My Fav Happy Hour Cocktail ...

I'm gonna try to do a Hapy Hour Friday Cocktail recipe each week ( again the key word - TRY ) to start my blog off I will give you my favorite drink !

The Manhattan :

A Manhattan cocktail is basic: whiskey and sweet vermouth. This drink is fairly forgiving when mixing, the key is to find a balance of ingredients that suits your taste.

My whiskey of choice (or Rye) is Old Overholt (although Maker's Mark is pretty darn great too !). For me, this makes the perfect drink:
2 parts Old Overholt

1 part vermouth

1-4 dashes of Bitters (Angostura or Peychaud's)

Measure into a glass with ice.

Stir.

Garnish with a maraschino cherry, and if desired a bit of the cherry syrup.

Please don't Drink and Drive ...

A brief History of the Manhattan from http://www.artofdrink.com/ :

Manhattan Cocktail
Darcy O'Neil :: August 16, 2007 9:04 PM
The Manhattan is still widely regarded as one of the greatest cocktails ever created. Personally, a well made Manhattan is a cocktail I truly enjoy. It’s perfectly in balance, simple and as a guy I can drink this cocktail anywhere and not feel out of place. It’s also as strong as a properly made martini, but like the martini it started out differently. The martini is based on a cocktail called the Martinez, which for the sake of brevity, was 2 parts vermouth, 1 part gin, bitters and Maraschino. Notice it wasn’t all gin and a wisp of vermouth. The Manhattan started out the same way and that’s the cocktail I’ll be taking a look at.
The history of the Manhattan has a fairly convincing story behind it, only because it is so often repeated. Basically the drink was made for Lady Randolph Churchill, Winston Churchhill’s mother at the Manhattan Club in the 1870’s and it was thoroughly enjoyed and became popular. The story has been picked apart and it seems it may not be true. The reality is that the Manhattan was probably one of the five borough cocktails (Brooklyn, Bronx, Manhattan, Queen’s and the Staten Island cocktail) made to represent the parts of New York city.
The recipe for the original Manhattan cocktail is fairly simple, but when you read the recipe from Jerry Thomas’ Bartenders Guide you’ll need to do a little thinking. Some of the measurements are a little dated, but with a little research you’ll find that a wine glass is 4oz* 2oz and a pony is 1oz. I could be wrong though.
In other classic cocktail books the recipe indicates either equal parts whisky and vermouth or two parts vermouth and one part whisky. For me I decided to try the 2:1 variation. The recipe also calls for Boker’s bitters which are long defunct. You can fine recipes to make your own, or rumor has it the Bitter Truth is creating a version that is similar. The other rumor is the Unicum bitters are similar to Boker’s because Boker’s was a digestif bitter, meaning it was created to be served alone and not as an aromatic bitter. Basically it was sweetened. I decided to use Unicum bitters just to see what would happen.