Cocktail Hour
As the sun sinks slowly below the yard arm it's time for Cocktail Hour—a time to talk, to review the day's events, to relax and to enjoy a pre-dinner cocktail.
Here are our favorite recipes. All of them are good but those on our Top Shelf are marked—these we return to time and again.
The journey began when we tried to plant a Margarita Tree. But, like the Margarita Tree, it didn't take off until the book The New Cocktail Hour revealed the way. Now, with years of dedicated research behind us, we'd like to share the best of what we have discovered. (And in the interest of science, and to avoid unnecessary loss of brain cells, we'll share the failures too.)
I always wanted to understand cocktails. They just seemed such a mess of unrelated recipes listed alphabeitcally by name. We found that by sorting the recipes according to type of ingredients they naturally organize themselves into related groups. It's also a great way to choose a cocktail when you're not quite sure what mood you're in. Please check out our charts of the Sours and the Aromatics to sort the wormwood from the Margarita trees:
- Our at-a-glance Chart of the Sours,
- Our at-a-glance Chart of the Aromatics.
Peter & Kathy