Summer is here! Savour the heat by quenching your thirst with a fortified Sangria Blanc. Nothing could be simpler than grabbing a pitcher, your favorite seasonal fruit, a nice white wine, gin and a tasty liqueur and mixing it up for your friends.

Carbonating and bottling cocktails is a great way to batch cocktails for your bar or for fun at home. Using great ingredients, like Martin Miller’s Gin and adding bubbles also makes any cocktail a more refreshing drinking experience.

An abundance of fruit and produce presents itself in the summer and thus it is the perfect season for making a shrub. Made simply by combining fruit based syrup (think of simple syrup made with fruit juice instead of water) and vinegar, shrubs are a great way of imparting sweet fruit flavors and delicious acidity to a cocktail. In this case, Jamie utilizes a rhubarb shrub that combines beautifully with a citrus forward gin like Martin Miller’s.

The swizzle, a style of cocktail utilizing crushed ice, typically made with rum and given a good mixing with a swizzle stick, is a perfect drink for the approaching Summer. In this swizzle, Jamie utilizes Edinburgh Gin, a new gin on the market. With wonderful floral tones and resounding pine notes, it is the perfect gin for the Evergreen Swizzle.

The winner of the Martin Miller’s Gin ‘Trade Up’ competition is the Strega Sour from Junior Ryan of Clyde Common in Portland, OR. Junior found the Strega Sour in the Playboy Host and Bar Book and traded it up using Martin Miller’s Gin and the addition of egg white and house-made honey and earl grey syrup. To see Junior making his traded up Strega Sour, check out this link: Junior Ryan Strega Sour.

Jamie brings back the “golden ratio” and discusses proper technique when opening a corked bottle of wine or vermouth. The resulting cocktail, Kentucky Medicine, will surely cure what ails you this Winter season.

The Pumpkin King was inspired by the great seasonal pumpkin ales that pop up this time of year. Jamie uses Pumking Imperial Pumpkin Ale from Southern Tier Brewing Co. to create a beer liqueur which he uses as the foundation for the cocktail. With its soft yet rich flavor, Pigs Nose Scotch Whisky is the perfect compliment to the deep spice of the hand made beer liqueur.

There are ingredients sitting in your back bar that you just don’t like. Maybe it is just because you haven’t taken the time to get to know them. The WTF cocktail is a cocktail made with some of those ingredients Jamie took the time to experiment with.

Created by the former Milk & Honey bartender Enzo Errico, the Redhook Cocktail has become a modern day classic. Using Headlong White Dog Whiskey from Woodinville Whiskey Co., Jamie concocts a variation on the Redhook he calls the Whitehook. Barrel aged for almost three months, Jamie prefers to drink and serve the resulting liqueur straight without dilution.

Bitters have been an ingredient in cocktails since the birth of the art form. Some would say that a cocktail is not truly a cocktail without bitters. Even so, it is rare to find a cocktail that utilizes more than a dash or two. Not so with the Aromatic Collins. A lover of bitters, Jamie Boudreau uses an entire ounce of Angostura Bitters in this creation.