Sorry, I was momentarily overcome by The Swedish Chef.  (He's excited about this too.)

Over the years, as many classic cocktail ingredients have become lost to us, we've had to improvise or make our own. Pimento (allspice) dram, defunct bitters, and the Batavia arrack-based Swedish punsch, which is still quite popular in Sweden but hasn't been available in the U.S. for many years.  When it was available it was still very difficult to find -- Grönstedts Blue, Carlshamns Flaggpunsch and Cederlunds Caloric Punsch were the only brands I'd ever seen, with the former being my favorite.

Not only is it a classic ingredient in cocktails on this side of the pond, it has a long history in Sweden after arrack first arrived there in 1733.  In the earliest days of punsch consumption in Sweden it was a homemade product as punch is now, mixing arrack with water, sugar, citrus and spice, and was most often consumed hot. Before long commercially bottled brands became popular, and those tended to be served chilled. In Sweden it's almost always consumed straight, rather than as a cocktail ingredient.

My own first taste of Swedish punsch came thanks to Ted "Dr. Cocktail" Haigh, who demonstrated a rather amazing effect -- "You can add Swedish punsch to a cheap rum," he said, "and it'll make it taste like a much more expensive aged rum."  I don't remember which cheap rum he used (I was a bit tipsy at the time, as you can imagine), but he was right -- just a splash of punsch added spice, depth and nuance to whatever that rum was.

During our Swedish punsch drought folks in the cocktail community started making it, as we do -- Erik Ellestad came up with a quite lovely version, and another one done for Tales of the Cocktail that had more of a spice base. Some bars around town have been making their own versions as well.

Now, as has been the case for Crème de Violette, Allspice Dram and punsch's base ingredient Batavia arrack itself, Eric Seed of Haus Alpenz comes to our rescue once again. Kronan Swedish Punsch, made just outside of Stockholm, will be arriving on our shores soon. (What would we do without Eric Seed? I ask you!)

Let's celebrate punsch's return with a classic cocktail, the namesake of our good Dr. Cocktail ... the Doctor Cocktail!  The original recipe was simply Swedish punsch mixed with lime or lemon juice, but I favor this Trader Vic variation that appears in Doc's book Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails:

[Image shamelessly purloined from Jay Hepburn's post about the Doctor, and another brand of punsch that never seemed to make it to our shores.]

THE DOCTOR COCKTAIL

2 ounces Jamaican rum
1 ounce Swedish punsch
1 ounce fresh lime juice

Shake and strain, garnish with a lime twist.

Speaking of Jay's Doctor Cocktail pic that I absconded with ... his presentation shows it on the rocks, which would also be a lovely way to enjoy the Doctor. I also highly recommend you browse through Jay's site Oh Gosh!, my favo(u)rite U.K.-based cocktail blog.

Actually, this excellent and hope-inspiring article by Wayne Curtis in The Atlantic actually refers to "high-end cocktails" in the article's subtitle, but I have to wonder about that appellation.  Is it "high-end" to make a Daiquiri with lime juice instead of some horrid cheap sour mix? No, it's just the way it's made.  As Wayne tells us, chain restaurants and other large-volume operations are beginning to learn that "properly made" is the way to go, that it's not really high-end to make a cocktail properly.  The reason they're doing it?  Customer demand.  The so-called Cocktail Revolution of the last 10 years has made some serious progress, and gone a long way toward educating the public palate. We still have a long way to go, though.

In one session at the [Cheers Beverage] conference, I explored a touch-screen video program used to educate chain bartenders. I was pleasantly surprised to see an excellent but long-forgotten cocktail called the Ward Eight in the lesson plan. I was less pleasantly surprised to see that the recipe called for sour mix.

Still, it is possible to construct a better cocktail on a mass scale, as I learned when I met Kent Bearden, until recently the master mixologist at the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. The MGM is, in effect, a self-contained city, employing about 300 bartenders at 29 venues, each with its own cocktail menu. Four years ago, the hotel switched over to all fresh juice and higher-quality ingredients. Manhattans at the MGM are now made with an eight-year-old bourbon, West Indian orange bitters, and brandied cherries. The margaritas get a lime squeezed fresh into the glass, not a slug of sour mix. And Bearden says the numbers work for them: upgrading from mix to fresh lime juice added only eight cents per drink, but allowed the MGM to bump up the price of a margarita considerably without customers’ complaining.

