🔥 7 Cocktails That Rule the World 🍸 w/ Dr. Cush

What are the 7 cocktails every drink is based on? 🍹 Dive into tiki, bitters, fire tricks & cocktail history w/ bartender legend Dr. Cush! 🎙️@ThirstyThursdaysat3PMEST

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/azJZrXe5R2Q

💡 What happens when a comedian turns into LA’s best bartender? You get Dr. Cush’s Exotic Drinks — a one-man show mixing cocktail science, bar wisdom & some hilarious fire tricks 🔥🍊

✨ Highlights from the episode:

• 🍹 The 7 cocktails that rule all other cocktails
• 🔥 His signature drink: Dr. Cush’s Exotic Old Fashioned
• 📚 Why bartending is more books than booze
• 🍍 How pineapples became the symbol of hospitality
• 🧊 The lost art of ice (yes, really!)
• 🎭 From improv heel to hospitality hero
• 💻 Building an online bar community during COVID
• 💥 Flaming citrus, tiki wars, and cold pizza cocktails

🎯 CTA: Subscribe for weekly food & bev innovation talks 🎙️ — and try making the Hemingway Daiquiri or your own signature drink!

0:00 Intro to Dr. Cush 🍸  
1:00 From comedy to cocktails  
5:00 The 7 cocktails theory explained  
12:00 Punch vs daiquiri: tiki breakdown  
17:00 Cocktail vs experience: why it matters  
25:00 Building an online bar community  
31:00 Hemingway Daiquiri tutorial 🍹  
41:00 The Dr. Cush Exotic Old Fashioned (🔥)  
50:00 Shelf-stable lime juice recipe  
1:03:00 State of the booze industry  
1:10:00 Signature drink + fire tricks  
1:20:00 Cocktail nerd history tour  
1:30:00 Outro & cocktail class invite

Mentors in Drinks and Tiki 

Steve the Bartender

Created Drinks Website: Kindred Cocktails    Discovered: Pseudo Juice Calculator

Dave Arnold - Technique Liquid Intelligence

Jeffrey Beachbum Berry Owns Latitude 29 in New Orleans 

Martin & Rebecca Cate own Smuggler's Cove in San Francisco

Wrote James Beard Award-winning “Smuggler’s Cove: Exotic Cocktails, Rum, and the Cult of Tiki

David Wondrich Drinks Historian and author, Link to his Books and awards

Sammy Ross Best Bar Dudes of All Time 

NOW ON YOUTUBE!!! Thank you for Listening! Join us on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter!

Host Jessie Ott's Profile on LinkedIn

Chapters

• 0:00 Dr Cush and the 7 Cocktail Types
• 5:19 The Art of Bartending and Hospitality
• 7:47 The Seven Cocktails Theory
• 10:34 Creating Unique Cocktails and Community Engagement
• 13:03 The Science Behind Cocktails
• 15:51 The Impact of COVID-19 on the Bar Industry
• 18:27 Cultural Differences in Bartending
• 21:14 Transitioning to Online Classes and Community Building
• 23:35 Future Aspirations and Opportunities
• 30:58 The Importance of Community and Passion
• 31:53 Crafting the Perfect Cocktail: The Hemingway Daiquiri
• 36:51 The Art of Cocktail Preparation
• 42:20 The Science of Ice in Cocktails
• 47:19 Creating Signature Cocktails and Oleo Saccharum
• 53:12 Community and Support in Mixology
• 56:20 Mentorship and Influences in Cocktail Crafting
• 1:01:36 The Evolution of Cocktail Culture
• 1:06:07 The Future of the Beverage Industry
• 1:09:49 Personal Passions and Hobbies Beyond Cocktails
• 1:13:53 Dr Cush's Signature Drink
• 1:16:37 The Fajita Effect: A Cocktail Experience
• 1:22:14 Old Fashioned: The Classic Cocktail
• 1:27:57 The Science of Cocktails and Citrus
• 1:32:53 The Historical Impact of Alcohol on Society
• 1:34:10 Produced by Fedora J Productions
• 1:34:31 Tune in Next Thursday!

Transcript

Dr. Cush (00:00)
I have a theory. It's not just my theory. The boys at Death and Co put out a whole book about it called the Cocktail Codex. A lot of people have worked on this theory. ⁓ I sort of have my own version of it, which is the theory of the seven cocktails. That there are really only seven cocktails in the world. And once you understand that you can sort of decipher menus, but you can also start to create your own cocktails.

What I imagine is an ingredient swapping it in, swapping something else out or splitting bases. So yeah, if you walked up to me, for a while I would say I have 100 pocket cocktails that I could make at any point. ⁓ At this point, I have the seven cocktails and ⁓ I can adjust accordingly.

Jessie Ott (00:30)
else out.

Wow, that's impressive.

And what is the basis for these different seven cocktails?

Dr. Cush (00:49)
Sure, let's get into it. So there's the old fashioned, which is sugar, booze, and bitters. There's the martini Manhattan Martinez, ⁓ which is booze, bitters, and some sort of fortified wine or like a liqueur. There's the sour, which is sugar sour and booze. There's the daisy, which instead of the sugar, you're sweetening that with liqueur.

Then there's the high ball or the fizz that has some bubbles in it. Those are, that's a lot of drinks, the Jack and Cokes and the gin and tonics. there's the flip, which, I like to say anything that comes from a platypus, is a flip, is the, flip cocktail, any kind of milk, any kind of egg base, that's your flip. And then there's the punch, which is, think one that a lot, like the Cocktail Codex guys don't put the punch in there.

Jessie Ott (01:20)
Yeah.

Dr. Cush (01:38)
But the punch started the whole thing. The punch predates the cocktail by hundreds of years. And that one is great because it comes with a rhyme, which is one of sour, two of sweet, three of strong, four of weak, and a little spice to make it all nice. And that's actually also the template. One part sour, two parts sweet, three parts strong, four parts weak, and then a little spice, something like a tea, something like a bitters. And if you really break down a lot of tiki cocktails,

Jessie Ott (01:42)
Yeah.

Dr. Cush (02:06)
The punch is a tiki cocktail.

Jessie Ott (02:38)
Hello everybody and welcome to Thursday Thursdays. I am Jessie Ott and I have an awesome guest today. I was a guest on his podcast last Saturday night, 6 PM PST, 9 PM here in the Orlando area. And it's Dr. Kush of Dr. Kush's Exotic Drinks, which is on YouTube at Dr. Kush. Welcome Dr. Kush.

Dr. Cush (03:03)
Thank you, Jessie

it's so good to see you again.

Jessie Ott (03:05)
And he's a bartender extraordinaire. He's hosted Mixed Cocktail Hour on the Hungry Channel, as well as Head of Beverage at Circa93 and rated best LA bartender in LA. So that's pretty impressive.

Dr. Cush (03:17)
for NEPRONCA.

Thank you for NET.

Jessie Ott (03:18)
Yeah. So, we've got quite the mixologist back here. I know he doesn't like to use that word so much, but, he's really, really good at it. And obviously you can see his, ⁓ his heart and soul is right around the, the Tiki, the Tiki, ⁓ the theme and drinks. And so we're going to be mixing up some fun cocktails today. And, I'm super pumped. I'm super pumped to have, to have you here and we're going to learn all about Dr. Kush today.

Dr. Cush (03:40)
Can't wait, Jessie. Let's go. Let's go.

Jessie Ott (03:42)
Let's do it. So,

and, and he's got a super extra, I guess, ⁓ glow today because he's about to go to Greece in a couple of days. So he's, ⁓ almost on, vacation mode to an a beautiful, one of the most beautiful parts of the world. And, I can't wait to hear about your, your, your trip when you get back.

Dr. Cush (03:53)
I am.

Yes.

100 % yeah, I have a few rum bars that I got to hit while I'm there, so I'm dragging my wife around for an afternoon

Jessie Ott (04:09)
It would, it would be kind of fun to do a live tasting with you.

Dr. Cush (04:13)
Yeah, I think it would it would be at 3 a.m. So I think that is a that's a tough time to like wake people up like hey I'm drinking some booze. I know you're supposed to be sleeping but watch me drink ⁓

Jessie Ott (04:16)
⁓ Maybe

so fun though. So where are you calling from? Where's your little studio at?

Dr. Cush (04:31)
Yeah, so I am in the valley in Los Angeles. This is just, you know, it looks like a bar. It is a studio for sure. If I turn the cameras like an inch either way, it is definitely just a room. So this was just, this is my little slice of heaven, my little bar in a studio in the valley.

Jessie Ott (04:34)
Okay.

that's awesome. Are you originally from there?

Dr. Cush (04:53)
Yeah.

No, I grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, a little Pueblo just east of here. And I moved here, I moved to LA about 20, I forget how, like 20 something years ago to be a comedian and a writer. I did that for a while. And then when that sort of, you know, as it does, the industry, LA is undefeated. So as that sort of fizzled, I got a job working in a bar and

Jessie Ott (05:07)
Nice.

Dr. Cush (05:19)
realized that I like that a lot more. So I stuck here.

Jessie Ott (05:23)
that's cool. Well, I think you're either somebody that like just loves hospitality or it's not your thing. It's hard work. and, know, being a bartender, you got to play a lot of roles, right? You got a team that you're working with back there with the cooks, the chefs.

Dr. Cush (05:25)
Yeah.

Yes.

Jessie Ott (05:40)
The bar backs, got other bartenders and you got to manage the flow of all the different consumers and all the different cocktails. if you're at a high-end cocktail bar or if it's a mixology bar, those take time to make. They're not just pouring booze and soda together. yeah.

Dr. Cush (05:57)
Yeah.

