Dale DeGroff is a smooth operator and just about as handsome as Dean Martin. He was among my instructors for the BAR certification program and I can vouch for his storytelling ability, and is a living legend in the mixology world. So imagine my delight that he'll be at Astor Wines this evening from 5 - 8 pm, shaking up drinks to go alongside his wife Jill's book signing.

While you may not have the benefit of sitting next to the Astor Wines tasting bar (I can get cocktails without even stepping outside!), you are invited to come on down and taste Dale's wares. For free! I'm sure you plan to be very abstemious during Lent, so it is only right that you should celebrate tonight with something rummy and yummy.

Aside from running the most outstanding culinary center in New York City, our fearless leader Jenn Smith is currently working on one of her life's goals, creating a different cocktail to compliment every American president. Here she shares with us #39, James Earl Carter Jr. or the "Jimmy Carter" The Jimmy Carter
by Jenn Smith

• Crushed salt, sugar, peanuts on the rim
• Castries Peanut Liquor
• Anchor Porter
• Nutmeg

On my most recent of Sunday morning bloggings, I came accross a little piece of fun called Roboexotica. It's a festival held in Vienna that adresses a long standing issue. This is direct from their homepage.

"Until recently, no attempts had been made to publicly discuss the role of cocktail robotics as an index for the integration of technological innovations into the human Lebenswelt, or to document the increasing occurrence of radical hedonism in man-machine communication. Roboexotica is an attempt to fill this vacuum. It is the first and, inevitably, the leading festival concerned with cocktail robotics world-wide. A micro mechanical change of paradigm in the age of borderless capital. Alan Turing would doubtless test this out."

Needless to say, you can take a few minutes out of your day to check this out.

Below is a robot that mixes cocktails based on how you play Mario. Needless to say, my drink would be elegant, potent and delicious.

You likely know Jimmy Carter was a peanut farmer, and if you’ve had it, you know that Castries Peanut Rum Crème is a deliciously silly tipple, so in pursuit of a presidential cocktail for the 39^th president, I naturally wanted to incorporate the stuff.

I’d encountered plenty of sweet, froofy Castries cocktails at Tales, but wanted to create something more complex and maybe a little manlier, as well – after all, Carter was in the Navy. Bourbon? But it is hot as Hades out now, and a brown spirit base with a milky component just sounded wrong, like so much nog. And then it hit me: beer.

A Nutshell History of American Beer: proliferate and reflective of European beer traditions until Prohibition; stagnant during Prohibition; dominated by the “big three” in the post-Prohibition era (Anheuser-Busch, Miller and Coors); and relatively recently, somewhat slowly, flowering into a full-blown craft beer culture.

Why has it flowered? Arguably, thanks to legislation that was passed during Jimmy Carter’s presidential tenure, signed off on by the cardigan-wearing New Southerner himself. For whatever reason (oversight on the part of lawmakers or conspiracy at the hands of the big three, take your pick), home brewing had been illegal in the United States since Prohibition. Its legality led to a greater awareness of good beer, more people attuned to brewing it, interest in craft breweries and hey presto, great suds at every corner store in the city.

And so in my presidential series, I celebrate Jimmy Carter with a cocktail based on good American beer: Anchor Steam’s Anchor Porter, an intense, hoppy, coffee-and-chocolate beer made with care in San Francisco by an early beneficiary of the interest in craft brewing - one of the country’s finest, smallest, and most traditional breweries.

To give the cocktail a little characteristic sass – after all, Carter did lust, even if only in his heart, and never holds his tongue when criticizing current world leaders - I served the drink with a rim made from a couple of crushed peanuts and equal parts salt and sugar. It ends up being roasty, nutty, and even a little refreshing.

The Jimmy Carter

3 ounces Anchor Porter

1.5 ounces Castries Crème 

Shake ingredients over ice and strain into a coupe rimmed with a salty-sugar blend. Top with a scant scrape of nutmeg.

Our good buddy Dave Wondrich, stopped by the Colbert Report to mix up a few cocktails for Stephen, as well as create one just for him. He mixes up a few of the popular cocktails from American History (Civil War, Prohibition) as well as the Colbert Bump.

THE COLBERT BUMP

1 ounce Heering cherry liqueur
1 1/2 ounces gin
1/4 ounce lemon juice
Splash of soda wate

Stir in a tall glass with 3/4 ice