Press

Camper English wrote this excellent article for the SF Chronicle: Resurrecting Spirits

Last year, Erik Ellestad, a cocktail aficionado and systems administrator at UCSF, decided to drink his way through a classic recipe book. Though he initially considered “The Old Waldorf Astoria Bar Book,” he found a cocktail every couple pages that required an obscure or unavailable ingredient, so he chose the easier-seeming “Savoy Cocktail Book” from 1930. On his path to making the book’s 750 drinks, he hit his first snag at the second recipe: The namesake spirit in the absinthe cocktail had been banned in the United States since 1912.

Erik Felten wrote the following article for the Wall Street Journal: Stomping Through the Savoy

Book-bloggers have taken up everything from sole to the soul. A couple of years ago, blogress Julie Powell famously cooked her way through the book that made Julia Child a star, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” Last year, Slate deputy editor David Plotz got to the end of 2 Chronicles, wrapping up his “Blogging the Bible” stroll through the Old Testament. And now one of the essential texts of the cocktail canon is in the middle of getting the same thoroughgoing treatment. Erik Ellestad, a host at the eGullet.org Web site, has been leading a bibulous crew of online collaborators since June 2006 on an Abbey to Zed trek through the 1930 “Savoy Cocktail Book.”