Yeah, I think

LA and New York have a specific extra thing there, which is managing actors' egos. Because you find a lot of bartenders are actors on the side, so finding a way to sort of corral them to, you know, makes... I'm not saying LA is a more difficult place, but it has a unique aspect to it. Yeah.

Jessie Ott (06:26)
Yeah. Yeah. I've,

I've been to Newport beach and that's it. I've not really, I mean, I've been to Napa and I've been to San Fran, but I haven't spent a whole lot of time. And yeah. Yeah. What the audience listening can't, can't see is that Kush and I planned our outfits the exact same. So we both have black t-shirts on.

Dr. Cush (06:35)
You missed us. You missed us on all sides. Yeah, probably good for you.

That's the sign

of hospitality. You probably have a pineapple somewhere in your vicinity and you have a lot of black shirts. That's how you know you're in hospitality.

Jessie Ott (06:57)
Yeah, actually it's my wife loves pineapples because we learned, I didn't know this, but when we were in, we went to Cuba over Thanksgiving on a cruise a while back and they have pineapples all over their town square. And they were explaining to us that that pineapple is the, is hospitality. And I didn't know that. And it's funny, my wife and her, her cousin were with us and they both had matching, like matchy kind of

Dr. Cush (07:02)
Yeah.

Jessie Ott (07:22)
pineapple outfits on and it was like, that is really cool because her cousin's in hospitality.

Dr. Cush (07:26)
Yeah.

That's the thing. Yeah. That, that, the, the pineapple as hospitality. I learned about that, ⁓ somewhat recently as well. I just, thought that was so cool. Cause who doesn't love a pine. I don't know one person that doesn't like at least enjoy a little pineapple. Yeah. For sure. Yeah.

Jessie Ott (07:40)
Yeah. And it's good for you. It has so many benefits for you.

I know it's got sugar in it, but there's a lot of other really good things. Yeah. That's all there is to it. That is awesome. So, so what, so you started bartending out in LA and that was sort of kind of the end of it. And then I guess you kind of dove.

Dr. Cush (07:47)
Please, there's sugar in everything. Everything great has sugar in it. That's all there is to it. If it's great, it has sugar in it. Yeah.

Jessie Ott (08:03)
You know, instead of, instead of bartending and then doing a gig here and there, you just dove in head first and just started mixing cocktails at that point.

Dr. Cush (08:10)
You know, I started off at a place called The Room Hollywood. I was doing a comedy show right around the corner and some guys that were, I was, we were doing a, like an improv, but it was like an improv show, but it was ⁓ mean spirited and it was like survivor. Basically we were kicking people off and I was the heel. I was the bad guy. You know, a lot of people still, I still think a lot of people see me as that, that sort of heel guy. But as that started wrapping up,

I was actually, at that point I was working in a law office. I was the systems analyst. did a lot of fixing lawyers computers. The case I was working on wrapped up, I wanted to jump off of a bridge because I did not like fixing lawyers computers. And these guys were like, hey, we're looking for a bar back. You want to come bar back? And I said, I have no idea if I want a bar back.

Jessie Ott (09:02)
Yeah.

Dr. Cush (09:02)
⁓ so I, you know, went in for a

couple nights, fell in love with it. I still, still hang out with those guys. you know, bar family is, ⁓ is bar family. It's, you connected forever. and from there, I just, I, there were a bunch of people that worked there, that were doing this cool stuff, this cool, like, you know, making, you know, I didn't know what a gimlet was when I started working at that. had no idea.

What a the drink that I drank every night was a Malibu and pineapple. because I didn't, I just didn't know anything about it. went to the, ⁓ bookstore. Let's see, do I have it right here? I got my, yeah, I got my very first, bartender book, the Playboy bartender guy by Thomas Mario. I started thumbing through it. This is the first one I ever bought. I started thumbing through it. I found some really cool stuff. we were limited.

Jessie Ott (09:41)
Ha ha!

Dr. Cush (09:51)
by what ingredients we had because this is a, you know, the room Hollywood is a dive. It's a Hollywood dive, but it's still a dive. So I was learning everything I could there. The bar group that I was working with ⁓ opened up a bar downtown right in the middle of like LA catching the New York bar craze. And I went over there to work and I was able to sort of.

quest ingredients and I could finish the rest of Mario's book and then started buying new books and fell in love with it from there, you know.

Jessie Ott (10:22)
Yeah, that's pretty awesome. What do you think you like about it the most? it the actual art of being creative with the different cocktails or is it hospitality or is it kind of a combination of both?

Dr. Cush (10:34)
Yeah, you know, I love working by myself creating the cocktails. Like I love the time that I can spend in the back. I am notoriously early for everything, like hours early for everything. So I would get into work two, three hours before my shift started so that I could work on stuff. But it wasn't just creating the drinks. It was explaining the drinks. Like, like, you know,

bring the passion, like, oh my gosh, you guys gotta try this thing, it's so cool, and then being able to hand somebody a drink after the explanation, after they see what kind of work I put into it, and that, for some reason, always made the drinks taste better when you know what goes into it. So yes, I like creating by myself, and then I like sharing with other people, so I suppose it's sort of in between those two.

Jessie Ott (11:18)
Yeah.

So are you one of those bartenders that if I came into the bar, someone came into the bar and you were just like, okay, are you a vodka, gin, or do you like sweet and sour? Do you like sweet? Do you like what? And then just make something up for them.

Dr. Cush (11:44)
Yeah. So

I have a theory. It's not just my theory. The boys at Death and Co put out a whole book about it called the Cocktail Codex. A lot of people have worked on this theory. ⁓ I sort of have my own version of it, which is the theory of the seven cocktails. That there are really only seven cocktails in the world. And once you understand that you can sort of decipher menus, but you can also start to create your own cocktails.

So

Yeah, you come in you say, hey, I like it. I have the most difficult customer in the world and I'm married to her. My wife is amazing. She's wonderful, but has no idea how to order a cocktail without like the feeling of it. So she'll say like, you know, I'm really feeling rum tonight, but I want it to be sort of like ethereal. And if I could have it sort of like

you know, less grounded than your other cocktails. like, I don't know. I don't know what any of that means. So I get to practice that a lot. ⁓ Just like, you know, I saw this really cute like jacket the other day and I want that rum drink to sort of taste like that jacket. I don't know exactly, you know, so I've gotten pretty good at it by just following the recipes for the seven cocktails and then, and then taking

Jessie Ott (12:44)
Okay.

Dr. Cush (13:03)
What I imagine is an ingredient swapping it in, swapping something else out or splitting bases. So yeah, if you walked up to me, for a while I would say I have 100 pocket cocktails that I could make at any point. ⁓ At this point, I have the seven cocktails and ⁓ I can adjust accordingly.

Jessie Ott (13:08)
else out.

Wow, that's impressive.

And what is the basis for these different seven cocktails?

Dr. Cush (13:27)
Sure, let's get into it. So there's the old fashioned, which is sugar, booze, and bitters. There's the martini Manhattan Martinez, ⁓ which is booze, bitters, and some sort of fortified wine or like a liqueur. There's the sour, which is sugar sour and booze. There's the daisy, which instead of the sugar, you're sweetening that with liqueur.

Then there's the high ball or the fizz that has some bubbles in it. Those are, that's a lot of drinks, the Jack and Cokes and the gin and tonics. there's the flip, which, I like to say anything that comes from a platypus, is a flip, is the, flip cocktail, any kind of milk, any kind of egg base, that's your flip. And then there's the punch, which is, think one that a lot, like the Cocktail Codex guys don't put the punch in there.

Jessie Ott (13:57)
Yeah.

Dr. Cush (14:16)
But the punch started the whole thing. The punch predates the cocktail by hundreds of years. And that one is great because it comes with a rhyme, which is one of sour, two of sweet, three of strong, four of weak, and a little spice to make it all nice. And that's actually also the template. One part sour, two parts sweet, three parts strong, four parts weak, and then a little spice, something like a tea, something like a bitters. And if you really break down a lot of tiki cocktails,

Jessie Ott (14:20)
Yeah.

Dr. Cush (14:44)
The punch is a tiki cocktail.

I gave a seminar at Tiki Oasis a few years ago and we took a bunch of tiki cocktails and sort of redid them so that they follow exactly the one of sour, two of sweet, three of strong, four of weak. And I think for a lot of them we were able to improve them because they, when you find that formula, there's a reason that that formula has stuck around for so long.

Jessie Ott (14:47)
Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah, yeah, that's really cool. I didn't realize there was such a science to it. That is, that's, makes it so much easier.

Dr. Cush (15:15)
Yes, this is not magic. We are not geniuses behind the... I mean, listen, I know a lot of very smart bartenders. I'm just saying we are not geniuses. are not, you know, insanely creative. A lot of the stuff that bartenders are doing that looks so cool is usually started by a chef. We just borrow that from the kitchen. So I think once you understand, it's sort of like in cooking, you you understand the mother sauces.

And then from there, you can throw your stuff in there. There are really seven mother cocktails. And after that, it's just a matter of swapping. All we do is swap. you you mentioned that, you know, Kush doesn't love the term mixologist because yeah, I feel like the most important thing is to be a bar person. should be, you are there for the experience. If you can do cool stuff.

Jessie Ott (15:51)
Sopping.

Dr. Cush (16:06)
That adds to the experience. But if you are a brick or if you are stone-faced or somebody walks up and orders a vodka cranberry and you scowl at them, well then you've missed a whole, like you've missed 80 % of the bar, the experience. You've missed a lot of it.

Jessie Ott (16:24)
Yeah. And I definitely think, know, we have a quarterly review and I've had different panelists on over the years. you know, one of the big words that, it's not a big word, but one of the words that I use to describe, you know, the culture of going into a restaurant, the addition of all the speakeasies and all the things is experience, it's your experience.

