Free Boozehound by Jason Wilson

presentation on “Big Trends” where someone talks about “bartender proactivity” in getting people to try new spirits. Perhaps someone suggests how important it is for a spirit to have something called an “equity delivery vehicle.” Tequila, for instance, is fortunate to have the popular margarita as its equity delivery vehicle. Perhaps, it will be suggested, pisco and cachaça need better equity delivery vehicles to expand their appeal? “What’s new in fruits right now?” the moderator will ask. “In Europe, we’re over fruit,” will come the reply from a British bartender. There will possibly be talk of a movement to eliminate tedious muddling in high-volume bars. And it will be agreed that mezcal, rye whiskey, and grapefruit juice are all hugely popular.
    At various points during Tales of the Cocktail, the issue of vodka will be addressed. Someone will say something solemn like, “We needed to kill vodka in order to create a place for ourselves.” Later, a famous bar owner—a leading figure in the so-called mixology renaissance—will cause audible gasps by telling the cocktail geeks to lighten up a bit. “If someone wants a vodka drink, give ’em a vodka drink. Are we fascists? Vodka tonics pay the rent.”
    Then, later on, you’ll be tasting an aged rum next to someone wearing a fedora, a kilt, or a seersucker suit and bow tie.
    In the midst of my first visit to this craziness, I attended a panel called “Lost Ingredients: Obtaining (or Making) Rare Ingredients for Even Rarer Cocktails.” Eric Seed was among the experts on this panel. We all got to taste falernum, Swedish punch, Amer Picon, and what the presenter referred to as the “holy trinity of lost spirits”: absinthe (this was several months before legalization), pimento dram, and violet-flavored Crème Yvette (out of production for a half century). For some people in the room, that tasting clearly was a life-changing experience. I cannot say I wasn’t one of them.
    For years, the holy grail of our Liquor Store Archaeology game had been Crème Yvette, which was a purple-hued violet-and-vanilla liqueur, a variation on the traditional crème de violette liqueurs found in Europe. Crème de violette and Crème Yvette pop up as ingredients over and over again in old recipe books. Even as late as the 1940s and 1950s, bartending guides suggested that a particular brand called Crème Yvette was part of any well-stocked home bar. But by the late 1960s, Crème Yvette had simply disappeared. The Charles Jacquin et Cie distillery, in Philadelphia, was Crème Yvette’s final place of production. Since that’s near where I’m from, I searched for years, with false hope, wasting hours in dicey Philly bottle shops and neon-lit “package goods” stores in Jersey strip malls. But I never found Crème Yvette.
    And then, just like that, in a conference room at the Hotel Monteleone, a guy named Rob Cooper, the scion of the family who owns Charles Jacquin, was pouring little plastic cups of the spirit for all of us. “From one of the only two bottles left in existence,” said Cooper, who promised that—if he had anything to do with it—he would return Crème Yvette to the market. It would be 2010 before that came to pass.
    However, that same afternoon at the same panel, the Indiana Jones of spirits beat Cooper to the punch, casually mentioning that he would very shortly be bringing out a crème de violette made by a distillery in Austria.
    The next day, Eric Seed and I had a drink, and then he invited me up to his hotel room. Don’t get the wrong idea. At Tales of the Cocktail, the big liquor brands host lavish tasting rooms and parties with bands and DJs and tons of free booze and swag—and sometimes even burlesque dancers and scantily clad women painted blue (such was the case at one Hendrick’s gin party, for instance). Smaller companies, like Seed’s Haus Alpenz, can’t afford those sorts of things. Which is why a bartender from Boston with a