“Does anyone have a nutmeg grater?” “Does anyone have a lighter?” Nine bartenders are rushing around the Fifty/50, a three-story bar/lounge/restaurant in Ukrainian Village, gathering ingredients and tools. They’re shaking, straining, and muddling, making foams and garnishes, and occasionally setting things on fire. Their creations are gradually lining up on the bar, but there are no customers around to consume them. The place isn’t even open. The bartenders have assembled for a mixology lab, the latest project from the Boozehound, a company Kyle McHugh started last fall to “help people drink better things better.” At the more-or-less bimonthly events, some of the city’s top bartenders gather at places like the Violet Hour and Le Passage to mix cocktails and to learn about the spirit featured that day. McHugh aims to focus on unusual or little-known ones, and today it’s Qino One vodka, the only spirit in the world made from the Andean grain quinoa and the first vodka to be certified fair trade.
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After Qino One owner Jean-Denis Courtin gives some background on the vodka, the bartenders start on their cocktails, first using existing recipes (they vote on their favorites) and then making up their own. The first recipes they mix, created by McHugh, seem complex enough—the vegan Bloodless Mary requires an organic celery stalk, an organic lemon wedge, and a skewer with an artichoke heart, a button mushroom, a radish, and a grilled organic pimiento-stuffed olive—and that’s just the garnish. Another calls for a foam made from “organic fair trade freeze-dried 100% coffee.” But the mixologists get even more inventive. D.J. Love makes the Chocochili, a cocktail involving chocolate and serrano peppers with nutmeg, cinnamon, coffee and vanilla liqueurs, coconut milk, and vodka; Dan Barringer comes up with the Melon Love: cantaloupe, honeydew melon, red grapes, lime juice, orange liqueur, grapefruit bitters, ginger beer, Sprite, and vodka, dusted with nutmeg.
When McHugh started the Boozehound last fall, he’d just left his job of five years bartending and overseeing the drinks program at Weber Grill. Prior to that he’d worked at Clyde’s in Washington, D.C., and Houston’s in LA and Chicago, and, having spent his “entire adult life behind bars,” says he was sick of all the pretension in the industry. “You’ve got people in three-piece suits, and you’re swirling, and you’re rinsing, and you’re talking of lychee and of oak, and you’re forgetting that our job—it’s fun, and it’s exciting, and it has its artistic elements,” McHugh says.
And, he says, he’ll have tasted all the wine, beer, and liquor he stocks—around 250 products in a 2,200-square-foot space—so he can tell customers about any of them. He’s also going to have a reserve room for “fun, crazy stuff in limited quantities”; things like Sazerac 18-year-old rye whiskey from New Orleans (of which Illinois is allotted only 24 bottles a year), and Pappy Van Winkle’s family reserve bourbon from Kentucky. Buffalo Trace Distillery, the maker of both, is lower priced than some of its competitors—despite nearly uncountable awards over the past ten years—meaning, according to McHugh, that “price whores” don’t want it. “There are only so many places that can sell stuff like this, that have the knowledge [to do it] or customers who give a damn,” he says. He’d also like to get his hands on some of Three Floyds’ Dark Lord Russian Imperial Stout—available only one day a year at the brewery, where each person is only allowed to buy six bottles (and they usually sell out early). How’ll he do that? “It’s going to be an adventure,” he says.