Dr. Cush (16:47)
Yes.

Jessie Ott (16:48)
⁓

We have a speakeasy down the street here in Lake Mary that unfortunately is now closed. But I ordered a bathtub gin. And it came in a bathtub with foam and a little rubber ducky. And we giggled and giggled and laughed and laughed. mean, those are things that are so important. know, with all the flashy social media stuff, I think that the hospitality game has got has

Dr. Cush (16:58)
Yes.

Yes.

Jessie Ott (17:14)
has to level up too. And that was my word for 2025. So experience was 2024 and 2025 was elevate because there's so much competition out there that you're gonna have to elevate that experience, whether you're a bar, whether you're a brand, whatever it might be. Storytelling.

Dr. Cush (17:32)
Yeah, yeah, and you know,

I think that, you know, it's tough to get your name out in the world as a bar anyway. I mean, I know, you you can have liquor.com, Rachel is one of the great bars and whatnot, and then you'll get some foot traffic, but the way that you're gonna get people in is by finding your regulars and having your regulars bring people in. That is the best way to do it. So having that experience, hey, you know, having your regular be like, hey,

They got this drink and you're not going to believe it. It comes in a bathtub. that is, that's the commercial right there. We bars don't do commercials. that's the commercial right there. So finding ways to, yeah, to, to elevate, but also to keep your, ⁓ your regulars, you know, big and happy if you, if you, ⁓ elevated, you keep adding elements and suddenly it takes, you know, 20 minutes to get a drink or, you're, you're catering to just new people.

Jessie Ott (18:15)
Yep.

Yeah, no, 100%.

Dr. Cush (18:23)
So I

think that falls right into the experience.

Jessie Ott (18:27)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. you know, it's the cocktail culture is I don't know how you would rate it. I haven't been to London in a really long time. I don't know how you would rate it between the two or, you know, Hong Kong or wherever, you know, I'm sure you've traveled to different places. We went to Japan and, you know, obviously hospitality and consumer behavior is not the same there as it is here.

because there's no trash cans for one. So nobody's walking around with a 12 ounce, you know, uh, Coke pop soda, coffee. You know what I mean? It's just, it's just different. The restaurants are smaller, you know, tend to maybe 20 people. You wait in line for an hour to eat and you get, you get a choice of beer, sake, wine, or not even really wine, beer, sake or highball.

Dr. Cush (19:02)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Jessie Ott (19:18)
That's just a completely different experience. But what we did, we did get to go to a couple of the cocktail bars, which I would say are at par or at level with anything I've been to.

Dr. Cush (19:29)
Yeah, I have wasted many hours online watching Japanese people explain how to make a highball, the different bubbles per ⁓ inch. I mean, when the Japanese bartenders got a hold of what we were doing, they changed the game. mean, they really, watching a Japanese master bartender make a highball, it's two ingredients plus ice.

to watch them fret over not having the right soda, to match that exact whiskey with the type of, I mean, you know, on the bar right now, I have Canada Dry. This is what I use. I don't have multiple sodas ready to go. You have multiple sodas. You can feel that passion in it. And so yes, it's two ingredients, but watching them do it is phenomenal. I highly recommend anybody that's got like two days to waste.

Jessie Ott (20:18)
Yeah, it's an art. Yeah.

Dr. Cush (20:22)
Just look up Japanese high ball and they'll walk you through it and by the end you won't have a regular high ball again. You just can't. You can't go back.

Jessie Ott (20:25)
Hahaha!

I remember seeing, I don't know if it was social media, TV, whatever it was, but I remember there was a bartender that took a square ice cube and shook it to where it was a circle. That was really impressive. Yeah, I don't know how they do that.

Dr. Cush (20:43)
I love that. It's so cool. Yeah, those

fun tricks are spectacular. And it's part of the show. You know, we don't have chefs out in front, you know, flipping the set. I think that would be cool. We don't, that's not a real thing. Bartenders though, we are, we're right there. You come in, you're paying for a seat at the bar to watch the show. Yeah.

Jessie Ott (21:00)
Right there.

Yep. Yep.

Yeah, no, a hundred percent. So, so you went to downtown LA and so now you're kind of able to expand your cocktail offerings and order different ingredients. What, what happens after that?

Dr. Cush (21:15)
⁓ you know, I, those bars were, they, those bars had a few issues. had, you know, it was, it was tough hiring the right people. ⁓ it was tough, with promotions and all that stuff. So first thing I did was I started hiring new staff. started sort of jettisoning.

Jessie Ott (21:25)
Yeah.

Dr. Cush (21:34)
Some older staffs not some older stuff, but some you know some staff that have been there for a while People that had either turned into full star tenders Where they were rude to customers if they if they ordered something normal or people that's you know weren't interested so I ended up hiring what I think is the greatest staff of five bartenders on earth and I worked with those guys for

Jessie Ott (21:58)
Nice.

Dr. Cush (21:59)
three years probably, shaking with those guys. We had a couple come in and out, but we continued to go from there. Right before that, I actually went and worked with three of my best friends. They weren't my best friends then, they are now my best friends. all, we play Dungeons and Dragons every Sunday night now. We're old bartenders that don't go to bars. Which ended up, it started off as a little bar out in Santa Monica called Bar Copa.

Jessie Ott (22:17)
Nice.

Dr. Cush (22:23)
And then midway through, we changed it into a Tiki bar. and that's where I got my love for Tiki. that bar is strangely enough, that bar started doing too well. And so the company that owned the building kicked us out so that they could continue on, you know, they, they thought, that they're doing so great. We'll kick them out and we'll put our guys in here and we'll do well.

And that bar closed within six months. So a really good way to remember that it isn't just the location. It is about, you know, me and Curtis and Dee and naked, right? My very good friend naked really brought a life to that bar. So anyway, that closed. went out, I did my whole thing with the, with the association where I worked, brought in an amazing staff. And then.

Jessie Ott (22:46)
Yeah.

Dr. Cush (23:08)
They elevated me to, they opened up two new bars, the Continental Club and the Queensberry, and they elevated me up to head of beverage. So basically I was creating cocktails, I was managing staffs, sort of taking what I did with the association, hiring and training staff, making sure that the cocktails were up to par, making sure everybody sort of knew what they were, because again, in LA, I'm sure there's other things in other places, but we're dealing with a lot of actors that,

you know, God bless them. They didn't move out to LA to become bartenders. They moved out to LA because they want to be actors and the bartending helped them along the way. And I don't fault them for that at all. But my passion was in the bartending. So, yeah, we got everybody sort of up to speed. And then what happened, Jessie? March 2020, March, March 14th, 2020. All the bars, we were the last bars open in downtown LA, but COVID hit.

Jessie Ott (23:50)
COVID.

Heheh. Ugh.

Dr. Cush (24:00)
And I went into a deep depression. I was teaching classes at all these bars, five nights a week. I had a bunch of people that loved my classes that were regulars. They would come into every class. I don't know what they were learning after about the first three, but they come to every class. And I was sitting around in a bath robe and I said, well, have, we thought from March to June, everything that they were like, it's going to, this COVID thing might go till June. So I was like,

What am I going to do for three months? I started drawing. It turns out I have no ability to draw. So a friend of mine or somebody that come to my classes was like, Hey, you should just do your classes online. So I got a, I got a phone camera. set up this time. can go, you can still go see my very first classes. There's I've never taken them down off YouTube. So if you just go search my very first classes, they are horrible. They are shot.

Jessie Ott (24:31)
Yeah

Dr. Cush (24:53)
It's you can barely tell it's me by how blurry they are. They are the lighting was insane You can see it's just a table that i've put in front of a wall it they were rough. They were very rough, but I started doing that and I struck a chord with some people And now I have a group that shows up three nights a week to watch my show I don't know how I did this, but I have the nicest

most loyal, fun, most like funniest group of people that show up three nights a week to watch my show. ⁓ It's crazy. I literally no idea. I hired a bar back, Kyle, he was walking dogs. I said, Hey buddy, I'm looking for a new person to come work for me. Hired him off the street and now he lives here. And ⁓ we have a, I have a little bar back who's everybody's favorite person.

Jessie Ott (25:27)
that's awesome!

Dr. Cush (25:47)
He's odd. Kyle is odd. Kyle Tender. Kyle Helperton, his real name, Kyle Helperton. But yeah, we just sort of created a little culture around this whole thing. The idea is not that I'm teaching you how to make drinks because there are a bajillion books with recipes. The idea is that we're a community. We're a local bar that's online.

Jessie Ott (25:50)
you

Right. Yeah.

That's really cool, I like that.

Dr. Cush (26:10)
Did I, I

feel like I answered a thousand questions in that one. I get, I feel like maybe I went too far.

Jessie Ott (26:16)
No, so in these classes then do you do people buy ingredients and make cocktails with you?

Dr. Cush (26:23)
No, for the most part they don't buy the I mean something you know a lot of them now have built up their bars that they've been with me long enough ⁓ the greens certainly do my ⁓ Bon Bon who's been with me forever certainly they have bars at their place I don't It took me a while to realize That I don't think people are tuning in to see what drink I'm making. I think they're tuning in

Jessie Ott (26:24)
or

Dr. Cush (26:47)
to be part of the bar for that night, to see their friends and chat, to hang out. I'm goofy. I will often let weird moments in my life slip that I probably shouldn't be telling people. So I feel like there's a little voyeurism into like, what's this idiot gonna do tonight? What's this cocktail buffoon gonna get up to tonight? I make a lot of mistakes.

