It’s called the Hucktini, a name that might remind you of stories by Mark Twain but probably comes from cocktail naming “sensibilities” of the relatively recent past—before the modern craft cocktail renaissance. Bars of the 1990s seemed to call every cocktail a “tini” of one sort or another. Vermouth? Never. They weren’t classics, just syrupy sweet vodka drinks of every flavor, poorly named and capitalizing on customers that didn’t know any better. It was a different time for sure. The silver lining is probably the fact that a continually missed naming opportunity has spared us a bloated hist ..read more

For almost a decade and a half, we’ve been extolling the virtues of great cocktails and how to make them. We’ve shared innovative ideas and revolutionary recipes. We’ve unlocked the mysteries of transformative techniques and inventive ingredients. But we have unintentionally avoided one topic that has, metaphorically speaking, built up enough pressure that we think it’s time to make a change. We are referring, of course, to the simple fact that what goes in must inevitably come out. It is time to finally break the seal and address this gap by completely rebranding ourselves. We will soon chan ..read more

There’s a restaurant in Portland, Oregon called Kann. It’s Haitian cuisine from James Beard Award winning chef Gregory Gourdet. It was already a popular place, but when it was announced he had won the James Beard Award, it became a lot harder to secure a reservation. Below the restaurant is Sousòl, a bar whose name is literally the Haitian-Creole word for “basement”. This place has been in our sites for over a year, and as part of our 2023 Portland Bar of the Month tour, we finally made our way to the Buckman neighborhood of SE before the new year (better late than never). You cannot access S ..read more

Here’s the first in a pair of quick and easy Tiki recipes we whipped up for online happy hours recently. The Lani-Honi is just three ingredients with crushed ice and it’s an honest-to-goodness historic recipe that appears in Jeff Berry’s books (so you know it’s good). This one also contains Benedictine—a lovely herbal liqueur that we sometimes forget about, but one that adds an unusual flavor component to a basic rum sour formula. First, setup your glass with crushed ice. The recipe calls for a wine goblet as it was served back in 1962 on a south seas cruise. It doesn’t have to be a large vol ..read more

The flaming Krakatoa cocktail at Hale Pele We kicked off 2023 with a plan to visit a dozen bars around Portland, Oregon over the course of the year. Everything was going along fine until mid-year when we decided to move across town! Selling a house and moving definitely rearranges some priorities, not to mention adds a lot of new projects. Needless to say, this caused our Bar Of The Month tour to slide several months, but we are still committed to the project, and last week we finally picked up where we left off. Hale Pele was the destination and we arrived early in the week—and perhaps more i ..read more

The century-old Casino cocktail (which we should probably write about) inspired Sam Ross to create this rye-based version in 2005. We will make both, but decided to share this one first. This is like the Final Ward cocktail only without the Chartreuse—something we can all appreciate right now. First, get yourself some Luxardo Maraschino (mar-uh-SKEE-no) liqueur, or the Maraska brand as we have here. Then, grab a bottle of a strong, bonded rye—we used Rittenhouse 100, but something like Old Grand-Dad bonded rye works. You want that peppery flavor alongside the lemon. There’s not much to say ex ..read more

Tammy Faye and Satan’s Helper We have fallen a little behind posting our 2023 bar scene experiences across Portland, but we are still making our way around the city. A few interruptions like birthdays and moving across town have affected our timetable slightly, but we still made a revisit one of our favorite little spots on the east side called Rum Club. It has been nine years since we first visited and wrote about this place, and all we can say is that in this intervening near-decade, it has only gotten better! We sat at the bar, though tables are available as is a small patio. Years ago, on ..read more

We have been enjoying the medium format as well as the more recent video shorts by Zach Zoschke, and in one if his cocktail features the other day he was wearing an Aviation Gin t-shirt. This was like a shout-out to Summit Sips as if to say, “Hey Portland, you should definitely try this cocktail!” We are game, and it was perfectly timed for a virtual happy hour anyway, so we mixed up some of these. Zach’s relentless video uploads remind us of our own “Drink of the Week” series many years ago. Whether trying to write regular posts about drinks or shooting and editing videos, we appreciate the ..read more

The April installment of our Bar of the Month tour brought us to the Teadrop Lounge, an important fixture of the Portland bar/cocktail scene that we reviewed nine years ago. If you only had time to visit one cocktail spot in the city, we think you cannot go wrong with a visit to Teardrop. It is consistently one of the best places get the most out of a cocktail adventure. They feature drinks from around the world as well as seasonal selections of their own design—drinks that are always unique and delicious. On this visit, we noticed their menu has evolved somewhat, with sections for Bright &am ..read more

For the third month in a row, we visited a bar we had never been to before. This was, of course, the luck of the draw as we make our way through a dozen locations this year. Pacific Standard is just over the river on Portland’s East side on the main floor of the KEX Hotel. It’s also home to Oregon’s own Jeffrey Morgenthaler, celebrated for his recipes and techniques made famous online, in books and of course, from Clyde Common and Pépé le Moko. Pacific Standard describes itself as a living room to the city and a destination for travelers and locals. It has a comfortable vibe featuring a large ..read more