tried to get to the bottom of every origin story, and record them as accurately as possible. And that, I thought, was the end of that story.īut it wasn’t. She told me it was named after the year the Mexican Revolution began. It was invented in 2011 by Boston bartender Ezra Star, who ran the bar Drink for many years. It’s a mezcal-Cognac blend, supported by Punt e Mes, maraschino liqueur and Peychaud’s bitters. In my new book Modern Classic Cocktails, there’s a drink called 1910.