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A Mai Tai Brief & Elena's Virtue

We love rum. It's wonderfully diverse, under appreciated, and often misused. If you want to get into a geek conversation about it, corner us on a slow night.

One of the most often-butchered rum drinks, and a true classic, is the Mai Tai. When made properly, it's an earthy, nutty, bitter gem. When butchered, it's sickly sweet and boring.

A great overview of several mai tai recipes can be found over at Andrew Bohrer's blog, Cask Strength. If you want to simply geek about rum for hours, head over to Matt Robold's Rum Dood blog.

These guys are the real deal. Check them out.

Additionally, Andrew posts a recipe for his take on a Mai Tai without any rum, called Elena's Virtue.

1 ounce Amaro Nonino

 .5 ounce Amaro Montenegro

.5 ounce fresh lime juice

.25 ounce Tuaca

.25 ounce Luxardo Amaretto

Shake ingredients and strain over finely crushed ice. Garnish with an orange zest, basil, and .25 ounce of hickory-smoke infused Ramazzotti.

Underberg.

If you spend any time drinking with any of us, you'll quickly realize we're crazy huge fans of amari. When we find people we deem potential converts, we'll do anything we can to put a glass of Fernet Branca, Cynar, or Ramazzotti in their gullet.

For the uninitiated, an amaro (pl. amari) is a bitter, herbal liqueur, most often consumed after a large meal to aid in digestion. They are mainly consumed and produced in Europe and flavors vary greatly between brands, the defining factor being bitterness often derived from various combinations of gentian, quinine and many other roots and barks.

We are doing our best to work with the State of Maine and multiple distributors in the region to make more amari available to us at the Club (and you), but currently the selection is thin. Which is why we were so surprised to find Underberg available at one of our favorite stores in the state, Morse's Sauerkraut & Deli in Waldoboro. Make the trip out there for awesome pickles, sauerkraut and sausage, and be sure to grab a pack of Underberg or two while you're at it.

Restaurant Failure Rates

When starting out any new small-business venture, one is required to focus on the positives, address the negatives in a cool and level-headed manner, and forge ahead. However, we bar and restaurant entrepreneurs have a daunting statistic breathing down our neck, and every person we talk to addresses it: "Don't 90% of restaurants fail in their first year?" Until recently, I believed a variation of that number, though not quite as high, and simply continued on, knowing our product to be superior. Now I can happily report something else:

It's not true.

A bit of business reading lead me to a 5-year old article by BloombergBusinessweek tearing down that statistic. The simple facts are this, according to Ohio State's Hospitality Management Program's research, 25% of restaurants fail within a year. And 60% within three years. Which may seem high, until you realize that a 60% failure rate over three years is average, across all industries, for small businesses.

Let me write it again, for myself: bars and restaurants fail on a rate similar to any other small business. It feels good to know, and while there are thousands of moving parts involved in opening a bar (or any small business), this one positive thought can make things feel a little less daunting from time to time.

Pleasant Surprises.

We're always on the lookout for pleasant surprises that inspire us and finding this poster in the basement bathroom at one of Portland's more well-known restaurants was quite a treat.

Bonal is a quinquina, a bitter-laced and fortified wine made to be consumed before a meal to open the appetite. While it's not currently available in Maine (we're working our contacts to change that), we happen to snag a bottle for our home collection and have used it for years in other markets. It's fairly light, as far as aperitifs go, near a light-bodied sherry, and the bitterness is driven by quinine, but lends itself wonderfully to providing a punch up to a flagging spirit-driven cocktail.

Faking Amer Picon.

This one is from a few years back, but great geekery and useful until the day Picon is imported.

Jamie Boudreau, a Seattle-based bartender and long-time blogger, made a very effective substitute for Amer Picon, essential in drinks such as the Brooklyn and Picon Punch. Amer Boudreau is something you'll be delighted to find behind the bar at the Club, once we get the Campari Group to bring Ramazzotti into the state. In the meantime, you'll have to be content making your own batch at home.

The Sun King's Swizzle.

One of the more exciting things about bartending can be the R&D that goes into cocktails. There are so many combinations of this, that or the other, focusing on one ingredient or flavor is necessary when developing something new. Thankfully, to keep our palates trained, we try to participate in cocktail competitions with just that sort of focus.

This one from Louis Royer came across our desk recently and we decided to throw our hat in the ring. Our approach to these sorts of competitions is to draw inspiration from drinks, flavor combinations or ingredients that we love. Ideally, from all three.

Our entry into the Royer competition is The Sun King's Swizzle. It's inspiration comes from one of our favorite late-summer drinks, the Queen's Park Swizzle, replacing the rum with Royer's Force 53 cognac, switching the lime for lemon, and balancing the sugar and bitters to our liking.

The recipe is as follows:

2.5 ounces Louis Royer Force 53 Cognac

.75 ounces fresh squeezed lemon juice

.5 ounces rich sugar syrup (2:1)

2 dashes Angostura bitters

Combine all ingredients in a chilled pint glass. Fill glass with finely crushed ice. Swizzle drink until well mixed and glass is frosted on outside. Top glass with more finely crushed ice to form a mound of ice above the rim. Garnish with 2 further dashes of Angostura and 3 fresh mint sprigs.

The drink is at once intense and refreshing. As you raise the glass to your mouth, the mint's aroma is the first to hit you (when garnishing with mint, be sure to lightly smack the mint in your palm to release its oils). That aroma provides a cooling counter-balance to the intense flavors of over-proof cognac and bitters.

We think we have something that's a perfect remedy to a hot, late summer afternoon. Paired perfectly with a lounge chair in the sun and a good book.