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I was lucky enough to make it to Mayahuel before the bar closed last year. The bar, named after the Aztec goddess of fertility, was a shrine to agave distillates: tequilas, mezcals, sotols, and raicillas. The fact that Phil Ward could open such a bar is testament to the power of the Cocktail Revival to change perceptions. No one put the words high end and tequila together before the 90s. In ten short years that completely flipped. _ The Oaxaca Old Fashioned was the drink that started turning tequila drinkers into mezcal drinkers en masse. I have lettered it here in the style of the Mayahuel menu. The letters, sinuous and sensual, have an art nouveau quality that speaks to the magic of mezcal. Get the full history of the Oaxaca Old Fashioneds on my blog, link in bio! #lettersandliquor #classiccocktails #handlettering #mezcal #tequila

PENICILLIN The Penicillin is a shining example of the power of aromatics in a cocktail. On the surface, it’s a whiskey sour, with malt taking the place of the more popular bourbon. But the addition of ginger and peated whisky transform the drink. I have a hard time letting one last for more than a few minutes. Guess a spoonful of aromatics really do make the medicine go down. Get the full history of the Penicillin on my blog! Link in bio. #lettersandliquor #classiccocktails #whisky

If you've been to the original Milk and Honey (or the original Attaboy) you recognize this lettering. Set in gold foil on the window of a former tailor’s shop, this was the only sign Sasha Petraske’s groundbreaking bar had. The year was 2000, and back then speakeasy genuinely meant speak easySasha wanted a quiet, civilized bar where the focus was on great drinks and respect for your neighbors. This week on the blog I’m featuring one of many modern classics to come from Milk and Honey, the Penicillin. It’s my favorite turning people on to Scotch drink. Link in my bio, enjoy!! #lettersandliquor #lettering #illustration #classiccocktails #scotch #cocktailhistory #graphicdesign

CHARTREUSE SWIZZLE The Renaissance, in cocktails as in art, was mainly fueled by taking pieces of the past and reinventing thema Whiskey Sour with honey becomes the Goldrush, a Moscow Mule with gin becomes the Gin Gin Mule. Now, the Chartreuse Swizzle technically falls into the same category, subbing Chartreuse for rum in the age-old Caribbean formula for ultimate heat relief, but that substitution, a French amer for a simple base spirit, was downright revolutionary. Chartre...use brings such intense and varied flavors to this party that it hardly seems fair to put it in the same category as its predecessor. It took a fecund creative mind to make this leap, and his name is every bit as colorful as his signature drink. Marcovaldo Dionysos brought a voracious appetitive for education and experimentation to the craft of bartending back before the internet had crowned cocktails as the next big thing. I’ve written a blog post on the Chartreuse Swizzle (link in bio) that tells some of his story. You can get the full version from @shanna_farrell’s book Bay Area Cocktails which I highly recommend. Happy drinking #lettersandliquor #chartreuse #craftcocktails

When @smugglerscovesf opened in San Francisco, you couldn’t help hearing about it. I hadn’t made the deep dive into cocktail history yet, but the buzz reached me anyway. Smugglers Cove was known for recreating the history of exotic drinks to exacting standards. With a menu that stretches beyond the term tiki it is a literal education with its encyclopedic menu. But in addition to plumbing the past, the Smugglers Cove menu also featured a very, very contemporary drinkMarcovaldo Dionysos’ Chartreuse Swizzle. Using Chartreuse as the base spirit, it recreates a Caribbean classic with a decidedly postmodern mien. The illustration you see here is styled after the Smugglers Cove menu. For a full history of the drink, click the link in my bio! #lettersandliquor #chartreuse #craftcocktails #illustration #graphicdesign #etching #tiki

The Red Hook is the drink that reignited neighborhood cocktails in New York. Vincenzo Errico, working at Sasha Petraskes Milk and Honey, created a drink that sits between the Manhattan and the Brooklyn with its recipe. As the Red Hook neighborhood sits more or less between the two boroughs, that became the name of the drink. Unwittingly, Enzo created a race amongst bartenders to see who could lay claim to the city’s neighborhoods with a titular cocktail, and thus the Benson...hurst, Greenpoint, Carol Gardens and Park Slope were bornall modern classics in their own right. I’ve heard industry vets say that the Red Hook became a sort of secret handshake amongst bartenders when it first began making its way from bar to bar. Just seeing its ingredients on a back bar (rye, Punt è Mes and Maraschino liqueur were all hard to find in those days) was a sign of a bar’s quality. My main source for this post was the @robertosimonson book A Proper Drink, which I cannot recommend highly enough. To get the full history, as well as the recipe, click the link in my bio. #lettersandliquor #whiskey #classiccocktails

