the past, 21st-century cocktails are becoming a sophisticated blend of ingredients like infused syrups and egg whites.

San Francisco bartender Jennifer Colliau has been wielding her cocktail shaker for 12 years and has worked behind some of the city’s greatest bars (currently you can find her at The Slanted Door).

Colliau’s classic cocktails are actually classic: She pores over vintage recipes and tweaks them until they become mini liquid masterpieces.

Recently, she began handcrafting pre-Prohibition-era cocktail ingredients with her business, Small Hand Foods. She mostly re-creates infused gum syrups to sweeten drinks, utilizing the ingredient that has become more popular than simple syrup in recent years.

In this bonus Storyboard podcast, host Adam Rogers geeks out with Colliau on the subject of cocktails. Hoist a glass and find out what orgeat and cyanide are doing in the same sentence, as well as what bartenders drink when nobody is looking.

Bonus: Top-Shelf Tiki Drink Recipes

If you want to drink like it’s 1919, or just make this week’s podcast more entertaining, check out some of Colliau’s recommended Tiki drink recipes:

Pusser’s Painkiller
2 oz. Pusser’s rum
1 oz. cream of coconut
1 oz. orange juice
4 oz. pineapple juice

Shake and pour everything including spent ice into a large glass. Garnish with freshly grated nutmeg.

Sidewinder’s Fang
1.5 oz. lime juice
1.5 oz. orange juice
1.5 oz. passion fruit syrup
0.5 oz. Smith & Cross rum
1 oz. Gosling’s rum
1 oz. white rum

Shake over ice, add 3 oz. soda to mixing tin, then strain into a tall glass. Add as much ice as you can fit into the glass. Garnish with an orange twist.

Piña Colada
2 oz. white rum
1.5 oz. cream of coconut
1 oz. pineapple juice
0.75 oz. lime juice
0.5 oz. pineapple gum syrup

Shake over ice and strain over crushed ice. Garnish with freshly grated nutmeg and cherry-speared lime wheel.

Montego Bay
0.5 oz. lime juice
0.5 oz. grapefruit juice
scant 0.5 oz. honey syrup (equal parts honey and hot water, stirred together until dissolved)
0.25 oz. allspice liqueur
1.5 oz. Smith & Cross rum
2 dashes Angostura bitters
6 dashes absinthe

Shake and strain over crushed ice into double old-fashioned glass. Garnish with grapefruit peel.

Recipe credit: Erik Adkins of Heaven’s Dog. Top photo: James Lee/Flickr

See Also:

• This Nose Knows Whisky: A Spirited Talk With Master Blender Richard Paterson
• SXSauced: Crafty Cocktails at East Side Show Room
• SXSauced: Sinfully Good Cocktails at Péché

Authors: Allison Davis

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