I just got back from Tales of the Cocktail and was inspired to write up a little bit about what I learned there, what I’m thinking about, and what I’m planning. Plus a general update because they’re so few and far between, particularly in season.

First up, what I’ve been up to. This summer has been crazy for me with the Happy Camper. Around the end of last year my cofounder and I realized we weren’t working well together and needed to do something about it. I was working a solid 60 plus hours a week (often very plus) and she felt she didn’t have that much time to devote to it.

When starting a business, there’s this rule of thumb that you should be able to live for three years with no income from it, and it’s really not a bad one. I probably should have talked more with her about finances and expectations going in.  She felt she needed to work a full-time job and do the Camper on the side, and I felt like it’s too big of an opportunity for that.

So I found myself doing 80% of the work and feeling like she wasn’t even doing a very good job at her 20%. She felt unappreciated for the stuff she did do. Something had to give. We came to an agreement and I purchased the rest of the company, making me the sole owner.

And then things took off. I had finally gotten over the hump of making the drink end of things work. My first year was a lot of developing recipes, finding an equipment solution to let us do thousands of cocktails on draft out of a tiny camper, getting a rental kitchen setup, etc. I knew my time commitment was so high that I had to find ways to be more efficient and boy did I. Maybe I’ll go into that more later.

Suffice it to say I managed to automate more hours away than my previous partner was even working. And between that and the off-season (I have very few events between November and April) I stepped up my networking and marketing game.

In any business you start with the product you think people want, and then you if you are really smart and/or lucky the product you start with is close enough to something people actually do. If you’re then limber enough, you can figure out what that actually is, and you end up improving. As Paul Graham points out, Microsoft started off making an Altair Basic interpreter. If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry, Microsoft is the third most valuable corporation in the world and Altair and Basic interpreters are long gone, which illustrates my point.

Probably only 25% of entrepreneurs know that going in, and what most of them don’t realize is that you do the same with your marketing channels. You probably go in with an idea of how to reach your customers that, if you are lucky, has a passing relationship to what actually works.

I spent much of the off-season and early busy season working on that and I made a lot of headway. Some of the channels I thought would be great really weren’t, some of the ones I didn’t know much about turned out to be awesome. I won’t bore you with the details, because unless you’re doing a mobile bar too you probably don’t care, but suffice it to say it isn’t easy!

I started off the year hoping to be kegging and selling my ginger beer but quickly ran into problems. It turns out that while you can make products with unpasteurized juices for sale at retail with no problem (like a restaurant, juice store, etc.) making it for resale requires using a juice HACCP plan, and taking a class for developing said plan. I figured out a reformulation that doesn’t involve juice (though logically is neither more nor less safe) but just haven’t had time during the season to get it going. It’ll probably have to wait until October.

I’ve also finally developed my own tonic from quinine sulphate. The people who know me have probably heard the stories of my three year ordeal in acquiring that stuff. It is unreasonably hard. Nonetheless I’ve found a source, and all those years of reading obscure soda manuals are finally paying off, as tonic is really just a soda with quinine in it.

I’ve aimed for an opinionated, citrusy tonic that really plays well with a gin lover’s gin. I’m hoping to get both of them on draft at finer local establishments during the off-season. I might also make a grapefruit version if I can get a cost-efficient, clarified grapefruit.

I’ve got a handful of cocktail experiments I want to try.

1. Figuring out the dilution added by using a Yarai glass rather than a shaker tin when stirring. I’ve already shown in the past how much more the thermal mass of a pint glass dilutes a drink. I’d like to show that next to a Yarai, and then also do shaken drinks with the various shaker solutions (Boston with pint glass, Boston with cheater tin, cobbler, etc.). We know that basically the less glass and the less mass, the less dilution.

2. More playing around with tinctures, extracts, food-grade essential oils (not the stuff you get off Amazon), etc. I like the idea of building cocktails from the most elemental flavors on up. Bitters are a very broad tool, as they’re 30 flavors in one dash. Tinctures, extracts, and oils allow almost surgical precision.

