Breathnaigh

Simple spring cocktail: lavender and gin.

Evenings in May, when the shivers of early spring have subsided but the weather has yet to yield to smothering humidity, are well spent in a backyard or patio with something cool to sip and someone lovely to talk with. I can provide you with one of those things.

Ingredients

1.5 oz gin (a floral gin like Hendrick's works)

1 tbs lavender syrup (recipe below)

1 tsp fresh lime juice

Seltzer

Cracked ice

Recipe

Combine all ingredients in a large rocks glass. Stir. Garnish with lavender flower or sprig.

Lavender syrup

Essentially, simple syrup steeped with lavender flowers. In a saucepan, heat 1.5 cups water with 1 cup granulated sugar on high. Stir to dissolve sugar. When mixture boils, remove from heat, and add a half cup lavender flowers. Stir. Cover and let steep at least 15 minutes. Strain and let cool.

Travel, documented.

I had the good fortune to travel through Florence and Paris last month, partially on business. I can recommend: Italian concierges, Frasi, Mario's, negronis, the Hotel Excelsior (not that I stayed there), EasyJet, Orly airport, Rue des Canettes, Gerard Mulot, and Cafe Verlet. I recommend against: early flights, CDG, European breakfast (related: European Starbucks), Versailles when the weather is bad, Verizon's international service. If you know me on Facebook or follow me on tumblr, you've probably already seen most of my travel snapshots.

Mont Blanc pastries at Angelina.

Musee d'Orsay.

Parked bike in Florence (possibly a marketing gimmick).

English graffiti in Florence.

Scooters in Florence.

Mulot macaron (I don't generally care for macarons, but... woah)

Classical sculpture in storage at the Louvre.

Sunset in Paris from the Louvre.

Lovelocks near Notre Dame.

Kopi Luwak coffee at Cafe Verlet.

Beers D.C. people order.

Can't deny I'm a little jealous of the guys who run D.C. Brau. Convert a NE D.C. industrial space into a quality microbrewery, sell to the best bars in the area, and roll up the garage doors every weekend for tours, tasting, and general smorgasborderie. I made it over there for the first time yesterday (they're open 1-4 Saturdays), tasted a few beers, and sampled a pork belly bun from an upstart steamed bun outfit, D.C. Buns. Also grabbed a growler of their Thyme after Thyme, since herb-infused beers like Stillwater's sage-y Cellar Door have kept me interested in craft beer as the appeal of super-IPAs have worn off.

Some beers are aged in used whisky barrels. Several pounds of whisky can remain soaked into the wood when Copper Fox is done with them.

Newer breweries all seem to have decent graphic design.

Can't say I love the trend of small breweries canning rather than bottling. Cheaper = good, but I still taste metal.

Winter warmer: boilo.

We had our now-annual holiday party this weekend, and although it's mellowed with age--from 30+ people crammed in a two-bedroom apartment, spilling beer and (shiver) actually dancing, to a dozen or so friends catching up over drinks in a small house--I still made a batch of boilo, a drink that can turn the most staid holiday get-together into a blur of red and green.

Boilo is a Pennsylvania coal country cocktail, a steaming cup of rye whiskey-spiked herbalism.  The recipe was passed to me as a relic of windswept rail yards, where men working frigid overnight shifts needed something warm and inebriating to look forward to. It was sipped in bone cold shacks to soften the everlasting chill. It's just as comforting today if you've just finished raking your half acre, or taken a chilly walk back from Whole Foods.

Boilo

Ingredients:

1 orange, quartered

2 lemons, quartered

10 oz water

1 tsp caraway seeds

2 sticks cinnamon

1 tsp cloves

8 oz honey

10 oz rye whiskey

Directions:

Place fruit in a medium saucepan, add water, and heat on medium-high. Add spices. Stir occasionally, and mash fruit. When water boils, stir in honey. Return to a boil, and reduce for about 4 minutes. Remove from heat, and strain into another saucepan. Discard fruit/spices. To the strained liquid, add whiskey. Stir well. Can be poured into a teapot for serving, or left on very low heat to keep warm, but take care not to cook off the alcohol. Serve in teacups or demitasses (or in mugs, but larger servings make it harder to drink, uh, responsibly).