Sasha Petraske changed bartending in America. Before Sasha, it was a Tom Cruise kind of scene. After Sasha, it was an Old Tom Gin kind of scene. Petraske ushered in a reverence for drinks that hadn’t been widely enjoyed since Prohibition cast its long shadow over our continent. Petraske’s dedication to the classics was such that he didn’t try to create new drinks, but the bartenders he hired did, and Petraske bars gave us many of the modern classics that made the Cocktail... Revival so exciting. The drink I’m featuring this week didn’t just become a classic, it inspired a number of other classics as well. Vincenzo Errico’s Red Hook took inspiration from both the Manhattan and the Brooklyn cocktails, so naming it after a neighborhood that straddles both boroughs seemed appropriate. This illustration draws from the logo for Little Branch, Petraske’s second bar in New York. Like the original, it’s modeled after an old subway token, and it sits atop a map of New York that shows the Red Hook neighborhood. It’s just below the H in the word hook on the bottom of the token. For a full history of the Red Hook cocktail as well as two recipes (the original and my modification) just click the link in my bio. Cheers! #lettersandliquor #classiccocktails #hand-lettering

TRIDENT I drink Tridents all the time. They are delicious. They also taste nothing like Negronis, so it’s crazy that the two drinks are related. In the late 90s, a Microsoft marketing evangelist named Robert Hess started searching for rare cocktail ingredients, the more esoteric the better. When he saw in some old cocktail books that peach bitters were used in some pre-Prohibition recipes, he called up the Fee company in Rochester New York and asked them to make their own ver...sion. They did! When’s the last time you called up a company and they created a new product to your specifications!?! Peach bitters in hand, Hess started tinkering with recipes to find ways to feature them. He ended up using the Negroni formula, but swapping out each ingredient for something more unusualaquavit for gin, sherry for vermouth, and Cynar for Campari, and a couple dashes of peach to finish. The result is lush and layered. The aquavit takes on an unctuous quality that I find particularly beguiling. And the soft interplay of herbal notes, from fruit to bitter, is sublime. You can get the whole history, along with the recipe, via the link in my bio. Cheers! #lettersandliquor #craftcocktails #aquavit

Three years ago I started a blog called Letters and Liquor to trace the history of drinks, one cocktail at a time. The plan was to do 52, One a week, and have it be a yearlong project. Then we had a baby, we moved, we had to look for new day care, we had to look for new daycare AGAIN, I couldn’t work, I got more work than I could handle, my Dad got sick, my Mom got sick, and with all that, one year became three. This week I finally finished the last piece of art for the blog.... Everything is written, illustrated, photographed, coded, and ready to go. It’s a bittersweet feeling. The blog took me in a journey I never could have anticipated. I want to thank more people than I am allowed to tag in a post! For everyone who has commented, encouraged, taught, listened, read, and especially trusted me to design something for their business based on what you saw here, thank you. You made some dreams come true for me and I appreciate it. #lettersandliquor #cocktails #handlettering See more

GIN GIN MULE In many ways, the Gin Gin Mule is THE quintessential Cocktail Revival drink. The Revival focused on the classics, often reinventing them-check. The Revival brought back spirits that had been left for dead-check. The Revival was all about fresh squeezed juice-check. And the Revival saw the rise of house made ingredients-check, check, check, check. 50 years before Audrey Saunders opened the era-defining Pegu Club bar in New York, John Martin and Jack Morgan used h...ouse made ginger beer and lime to turn Americans on to another clear spirit, vodka. I don’t think Saunders was consciously trying to replicate that alchemy in her quest to restore gin’s place in the popular consciousness, but the symmetry of the two drinks is striking. Just goes to show, it pays to know your history. You can read the full story and get the recipe on my blog. Link in bio. #lettersandliquor #gin #cocktailblog See more

GIN GIN MULE Audrey Saunders’ Pegu Club was a revelation. After years of fern bars and fusty old lounges, she introduced a space for civilized drinking that was both classic and incredibly modern. The logo she chose for Pegu Club echoes the roots of the drink from which it took its namethe grand hotel bars of English colonies. Saunders named her bar after a long-forgotten gin cocktail because she was building a temple to gin mixology. While recent years have seen an outpour...ing of interest in the spirit, it was not popular in the early aughts. Saunders changed that with a series of drinks that got people excited to drink gin again, chief among them, the Gin Gin Mule. Here, I have channeled the spirit of her logo, creating a crest for the drink that bears the dignity of an old British seal. For a full history of the Gin Gin Mule, click the link in my bio. #lettersandliquor #gin #cocktailblog . . . . . . . #typeinspired #lettering #typography #handlettering #graphicdesign #illustration See more

As it features freshly muddled ingredients, it's only fitting that the Mojito was the drink that reignited the San Francisco cocktail scene. Here in the cradle of farm-to-table cuisine, it was the then shocking sight of a bartender pressing fresh mint and lime in a glass that led two writers from the local paper to pen a feature article on bartender Paul Harrington. The Mojito phenomenon was so overwhelming, Harrington actually left the bar where he'd made the drink famous (E...nrico's) to find to a less conspicuous post. Harrington's absence did nothing to slow the momentum he'd built. There were a crop of ambitious young bartenders ready to take up the mantle, and one of them David Nepove, started throwing things besides mint into the glass before deploying his muddler. Pretty soon the Mojito craze had spawned a whole family of drinks and earned Nepove the nickname Mr. Mojito. For the full history, and the recipe, click the link in my bio. #linkinbio #lettersandliquor #mojito