3. Unusual ingredients and techniques. Admittedly, this has been the weakest part of my game over the last two years. Don’t get me wrong, with the Happy Camper I get to really push the limits of what someone can do, cocktail-wise, in large format, high-volume, off-the-grid settings. I’m proud of what I do. I give people the best damn mojito they’ve ever had at a wedding or street festival, and serve 2,000 drinks in about 4 hours that way. That ain’t nothin’!

But I don’t get to play like I want to. I probably couldn’t get away with a carbonated negroni variant. The formula for street festival success is usually something like seasonal fruit + classic cocktail. Blueberry Collins. Blackberry Mojito. Etc. Those things kill because they’re approachable, and by being properly-balanced, rather than cloying (like you probably expect when you hear Strawberry Margarita) you can walk through the crowd and hear people raving about it.

4. Make my own cola. I have some great ideas there, and it’s always one of the more popular requests to get on draft.

5. Carbonated cocktail draft system. More on that later.

So it’s finally my offseason and I’m about to get a bit of time off. I’m working on a few things.

First off, as I mentioned here before, getting my fake lemon and fake lime juice bottled for bars that want to use it. I’ve been calling them Flemon and Flime for a long time as part of a joke, but I think I might just actually call them that. I’m notoriously bad at naming things though.

My ginger beer is my most popular item, and people are always asking where they can get it. I’ve literally not done a single event where someone didn’t. I’ve had someone tell me it’s the best ginger beer “and I love ginger beer,” they always say, pretty much every time. That’s the sort of sign you can’t ignore I suppose.

Turning that into a product you can get on a shelf is surprisingly difficult! I’m still figuring it out. There are all sorts of department of agriculture regulations, particularly where fresh juice is involved, that I’m still navigating. Thankfully Flemon and Flime don’t have those problems.

I’m also working (slowly, but I’m doing it!) on a book for batched cocktails. I hope to share some techniques, recipes, and equipment recommendations. I am trying to re-think, to some extent, how such books work though, because there are quite simply some things that are just better off as video, while some are better as text and images. I’m quite limited by the fact that I’m not a skilled video producer (or really even an unskilled one) and don’t have any equipment better than a GoPro. I suspect this book will sell 1,000 copies if I’m lucky, since the batched cocktail industry is nascent, so I can’t really afford a professional.

I’ll figure it out. Maybe just do the classic book technique of words and pictures, and then toss in a link to the video version.

I’ve also been playing around a lot with gum Arabic and emulsifying in flavoring oils in beverages. And doing alcohol-based extracts of various herbs. I like the idea of being able to mix one flavor at a time. Bitters are nice, but they’re all like 40 different flavors, and sometimes you just want some grapefruit peel.

I’ve been playing around more with savory cocktails as well. It’s a woefully un-explored area I feel like. You’ve got bloody maries, martinis. That’s about the extent of it. Why aren’t people doing more drinks without sugar in them? I hope to have more thoughts on that in the not-too-distant future as well, though with everything else going on it’ll probably be low priority stuff I just fool around with for home use. Whenever I do an event I have dozens of girls ask me “what’s, like, the sweetest fruitiest thing you have?” so savory cocktails are probably not high on the list of crowd pleasers.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to.

This weekend I did a cocktail that people really loved at an event. It’s a variation on our normal Moscow Mule (by far our top-selling cocktail since we make our own ginger beer) that uses what I call “crime juice”, which is cranberry juice that’s been acidified to match the level of a lime.

I thought I’d share the recipe here so you can make your own.

Thanksgiving Mule

2 oz. liquor of choice (I like dark rum best)

1 oz. crime juice

4 oz. ginger beer

For bonus points, serve that shit in a champagne glass, but you can throw it on the rocks Moscow Mule style.

For double points, make your own ginger beer, and for triple points carbonate the whole thing in a keg.

Crime Juice:

1 liter cranberry juice

20 grams citric acid

2o grams malic acid

Long time, no update. Sorry folks. I’ve been overwhelmed by how many of you have written me one way or another to ask about various things I’ve done here. It’s a small but growing community.

I’m working on a few things right now. Maybe too many things. That’s kind of how I operate. For once they’re at least mostly related though, so it doesn’t feel like my normal habit of doing several disparate things.

