Sure, the Derby has come and gone, juleps and all, but there is still a serious season of pony racing to come this summer. Having grown up near Saratoga, I’m well adept at picking out a winning horse when I see one — and I look at Manhattans the same way. Sitting down for a drink recently at Tribeca’s Silver Lining, I was reminded of one of my favorites, the Preakness, which could look like any other Manhattan at first glance, save for it’s secret weapon: Benedictine.

Benedictine liqueur is something that is shrouded in mystery itself; it is purported to have been created by a monk in the 15th Century and somehow the recipe was lost until a Frenchman rediscovered it in his art collection after the French Revolution. However, some say this story could be a complete fabrication, implemented as a brilliant marketing tool by the inventor when he created it in the mid-1800s.

Either way, the secret recipe of this cognac-based liqueur, with it’s 27 botanicals and spices, has been highly guarded.  But, thankfully, we can find it easy available today, though I doubt many would think to include it as an important facet of their home cocktail bar.

When combining Antica vermouth, Templeton’s gorgeous rye whiskey, and Benedictine, the Preakness (for my money) is one of the most regal Manhattan’s as you could ask for. The quality of a drink also speaks for itself when you consider that each of these ingredients could stand alone as solidly as they work together. While it can seem pricey, a quarter ounce of Bene goes a long way and you will know it’s worth once you add it’s delicious secrets to your Singapore Sling’s, Vieux Carre’s, and now, Preakness.

Ingredients
2 ounces Templeton Rye Whiskey
3/4 ounces Carpano Antica sweet vermouth
1/4 ounces Benedictine
2 dashes Angostura bitters

These cookies can’t quite decide if they’re cookies or cakes – they have the shape of a cookie and the texture of a cake and with a sweet-tart lemon glaze, they make the perfect treat to soak up whatever spirits you might be drinking.

My dad was actually the first one in my family to make this recipe. He found it in what is now one of my favorite baking books of all time: the aptly named The Rosie’s Bakery All-Butter, Cream-Filled, Sugar-Packed Baking Book by Judy Rosenberg.

Lemon Springtimes

Makes about 30 cookies

Ingredients

Vegetable oil or butter for greasing the baking sheets (optional)

Cookies
2 cups plus 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
¾ teaspoon baking powder
¾ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter
1 ½ cups sugar
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
2 teaspoons grated lemon zest
3 large eggs
1 large egg yolk
¾ cup plus 2 tablespoons sour cream

Glaze
1 cup confectioners’ sugar
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
1 tablespoon plus 2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F and line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper or lightly grease them with vegetable oil or butter.
2. Make the cookies: sift the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt together into a small bowl and set aside.
3. Cream the butter, sugar, vanilla, and lemon zest together in a medium-sized mixing bowel with an electric mixer on medium-high speed until light and fluffy, about 2 minutes. Stop the mixer once or twice to scrape the bowl with a rubber spatula.
4. Add the eggs and the egg yolk to the butter mixture and mix on medium speed until the mixture is light in color and increased in volume about 1 ½ times, about 2 minutes, stopping the mixer after each addition to scrape the bowl.
5. Gradually add the flour mixture and sour cream in 3 additions with the mixer on low speed, starting with the flour and ending with the cream. Mix each addition for only about 5 seconds, then stop the mixer and scrape the bowl. Finish the final mixing gently by hand with the spatula until the batter appears velvety.
6. Drop the batter by heaping tablespoons 2 inches apart onto the prepared baking sheets. Bake the cookies until they have puffed up, spring back to the touch, and are lightly golden around the edges, about 10 minutes. Carefully transfer the cookies to a cooling rack. Let them cool completely.
7. Meanwhile, prepare the glaze: Place the confectioners’ sugar in a medium-size bowl. Add the butter and the lemon juice, and beat vigorously with a whisk until the mixture is smooth and creamy.
8. Once the cookies have cooled, drop heaping ½ teaspoons of the glaze onto each cookie and spread with a small butter knife. Allow them to sit until the glaze hardens, about 2 hours (or pop them in the refrigerator for an hour).

Enjoy!

The first time Brian hosted a cocktail SideTour, I was looking for the right snack to serve to the attendees: something that would taste good (and yet not interrupt the flavor of the cocktails) and that would fill people up enough to absorb at least a little bit of all of the spirits they would be tasting. Soft pretzels came to mind, and after looking at multiple recipes, I decided to try this one from Alton Brown. It has turned out to be pretty awesome. The pretzels were easy to make, and turned out soft and chewy, with great flavor.  Enjoy!

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups warm (110 to 115 degrees F) water
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 2 teaspoons kosher salt
• 1 package active dry yeast
• 22 ounces all-purpose flour, approximately 4 1/2 cups
• 2 ounces unsalted butter, melted
• Vegetable oil, for pan
• 10 cups water
• 2/3 cup baking soda
• 1 large egg yolk beaten with 1 tablespoon water
• Pretzel salt

Directions

One of the most notable drinks in current cocktail lexicon, the Negroni, was created when an Italian nobleman Count Negroni instructed his bartender to change his Americano by adding gin and leaving out the soda. Here’s some background.

