America (or in this case 'Murican) and the 4th of July; I'm riding shotgun, driving is noted Campari enthusiast Steve Bowman who co-owns the forthcoming Fairsted Kitchen, opening Fall 2013 in Brookline’s Washington Square. Take it away Steve:

The ‘Murican: A Bitter Pedigree by Steve Bowman

Summer is the season of the aperitif. As the dog days swelter and the lithium rises, it’s time shelve the weighty, spirit laden refuges of winter and look for something new. Something light, something cool, something refreshing. Something you can quaff all day on decks and patios and still make it to dinner. Something like Campari.
Look around your favorite watering holes this summer and you’ll see its brilliant red hue shining like a beacon from within glasses and tumblers of imbibers in the know. Not only is the bright and bitter Italian infusion of herbs, fruits, spices, and barks a perfect on its own with nothing more than a little ice and a twist of citrus, but Campari is the proud papa of a whole family of thirst quenching aperitifs.

It all starts with in Gaspere Campari’s little cafe in Northern Italy in the mid 1800’s where he crafts his soon to be famous eponymous liqueur. There he serves a simple mixture of Campari and sweet vermouth called the Milano-Torino. The Campari is from Milan, the vermouth, either Martini & Rossi or Carpano, is from Turin. Soon enough, an enterprising bartender adds a top of soda water and serves his creation long in a highball. He names it after the American tourists that flood Italy after the first world war and the Americano is born.

But it takes a true rogue, a member of what cocktail historian David Wondrich calls the “Sporting Fraternity” to create a classic both modern and timeless. Florentine gentleman Count Camillo Negroni, aristocrat, rodeo cowboy, gambler, and barfly extraordinaire, is no stranger to the Americano. But one day between 1919 and 1920, Count Negroni finds himself craving something a little stronger. He stops in at his local, the Cafe Casoni, and directs the barmen to replace the soda water in his Americano with a little gin. Soon enough, locals start requesting their Americano in the “Negroni way”. That recipe of equal parts gin, sweet vermouth, and Campari, has stood the test of time to become a standard of the cocktail craft.

But history doesn’t stop there. From the hands of adventurous barkeeps you can now enjoy a Negroni Sbagliato, a “wrong” negroni replacing the gin with prosecco. Or Negroni riffs based on genever, whiskey, or tequila. I’ve even seen a Negroni sorbet. Inspired by the traditions of Gaspare Campari and Camillo Negroni, I present my answer to summer's oppressive heat: The ‘Murican. Find the biggest glass you have, add equal parts Campari and sweet vermouth and fill with lots of ice. Top with America’s finest champagne of beers, Miller High Life, and garnish with freedom. Or a slice of orange. Whatever you have on hand.

The famous wine writer (and importer) of the 50s through the 80s, Alexis Lichine once said about learning wine "buy yourself a corkscrew and use it." The message clearly, taste, taste and taste again. I translated this idea with spirits into a visit at the Urban Grape South End the other day where I decided to purchase a bottle I'd never heard of, and, well, taste. As Ben Bouton (of UG and beer buyer) said to me "...either way trying something new is worth it. At worst, if you don't like it, you know you never have to try it again." Words to live by.

I picked Riga Black Balsam, an herbal liqueur from Latvia, created in 1752 to help heal the empress of Russia. Like so many old spirits, began in this medicinal way and today is sipped after dinner or maybe added to coffee or tea. What's in it? Secret recipe of course, but they do admit to birch bud, valerian root, raspberry, ginger, nutmeg, black peppercorn, peppermint and other herbs and blossoms.
It's kind of like Fernet Branca or other Amaros with the addition of berry sweetness (almost, but not quite, cough syrup-esque). Pretty rough and tumble though, trust me, a lot goes a long way, and at 90 proof you don't want to be drinking shots of this all night. So, what do you do with it? Here's what I tried, kind of a Riga Julep:
1.5 oz rye, .5 oz Riga Black Balsam, .25 oz simple syrup, mint, .5 lemon, ginger beer. Pretty tasty and surprisingly light.
Go out and try something new, you just never know.
Riga Black Balsam 375ml available at the Urban Grape, $18.

A good cocktail certainly does not need to have any alcohol in it. My two girls prove that all the time by making a variety of beverages. It's getting warmer, so Emily penned the following:

By Emily Childs

Hi, I’m Emily Childs, Josh’s oldest daughter. I will be going into the sixth grade this September and planning to spend long days lounging around during the summer. So, I decided to make a sweet and sour mocktail for your lounging around!

Emily’s Lip-Smackin’ Lavender-Basil Lemonade

This lemonade calls for some simple syrup, so let me explain how to make it (get help from a grown-up).