Can Bearden’s experiment be replicated by the chains? The jury’s still out.

Progress on the horizon! I also had to chuckle and wonder last week while I was in New Orleans ... I tweeted that I was enjoying having Old Fashioneds with my dad, who introduced me to that cocktail -- his drink of choice -- many, many moons ago.  I got a reply from the TGIFridays account, of all people, saying, "Yeah! Gotta love an Old Fashioned!" I replied, "Yep, you sure gotta! Um, can you even get a real Old Fashioned at TGIFridays? ;-)"  No reply, alas, but given the fact that the TGIFridays "cocktail menu" is a horror show, maybe the fact that it was even mentioned is a step in the right direction.

Members of the cocktail community ... are you Cognac-curious? Exploring? Just want to brush up? The kind folks at Beverage Alcohol Resource (who have and who continue to educate many of us) have prepared a new reference website called Experience Cognac.

History, vineyards and regions, its use in cocktails historically and currently, pairing, recipes, quizzes and more -- learn anew or fortify what you already know. While I'm reading I think I'll make me a Brandy Crusta ...

Meanwhile, Martin Doudoroff, one of the two diehard cocktail historians (along with Ted "Dr. Cocktail" Haigh) behind the massive, indispensible reference CocktailDB.com (bookmark that NOW if you haven't already) seeks to share his knowledge of and passion for aromatized/fortified aperitif wines with his new site Vermouth 101. The various wines are organized by style and by brand, along with a section on quinquinas and Americanos and a smattering of drink recipes.

What a perfect time to mix a cocktail.

Martin shares his recipes for the Vermouth cocktail -- basically 2 ounces vermouth of any kind and a dash of bitters, stirred and strained -- but I like this one, which came from a book called The Speakeasies of 1932 (illustrated by Al Hirschfeld):

VERMOUTH COCKTAIL
(adapted from a Prohibition-era speakeasy cocktail)

1 ounce sweet vermouth.
1 ounce dry vermouth.
2 dashes of Angostura or other aromatic bitters.
2 dashes orange bitters.
2 dashes grenadine.
1 lemon twist, for garnish.

Shake all the ingredients over ice, and strain into a chilled cocktail glass or coupe. Add the garnish.

Go wild with your choice of vermouths and bitters, or go wilder with quinquinas or perhaps Cocchi or Barolo Americano. It's spicy, complex and easy on the noggin. We likes it!

Jonathan Gold, Pulitzer Prize-winning food writer from the L.A. Weekly, has been drinking his way across town for quite a while now. (This is a job I would not mind having.) All the while, he's been thinking about essence:

We have, I think, nearly come to agreement on what an essential restaurant might be in Los Angeles, a place that may have transcendent food or occupy a niche in the social ecosystem, but explains something to us about ourselves. Our ideas on the subject are firm. The nature of an essential cocktail may be more subjective. To one man we know, 55 essential cocktails means 55 glasses of Chivas, because that's all he'll ever drink. To us, an essential cocktail says something about L.A. [...]

Three years into the cocktailian revolution, there remains little agreement about what an essential bar should be, but a rough consensus about how an essential bar should be run. At the best bars, be it the Varnish or the Tiki-Ti, syrups are fresh, juices are prepared daily, and the ice, whether chipped from a giant block or made by a $10,000 machine, is clear and cold. Even a novice can tell a great bar from a mediocre one by the sharpness of the report from the shakers.

But 55 essential cocktails? Why not 99? Why not 82? Why a number associated with that which Sammy Hagar cannot drive? Because I drive. Because I have a human liver. Because however much you may adore the saketini at that little place in Torrance, it is only essential if you happen to be eating a sliver of yellowtail sashimi there at the time.

Bottoms up!

He's come up with his voluminous list of what he considers to be the 55 very best tipples in Los Angeles, at a variety of places undoubtedly familiar to most of us, as well as some I still have yet to try. I think you'll find it's a pretty solid list; perhaps it'll give you some inspiration for a formidable (and, one would hope, weeks-long) bar crawl.