How does a middle aged accountant, a punk rock cruise, an English rock star and an Omaha bar all come together.  Easy, with a cocktail called Lorna’s Hammer.  I suppose a little more background might be useful.  A few years ago, I was introduced to the Capone’s Revolver cocktail.  This drink is a boozy creation of Johnny Santer at the Esquire Tavern in San Antonio.  It’s an Old Fashioned variant with Trader Vic’s Kona Coffee Liqueur and Bad Dog Fire and Damnation bitters standing in for the sugar and aromatic bitters in the traditional Old Fashioned.  I’d found the recipe online, gotten the ingredients and replicated the drink.  A visit to San Antonio and the Esquire Tavern a few years ago confirmed that I had the drink right.  I ended up serving this drink a lot at parties and some pop up bars I did for Flogging Molly and its reception was always excellent.

In 2017 our friends Skinny Lister and AJJ were doing a tour of the UK with the final show at the Scala in London.  That show was expected to sell out and be the largest headline show of Skinny Lister’s career.  The show was also the night before the start of Frank Turner’s Lost Evenings Festival in Camden.  We had made plans long before to attend the Skinny Lister/AJJ show and then Lost Evenings.  Coincidentally, both of those bands were playing Lost Evenings as well.  We decided to throw a celebratory end of tour party for the bands and also have a nice kick off for the Festival.  We rented a local bar a few blocks from Scala, called the Chapel Bar. We arranged to have our friends Brian and Neil, better known as Koo Koo Kanga Roo perform at the party and invited about 150 people from the concert guest list as well as people in town for Lost Evenings. 

In the lead up to the party, I had the idea of making a special cocktail for the event.  I even had the name, Lorna’s Hammer picked out.  In the Skinny Lister music video for their song “Devil in Me”, Lorna destroys a car with a sledgehammer. 

So, my theory was that the cocktail had to be sweet on the outside, but deal a hammer-like blow once you had the drink on board.  Having seen more that one party goer laid low by the Capone’s Revolver, I knew that a boozy whiskey cocktail like that was in order.  I also liked the heat in the finish of the drink from the bitters.  So I paid a visit to my local liquor store that stocks a huge variety of liqueurs and cordials.  I came across a bottle of Trader Vic’s Macadamia Nut Liqueur.  That had a nice sweet nutty taste to it.  I then thought of how the pairing of chocolate and macadamia nuts in cookies was a winner so I also got a bottle of Crème de Cacao.  In order to spice the drink up, I went with Bittermen’s Hellfire bitters.  It’s a habanero bitter as opposed to Fire and Damnation which is based on cayenne pepper.  Then it was experimentation time to find the right proportions.  I finally arrived at 2 oz. of Bourbon, ½ ounce Macadamia Nut Liqueur, ½ oz Crème de Cacao, 3 dashes of orange bitters and four drops of Hellfire bitters.  Its stirred over ice and strained into an Old Fashioned glass with a single large ice cube and an orange twist.

The drink made its world debut on May 11, 2017 at the Chapel Bar in London.  It was apparently a success as the bar ran out of ingredients and late in the night I saw Jameson’s being used (the less said about that the better).  The next day, an attendee accused me of laying most of the London music scene low with the cocktail.  So I knew I was onto something.  I ended up making the drink at a number of pop up bars and cocktail parties and it always went over very well.

In January of 2018, we went to Europe to a number of the Dropkick Murphys / Flogging Molly shows.  One memorable night in Oslo, we were at a great bar in Oslo called HIMKOK and Dennis Casey of Flogging Molly asked me if I wanted to put on a speakeasy style bar on their upcoming Salty Dog Cruise.  Obviously the answer to that question is “Fuck yes!”

So having committed to that, the search was on for cocktails to serve.  Lorna’s Hammer was an easy call and I finally ended up with 3 more on the menu, and I had a few extras in reserve like the Old Fashioned.

So fast forward to April 2018 and the cruise.  We did 2 nights for 2 hours each.  There was a bit of confusion with the boat as to how much we could “advertise” the bar, so it ended up being a lot of the bands plus some friends.  Here’s some action shots of me and my bar back Annie Clemmons.

The second night that we did the bar I met Erick and his fiancé Laura (who had become his fiancé only minutes before).  Erick runs a great bar in Omaha called Nosh.  We had a great conversation and he enjoyed a couple of the cocktails.  A few days later he asked me for the recipe for Lorna’s Hammer and the next thing you know, its on his menu actually being served to real bar patrons.  Quite a thrill for me. 

We’ve been able to make it to Omaha twice since then and have enjoyed the bar, the food and the company. So there you have it…the saga of Lorna’s Hammer…and rest assured that it will make a reappearance on the 2019 Salty Dog Cruise!

Bonus content: Here’s me at the 16:00 mark talking about the cruise spreakeasy for Deathwish Coffee Podcast

https://www.deathwishcoffee.com/pages/fueled-by-death-cast-before-you-die-salty-dog-cruise-2018