Free Boozehound by Jason Wilson Page A

shaved head and I found ourselves sitting on opposite hotel beds while Seed sat at the desk and opened what he called his “medicine bag,” full of tiny bottles of his various products.
    First, we tasted the two products that Seed had originally begun importing in 2006— kletzenlikör , a traditional Austrian pear cream liqueur, and zirbenschnaps , a liqueur made from the fruit of the native Arolla stone pine, both made in Austria by Josef Hofer, a two-hundred-year-old family-owned distillery. Seed had discovered these spirits during a college semester abroad in Vienna and thought they might be popular at ski resorts like Aspen. The spirits never quite caught on. Of the kletzenlikör, which sells under the name Lauria, Eric Felten wrote in the Wall Street Journal , “The texture is off-putting. One expects a cream liqueur to be creamy. Instead, Lauria, thick with a pulpy pear purée, is gritty and gloppy.” The zirbenschnaps, which sells under the name Zirbenz, tasted like … well, pine. Not in an unpleasant way, but it was certainly a unique, acquired taste. Gary Regan advised, in the San Francisco Chronicle , to use Zirbenz “sparingly in cocktails, lest it take over the drink completely.” Both Zirbenz and Lauria are lovely spirits, but they have very little application for most bartenders. And I can tell you from spending my formative years as something of a ski bum … the après-ski crowd was likely looking for something else. Like maybe a shooter of some kind.
    After the Zirbenz and Lauria, we tasted Seed’s upcoming launches, including an apricot liqueur, a walnut liqueur, and then—the thing we’d come to the hotel room for—the crème de violette. Now, with a larger glass of the lavender-hued stuff and more time to contemplate it, I could tell that Seed was on to something. The bald bartender from Boston and I agreed that this would be his breakout product. Indeed, several years after that day in New Orleans, events have proved us right. Today, crème de violette is one of Haus Alpenz’s top sellers, and you will see it on the back bar of most serious cocktail bars.
    Here I must pause to raise the reasonable questions that you might well be asking yourself right now: Why? Why had a taste of it brought a conference room of cocktail geeks nearly to tears? What was the big deal with crème de violette? On its face, crème de violette, with its fancy-soap aroma of spring violets (“It smells like your grandma’s underwear drawer,” according to one friend), should have been no more successful than a liqueur made of pear puree. Seed’s apricot and walnut liqueurs were bolder and tastier, seemingly more in line with modern tastes. If you were simply looking for obscurity, what could be more obscure than a liqueur made from fruit harvested from a frickin’ wild stone pine tree that grows in the high Alps! Maybe it was simply nostalgia for a pre-Prohibition taste? But almost none of these people had been of legal drinking in the 1960s, so how could it be actual nostalgia for something they had never before tasted?

    During that first trip to Tales of the Cocktail, my outlook on Liquor Store Archaeology changed significantly. For one thing, I was quickly learning that finding interesting spirits would require slightly more effort than a jaunt to my local liquor store.
    After we’d sampled everything in Seed’s room, I shook hands with him, then took the elevator back downstairs. In the Hotel Monteleone’s lobby, a local jazz band was jamming, trumpets blaring, and people were handing out free samples of new vodkas, one called Absolut New Orleans, and another one, from the Netherlands, called Sonnema Vodka-Herb. I ran into a woman named LeNell Smothers, a liquor store owner from Brooklyn, who wore a pink cowboy hat. I’d met her late the night before, in the wild after-hours suite sponsored by Sonnema VodkaHerb, as she’d been pouring shots of Chartreuse directly into people’s mouths. LeNell had