First up, there’s the Cocktail Calc. I had some features I wanted to add and hired a guy from Upwork. Seems like a good guy actually. I then got busy with camper season and probably wasn’t able to help give him much guidance. Our first year was so much busier than I anticipated, and I found myself working on events from the time I woke up to the time I went to sleep a lot of weeks.

If he’s still up for it, I’ll work with him to improve it. If not, I’ll get ‘er done myself somehow. I used to program the internets, after all. I am sure I could do it again. I want to make it a site/app for sharing batched cocktails. And get it professionally designed, because it ain’t pretty. In fact, it’s probably taken a step back aesthetically and I need to revert it.

Then there’s a book on batching drinks. I’m going to self-publish it, because previous experience with professional publishers wasn’t great and self-pub has come a long way since then. It used to be something you did when you just couldn’t get a “real publisher” and now it’s a serious consideration even when you can. I’ve now got a season of full-time experience batching cocktails under my belt, and I’ve learned quite a bit. I’m doing a few seminars on it in the near future. I’ve got some improved equipment recommendations and a ton of new recipes to share.

I’m also working on a store for both equipment and homemade ingredients. My goal is to sell keg-sized syrups. That’s not easy. Selling packaged food products requires a ton of paperwork and licensing with the state. It’s my winter project though. My initial products will probably be my lime and lemon replacements, ginger beer, and tonic. The latter two you’ll buy in 1 liter bottles and add to a keg, fill with water, and carbonate. Boom, keg full of all natural, delicious mixer.

On the equipment side, I want to sell most of the things you need to do batched cocktails for professional service. I’ve been ordering the stuff myself but man is that no fun. I order stuff from AliExpress and wait a month or two. Or I pay ridiculous homebrew store prices. Those are the options.

So, I’ve been busy. I haven’t been ignoring you, dear readers.

One thing I’ve been thinking about, now that I own my own bar, is waste. You don’t really pay much attention to it when you’re a customer or even a bartender. But when you own the bar and look at the spreadsheet full of expenses, you notice the amount of things like citrus that go down the drain every week.

In our case especially, since it’s our first year doing event bartending, it can be rather feast or famine. One event might use half a case of limes and we might have nothing for a few weeks. Buying a case of limes is cheaper than buying even half a case would be if we got small quantities, and we get higher quality limes that way. In fact I can get about 230 limes at Restaurant Depot for the same price I could get 120 for at Sam’s Club, and the Restaurant Depot ones are juicier. So if I have an event that’s going to use 100 limes, it makes more sense to buy the case but I still have 130 left at the end. They’ve got a pretty short shelf life though, so if I don’t have two weekends in a row I’m going to lose some.

One obvious solution to this is cordial, and it’s what we’ve started doing. Whenever we have a bunch of citrus laying around, we juice it up and make cordial. Cordial is shelf-stable (I pasteurize it en sous vide) so it doesn’t take up precious fridge space.

Cordial is also delicious. Rose’s Lime Cordial is a garbage product and has been giving the entire category a bad name for decades. But a fresh, homemade cordial is incredible.

Here’s my general process for making it:

Take a bunch of citrus. Zest a third of it with a Y-Peeler.

Juice it all.

Bring it to a boil and then simmer it, with the peels, for  a half hour.

Strain through a chinois or fine mesh strainer

Using a refractometer, add sugar to get it to 25%. (I add sugar to about 20% at the start, then add the rest after the boil so that I don’t go over after evaporation.)

Note: If you’re doing this professionally, or are an enthusiastic amateur with a little bit of a budget get a digital refractometer because it saves time and you’re often going to be above the 30% limit optical ones have, but if you’re just doing sorbets and cordials get a $30 one. If you don’t have a refractometer and don’t want one, you can just Google the average sugar content for the fruit you’re using and do a little math. Your cordial won’t be exact because there’s a surprising variation from one fruit to the next, but it’ll still be delicious!

I like 25% sugar for my cordials for a few reasons. First, it’s exactly half as sweet as my simple syrup, which makes it really easy to balance. Want to make a whiskey sour with it? If I’d normally do:

2 parts whiskey

1 part lemon

1 part simple

Instead I can just do:

2 parts whiskey

2 parts cordial

Since the cordial is half as sweet, but I use twice as much of it, it’s the same balance.