I admit when I make mistakes things fall over My audio almost never works. So ⁓ You know Yeah, yeah. I did not get into this to be an audio technician But I've had to quickly learn how to be an audio technician So yeah, no people for the most part don't If they have it, they're very excited and they'll say my gosh, I had everything for this one. I'm gonna make it

Jessie Ott (27:16)
I know the feeling.

Dr. Cush (27:32)
But I usually decide what cocktail I'm doing about two hours before the class starts. And then normally people don't have enough time. So they show up to sort of hang out and if they think the cocktail looks great and if I give it a good review, maybe they'll go out and buy the ingredients. But for the most part, it's a hangout. It's a chat room. It's a community.

Jessie Ott (27:50)
Yeah, it's a community and I love that. And I think

that's another important word. You know, I interviewed a restaurateur, very successful restaurateur a while back, and he was mentioning that it was spot, that sense of community was spot on because the restaurants that he's now building is less chain focused and more neighborhood focused. And I think that's really powerful.

Dr. Cush (27:54)
Yeah. Yeah. Huge.

Jessie Ott (28:14)
Especially with AI coming and all the noise, I think that it's important to have that safe space where people can come and just hang out, get to know each other, you know, all the things. Yeah.

Dr. Cush (28:24)
100 %

100 % Yeah, I mean you can put into chat GPT These are the five ingredients that I have make me a cocktail and they'll spit out five cocktails So just having a show where I'm explaining how to make a cocktail isn't that interesting or sustainable but building a community with wonderful people is you know community we will always we are a social social species we will always need community and

I think that's one of the reasons that I fell so deeply in love with bars because people from all over the place, people that I would never see in normal life, they come to the watering hole to drink and you can't hate somebody if you're sharing a drink with them.

Jessie Ott (29:07)
Yeah, no, I agree. Do you ever miss it?

Dr. Cush (29:09)
Um, yes, I do. Um, I have some plans on going back in a limited capacity. I think at this point, I'm 43 years old. Uh, my knees hurts, basically all my bones hurt at this point. Uh, and so standing for that long, uh, and running and being, uh, in the weeds like that, uh, seems like an absolute nightmare. Um, my sleep schedule was done. It was just decimated. You know, I, I'm, I like to wake up early. Uh,

Jessie Ott (29:21)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Cush (29:39)
So going back to the bars, know, to just to bartend seems like that would be a poor health choice for me. ⁓ But there's been some great opportunities. You know, I've helped a few other bars open, which is nice. I stay there for a couple of weeks while I train staff and I get to see that I get the sort of the hit from it.

Jessie Ott (29:46)
Yeah.

That seems perfect.

Dr. Cush (29:59)
I have some fun

opportunities coming up ⁓ to just teach classes, which is my favorite part about it. but yes, I do miss, there are aspects I miss my friends. I miss all my bartender friends. miss my regular friends. but, if, if I could just do this where I have my wonderful community and I get to make stuff by myself and I have a really nice foot pad back here.

Jessie Ott (30:03)
Yeah.

Yeah.

⁓ Yep.

Dr. Cush (30:22)
then my feet

don't hurt. I would keep doing this.

Jessie Ott (30:26)
Yeah. No, I think it's great. I think there's a lot of opportunities for that. You could even do staff training from there too. ⁓ And, you know, I could see where restaurants and bars would want to go to Dr. Kush to help them write their menus, their drink menus.

Dr. Cush (30:32)
Yeah, absolutely.

You guys can

find me at kushtender.com. Find me, find me over there. If you guys are looking for me, I am not hard to find. Nobody's knocking on my door. Nobody's knocking down my door yet, but hopefully soon.

Jessie Ott (30:44)
Heheheheh!

No, that's his.

Yeah. I think that that's right up your alley. And I love the fact that you like to teach. That's so important. Yeah.

Dr. Cush (30:58)
Yeah. Yes. Yeah.

I just, wanna, I wanna like, I'm passionate. And like, if I keep all this passion in, I'm gonna, I'm gonna explode sometimes. So, sometimes I need, I needs to get out. Like I am very excited. Yeah, I need an outlet. I'm like a dog. I need to be walked sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jessie Ott (31:02)
Yeah.

You need an outlet. Yeah. Yeah, that's really cool.

No, that's funny. ⁓ But I get it. You know, got to have an outlet for that energy for sure.

And it's not really a sense of belonging, but it's a sense of being part of a community.

Dr. Cush (31:26)
Yes, yeah, yeah, absolutely. ⁓ Yeah, the community, I didn't realize how important that was until my community built up around me. I just happened to be the place that they showed up. These are all great people and if they met somewhere else, they probably would have communed there. But they met around me and I just, I love my community. just, can't even tell you like how much my community means to me.

Jessie Ott (31:37)
Yeah.

That's amazing. That's great. I'm happy to hear that.

That's wonderful.

Dr. Cush (31:53)
Yeah.

Jessie Ott (31:53)
Well, should we dig in and roll up our sleeves and make a cocktail or two? Okay. Let's roll. What are we doing?

Dr. Cush (31:56)
Yeah. I love that idea. Yes. Yeah. Cool.

Well, so as a, as a bar forward person, as a person that's, know, the face of a bar, I get asked all the time what my favorite cocktail is, know, what, know, make me something. What's your favorite cocktail? And, uh, every year I try and beat it every year. I try and make something better, but every year I come back to my favorite cocktail being

the Hemingway Daiquiri. This is a fantastic version of a Daiquiri. It falls probably closer into the daisy category because the sweetener we're putting in here isn't just a simple sugar, it's not non-alcoholic, it is gonna be Maraschino liqueur. So it's got a little bit more complexity than normal.

Jessie Ott (32:36)
Okay.

Dr. Cush (32:46)
But this is Ernest Hemingway's daiquiri. There you go, you found it. There was some questions. Yeah, this stuff, yes, this stuff is phenomenal. It has, I don't recommend drinking it by itself. By itself, it's awful. It's disgusting, it's gross, it's really tough. It's made of these things called morosca cherries.

Jessie Ott (32:51)
Found it. Found it. Pat's Liquor. Thank you, Pat.

I've never had it.

Okay.

Dr. Cush (33:10)
And they are from Croatia and I think even by themselves just eating the cherries by themselves I can't imagine they're any good, but they make this liqueur out of it It has this amazing bitterness to it, but it's also very sweet So it just adds a ton of depth to to anything if you are planning on following my seven cocktails You know building blocks anytime you see simple syrup in a cocktail

add maraschino liqueur and you're gonna be right there. So we're gonna start over here with a grapefruit. I'm just gonna get the juice out of the grapefruit. We only need three quarters of an ounce. And now that I'm thinking about it, I don't think you guys needed to watch me squeeze a grapefruit online. So I probably could have done this beforehand. So we're gonna get, yeah, we're gonna get about three quarters of an ounce of grapefruits going in here. Let's see, do I got juicy grapefruit? Oh yeah, we only need half of the grapefruit. That's great.

Jessie Ott (33:52)
No, you're fine.

Dr. Cush (34:03)
I always try and preach cheapest ingredients first, because if you make a mistake, we don't mind throwing out cheap stuff, but we do if you crack an egg into a Louis the 13th, because you for some reason are an idiot and are deciding to make a Louis sour and now you have eggshell in there, you gotta throw in that Louis, you are in some trouble.

Jessie Ott (34:08)
True.

Okay, I am not using fresh grapefruit. So I am using this ⁓ alcohol-free amethyst spirits. It is grapefruit basil. So I'm making a slightly but the same cocktail.

Dr. Cush (34:28)
So yeah, I love it.

I love it.

So because this is a daiquiri and you want to, you still want to give it sort of that thickness, you're going to probably add a little bit more lime juice than I'm adding. So just maybe bring down that liqueur or that non-liquor liqueur, that mixer. So maybe do that at half an ounce and then bump up ⁓ your lime juice to three quarters. That would be my thought. I've never tasted that stuff, so I can't.

Jessie Ott (34:50)
Okay.

Half.

Dr. Cush (35:08)
give you an exact answer there. There we go. This is three quarters of an ounce right there. ⁓

Jessie Ott (35:12)
Okay, and now I need three quarters,

three quarters of an ounce of.

Dr. Cush (35:16)
So I would do half an ounce of your stuff. So just half an ounce. Yeah, I think I'm taking a guess at what it tastes like since I've never tasted it. I would do half an ounce because then you'll have one full ounce of sweetener in there. You'll have three quarters of a lime plus we're adding a lot of rum to this.

Jessie Ott (35:19)
Yeah, I did half an ounce of...

Okay, so I'm doing three quarters of lime.

Dr. Cush (35:38)
Three quarter lime, yeah.

So this is how, so this is a cocktail that's based on a Constante Constantino Rivialagua Burt cocktail. I don't know if you, have you ever heard of this guy?

Jessie Ott (35:50)
Nope.

Dr. Cush (35:51)
one of my favorite bartenders of all time. He was the king of the daiquiri in Cuba. He ran a little place called La Floridita and he had on his back wall, he had a ton of different daiquiris, maybe eight different types of daiquiri. The story goes that Hemingway was walking by and had to pee. So he went into this bar, saw Constante,

⁓ like really shaking a daiquiri and he's like, yeah, that sounds great. If you don't mind, I'm use your restroom. It came back out and ⁓ he turned to Constante and said, you know, I'd really like one of your daiquiris, but can you take out all the sugar and just double the rum? Apparently he was diabetic. So he wanted, he thought that maybe he could get away with this by not putting sugar in there. So Constante made it and it became the Hemingway daiquiri. So this is a Constante,

This is a technique of his for limes. Instead of cutting a lime right down the middle, we cut a little moon off of here, right there, and then we look inside and we see this. This right here is our, it's a juice thief. That's the structure of the lime. We don't want that in there. So we're gonna cut all of these out right here. So we just get these four pieces of lime like that.