Ingredients for the Simple Syrup
2 oz dried lavender (Christina’s in Cambridge has the best)
10-15 good-sized basil leaves (any supermarket)
1 ½ cups water
1 ½ cups sugar

Put water into a pot and heat on stove for a minute. Then, add the sugar. Stir sugar around until dissolved and put lavender and basil in. Push it down with a spoon so it’s wet, then you let it heat to a boil. Once it boils, turn burner off and cover with the top of the pot. Let it cool until room temperature.

Ingredients for the drink
1 ½ oz lavender-basil simple syrup
1 oz lemon juice
1 ½ oz water
Basil leaf garnish

Hirsch Canadian Rye is sourced for the Anchor Distilling Company from Glenora Distillery located on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. Double distilled (second in pot stills), aged in oak and bottled by hand this is serious stuff, true to older Canadian Whisky roots. The style is more subtle, lighter with fruit and honey flavors than American versions, but there is still spice from the 100% rye and 3 years in oak. Think of this selection's weight more akin to a lowland Scotch, where say the American Bulleit Rye would be like the much bigger Islay whiskies. Now I've confused myself.

Enjoy this with a couple of ice cubes, but really it shines in cocktails, particularly lighter Collins-style drinks. I've recently been re-making a variation I came up with last Summer:

Check the Rhyme
1.5 oz Hirsch Canadian Rye
.75 oz Cocci Americano (an Italian aperitif- like the French Lillet)
.75 oz thyme simple syrup
.5 oz lemon
Serve as a Collins- on ice with a splash of soda if desired. Garnish with thyme sprig.
Make simple syrup 1 to 1 water to sugar. Heat until sugar is dissolved, then simmer with thyme (a cup should work) for 15 minutes. Turn off heat, cover until cool and strain out the thyme.

Hirsch Canadian Rye, 86 proof, about $30.
Find it at:
Bin Ends Braintree
Blanchard's West Roxbury and Jamaica Plain
Boston Wine Exchange Downtown

The Algonquin Hotel in New York City was built in 1902, and although technically dry in the early years, held court to a group of poets, editors, actors, playwrights and humorists; most notably Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley during the 1920s (they were called the Vicious Circle). One of Ms. Parker's most famous quotes "I like to have a martini, two at the very most, after three I'm under the table, after four I'm under the host" leads me to believe that's what they were drinking, not the hotel's namesake cocktail. Of course no one may have been allowed to drink in the hotel during prohibition at all- but I think they probably were, right?

So, anyway, it's uncertain (and unlikely) if any of them drank Algonquin cocktails in the Algonquin. But I do know that Algonquin peak is the second tallest mountain (5,115 ft) in the Adriondack High Peaks of upstate New York, just below its neighbor Mt. Marcy. That's where I was over Memorial Day weekend, so we had to make the cocktail- why not drink an Algonquin looking at Algonquin? As the lovely and talented bartender Emma Hollander would say: "I mean, obvi."

Algonquin Cocktail
1.5 oz Rittenhouse Rye
.75 oz Dolin Dry Vermouth
.75 oz Pineapple juice
Lemon peel garnish if desired.

The drink is pretty easy quaffing, maybe not as complex as the Vicious Circle, but probably goes down a whole lot easier.

A visual cure for a heatwave:

I think Martha Reeves would agree, don't you?

Hailing from Cartagena, Spain, Liquor 43 is a versatile sweet liqueur with vanilla, citrus and orange blossom- think Summer in the Mediterranean. A couple of Mondays ago, a great group of bartenders fought it out using it as a base at Moksa in Cambridge. The competitors in the ring: Josh Taylor Westbridge, Oronde Popplewell Moksa, Sam Gabrielli Russell House, Jason Kilgore Catalyst, Taso Papatsoris Casa B and Amber Schumaker Eastern Standard.

Judges Fred Yarm, Heather Kleinman and Jerry Knight picked the winner, Josh Taylor.

Here's the drink, like a grown up strawberry-rhubarb pie, ready for hot weather imbibing:

The Backyard Cocktail
1.5 oz Licor 43
.75 oz Rhubarb Shrub
.5 oz Strawberry Juice
.5 oz Lime Juice
Soda

I imagine Cuba of another era, heightened by imagery I've seen from black and white sepia toned photographs; and I'm sipping daiquiris at the famous La Floridita in Havana. The namesake cocktail is a slight variation on the classic- it adds wonderful depth with the addition of Maraschino liqueur.

Daiquiri La Floridita
2 oz White Rum (try the local Privateer)
.75 lime
.5 simple syrup
.25 Luxardo Maraschino liqueur

Hemingway himself varied it further, added grapefruit, removed the simple syrup. Rumor has it he would order a double which got the name Papa Doble. Order either version (or make it on your patio) as the warm weather hits and you don't have to pretend, you'll be sipping a taste from another time that holds up just as well today.

1955 Ernest Hemingway Collection, JFK Library, Boston, permission by public domain

Amaro, Italian for "bitter,” refers to an herbal liqueur category, usually consumed as an after-dinner digestif. With an alcohol content between 16% and 43%, they are bitter-sweet and range in syrupy viscosity. Similar products are available throughout Europe, but tradition and focus here in Boston, Italy sets the standard, and that brings us to
Fernet Branca.