Or I can get experimental and do:

2 parts whiskey

1 part lemon

1 part cordial

1/2 part simple syrup

That’s slightly less sweet than the original, because it has a little higher volume but the same amount of sugar. But it’s really close.

Second, it lets me get more flavor into the drink if I so choose. Most commercial cordials are more like 65% sugar for shelf-stability reasons. So you can’t use much of them without making the drink cloying. I can do a drink that’s 50% cordial if I want and still have only ab out the sweetness I’d have with a standard sour.

I can always dial the flavor down if it’s too much just by cutting some in favor of simple. In practice this almost never happens.

Cordial is, of course, not the same as fresh citrus. It’s not better or worse, but it is different. The cordial whiskey sour I wrote above won’t by any means be the same as the one with lemon and simple. But it will be fantastic.

My recommendation is that bar owners simply have their bartenders save fruit from their shifts. Have them strip the peels off of the citrus before they juice it one or two days a week and toss them in a deli container. Then once a week take all of that and make the cordial. It’s a little bit of work but not much, and you get a great product you can use in cocktails. It also allows you to over juice on a nightly basis, ensuring you never run out of the fresh stuff but still lose nothing down the drain.

Also having a stockpile of cordial might insulate you a bit from ridiculous price swings with citrus. If we ever have another severe shortage, you can simply change your menu to items leaning toward cordial.

For long-term storage, I don’t think my sous vide pasteurization method will work. I suspect a combo of that and refrigeration will buy you quite a bit of time, but if you need to save it for 6 months plus, you might want to look into preservatives and/or freezing.

Long time, no post. It’s not because I don’t love you though. Thought I’d drop a little update.

Lately the Happy Camper Bar Car is taking up a lot of my time. We are doing the cocktails for the Cleveland Flea, Sunday Market, and a couple one-off street festivals.  As near as I can tell we sold at least 1,000 Mules last weekend at the Flea, and expect to do even more at a couple other events. We’ve also got a few weddings booked, and a couple events without the camper. It’s going to be a busy summer!

I’ve also got the Cocktail Calculator on its own site. After it went down (because Google shut down the service it was running on, Divshot) it was gone for a bit. I got a surprising number of Reddit messages asking where it went, so I brought it back. I’m preparing to pay a programmer to make it a lot better too with some new features. I intend to keep it free as well.

I’m working on a book on batching cocktails. It’s great because I’m writing it as I go along. I’ve already got a bit of experience doing high-volume events, and let me tell you, the price of any normal book is 1% of what it’ll save you in equipment costs, time, and anguish. Had I had the book I was writing and paid $1,000 for it, I’d have still had a good ROI. (And of course, it’ll be normal book prices.) I’ll be including a few of my best recipes.

I’m debating shopping around for a publisher. That’d give me a budget to do stunning photography, something I can’t do myself. While the book doesn’t require it, per se, it’d be helpful in some spots. Pictures of the parts of a corny keg are worth more than their thousands of words.

Lastly but not leastly, I’m also working on a store to sell some of the stuff I make for my own batched cocktails. My lemon and lime replacements, for instance. I can sell them relatively affordably and highly concentrated. I’ll probably size them for 5 gallon keg batches, though of course with a measuring cup you could use them for other batch sizes. If I succeed, the recipe for a whiskey sour will be something like add 1 bottle of fake lemon, x pounds of sugar, y gallons of water, z bottles of whiskey, shake and carbonate.

I’ve got a few other products I use on a regular basis to make good things by the gallon. Some are for batched cocktails specifically, some are just for whatever. All of them are going to go on sale. I’ll have more details soon.

I’ve recently gotten into fermenting cider. I’ve always loved cider, and always loved fermenting things. But for some reason I’ve always looked at hard cider as sort of a gimmicky drink for girls who don’t like beer. And then I tried a few good ones that changed my mind. We’ve got a great local cider maker (cidery?) called Griffin Ciderworks that does a few exceptional ones.