Jessie Ott (36:52)
yeah.

Dr. Cush (37:05)
So we have a full moon, we have a waning gibbous, we have a waxing gibbous, and we have a little Cheshire cat. We have our four phases of the moon. And Constante knew, and most bartenders should know this at that point, that the inside of a lime doesn't taste that much like a lime. It tastes sour, it tastes like citric acid, but the outside of the lime really tastes like lime. That's what you assume a lime tastes like. when we, so Constante for his limes wouldn't use a hand squeezer.

He would squeeze all of his cocktails like this, right in here, just get all that juice out of there. And then, that's all right. That's all right. Honestly, you're losing a little juice, especially for this, it doesn't really matter. So then we're gonna drop our lime into the drink, because those oils on the outside are what's gonna give us all of that big lime flavor.

Jessie Ott (37:36)
Okay, well, I'm, I am doing that right, but I did not cut the lime right. I gotta go get more limes too. It's fine. Okay.

All

the limes?

Dr. Cush (38:00)
I'm just gonna do, so for me, I'm gonna do ⁓ the one small, or two, the waxing gibbous, the waning gibbous, and then the little half one. And that should give me about half an ounce of juice. That means I'm gonna be left with our big full moon and this inside structure. So we can use that for something else. All right there. So those are our cheap ingredients. I don't know how much limes are where you are, but for me, they are, they're in,

Jessie Ott (38:17)
Okay. Okay.

Ridiculous.

Dr. Cush (38:26)
They're insane. It's insane to pay 75 cents for a lime. I mean, we're actually growing a tree back at the house, a lime tree, because eventually I will become a millionaire selling limes, it turns out. So that's what we got. Next, we're gonna be putting in our Maraschino liqueur. This, yeah, like I said, this stuff is great, but it is, an invasive ingredient. If you put too much in here,

Jessie Ott (38:38)
Yeah.

Okay.

Dr. Cush (38:51)
Your whole cocktail is gonna taste like that and that is no good. But the right amount and you're in a good spot. I'm gonna put half an ounce of some Luxardo Maraschino liqueur in here.

Jessie Ott (38:52)
overpowers it.

Dr. Cush (39:01)
There we go.

need to get a new bottle, I just ran out. We've done it, we've finally killed a bottle of Maraschino Liqueur. And then, the rum. Now a normal daiquiri, Jessie, you would know probably, has about two ounces of rum. Right, that sounds about right. This one has four ounces of rum. That's why I love this drink so much. We're gonna put a full four ounces of rum. Now you can throw in.

Jessie Ott (39:18)
He

Dr. Cush (39:24)
whatever rum you'd like. Normally you want a white rum. I'm gonna be putting in Bacardi, because this is probably closest to what Ernest was drinking down in the Florida Dita with Constante. So I'm gonna put four ounces of a white Puerto Rican style rum.

Jessie Ott (39:34)
Yeah, probably.

doing pandemonium rum the Selva Ray which is I thought if I'm gonna buy interesting rum I might as well make it really interesting right Bruno Mars is wrong this is this is supposedly Bruno Bruno Mars is wrong

Dr. Cush (39:45)
great!

Absolutely. Yeah. What's great about... What's that?

Ooh, wow. Wow, I bet it dances. Yeah, super fancy. Yeah, honestly, what's great, especially once you learn about the seven cocktails, learning that what we put in there at first was the base. That's the grapefruit, the lime juice, and the maraschino. From there, if you want to switch out anything, it won't be the original cocktail, but there's a really good chance that it will work out with another spirit. So...

Jessie Ott (40:01)
FATSY!

Dr. Cush (40:25)
There's a great cocktail coming out of Smuggler's Cove that switches out grapefruit for Ting and they put tequila in there. But everything else is basically the same. It's really nice. Okay, we want to give this a shake.

I am what many have described as an ice pervert. I love ice. I love nice clear ice. I created a style of making ice. These are a little frosty, but trust me, they're clear. To make my ice nice and clear where I clarify from the bottom up as opposed from the top down. It's one of my very...

Jessie Ott (40:56)
Nice.

Dr. Cush (40:59)
If we start talking about ice, we're not gonna stop talking about ice So I'm just I'm gonna go as quickly as I can with that, but we have these beautiful pieces of ice and For the most part almost always better to shake with a large cube of ice So almost always because when you're shaking The the thing that you worry about most is over watering, right? We want some water in there, but we want we want to have control over that water

Jessie Ott (41:11)
It is? Oops.

Dr. Cush (41:26)
When you put a bunch of little pieces, you're creating a lot of melting points, right? With one big piece, you're giving the same cooling power, but with less melting points. So you can shake these for a little bit longer without having so much ice melt. It also, especially when we're lime bits in here, it's gonna sort of break those lime bits up. It's gonna help bring out a lot of those oils that we were talking about.

Jessie Ott (41:26)
Okay.

Mm.

Well, I didn't do that for this one, but now I know, I learned.

Dr. Cush (41:53)
That's all right. That's fine. Honestly,

you are, you do not have to be an ice pervert like I'm an ice pervert. I do think that ice is, yeah, there's just little things that, you my whole philosophy is if you can't, if you don't have all the ingredients of a drink, but you have most of them, try something else and you're still, at least you'll have a cocktail, you know? Sometimes it's better to have any cocktail than the perfect cocktail. So.

Jessie Ott (42:00)
But that's what makes a cocktail.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Dr. Cush (42:20)
Big ice is just one of those things that I love doing. So I always have big ice hanging around, big clear ice, some of my favorite things. So we're gonna give this a big shake. This is a daiquiri so we can give this a real big shake. We're not worried about bruising a lot in here, especially if we have the big ice. We're not worried about overwatering. So we're gonna give it a nice, healthy shake.

Jessie Ott (42:40)
Yeah.

Dr. Cush (42:42)
Switch to shake cam.

Jessie Ott (42:44)
funny.

Dr. Cush (42:44)
We do ShakeCam down here sometimes. Sometimes we go right in here. Hey, hello ShakeCam.

Jessie Ott (42:45)
Nuh-uh. ⁓

Hey! That's

so fun! How do you switch?

Dr. Cush (42:55)
I have foot pedals. have, ⁓ so I direct my entire show with my feet. So sometimes you'll see me like shift weight and it's because I gotta go from this camera to this camera. Those are the two furthest away. And then this is just a close up of this one. And then this one I have hidden right here. So it's right here behind.

Jessie Ott (43:02)
That's cool.

⁓ gotcha.

That must have taken you so

long to figure out.

Dr. Cush (43:16)
You know, yes, it took me

longer than it should have, but I did finally get it. And now if my computer breaks, there's no way that I'm ever getting any of this back. It's gonna be a completely new show because I can't redo any of this.

All right, we are gonna serve this one up. I know this is a Hemingway Daiquiri, but this is how Hemingway would have drank it. This is a cocktail glass that we call a Marie Antoinette. It is based, it is ⁓ designed after Marie Antoinette's breast. This is just a little booby cup. So we're gonna go and pour this guy right in here.

Jessie Ott (43:47)
You

Dr. Cush (43:52)
It's nice and frosty. ⁓ One thing that you can do to improve your cocktails instantly is to just put your glass in the freezer for even just during the time that you're making the cocktail. If you forget to put glasses in the freezer, put it in the freezer right as you start your cocktail and pull it out. Especially when you're serving a drink like this, this is the coldest it's ever going to be.

Jessie Ott (43:54)
What kind of

Dr. Cush (44:14)
And then it's going to start because we don't have any ice in there. So nothing's helping it melt. So if you have a nice frosty glass and you'll keep it frosty for a little bit, it's going to add a little bit of texture as well. And when the cold hits your lips, you're sort of in a good spot. This is it. This is still to this day, my very favorite cocktail. ⁓ I think it's well balanced. have a Hemingway right here. This is my Hemingway, a Tiki mug, big fan of a big papa.

Jessie Ott (44:15)
Yes. ⁓

Yeah. OK.

Cool.

Cheers, Dr. Kush.

Dr. Cush (44:42)
So cheers. Let's see what you think.

I should say it is 1.40 here. I have 1.40 PM, so I have a lot to do in my day and this is four ounces of rum. We'll see how the rest of my day works out.

Jessie Ott (44:50)
Yeah

Well, you're in vacation mode. That is smooth. I didn't know what to expect because I hadn't had the Luxardo before. it's just a hint.

Dr. Cush (44:59)
That's right. Yeah. Yeah.

Jessie Ott (45:06)
And it is, it's really cold and you know, I obviously haven't tried this rum on its own, but it's very smooth, uh, very clean and very well balanced. Um, yeah, I really, dig it. Yeah.

Dr. Cush (45:18)
Yeah. Especially for four ounces of rum. know, that's,

a lot of people will do less grapefruit and more lime in order to go with what Constante would have made. But Hemingway would have, I mean, there's no way he didn't want more grapefruit, which has less, I don't know if that has less sugar. It's just a little less sweet than a lime. So I bump up that grapefruit, bump up that rum to what Hemingway would have drank and.

Yeah, it's also a drink that you can order at a lot of bars. You you walk into a lot of bars, you're like, hey, I want a paper plane. They say, we don't carry no Nino. You know, if your favorite drink becomes a paper plane, you're in a lot of trouble because you can't order it every place. Most places will have a bottle, a dusty bottle of Maraschino liqueur somewhere in the back and then just grapefruit, lime and rum.

Jessie Ott (45:47)
Yeah.

Yeah, I think it's good with the with the grapefruit basil, but I want to try it with the fresh grapefruit next time. Because I think it'll add an element, a different, just a different flavor profile to it.

Dr. Cush (46:14)
Yeah. Yeah.

