Farm-Fresh Cocktails
Filling my bag with fresh fruits, veggies, and herbs at the farmer’s market or produce aisle of the grocery store, smelling the winter citrus and autumn spices, and planning out the menu for the week ahead: It’s enough to make a person really thirsty.
Innovative mixologists across the country have become obsessed with putting food ingredients into drink form, giving us Bacon Bloody Marys, Avocado Daiquiris, and Pumpkin Cocktails. They’re also working hard on putting drinks in food form, from Liquid Nitrogen Caipirinhas to Gin and Tonic Gelatin to Deconstructed Negronis. But getting your recommended serving of fruits and veggies served in a glass can be a lot easier than all that.
The simplest way to drink your produce is to mash it up and suck it down. Citrus fruit like oranges, grapefruit, lemons, and limes makes for easy juicing, but you can also muddle a lot of juice out of other produce like pears, nectarines, peaches, plums, apricots, kiwi, pineapples, and grapes. Just chop them up (removing any large pits), drop them into the bottom of a mixing glass, and start smashing away with your muddler.
To build a drink around fresh muddled produce, add some vodka to the mixing glass and a sweetener, then shake it with ice and strain it into a new glass. Fill with ice and soda water and you’ve got a farm-fresh vodka soda. This procedure is almost the same as making lemonade (with vodka), so you shouldn’t need to write down the recipe.
About that sweetener- if you’re just adding orange juice to a vodka soda you may not need any, but most tart and acidic citrus and other fruit will need a sweetening component for proper balance. By the way, this is the trick to making many cocktails: balancing sweetness with acidity. Understand that and you’ll go far, young bartender.
There are many sweetening options to chose from, including homemade simple syrup (equal parts sugar and water), honey, or a liqueur like triple sec, the sweetener that balances the lime in a Margarita.
As this is a column about putting fresh produce into your drinks, I also suggest you put it into your sweetener. Heat equal parts sugar and water then remove it from heat and toss in fresh herbs like mint, basil, lemongrass, or cilantro. Be sure not to burn them or your syrup will taste wilted instead of wonderful. You can also make spicy syrups with hot peppers or ginger, or simmer dried spices like black peppercorns, allspice, cinnamon, and vanilla.
For all syrups, stir the ingredients for several minutes to an hour to extract all the flavor you can. Then strain out any solids and store the syrup in the refrigerator where it will keep for several weeks. With homemade farm-fresh syrup on hand, you’ll always have the ingredients to put produce into your diet, even if you’re on a liquid diet for the night.

Gay Bars versus Great Cocktails
Though I spend what many would consider an inordinate amount of time in bars, less and less of this time is spent in gay bars. My issue is not with the gays, of course, nor even with gay bars per se. Between dance bars, biker bars, piano bars, cruise bars, rock-and-roll bars, bear bars, drag bars, sports bars, and neighborhood bars, I think you can usually find the gay bar that suits your mood at any time of the week. What you can’t find, however, is a decent cocktail.
You can find a decent mixed drink in a gay bar - don’t get me wrong - but complicated cocktails are another story. The simple mixed drinks like vodka cranberry, vodka tonic, vodka soda, and the like when they’re served in gay bars tend to be stronger in alcohol content, less expensive, and served faster by better looking bartenders than in straight bars. This part I like very much.
The part I don’t like so much is that usually the only cocktails beyond a Martini and (sometimes) Manhattan that gay bar bartenders seem to be able to make is the Cosmopolitan and the Apple Martini. Those drinks were fine for a time but after six or seven hundred of them one’s tongue may want to wander towards something different or new or at least something invented within the last decade.
We are in a new golden era of cocktails made with fresh ingredients, homemade bitters, spicy syrups, and floral liqueurs, yet the drinks being served in gay bars became popular when Sex in the City was still a television series rather than a series of movies. The only good news is that the cocktails are so dated that soon they’ll be retro.
To be fair, the vast majority of bars in America aren’t making the couture cocktails of my dreams with hand-carved ice cubes, rare Indonesian rum, and fresh-picked kumquats either. But I still hold out hope that my gay sisters and brothers will hop on the haute cocktail bandwagon sooner rather than later. We’re supposed to be a trendy people.
Another trend is the prevalence of competitive cooking reality shows, and those are just chock full of gays. Who knew there were so many queer chefs? I suppose it’s the same with gay mixologists. They do exist, and there are more than a few of them, but they just don’t work in gay bars where their talent would be wasted.
Perhaps that’s my fault and yours too, leaving the gay bar talent untested. Maybe if we asked the bartenders (nicely) for more complicated and delicious cocktails they would learn to make them for us. We’ll have to do this at times when the bar isn’t very busy so the bartenders have the time to indulge us, but maybe if we start bringing in relatively simple, new cocktail recipes they’ll learn to make these drinks for us.
At worst we’ll be rebuffed and this plan will fail, but at best we’ll slowly improve the qualities of cocktails in gay bars, one bartender at a time.

Camper English is a cocktails and spirits writer and publisher of Alcademics.com.