So I fermented about 12 gallons of the stuff, bought from a local orchard, in my homemade fermenter (i.e. a trashcan with an airlock). It didn’t end up airtight, even after copious amounts of shrink wrap, but the cider was pasteurized in advance (no preservatives) and I’d been careful about sanitation and pitched it with a solid amount of yeast so it all went well. It started at almost 16 brix and after a week it was at about 9% alcohol. I racked it from one container to the next and then used Pectinex Ultra-SPL to clarify it. From everything I’ve read about normal pectinase enzymes it’s supposed to take days or even a week or two to clarify, but with Pectinex all the solids had settled out in a day. I was able to rack it off with ease.

The favor of unaltered cider is interesting. There’s none of the sugar left, as the yeast consumes it all, so it’s tart. It’s not your normal apple flavor though, which is probably why they so often add malic acid to them.

While it’s drinkable straight, it’s not what I’d call delicious. It needs something. It needs a little sugar and maybe a little brightness.

As a result I’m playing around with different recipes. I’m toying with various acids (malic, lactic, etc.) and sugars. I’m toying with force carbonating. I also want to make a cocktail for my family party this weekend, probably a cranberry gin justino with fresh cranberry, cider, and brown sugar.

So far after extensive testing I’ve come to the following conclusions.

1. Some sort of sugar is useful. All of it was fermented out and the result, while palatable, needs a little bit of a bass note. Options I’ve tried so far are cane sugar, brown sugar, honey, and concentrated apple cider (the frozen stuff you get at the store) which I think is my preference so far.
2. Some sort of acid is also quite delicious. I am guessing given the relatively high starting sugar content of the cider I purchased it had little acidity. This might not be true using different apples. So far I like malic, but once I get the level dialed in (and 1g/200ml is too high but better than none at all) I’ll play around with different options more.

A couple months ago I posted my recipe for a Rosemary Collins. It was basically a Tom Collins that used a rosemary simple syrup instead of the usual plain one. I mentioned in the post that it’d probably make a great modernist drink, and this weekend I decided to test it out.

First I had to clarify the lemon juice. I wasn’t in a hurry (I had a few hours) but I had a lot of things to do and didn’t have the time to devote to agar clarification so I decided to try Pectinex, Kieselsol/Chitosan, and racking/filtering. I’d done that before with lime juice. It does work, it’s just low-yield and requires you to burn through a lot of Chemex filters.

The process is pretty simple really.

1. Juice your lemons. I juiced 8 and came up with about 600ml of juice.

2. Stir in 2 grams per liter of both Pectinex and Kieselsol. (So in this case, about 1.2 grams of each.) Wait 15 minutes.

3. Stir in 2 grams per liter of Chitosan. Wait 15 minutes. You can see some separation is already occurring.

4. Stir in more Kieselsol, still at 2g/l. At this point I went and did some lawn work and came back maybe a half hour later. It had separated pretty well.

This is the point at which you wish you had a centrifuge. I could see how you’d get a massive yield out of it. But I don’t so I filter through a Chemex.

5. Wet your Chemex filter. Pour about 200ml through. You’ll see a slow, steady stream at first, followed by some dripping, followed by almost complete blockage. At that point you can pick the filter up and massage it a little. It will speed back up. Eventually it will get so blocked that even this no longer helps, just pour what’s left back into the beaker and start again with a new filter.

At the end it looks like:

(Clarified on left, obviously, some of the unclarified on right. You can’t really see the Chemex filtering still more in the background.)

My 600ml of lemon juice came out to about 400ml of clarified. I only needed about 250ml for the cocktail I was working on, so I guess I got a little extra.

Then I put the cocktail together. It was:

250ml clarified lemon

250ml rosemary simple syrup

500ml vodka (it was for a party and I didn’t know if they’d be gin people)

500ml filtered water

This gives us a final ABV of about 13%.

I put it all in a 2 liter bottle and carbonated to 40 PSI. Usually I’d have done this with gin, and served over the rocks in a Collins glass with a sprig for garnish. But this was for a party and we were drinking out of red Solo cups straight. (Sorry, no pics of the final drink as a result.)

It was quite awesome. Everyone seemed to love it. I’d done basically the same cocktail a couple years ago, when I knew how to carbonate things but not how to clarify, and it tasted good but foamed out and ended up flat. It’s much better for the extra bubbliness you get from clarifying and is a great example of why you shouldn’t try to carbonate unclarified juices.