When you see a group of bartenders, with the bar customers six deep, stop everything their doing at 11:00pm on a Friday night, and do a shot, I’ll bet 5 to 1 it’s Fernet- although it’s really meant to be a stomach ailment panacea. It has developed far beyond an industry cult following, can be seen everywhere, locally behind every cocktail bar. On the higher end of the alcohol spectrum, it clocks in at 43%, is bracingly bitter, mint and licorice flavors dominating. Italians really only take it as a sip or two after dinner; I remember being in Rome a few years ago and doing a shot at a cafe in the afternoon to stares that said "that American is crazy."

The history of Fernet Branca revolution in Boston can be pretty much traced to two men. Before the tremendous success of Eastern Standard, ICOB, The Hawthorne and soon to be Row 34, Garrett Harker worked in San Francisco, where he and fellow restaurant workers maybe took sips of Fernet out of espresso cups before service. Traditions tend to follow us, some more than others, and while at No. 9 Park he and Tom Mastricola, then bartender, would come visit me on a nightly basis (we were all a lot younger then). "Josh, could you get us a bottle of Fernet? We'll drink it." I had no idea what they were talking about, but of course ordered a single bottle the next day. A single bottle. In 1998, we were pouring a case a week (12 bottles), and while that didn't touch the present volume of ES, Citizen (Joy has it on tap) or even JM Curley down the street, the fire had been started.

What makes this business rewarding is what comes around goes around, and Kitty Amann, our local Fernet rep to the stars, brought Count Eduardo Branca down for an event at Silvertone this week. What an honor to have the sixth generation of the famous family in the room, I just hoped I wouldn't get in the way. Tremendously gracious and unassuming, he also showcased their other brands, the spectacular Carpano Antica and Punt e Mes vermouths. Time to make some cocktails.

John Nugent (Silvertone, Citizen, Brick & Mortar, Franklin) poured his crowd pleasing Home Wrecker cocktail: 1.5 oz Rye, .5 oz Punt e Mes, .5 oz St. Germain, .5 oz lemon. The drink is delicious, spicy from the rye and vermouth, lechee sweetness from St. Germain, and finishes with the bright lemon and orange flavors. Vermouth works surprisingly well with citrus, so with that in mind comes my version of a classic. My daughters call me Papa, so obviously I poured Papa's Americano, 1 oz Carpano Antica, 1 oz Aperol, .5 oz lime, soda. Perfect for a sunny patio, or at least I think so.

Legendary musician, dj, bartender Brother Cleve pulled an on-the-fly recipe from 1909 out of his vast repertoire, the Fernet Cocktail. 2 oz Carpano Antica, 1 oz Fernet, bar spoon Orange Curacao, orange oil. A full bodied precursor to the Americano, maybe its grandfather.

As we toasted with Fernet Branca to Fernet and the Branca family, things had indeed come full circle. Garrett Harker raised his glass in the center of the room with Eduardo, just as he had showed me the way 16 years earlier.

Cinco de Mayo, the fifth of May, ironically is not a big holiday in Mexico. Here in the states it has become a celebration of Mexican culture, and also a quintessentially American excuse to have a more than a few Margaritas. Technically the day commemorates the Mexican army's 1862 victory over France at the Battle of Puebla during the Franco-Mexican War, but I must confess I had to look up those details.

So what to do? Well, I for one am heading to Allston's Lone Star Taco Bar for some killer Mexican food and cocktails. Legendary bartender Cousin Dave Cagle always has an ace up his sleeve; in this case a delicious take on a Sazerac "named after Clint Eastwood's character in the old Enio Morricone spaghetti westerns."

Hombre sin Nombre
2 oz blanco tequila
1/2 oz agave syrup (equal parts agave nectar and water)
6 dashes Peychauds bitters
2 dashes molé bitters
Stir and strain into a chilled old fashioned glass the has been rinsed with green Chartreuse
squeeze the oil from a big piece of lime peel into the cocktail and drink!

Beer cocktails are not easy, but when they succeed, well, everyone's happy, including me. Chris Balchum pouring the other night at Park in Harvard Square is doing just that with:

Tom Terrific by Daren Swisher
1 ¾ oz. Hayman’s Old Tom Gin (slightly sweeter style than London dry)
½ oz. Cherry Heering (Brandy based cherry liqueur)
½ oz. Demerara Syrup (richer simple syrup made with sugar in the raw- named after a formerly colonized area of Guyana)
½ oz. Lemon Juice
2 oz. Great Divide Titan IPA

Combine ingredients over ice. Shake and strain over fresh ice in a Collins glass.
Top with 2 oz. IPA; roll back and forth in a shaker tin.
Garnish with an orange and cherry flag. Sweet, sour, pleasantly bitter hops, perfectly balanced and ready for Spring refreshment.