As the Negroni has gained an incredible amount of recognition in recent years, more and more people are claiming the it as their favorite drink—and at the same time many cocktail bars are creating their own variations based on the idea of spirit, plus vermouth, plus bitters and an orange twist, often in equal parts. Here I went with rum as the base, while choosing Averna as a more suitable bitter than Campari to round out this drink.

Just the same way that creating Manhattan variations can open up many delicious concoctions, I’d encourage learning more about bitters through the Negroni’s basic specs and discovering how the wide range of amaros like Ramazzotti, Cynar, Montenegro, CioCiaro and Meletti can enrich the flavor profile of your cocktails. Naturally, the balance between the other base and vermouth spirits will be affected by your choice, as well. I loosely titled my experiment a Negrumni.

It’s told by Jessica, because it started years ago, way back before Brian and Jessica had ever even met.

Prologue
When this story starts, I (Jessica) was living in Southern California and was the CEO of a Girl Scout council. Brian was living in the Lower East Side and was managing jazz artists for Jazz Tree.

At that point, neither of us knew the other existed.

And here’s where it began…

Back in December 2008, Bon Appetit published this story about a Brooklyn couple throwing a vintage-inspired party centered around craft cocktails.

It cast a spell on me  - there was something magical about the contrast of handcrafted and vintage against the sterile, chain store environment that I was in.

Fast forward to October 2010. I had decided to apply to Seth Godin’s Female Entrepreneur MBA program (FEMBA). Right after I submitted my application, I was sitting next to Seth at dinner in Atlanta (I had gotten to know him over the summer by volunteering at a number of his speaking engagements, including the one in Atlanta, but that’s a whole story unto itself).

So I’m sitting next to Seth and he tells me he received my application and then he starts asking me questions about why I’m applying (at that point, I was decidedly not a female entrepreneur).

He tells me that before he’ll consider my application, I have to write an eight-page business plan for a business, any business, and get it to him by Tuesday (it’s Thursday). The only stipulations: it has to be something that can be bootstrapped and start generating revenue almost immediately.

This would have been fine…if I actually had a business idea. But I had no idea what type of business I wanted to start.

I started doing some mind mapping around what I was passionate about: dance, how work is being revolutionized, events, craft cocktails…but at that point, it was just a list.

I happened to be heading to New York for the weekend and reached out to Clay Hebert (an entrepreneur and a Seth Godin Six-Month MBA grad, who I had met at a program at Zappos…yet another story unto itself) for help.

We met up and I showed him my roughly sketched out list. Craft cocktails stood out. He thought they were the way to go. We started brainstorming ideas. He thought I could make something happen quickly by creating a craft cocktail directory – a listing site of all of the places to get craft cocktails in the country, with businesses paying a premium for enhanced listings.

I got to work on it. I did research. I started following people on Twitter. I made lists of names and terms related to cocktails trying to come up with the name for my new website. I bought the obvious one – craftcocktaildirectory.com – but then decided I want something more creative, so I bought the url alchemistofspirits.com.

I wrote my business plan and used WordPress to create the Alchemist of Spirits website. I posted one sample post and one video, so that Seth could see that I was serious.

I turned everything in to Seth…he asked me to call him to discuss it. He questioned the fact that I wasn’t a thought leader in the craft cocktail space. He told me to drop the business idea and come up with six more (and eventually he invited me to participate in the program, which I did).

That was November 2010.

Even though I had put the craft cocktail idea aside, I kept getting more and more interested in craft cocktails and underground supper clubs…and also got more interested in moving to New York.

One of the people I started following on Twitter at that time was Brian, via the underground supper/wine club he co-founded called The Noble Rot.

At the time, I didn’t know that two months later I would find myself living in New York, signing up to attend one of Brian’s events.

We only met for a brief minute at the event, but a few weeks later, a woman who had been following both of us on Twitter saw that we were going to be at SXSW and asked me to speak at an event and asked Brian to curate the wine. That put us in email communication with each other and we started planning the event. In the end, the woman organizing decided not to do it, and Brian and I never connected.

Back in New York, I came down with an awful, awful sore throat and tweeted that I needed to find an urgent care. Brian emailed me within five minutes to tell me where the best one was.

A week or so later, I saw him at another supper club but we barely got to talk because my throat was still recovering and I my voice hadn’t fully come back yet. We agreed that we should grab a drink soon, since we had been bumping into each other for months but had never really had a conversation.

I went home and pulled out a blank index card (this is how I was keeping track of my to do list at the time) and wrote “Cocktails with Brian Quinn”

A week or so later, we decided to meet at Little Branch, one of Brian’s favorite bars, for a drink. Halfway through our conversation, Brian declared that he was tired of talking about business, so we started talking about more personal things. It was quickly transitioning from a platonic conversation over a drink to a date. By that point we were both starving so Brian suggested we head to Daddy O’s, a bar down the street where we could get bacon wrapped hot dogs and tater tots. Halfway through tater tots we sealed what was then definitively a date with a kiss (or a few)…and as I headed home in a cab that night, I knew something special had just happened.

