Cocktail Cookbook

“What are we going to do with the rest of the evaporated milk?”

“Cocktail?”

1 ½ oz tequila

1 oz coffee liqueur

3 oz evaporated milk

Combine all ingredients in a shaker over ice and shake well. Pour into an old fashioned glass over a large ice cube.

Many a book, blog and news article has been devoted to the topic of whiskey: the way it’s aged, where to drink it, how to store it and serve it or pair it with food. But comparatively little attention has been paid to how whiskey is packaged.

Which is a shame, really, when you think about how a beautiful, funny or fancy-looking label can influence which bottles we buy – and which we ignore – when shopping the whiskey aisle.

Spirits and wine writer Noah Rothbaum felt that it was time that American whiskey labels had their day in the spotlight. His new book, The Art of American Whiskey, traces the history of surprisingly elaborate labels from the 1800s to today.

From Medicine To Modern Revival: A History Of American Whiskey, In Labels

How exactly did a cocktail chart for the U.S. Forest Service make it into the National Archives? Esquire investigates.

This Cocktail Construction Chart from the Forest Service always makes a big splash when we run it, but it also stirs up a bit of curiosity about its origins. Magazines esquire​ and popmech​ contacted the U.S. Forest Service and some of our colleagues at the National Archives at Atlanta to uncover the full story (a very hot topic this week at usnatarchives):

"We’re surprised it even made it into the Archives," admitted Larry Chambers, the National Press Officer for the U.S. Forest Service, explaining that, after 1946, the Archives began to be more vigilant about what passed muster for preservation. And Maureen Hill, an archivist with the National Archives at Atlanta, told us that the chart was mixed in "with a bundle of architectural drawings," and added, "This is the sort of thing our historian expected should have been tossed in the can." She guessed that someone had decided that the chart was too neat to throw away, and mused that she and her colleagues are "all wondering if this is gonna show up as a poster on college dorms next fall." If it does, royalties might be due to the family of late Forest Service Region 8 Engineer Cleve “Red” Ketcham, who passed away in 2005 but has since been commemorated in the National Museum of Forest Service History. It’s Ketcham’s signature scribbled in the center of the chart, and according to Sharon Phillips, a longtime Program Management Analyst for Region 8 (which covers Virginia, Georgia, Florida, Oklahoma and Puerto Rico, though Ketcham worked out of its Atlanta office), who conferred with her engineering department, there’s little doubt Ketcham concocted the chart in question. “They’re assuming he’s the one, because the drawing has a date of 1974, and he was working our office from 1974-1980,” she said. And in case there’d be any curiosity as to whether someone else composed the chart and Ketcham merely signed off on it for disbursement, Phillips clarified that, “He’s the author of the chart. I wouldn’t say he passed it along to the staff, because at that time, he probably did that as maybe a joke, something he did for fun. It probably got mixed up with some legitimate stuff and ended up in the Archives.”

Ingredients:

2 oz. Four Roses Bourbon

4 tsp. pumpkin puree (canned)

2 tsp. Sugar in the Raw (or Turbinado or Demerara)

pinch ground cinnamon

pinch ground allspice

3 oz. half-and-half 

1 cup vanilla ice cream (slightly softened)

Preparation:

Prescription Julep 

10 mint leaves

1 tablespoon Simple Syrup 

3 tablespoons VSOP Cognac

2 tablespoons rye whiskey

4 mint sprigs

Preparation