Bibulo.us - We plead the 21st.

First Floor

It’s New Year’s Eve in Vienna. You’ve walked among the crowds, spied whirling waltzers in tails through fourth-story windows, and watched midnight fireworks erupt all over town from a balcony overlooking the opera house. What’s next?

First Floor, we bid you, is next.

As you come in through an unobtrusive entrance on Seitenstettengasse and head up the stairs, you can hear clinking glasses, the murmur of conversation, and a familiar drum rhythm. You step inside and sit down at the bar.

The drinks are good -- more than competent.  But the real cocktail is the mix of the drinks, the music, and the crowd.  It’s bright young things stopping in after New Year’s parties, black ties untied, jackets slipped off.  They have their arms around sheath-gowned grinning girls.  And they’re dancing to deep cuts of 60s soul -- Shorty Long, Screamin Jay Hawkins, Little Willie John.

You stay.

Lebensstern

We just know you’re in Berlin, hanging around Nollendorfplatz, looking for an extremely cozy place to take a few friends for perfectly crafted drinks.

We’ve got the place for you.

Lebensstern.

Up on the second floor of an old mansion that belonged to silent film star Henny Porten, Lebensstern (“Star of Life”) is all soft lights, glass cabinets filled with exotic bottles, leather chairs, and warm hospitality.  

And what else to do in such a setting but have a cocktail named for a hotel in Louisville, Kentucky? Their Seelbach (Noah’s Mill, Cointreau, Angostura, Peychaud’s, champagne float) was ideal on our visit, with the sweetness of the bourbon and cointreau sliding smoothly into the soft bite of the champagne.  And on the subject of drinks named for American establishments, it was a bit of a shock to have come over continent and ocean to find a Tommy’s Margarita on the menu.  (Truth be told, it was better than the Margaritas at Tommy’s.)  Also notable was the presence of gins we’d never heard of -- Lebensstern’s house brand, as well as Xoriguer (from Menorca), Blue Ribbon (a London Dry from Bordeaux), and Blackwood (from the Shetlands).

Camper English has the whole Lebensstern menu. (We mean on his blog, but wouldn’t that make a great reality show?)

So walk on over, settle in, and enjoy the best cocktails in Berlin.

Fox Liquor Bar

A short note about a quick trip.

We recently spent a weekend in Raleigh, North Carolina. It turned out to be one of the more pleasurable 48 hours’ worth of civilized drinking we’ve enjoyed in a while. This was mostly, of course, because of our hosts, Steve and Heather (see St. George gins). But our visit to one cocktail bar in particular really impressed us.

Fox Liquor Bar had been open for less than a week when we visited on a Saturday night. Fox is subterranean, but not overtly speakeasyish; candlelit, but not uncomfortably romantic; drinks-focused, but not self-important.

Particularly enjoyable was watching a whole new crowd open up to really good drinks.  Steve and Heather have been cocktail-nerding in Raleigh for a decade, but the rest of the city mostly hasn’t. The bar was lively not just with (fairly loud) convivial conversation, but with the joy of discovery.

The cocktail program is run (largely by remote control) by Karin Stanley of Dutch Kills and Little Branch.  The list is East Coast classic -- Greenpoint, Turf, Pan American Clipper -- plus some highlights we hadn’t seen before (probably because we don’t get to Dutch Kills nearly enough).  One standout was the Late Night Reviver (Beefeater, Fernet, ginger, lime, soda water), which was effective in taming the Fernet.

Next time you’re in Raleigh, don’t miss Fox.

(Incidentally, we also had really outstanding fried chicken at Beasley’s and burgers at Chuck’s -- both, like Fox, owned by Ashley Christensen -- and unreasonably good Mexican/Colombian food at Dos Taquitos. All recommended. None so highly as Bols Barrel Aged Genever juleps on Steve and Heather’s porch, but that’s a rather more exclusive offering.)

St. George gins

When we heard St. George Spirits would be coming out with three new gins, we immediately called our trusty supplier of delicious boozes, Cask on 3rd St in San Francisco, and got on the waiting list. Conveniently, in addition to the usual 750ml size, these also came out in a 200ml tasting size, ideal for our upcoming trip to visit beloved fellow cocktail nerds Steve and Heather on the other side of the country.