Fast forward to today – February 2012.

We’ve been living together in Brooklyn for seven months and working together on throwing events, creating cocktails, and experimenting with cooking all sorts of things. We decided we should document all of our experiments and creations somewhere…and then I remembered this little blog – Alchemist of Spirits – I had created over a year ago, that was lying dormant waiting for someone (or two someone’s) to use it. It was the perfect name. We like bringing spirits together – both alcoholic and human – and creating something amazing through unique combinations.

When we went back to look at the Alchemist of Spirits blog to update it, we realized two things that gave us goosebumps:

First, I had called my original post on the blog “Craft Cocktails: A Love Story”.

Second, the only video I had posted on the site (again, before I had even met Brian) – that video of Rachel Maddow explaining how to make a Sidecar? Brian and I watched it together and at the very end Rachel announced the name of the bar she was in: Daddy O’s – the bar where Brian and I had ended our first date.

Alchemist of Spirits.

A love story, a couple of years in the making.

We hope you enjoy it. There will be a lot more to come.

The Original Alchemist of Spirits from November 2010

Brian and Jessica - Photo Credit: Steph Goralnick - sgoralnick.com

I think like many of us, my college drinking experience was largely driven by vodka and all of its versatile applications—with soda, tonic, cranberry, OJ. It’s no secret that vodka has become ingrained into America’s culture over the years, due to its ability to add an easy kick to any liquid. But in the cocktail world, where each ingredient plays an important role in the essence of the drink, it simply lacks the flavor to make a cocktail interesting. Think about trying to make risotto with water instead of broth. There’s something missing.

However, if there is was one cocktail I could point to that would have expanded my vodka-soaked palate years ago it is the Eastside—introduced to me at Little Branch in New York’s West Village.

Hailing from the Daiquiri family of cocktails, this drink is really just a modern-day Gimlet, with the addition of mint and cucumber. Refreshing and a summertime favorite, while also useful in warding off scurvy (as the British Navy found in the 1800′s), this variation is great year-round.

In addition, this recipe of 2-parts spirit, 1-part lime, and 3/4-part simple syrup can be expanded very easily to many spirits: with rum it’s a Daiquiri, with tequila it’s a Margarita, with gin you could shake lightly and pour it into a tall Collins glass with ice and soda to make a Rickey.

Fresh juice is always best (sorry, no Rose’s), and to make the simple syrup, just pour one pound of sugar into a one liter or quart container and fill the remaining space with water, then shake it up to combine. Contrary to popular opinion, there’s no need to heat it—leave the stove pots for your risotto, with chicken broth and shallots, of course.

Though many of us tend to stick to a large dose of coffee before work, back in the 19th and early 20th Century, a morning tipple was rather common, and it certainly didn’t seem to hamper productivity during the Industrial Revolution.

The Marmalade Cocktail was first published in Harry Craddock’s Savoy Cocktail Book in 1930, noting, “should there be no fog, take as preventatives lest there should be fog in the course of the day.” Originally, the drink did not call for Campari, but I prefer the addition, as fashioned by the notable London cocktail bar, Hawksmoor.

Delicious, citrusy and refreshing, this drink certainly provides a quick wake-up call. Most people would likely prefer to sip with their weekend brunch, but don’t feel ashamed if you break from better judgement once in a while and suddenly find yourself with a brighter workday.

Many in the bar world associate the name St. Germain with the elderflower liqueur that can add a lovely floral aromatic to most any drink, or even make a great accompaniment to your pancakes. However, when I encountered a drink simply titled St. Germain from the Savoy Cocktail Book, I was quite intrigued to see its ingredients not only left out any mention of elderflower, but also featured the intensely herbal liqueur, Green Chartreuse as the base spirit.

Green Chartreuse is a rather mysterious spirit: produced by Monks in France, only three of whom know the secret recipe of 132 botanical extracts that comprise this 110 proof, natural chlorophyll-colored liqueur. If you haven’t tasted Green Chartreuse before, you may want to start with a gateway-cocktails, like the Last Word or Greenpoint, or perhaps the Rococo Cocoa — a hot chocolate with Chartreuse at Peels in New York City. While purchasing Green (or the milder, sweeter Yellow) Chartreuse in the store can seem pricey, note that most cocktails only call for a small amount, so a bottle should last you quite a while.

For the St. Germain cocktail, after tasting it’s herbal and citrus notes, ever so slightly dulled by the egg white, one can easily see why it may have been named after Comte Saint Germain, the mythical 18th Century alchemist who is believed to have discovered the secret of eternal life. While this drink may not allow you to live forever, though we’ll never know, it might just get you hooked on Chartreuse for eternity.