Benjamin Zorn, preaching the good word at the BPL
Benjamin Zorn is a bartender at Tooker Alley in Prospect Heights and a cocktail-smith of the highest order. He also looks a little like Encyclopedia Brown, but that was appropriate to the context in which I first encountered him. Last week, Jason and I took one of the “culinary cocktails” series of classes at the Brooklyn Public Library for which Zorn was the master of ceremonies. Why the library decided to let a bunch of people come drink in their fancy new lab area, I’m not entirely sure, but it probably has to do with the library being awesome.
Similar to many enthusiasts of offbeat and intricate crafts, Zorn was almost visibly vibrating with fervor and brimming over with an abundance of helpful hints. These ranged from the obscure (explaining the dangers of ice chips in egg-white cocktails to a crowd of people who did not look as though they previously knew egg-white cocktails existed) to the obvious (“You can tell a bartender’s sense of humor from the way he names his drinks”*), from the practical (the difference between an $8 bottle of vodka and a $15 bottle of vodka is mostly sensed in the hangover) to the near-mystical (“Always pour with confidence!” my final note of the evening reads, which I must have written right before I chucked my notebook aside and started drinking the free samples.)
But perhaps the most useful concept (and the main theme of February’s class) was this: you can get a lot of mileage out of sticking to the elegant proportions of classic drinks but jazzing them up with infused liquors and syrups. Usually, I’m not wild about Old Fashioneds but when Zorn made one with star-anise simple syrup, Brooklyn-made bitters and an orange peel…hot diggedy!
Anyway, I didn’t want to rip off Zorn’s recipes, so I decided to use what he taught us and come up with my own take on a Tom Collins. I call it the Winter Thaw, and I’ll post the recipe below so you can rev yourself up before attending Zorn’s next library class in March.
The Winter Thaw Continue reading