While Raleigh graced us with a delightful bit of actual weather (as opposed to the general pleasantness we endure in San Francisco to the scorn of those with “real” seasons), we broke out tasting glasses and attentively evaluated these newcomers to the gin scene. Thunder rumbling above, we nosed our glasses of the gin by itself, debated flavor profiles, and brainstormed ideal cocktails to test each of the three varieties.

We began, perhaps unadvisedly, with the Dry Rye. St. George describes it thusly:

Dry Rye Gin has twice as much juniper in its recipe as either of the other two St. George gins, and a base of pot-distilled rye that provides structure and spice. Warm bass notes of pepper and caraway give Dry Rye Gin an intriguing depth of flavor, while the rye provides a sweet maltiness reminiscent of a genever. Try our Dry Rye Gin in your favorite cocktails that call for either gin or rye—or sip it straight for a gin experience like no other.

We found to our surprise that this has a sweeter nose than the other two, despite the less sweet grain base. The caraway notes were strong—leading us to taste some aquavit later for comparison—and it was drier on the tongue. Perhaps it’s the reduced sweetness, but you really feel the alcohol in this one. This gin definitely provides a great education in the tempering power of corn in the grain bill of a spirit.

We tried two drinks with the Dry Rye, but to our disappointment neither the Pegu Club nor the Mondays With Aalto (a great drink by Adam Bryan of Austin’s East Side Show Room) worked. In the former, it didn’t hold up to the lime and in the latter the botanicals just didn’t meld well with the other drink ingredients. Our next idea was to try it in a Ramos Gin Fizz, but dinner called and we have yet to make the experiment.

The second gin in the lineup was the Botanivore.

Botanivore Gin (our "botanical eater") earned its name because it's loaded with botanical ingredients. We distilled 19 different botanicals to compose this spirit (no small feat!) and the resulting gin is beautifully balanced and vibrant. Lance compares this gin to an orchestra where all the components are working in harmony. Deliciously herbacious and bright, Botanivore is a versatile addition to any gin cocktail.

This one seemed to call out immediately for a Martini to keep the focus on the flavors within the gin. It’s a very nice gin, a little sharp, and perhaps one note, but we like the note. It seemed to water out a bit in the drink and we thought it might work better in a dirty martini. We also tried it in a Pink Gin, which was okay, not extraordinary. Once again we did not feel we’d found a drink that really showed this one off to its best effect.

The third taste was of the Terroir and it was here that things got really exciting. Dinah, a Bay Area native and quite familiar with the environment which inspired this gin, was very impressed. St. George has absolutely hit the bullseye with this local flavor, saying “It tastes like the New Year’s Day walk in the Franklin Hills when I was a kid.”

Terroir Gin is our ode to the wild beauty of the Golden State. Distiller Lance Winters has a passion for exploring place and memory through distillation, and the aromas of the coastal forests on California's Mount Tam were what inspired him to start making gin in the first place. Terroir Gin has an intense earthy, woodsy nose and flavor derived from Douglas fir, California bay laurel, and California coastal sage—complemented by bright, citrusy top notes. This is a unique and proudly Californian gin with a sense of place and poetry.

The other three agreed that it’s “verrrry nice” and “damned nice.” We tried this in an Aviation and it worked very well indeed. Recommended!

Becketts Kopf

Their only sign is an illuminated painting of that which the bar is named for: Samuel Beckett’s head.

Our kind of place.


Small, friendly; the menus are embedded in thick hardback German biographies of Beckett, and divided into categories:

• Clear & Classic
• Fine & Fresh
• Fresh & Funky
• Herb & Floral
• Creamy & Candy
• Light & Low
• Drink & Drive

We would say more, but the night was a bit of a blur. We remember a string of very good drinks and the company of a pleasantly garrulous Irishman and some fellow San Franciscans; tramping through the snow to find the U-Bahn closed; then wisely locating and consuming Doner Kebap.

We recognize that all of this is singularly unhelpful in evaluating Becketts Kopf. But it’s what we’ve got to work with.