Have you ever gone onto the website Kindred Cocktails?

So it's a huge database of people that put in their cocktails. So whenever you're searching for a cocktail, you put it in. But if you go on, now you have created a brand new cocktail. So get on to Kindred Cocktail, write exactly what you did with all of your ingredients, and now you have a cocktail. Now that is your cocktail. Just because you didn't have the right ingredients means that you have created something new, which means that now you have a cocktail to your name.

Jessie Ott (46:24)
No.

⁓

⁓

Dr. Cush (46:51)
You can even see how you put it in. I have cocktails on Kindred Cocktails. It's a fabulous website. Some of the cocktails are god-awful, but some of them are really interesting and it's all user submitted. So there's no way to patent a cocktail. I know that ⁓ Goslings has tried. I don't know if they succeeded. I know that Pussers has tried with the Painkiller, but for the most part, cannot, you can't.

Jessie Ott (46:59)
Right.

Wow.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Dr. Cush (47:19)
⁓ copyrighted cocktail. get on to Kindred Cocktails, at least get your name on that one.

Jessie Ott (47:22)
That sounds

like so much fun. Twisted Root is one of, or Twisted Path is one of my brands. He ex-CIA guy. I hadn't had too many gimlets, but he's got a cilantro vodka and a gin that makes one of the best gimlets I've ever had.

Dr. Cush (47:38)
Mm. Mm.

Yeah. Yeah.

Jessie Ott (47:42)
Just

that alone was amazing.

Dr. Cush (47:46)
It's so simple. You follow the recipe for a gimlet and you switch out one thing. Brand new cocktail. That's how it works. This is not rocket science. This is hardly even brain surgery. This is bartending. This is mixing. This is putting one liquid into another liquid. And it really is about the passion that you bring to it. And if you have your own cocktail, I have a signature drink. It's on the internet. It's on Kindred Cocktails.

Jessie Ott (47:55)
Yeah.

Dr. Cush (48:12)
It's, you know, here I am, ta-da. It's just a lot of fun. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jessie Ott (48:15)
That's cool. That's really fun. I love that. ⁓

You mentioned the cost of limes and I think when we talked at one point, you had a recipe that could give you shelf stable limes. Is that something that you can share with the audience?

Dr. Cush (48:27)
Yes.

Absolutely. So it's not my recipe. I have adjusted some of it. But a bunch of us cocktail nerds, there was a guy named Nickel Morris. Nickel Morris was working out in Kentucky. And just like a lot of bars, you run into cost problems. know, booze stays stable forever, but limes don't, all your juices don't. And limes started going up. So Nickel said,

I'm going to take, his name might be Nick, but I think he goes by Nickel. So I'm to call him Nickel. He can call me Kush and we'll be easy. So Nickel said, basically there has to be a way, there has to be a new way to make lime juice, to make something that is a little bit more stable than these limes. We're throwing out lime juice every night. It's just a huge waste of limes, huge waste of money. So he took a concept that's been around in bartending forever. It's been around in cooking forever called oleo sacrum.

Jessie Ott (49:10)
Huge waste.

Dr. Cush (49:18)
which is where you put sugar and you ⁓ basically press it into the oils or into the skin of different citrus and different fruits and everything. And it starts to pull out, starts to macerate everything in there and it pulls out all those oils. So it goes from a solid of the granulated sugar and it turns into the sugar oil. And he thought, well, what if instead of sugar, what if I did this with citric acid?

And he did it, and he created something called oleocitrate. Now, Nickel was great. He did a cool thing. He took that oleocitrate and he added some water to it to make that lime juice. And then he would take the limes from the juice and he would squeeze that in. So you'd get this really fresh sort of lime juice tasting thing, but it also had some lime juice. But it would last him for a month instead of a week.

Then the bar did that, that lit a little fire under all of us bar geeks. And we all started to find, see if we could find a way to take the juice completely out of it. So we all started working on this thing called pseudo juice. So it's basically sugar, citric acid, malic acid. There are calculators all over the place. Steve the Bartender, if you don't know Steve the Bartender, an amazing YouTube bartender has a super easy calculator.

All you do is put in how much of your lime peel you've pulled off and it'll tell you how much citric acid, how much malic acid, in some cases how much sucritic acid you want to put in there, how much sugar, how much salt, and how much water you're gonna put in there. Basically, I put mine into vacuum bags so it squeezes everything together and it pulls out all that liquid. Dump that into a blender, blend that up in some water.

And you've created a shelf stable. I've never had, make it a 175 at a time, 1.75 liters at a time. I've never had mine go bad. That doesn't mean that it will last for forever, forever, but I've had some last for a year where I just keep it on my bar. It doesn't have to go in my refrigerator. It stays on my bar. It stays sharp. It stays fresh tasting. tastes, you we do a thing on my show called Battle Box.

Jessie Ott (51:13)
Wow.

Dr. Cush (51:24)
where I have, can't see what's in the box and I do taste tests and pseudo juice and fresh lime juice were almost the exact same thing. yeah, Steve the Bartender, shout out to Steve, an Australian dude that's just making drinks. He's got a great calculator online for how to make pseudo juice. For a home bartender, game changing.

I don't have to go to the store every time I want to make a cocktail to go buy, you know, to go get absolutely brutalized by these limes. These limes, I mean, for 75 cents a piece for a lime, I can make a 175 out of five limes. That's all it takes. Five limes. And yeah, it lasts, it has lasted me for up to a year, just not refrigerated in my bar. If you refrigerate it, it could go, you know, maybe a decade. I don't know.

Jessie Ott (51:45)
Yeah.

Yeah.

wow.

Can you put it in one of those cocktail, like the plastic cocktail pours? You know, the...

Dr. Cush (52:12)
Absolutely, yeah, I

actually I serve by this is this is I just ran out of pseudo lemon juice But I just put it right in here and then I put this off to the side of the bar It just sits right there and I pour it straight out it Yeah, as long as it has a as long as I has a top on as long as it's not interacting with air. It'll last Yeah, oxygen. Yeah, it'll it'll last for a year

Jessie Ott (52:16)
⁓ okay.

Yeah. Oxygen. No.

Is it one to one? So if I wanted three quarter shot, it's one to one. Okay.

Dr. Cush (52:38)
One to one,

one to one. Yeah, all of the, you know, I think Anders got onto this thing. I think Kevin Kos got onto this thing. Steve the Bartender was doing it. I was doing some experiments in my home. The only thing that I change from Steve's is I usually add about a quarter more water. I think Steve the Bartender's ratio for water is a little off. The lime juice, because it's a lot of citric acid, can become a little tart and a little cloying.

Jessie Ott (53:01)
Yeah.

Yeah. Okay.

Dr. Cush (53:03)
If you don't add a little extra water, I just add about a

quarter extra water. So whatever they tell you to the water is at an extra quarter to Steve the Bartender's calculator, and you're in a good spot.

Jessie Ott (53:12)
That's really good. I can't wait to make that. I'll have to report back in because you know...

Dr. Cush (53:17)
Yeah, you can join my

Facebook group. All my community has a Facebook group. It's Dr. Kush's Exotic After Hours, where they post everything that they're making. A really fun group, very supportive on Facebook, which isn't always the case on Facebook, but we're a closed community. So you have to let me know who my, there's a password, you have to let me know who my assistant is, and that's Kyle. So now you all know.

Jessie Ott (53:25)
cool.

Right.

Dr. Cush (53:44)
And we'll let you write in and then come in and say hi.

Jessie Ott (53:46)
Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm excited because I just went to fresh fruit market, down the street and it was five limes for a dollar and I haven't seen that in the regular supermarkets in years. Yeah.

Dr. Cush (54:01)
That's amazing. That's

an amazing price. I would have walked out with my pockets full of limes. I would have just been, I would have looked like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, but limes is wherever I can hold limes. Absolutely, but yeah, don't, you know, I've been a little lazy since we're leaving here soon. I've been a little lazy about keeping up on my pseudo juice, but I make it once every two months and I always have fresh lime juice.

Jessie Ott (54:06)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Dr. Cush (54:27)
It tastes like fresh lime juice, but it's bar stable. Phenomenal. Yeah.

Jessie Ott (54:30)
That's amazing. Yeah, we're

going to have to definitely, ⁓ I have to do that because then I'll make more cocktails.

Dr. Cush (54:36)
That's it. That's it. Make more cocktails. That's the whole point of this. Make more cocktails.

Jessie Ott (54:40)
Yeah. Yeah, I think I would.

Now I got to study the seven cocktails so that I can think about how to interchange things. And then I think that'll help me flip my brain on when I do bring out all the bottles and all the mixers and things, I can swap things out.

Dr. Cush (54:48)
Yep, that's it.

Yeah, yeah, we were able to do that on my show. You showed me a few of your things. We took the Manhattan style, just swapped a few things in and found, you know, I didn't have everything you had, but I made, my own version here. Once you understand how a cocktail is built, the world is your oyster. The cocktail world is your oyster. I don't want any of my information behind a wall. should all be out there. I've done the research so that you can make the cocktails.

Jessie Ott (55:24)
The other thing that made that cocktail absolutely amazing was the one, it was the Apolog liqueur that we used, but it was also the El Guapo chicory pecan, which gave that Manhattan this really nutty finish to it that just made it so unique and beautiful. That is my favorite cocktail, I think, so far that I've had.

Dr. Cush (55:36)
Yes.

I love

that. Yeah, finding out that bitters is just misnamed. There are some bitter bitters, but bitters is just cocktail flavoring. If you are looking to start making cocktails at your house, find a cocktail that you like and then add a couple drops of bitters that is new to you and you've made a completely new cocktail. Run the Kindred cocktails, put it in.

