Home Makers

’Tis the season for holiday hosting and whether you’re mingling fireside with family or toasting to the New Year with friends, creative cocktails are a must. Of course, in the festive flurry even the most talented bar masters can shake up a cocktail catastrophe, so take your inspiration from these top DC mixologists who share their tales of how tinkering with the right tools in their home bars transformed an erroneous elixir into a top tipple.

Spice and Easy
Maestro Stefan Trummer, Owner, Trummer’s on Main, 7134 Main St., Clifton, trummersonmain.com
Mainframe Trummer re-purposed a china cabinet to display his vast collection of unique bottles—many purchased overseas­—and stocks dedicated tables with elaborate tools and glassware. Bar stools and easy lighting encourage his guests to linger over a cocktail, before progressing to the adjoining formal dining room for the first course.
Mistake One of Executive Chef Clayton Miller’s favorite kitchen ingredients is cardamom. But when Trummer mixed gin with a syrup infused with the heady seasoning, the resulting sip was so unsavory, that he avoided the spice rack for several weeks.
Masterpiece While entertaining friends with ingredients from his home bar, it dawned on Trummer to instead infuse toasted cardamom seeds with cachaça. His resulting Cardamom Punch ($10) is a fragrant, Eastern take on the Caipirinha, with lime and sugar-cane syrup, stirred with crushed ice until the glass frosts over.

Tea Partier
Maestro Chantal Tseng, Head Mixologist, Tabard Inn, 1739 N St. NW, tabardinn.com
Mainframe Vintage glassware, shakers and measuring tools line the windowsills of the home Tseng shares with her mixologist husband, Derek Brown. Her go-to homefront secret weapons include honey for sweetness, sherry for complexity and a bevy of bitters and vermouths.
Mistake During a recent rainy spell, Tseng was inspired by global mythologies and traditions for evoking rain to build a new riff on the Pisco Sour. But her well ran dry. She couldn’t find that perfect tea to balance the tipple. “Creating cocktails at home is always hit or miss with a frequent need for alterations,” she says.
Masterpiece She figured out her Rain God Sour ($11) when she discovered the sought-after component on her own kitchen counter. A base of Peruvian Macchu Pisco channels the Incas, amaro adds ruddy bitterness and agave sweetens it. But it was Tseng’s precise blend of Yerba Mate and smoky Keemun Encore from her well-stocked home tea collection that ultimately tempered the flavor and texture.

Currant Affair
Maestro Ari and Micah Wilder, Mixologists, Black Jack, 1612 14th St. NW, blackjackdc.com
Mainframe The shelves of the library bar in the siblings’ new condo teeter with apothecary bottles of gomme syrups, bitters, tinctures and hard-to-find spirits, which the duo deftly drizzles as they play off, tweak and merge their synergistic genetic creativity.
Mistake Each commercially made version of crème de cassis the brothers sampled to use in a new vodka-based cocktail was deemed too cloyingly sweet, throwing the drink’s balance off kilter, they say.
Masterpiece For the Blue Vein ($11), which has a base of Tito’s handmade vodka, bright lime and spicy house-made ginger beer, the Wilders add their own tarter, more palatable currant liqueur. “There are very few occasions when we create a new drink that we don’t have to change it multiple times to create a balanced cocktail,” Ari says. “But where better to make mistakes than on your own turf?”