Amethyst twighlight, photo by Jack Delano, via Shorpy.

Take home a treat.

As an adult, I've learned to lament Pennsylvania's liquor laws, which are loosening but still funnel all alcohol sales through the state apparatus. Liquor and wine are sold in "state stores"; beer can be bought by the case, minimum, through beer distributors. Unless you get it at a pizza place, then you can buy a 6-pack. Yeah, confusing.

As a kid, though, I was an indirect but strong supporter of these laws, because the beer distributors also sold soda. So on the rare occasions my parents bought beer (not beer drinkers, but kept the fridge and liquor cabinet stocked with friends' drinks of choice), they'd more often than not also pick up a case of deposit bottles of soda (SE PA doesn't do "pop").

Before holiday parties there would be a wooden crate of glass bottles air-chilling outside the back door. When the real cold arrived, I'd brush snow off the bottles and they'd frost over when I brought them in. Sometimes we'd buy 12-oz Coke bottles, the ones with the bottle factory's location in raised letters on the bottom. Just as often we'd get a mixed case of A-Treat soda, the Allentown elixir. Coke and Sprite had nothing on A-Treat sarsparilla or birch beer. The stuff would be rationed out to me and my brother over the winter holidays, and the empty bottles put back in the case, the edges of the glass scuffed from years of this cycle, and returned to the distributor.

A cold bottle of soda is worth a little bald nostalgia.

What's next for beer nerds?

In 1997, Denis Leary complained about being thirsty for beer-flavored beer. He had no idea how bad it would get.

Full Sail Session Lager.

At one time I considered myself a pretty dedicated beer nerd. After being wooed by my first Sierra Nevada Pale Ale in 1999 or so, I made my way through the microbrew selection in my local beer store, and eventually became the guy bringing mixed six-packs to parties (this move makes other partiers' eyes roll). When the rabble were pounding Miller Lites I was sipping Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA, which had become and still is my favorite beer. I homebrewed beer in the early aughts, keeping a carboy of muddily fermenting liquid in a pal's cool, dry basement for weeks until, beaming, we presented the limited edition beer to friends. The results were mixed. We would've kept going, but some jackass knocked over the pregnant carboy, shattering it and our hoppy, slightly overcarbonated dreams.

At some point, though, the beer game passed me by. I suspected as much during my bachelor party weekend a couple years ago as we toured the Dogfish Head Craft Brewery in Lewes, Delaware. The beer of the moment then was Palo Santo Marron, an exotic product of DFH brewmaster Sam Calagione's endlessly inventive mind. Palo Santo ages in a one-of-a-kind cask DFH had built from Paraguayan wood. We bought a few bottles with conspiratorial glee, happy to be in on a beer you couldn't yet get back home. And... I didn't really like it. And looking at the "extreme brewing" DFH beers on the shelves, I didn't like those either. Calagione seems part mad scientist, part archaeologist, and maybe partly kidding. These beers were exotic for its own sake and packed knockout alcohol levels.

And the Belgian beers everyone was suddenly so hyped about? They were new (to Americans) and delicious for sure, but too sweet, specific in flavor, and heavy to take the place beer occupied in my life. Beer nerds were also reviewing beers on sites like Beer Advocate, sort of a beer Zagats (the site predates me as a legal drinker). For the most part, the new beers DFH puts out, and the beers that BA types love, are heavy, high-alcohol, strongly flavored beers. The kind you sip, appreciate, then need to lie down awhile.

The good news is that the "session beer" appears to be trending. Session beers tend to be less than 5% alcohol by volume, medium bodied, neither overly hoppy nor malty. Drinkable. If that sounds like a Budweiser, that's not too far off, except now many microbreweries are making session beers. Without the globalbev focus on max profits and low production costs, these beers, like Full Sail Brewing's aptly named Session Lager and Session Black Lager, are interesting enough for a jaded beer nerd but not overpowering. Someone ship Denis Leary a case.

Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

 
Around the corner from the Betsy Ross house, the Art in the Age mason-esque logo marks the shop.