Jessie Ott (56:05)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Cush (56:10)
That's your cocktail from now on. A lot of bartenders consider Kindred Cocktail as the website of note for cocktails.

Jessie Ott (56:10)
Hehehe.

I didn't know that. That's really cool. So you want to jump over and talk a little bit about some mentors that you've had over the years?

Dr. Cush (56:21)
Yeah. Yeah.

Sure, yeah. So to be totally honest, I had a couple guys that worked with me in the bars that were a little bit more advanced than I was when I started. So I always liked that, guy named Kyle Simone, a rest in peace to Kyle Simone. There was guys like Chad LeBlanc, who was great. A number of really fun.

George Garcia is great. I know he's doing all kinds of stuff with tequila at this point these guys that were That I worked with but I I am very self-taught. I am very much From books I have I mean again if I turn the thing a little bit you would see that I have a library of Cocktail books back here. So my my role models are guys like Dave Arnold Dave Arnold the mad scientist of

of cocktails. has, if you're looking to buy one book, it's not a recipe book, there are other great recipe books, it is a technique book. It is called Liquid Intelligence. goodness. Dave Arnold, Liquid Intelligence. He's with Booker and Dax. He just opened up a new bar that I got a chance to go to in New York called Contra, Bar Contra, spectacular. I think he is phenomenal.

Jeffrey Beachbum Berry, who owns Latitude 29 in New Orleans, wrote all the books on tiki. He was a tiki archaeologist, basically going to these old tiki bars, interviewing these old tiki guys. And famously, tiki is incredibly secretive about their recipes, but he was able to sort of get a lot of these recipes out to restart the tiki.

Jessie Ott (57:50)
cool.

Dr. Cush (58:04)
the Tiki revolution that I think that we're in right now. I clearly I have to think we're in here, otherwise this was a huge mistake. ⁓

Jessie Ott (58:10)
Well, there's a big tiki

place in Dallas. I don't know if you ever get to Dallas, but that would be a good place to go. What's interesting about them is I called on them for, I was selling a gelato as a mixer for cocktails and they're like, yeah, we don't use dairy anymore in any of our cocktails. We only use coconut milk.

Dr. Cush (58:27)
that honestly, tiki is the last great frontier for cocktails. That's where the real interesting mixology is happening. Because there's so many ingredients, because they're building punches, sour, sweet, strong, weak, and spice, you're expected to have, there's a lot that you can sort of mix around with. you can find, I mean, ube.

which I have been to a bar recently where they don't have an ube cocktail on there. That started in the tiki realm. Well, so ube is a potato. So ube, yeah, so I'm sure Monon has one. I'm sure Gaffard has one. I'm sure they all have one now. I know Savage Kitchen, another great YouTube channel. They have their own Savage Kitchen's ube. But ube started, and now every place.

Jessie Ott (58:55)
Is that moaning? Oobie?

Yeah, it's one of my

Dr. Cush (59:14)
does an ube situation. because there's so much room to play within a punch, there's so much more that you can switch in and out. So Tiki really is if you're looking for innovative cocktails, it's got to be Tiki. There are there are still double chicken, please, out in New York is doing really fun things with non Tiki cocktails. You know, their whole thing is like they make cocktails that taste like food.

Jessie Ott (59:24)
Yeah.

Dr. Cush (59:40)
They have a cold pizza cocktail, does, shockingly enough, taste just like cold pizza. Probably my top five favorite food is cold pizza. Oh yeah, please. Pizza the next day, I will order a second pizza just to put in the refrigerator. They have, so there's a lot of places that are still doing it, but every Tiki Bar is doing it. Every Tiki Bar is finding a new interesting little mix to throw in there.

Jessie Ott (59:47)
⁓ my. Really?

Dr. Cush (1:00:06)
I gotta give it up to Jeffrey Beach Bumberri for bringing back Tiki, for giving cocktail buffoons like me a handle on these old Tiki drinks that I would have had to figure out on my own. One of my favorite bartenders, Constante Rubio Lago Verde, we talked about him earlier. That's reading all about his stuff.

Yeah, mine my influences all came from books. I am very self-taught by the bar company that I worked for God bless them. They were great. They wanted to run clubs. I wanted to run a bar program So we didn't get a lot of if I wanted to be innovative. I had to innovate So So yeah mine I am I am fully coming in from books

Jessie Ott (1:00:37)
Yeah.

Dr. Cush (1:00:47)
So I think those are my two big, like those are the guys that if I really met them in life, I would lose my mind. Like people would be like, why are you freaking out about this skinny little dude in his lab coat? I'm like, that is Dave Arnold. You don't know that that is Dave Arnold. That's Dave Arnold, Dave Arnold. know, it's weird. Like when you get niche into things, how your heroes become weird. But Dave Arnold, Jeffrey Beechbum Berry with his amazing beard.

Jessie Ott (1:01:07)
Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Cush (1:01:13)
the Cate's Martin Cate, they own a great bar in San Francisco, Smuggler's Cove, I think those guys are doing good stuff. They wrote an amazing cocktail book. I feel like I'm leaving a ton of people out, but yeah, those are the big three that I can think of, but those big two specifically, yeah.

Jessie Ott (1:01:29)
Okay. And

is there any additional resources besides the books of these guys that you use, whether it be podcasts or yeah.

Dr. Cush (1:01:36)
Yeah, absolutely. Go to their

bars. Davey Wunderich. ⁓ I can't believe I forgot about Davey Wunderich. Davey Wunderich. Davey Wunderich is one of the greatest cocktail historians of all time. If you ever wonder why something is called what it is, Davey Wunderich. I call him Davey Wonder on the show. He has an amazing podcast called Life Behind Bars. He also, he wrote, all over there, he wrote Punch.

Jessie Ott (1:01:48)
cool.

Okay.

That's a one.

Dr. Cush (1:02:02)
Uh, he wrote Imbibe Uh, he wrote the Oxford Spirits and Cocktail, uh, you know the big reference book Davy Wonder Is phenomenal Life Behind Bars, uh change my life. I I listened to that podcast I think i've listened to it three or four times all the way through there might be 300 episodes I feel like i've listened to all of them at least three times. So yeah, just like dudes that like They just got into it. They were just so excited. Um, um

Jessie Ott (1:02:10)
Yeah.

Okay.

that's awesome.

Yeah.

Dr. Cush (1:02:31)
Yeah, who opened up, nevermind, we can get into bartenders, but those are the three guys that I really learned most of my stuff from.

Jessie Ott (1:02:41)
And in terms of, you know, pain points, you know, from your standpoint, you know, being back behind the bar and trying to manage the different brands, the suppliers, the things this, that, the distributor relationships, the ⁓ opening of an account for a new brand to be brought into the, to the location. Is that, is that still an issue?

Dr. Cush (1:02:45)
Yeah.

Jessie Ott (1:03:05)
Or is that still a major pain point?

Dr. Cush (1:03:07)
⁓ I have no sponsors for this show. Nobody sponsors this show. I would love a sponsor. Somebody wants to sponsor me, send me your stuff. If I like it, I will do it. But no, ⁓ mine comes from my own taste. yeah, I mean, I used to have to, when I was the director of beverage for ⁓ the downtown bars, yeah, you're tasting stuff. I gotta make sure that this is on the menu. is for me.

Jessie Ott (1:03:14)
Hahaha! ⁓

Dr. Cush (1:03:31)
If I don't like a product, myself and Roses, do you know Roses? These guys, I keep a bottle back here just so I can remind everybody what Roses is. These guys hate me. These guys are not fans of mine because I do not care for their grenadine and I will let that be known. I'm not interested, like if I like something, I like it and I will tell you about it. If I don't like something,

Jessie Ott (1:03:40)
Yeah. ⁓

Dr. Cush (1:03:57)
I will tell you about it. There have been a number of brands that ⁓ we do. Should we start a fight? I think that Proper 12 is a garbage product. I really think that that Irish whiskey is disgusting. And if the guys from Proper 12 would like to come on my show and talk to me about it, happy to do it. But no, I have no loyalty. What's great about being independent, I am ⁓ funded by...

I'm funded 100 % by my community. And so my loyalty is to my community and I don't want to have them, I don't want proper 12 to come to me and say, hey, you gotta, you know, here's some stuff. You gotta tell people that you like it. You lose authenticity instantly like that. Why would we tune back into Kush? So I've been sent a lot of great stuff that I'll tell you all about. Do I have any bottles? yeah.

Jessie Ott (1:04:41)
Yeah.

Dr. Cush (1:04:50)
These guys. Magellan. Magellan, have you tried Magellan gin? An iris-flavored gin? Spectacular. I would never found it. They found me online, sent me this bottle. I opened it up, tasted it. It's great. It's great. Yeah. So, yeah, for me, being a small, little independent thing, I have no loyalties. ⁓

Jessie Ott (1:05:02)
that's great. Yeah, that's awesome. ⁓

Yeah,

I guess I was kind of referring back to the pain points of when you were in the bar. But maybe that doesn't... You it's so diff- You mean you've been out of that area of the world for a minute that-

Dr. Cush (1:05:17)
yeah.

out of it for five years. no, I,

You know, I feel like maybe I just cut that little section out of my life, you know, I just lobotomize that little part of my brain dealing with distributors and dealing with, um, all of that. Uh, no, having, having full control here means that yes, I do have to go out and buy my, my own booze retail. Uh, but it also means that I, um, uh, if you, if, if I say I like something, I like it. Yeah.

Jessie Ott (1:05:29)
⁓ Yeah.

Have full control.

Yeah.

And what is, you know, we've seen the ebbs and flows, we've seen the ⁓ turmoil on the tariffs here and there. From your perspective, what do you think about the industry and where it's headed? Is there any kind of value points you want to put out there?

