…and this is all about cocktails. 1001 cocktails to be exact. Cocktails that we researched, tested, refined, and rated to assemble a collection that includes historically significant, classic, and contemporary cocktails for you and your friends to enjoy. Now, having said all that, we do realize that this is a great many recipes for you to select from and for that let us just say, “You’re welcome.”

 

The journey that led us here began with a lunch and a bottle of Licor 43 (Cuarenta Y Tres). Actually, no. It began years earlier in a commercial bank on a pre-World Trade Center Wall Street where the workload was impressive, and overtime expected. Toward the end of a long day’s work someone in the area would euphemistically ask the group, “Are we going to stop for one?” The answer was generally an equally euphemistic, “Okay, just one.” 

 

Our search for “the one” often led us fairly far afield. One night, probably a Friday, it led us to a restaurant in the West Village. When the meal ended a round of Cuarenta Y Tres was sent to the table. Okay now cut to that lunch decades later when one of us said, “Hey do you remember that time in the Village…?” 

 

Rule One: Leave no bottle unemptied.

 

At our next lunch a bottle of Cuarenta Y Tres appeared, thanks Paul, and we ended the meal with some straight up. Now that could be the end of the story, but not for us. Why? Because we now had an opened, and unfinished, bottle of Cuarenta Y Tres which for us it was a challenge. 

 

It was agreed that next time, we would try a cocktail using Cuarenta Y Tres. One with scotch, maybe. A date was set, and a cocktail was tried. Now Paul is a bourbon and gin guy and I’m a scotch and vodka fella, so at subsequent lunches we had a cocktail made with each of those and the bottle stubbornly refused to be emptied. 

 

Then this conversation took place. Paul asked which cocktail I liked best? Well, let me think. Was it the second one? We should probably keep the recipes. Good idea. And maybe we should rate them too. Discussing how to rate a cocktail sometimes led us to deviate from the original recipe if we thought it would improve the experience. That led us to revise the recipe, retest the cocktail and adjust our rating.

 

Now do you get what the P and H in PH factor stand for? Anybody?

 

We kept trying new cocktails with other liquors. The bottle of Licor 43 was finally emptied but a methodology had been born. So, when Paul said, “You know I haven’t had Drambuie in a while”, I knew exactly where we were headed.

 

Rule Two: Life is too short for bad drinks.

 

Finding cocktails that combined each new liqueur we wanted to try with all twelve of our base liquors and with coffee was not always easy. Sometimes we settled for recipes that didn’t rate all that highly. C’est la vie, right? The number of liqueurs we added grew and the recipe collection expanded. Until we encountered an advertisement for Finlandia vodka that contained this quote by a philosophical bartender named Pekka, “Life is too short for bad drinks”. 

 

We had to agree and if we couldn’t significantly improve the rating of a cocktail on our list. We replaced it. Sure, it meant more mixology books to buy and read, more websites to scour through, more recipes to research and ultimately many more cocktails to test. But it was the right thing to do. 

 

Rule Three: If it’s not fun don’t do it.

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I don’t want to make it sound like it was all hard work. Getting together for lunch and testing, sometimes retesting, cocktails can actually be fun. 

  

Doing things you like is fun. Doing things you like with people you like is even more fun. Maybe the best fun. However, if you find yourself drinking alone, and fun is not a word you use to describe the experience. Stop it. Find a new hobby. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, “Alcohol is the rose-colored glasses of life” but take those glasses off when you look in the mirror. With your health and happiness, honesty is definitely the best policy.

 

​Lastly, remember to not let children mix drinks. It is unseemly

and they use too much vermouth.