Philadelphia seems to foster subversive capitalists. Phila icon Ben Franklin has become a textbook cliche of lawful American ingenuity, but the real BF was a hustler who authored and plagiarized with equal zeal. The conservative politics of Urban Outfitters cofounder and CEO Richard Hayne occasionally rankle the customer base of his indie-retail empire. The happy and fruitful marriage of subculture to corporate culture makes DIY purists squirm, cynics smirk, and shareholders rich.

That local tradition of blurring the line between art and commerce is strong with Steven Grasse. You know the feeling you get when you hear about a new band, or beer, or bar, when they’re just a little too polished? They feel focus-grouped. You get a spidey sense that you’re being sold something and soon enough you can make out the corporate fingerprints. Grasse and his marketing firm, Gyro, specialized for 20 years in the type of advertising that sold cool but wouldn’t leave any fingerprints.

A tree mural near the entrance to the shop displays faux polaroids of musicians who've visited, including No Age and the Spinto Band.

Grasse was responsible for giving Camel cigarettes a hipper image after the retirement of Joe C, and the campaigns, with fresh graphic design, gave new life to a brand in a dying industry. Big, bland clients brought Gyro in to give them what they couldn’t get from traditional advertising--a real edge. Gyro's (occasionally controversial) methods were authentic enough to draw people in and clever enough to work. A documentary about tattoo artist Sailor Jerry drew praise at film festivals (and also happened to raise his profile while Gyro marketed Sailor Jerry tshirts); reclusive, ornery garage rocker Jay Reatard (RIP) helped market Sailor Jerry rum. Gyro gave sex, drugs, and rocknroll a job, but didn’t insist they shave and put on a tie.

In the early 2000s Grasse was ahead of another cultural shift and used it to create a new brand for William Grant and Sons, a Scottish whiskey distiller. Grasse didn’t merely do the print ads, he designed the entire brand: a backstory involving rescued potstills, a strong graphic identity using anachronistic typefaces and apothecary bottles, and a liquor with herbal notes and a gilded age flavor profile that resonated with drinkers. Hendricks Gin has become the choice of connoisseurs worldwide, and with its aura of obscure craftsmanship it has largely escaped the backlash that affected other superpremium spirits at the end of the decade.

Arts in the Age customers can sample ROOT, a complex herbal spirit more akin to pre-Temperance root tea than schnapps. The store cannot sell alcohol.

Since Hendricks debut, the zeitgeist has gotten even folksier. Up and coming indie rock bands have ditched neon tshirts and synthesizers for waxed moustaches and mandolins. Etsy has made tattooed flea market knitters into internet entrepreneurs. Bartenders are now certified mixologists, resurrecting dusty cocktail recipes and infusing liquor with exotic herbs. And it seems like everyone is canning or pickling something.

While bloggers and journalists debate the reasons behind our new taste for all things old timey, Grasse is busy catering to it. Last year he broke Gyro apart, decided to stop investing his creativity in other people’s products and started Quaker City Mercantile, a new venture that markets only its own brands. The first is Art in the Age. It’s a store, or an arts space, or a liquor manufacturer, depending on where you look. The flagship location is in Old City Philadelphia, and fills a bright space with carefully sourced clothing, books, and ephemera that evoke a similar feeling to Hendricks gin. The shelves also display bottles of ROOT and SNAP, spirits that seem pretty close to pre-Prohibition tonics, and both appealing enough that William Grant bought the whole thing in 2010, including the store.  I had a chance to visit Art in the Age last weekend and ask a few questions of Mr. Grasse.

Peter W. Anderson: Art in the Age is an ambitious, uh, thing, as it makes stuff, sells stuff, and features music and art it's not necessarily making or selling. If you had to narrow it down, what would you call it? A brand? A shop? An experiment? Something else?
Steven Grasse: You’re right, it’s an ambitious, uh, thing. At the heart of it, it’s a space where things happen... we sell stuff to keep the lights on. And the stuff we sell, we are very picky about. It’s a brand, a shop, a gallery, an experiment....all of those things. And all the intricate moving parts are all equally important to it working.

Shop interior.

More photos and complete interview after the jump.