Dr. Cush (1:06:04)
Yeah.

Yeah, I'm actually gonna paraphrase my friend Jessie Ott, who said on my show that it really is going to become experience-based. It is going to become the stories behind this stuff. Booze is passion. We get passionate when we're drinking. So why not use that passion in all of it? If a small distiller

wants to tell me their story, I will listen to their story. And I almost guarantee you, I will like your product better when I hear your story. finding those little distillers, finding people that are passionate, finding people that yell and move their hands around, know, like what I'm doing, when I get excited, my hand, like I can't keep them to my side. I look ridiculous like a fish. Finding those people that are

excited about it. don't think, my theory is that nobody wants to drink what their parents drank, right? I mean, if we just, we go through the generations, you look back on what your parents did, you know, the 80s, you know, the people in the 50s were deep into their Manhattans and martinis. You get into the 70s, we start getting into drugs and vodka, which is a horrible time. We get, yeah, exactly. We get into the 90s, 2000s, we start to see the cocktail revolution.

Jessie Ott (1:07:16)
Beer!

you

Dr. Cush (1:07:24)
The new kids that are being raised by people my age are looking at that and being like, cocktails with your mustaches and your stop clap hey music. We're not gonna do that. Booze kept the ⁓ human race alive, finding ways to distill water, to ferment water. Beer was healthier to drink than a lot of water. Booze is deeply ingrained in humanity.

Jessie Ott (1:07:33)
You

Dr. Cush (1:07:48)
It may go on a down slope for a while, but there will always be booze drinkers, bars and barbers. They will be around whether they are, whether good times are good, times are bad. People keep drinking, hair keeps growing. So... ⁓

Jessie Ott (1:07:56)
Yep.

That's right. You know, why

it's been around for 8,000 years.

Dr. Cush (1:08:05)
Exactly. That's exactly it. Yeah. mean, you know, because there's something nice about breaking bread, about drinking wine with somebody, you know, cleaning the water, killing all the bacteria in there by fermenting and distilling. I mean, there's a reason that humanity will continue to go back to booze. Yes, right now, maybe the social aspect of it is a little stunted. You know, COVID certainly didn't help. The economy is certainly not helping.

Jessie Ott (1:08:08)
It's not going away.

Yeah.

Dr. Cush (1:08:34)
but We will find our way back those of us that are proselytizing the the public house and Talking to people that you wouldn't normally talk to you know in a place where you can all meet and Lose your mind a little bit. I don't recommend over drinking, but I recommend drinking a little bit to find where So yeah to find what your what your limit is ⁓

Jessie Ott (1:08:54)
Relax. Chill. Yeah.

Dr. Cush (1:09:00)
I think that will come back and in the meanwhile, I have removed myself from the physical one and I have mine on the on the digital one because I do think that there is a place for Online communities that come together. That's I know for a fact that a lot of my people don't agree with me on everything I know that they don't agree with each other on everything but when we they come together in my community to have a drink

Everybody has a fun time. have a saying, which is say nice things. No matter what you're doing while you're in Dr. Kutcher's exotic drinks, say nice things. I don't want to hear the bad. I want to hear the good. So I do think that they're the community aspect of this will never go away. and liquor is a big part of that. Yeah. Yeah.

Jessie Ott (1:09:43)
That's so awesome. Yeah, I love that. So, ⁓

what do you do for fun? When you're not working.

Dr. Cush (1:09:50)
Uh,

gosh, other than drinking, you mean? Well, I was a very good juggler when I was a kid. I was accepted into clown college, so I still juggle. I was a comparative literature major. What's that? Yeah, impressive is a, I think that's a big word. That's carrying a lot.

Jessie Ott (1:10:02)
That's impressive! That's impressive!

Dr. Cush (1:10:09)
So I like to do that. I love video games. My wife is ⁓ a phenomenal voice actor. She is certainly the breadwinner of our thing. She is an amazing voice actor and she's in a couple video games that I love playing. I love playing as my wife in video games. It makes me super proud. Yeah, I like photography. I like to take pictures.

Jessie Ott (1:10:16)
cool.

that's cool.

Dr. Cush (1:10:33)
I like, you know, just weird tech. But yeah, I feel like ⁓ I also really like just the concept of alcohol, not necessarily even drinking it. Just I love the, you know, the building of it. I know that that's kind of a cop-out answer to that, but I think, you know, juggling photography and video games with my wife's voice. Yeah.

Jessie Ott (1:10:44)
Right.

No. Yeah, no, you're creative. That's

your creative and your learner and your educator.

Dr. Cush (1:10:56)
Yes, that's the idea. That's at least what we're trying.

Jessie Ott (1:11:00)
So let me ask you something then. you said you're kind of into making your wife drinks and she's kind of elusive, does she come down to the bar and sit at the bar and you guys just hang out?

Dr. Cush (1:11:10)
Please. Absolutely. Here, I'll show you real quick. Let me just bring it up for you. So we have, I just redid all the lights in my bar. ⁓

Jessie Ott (1:11:20)
was wondering about

these lights that light up. Is that real?

Dr. Cush (1:11:23)
Yeah,

this is so the all this stuff is all very real. I don't have any. There's nothing here. So this real quick. This is she loves it when we can come in here and do one second. Taking me a little bit to get there. No, go. He's good. We're to go into not this one.

Jessie Ott (1:11:28)
Cool.

By the way, while he's

looking that up, I'm just gonna tell the audience that can't see, Dr. Kush has some of the best hair and beard I've ever seen. He's got such nice, beautiful black hair, all slicked back, and then he's got this really pretty black beard with a little bit of white at the end. It's really nice.

Dr. Cush (1:11:47)
Thank you!

Thank

you. I know that I said barbers would say forever. I learned how to cut my own hair. So now I just cut it more. I feel like I learned how to do one haircut. did it. Can you hear the thunderstorm? Yeah. So this is my wife's favorite thing. We come in here after a long day. I turn on our thunderstorm and we have a drink and she all, I love her to death.

Jessie Ott (1:12:07)
Wow, that's impressive.

Yeah, thunder, yeah!

You

Dr. Cush (1:12:23)
She's the producer on my show. So she's always there. She works with Kyle, who's always there as well. But she'll come in and she'll say, you know, I had this kind of day. It was, I'm feeling a little ⁓ floaty. So can you give me something a little, you know, like with a little weight on it? Let's try, let's work on it. I've really, yeah, of course. I've really gotten her into.

Jessie Ott (1:12:25)
Awesome.

I love her. I hope I get to meet her someday. She sounds so fun.

Dr. Cush (1:12:46)
I've gotten her into Manhattan's recently, which has been a huge help for me because I also like Manhattan's. And so it's nice to be able to make the same drink for both of us. Turn these back on. There we go. Yeah, it's been nice to just to sit and have a Manhattan. But before that, she was all over the place. You know, I created a cocktail for her called the blonde cat. When I first started doing my ⁓

Jessie Ott (1:13:03)
Yeah.

Dr. Cush (1:13:12)
during the drinks, was ⁓ pickle juice, a blanc vermouth, a cucumber vodka, and then it had manchego as a garnish. And we still talk about the blonde cat because that was her favorite drink of all time.

⁓ delusia?

Jessie Ott (1:13:26)
that's interesting.

The cocktails that you like, they define you in some ways.

Dr. Cush (1:13:32)
I agree. Yep, I agree. I may seem like a big beard and the whole thing, but in the end, I'm a sweetheart in the middle. I love a cosmopolitan, just like the rest of them. I would do well with the Sex and the City girls. Sit there, I'd gossip, drink my pink drink, and I'm ready to go.

Jessie Ott (1:13:35)
Yeah, I mean.

Heck yeah, I love that show.

Dr. Cush (1:13:49)
Yeah. Yeah, me too.

Jessie Ott (1:13:53)
Do we want to mix another cocktail or you want to light one on fire for fun?

Dr. Cush (1:13:55)
Yeah, sure. Yeah. Should I show you? Yeah.

Yeah. So this is my this is my signature drink. ⁓

Jessie Ott (1:14:00)
Okay.

Okay,

so we just drink, we just had his favorite drink and now this is his signature drink.

Dr. Cush (1:14:06)
Yeah. Yeah, I would not say

that this is not my favorite drink. This is my signature drink. This is something that I worked on for a while. I have been back and forth with people. A number of people have tried to put this into a book without giving me credits. I have tried to stop all of that. Listen, I don't mind. You want to put it a book? Put it in a book. But remember, this is the Dr. Cush's Exotic Old Fashioned. So this is just an old fashioned that we light on fire.

I'm gonna go ahead and grab one sugar cube and then some Angostura bitters. Shout out to Amy Beer who sponsors this bottle. have all these, people sponsor bottles back here. ⁓ Amy Beer sponsors Angostura bitters on my show. We're gonna put way more Angostura bitters in here than you normally would for a normal cocktail. Because we're lighting it on fire, we're gonna burn some of it out. So I'm gonna put about 10 dashes.

Jessie Ott (1:14:47)
Okay.

Are we, am I doing, am

I doing orange or regular and how much of simple syrup should I do? Cause I'm not lighting mine on fire. do not trust myself.

Dr. Cush (1:15:04)
Yes,

so if you're just making a normal one, I would put in a half an ounce of simple syrup and then put in maybe four dashes of Angostura bitters. But I'm putting in way more than I should. I needed to flood just a little bit.

Jessie Ott (1:15:19)
Do I want orange or regular?

Dr. Cush (1:15:20)
Regular regular. Yeah, cuz we're express the orange into there

Jessie Ott (1:15:23)
I might have done a little more than two or three. It kind of just came out. I mean, I'm already there.

Dr. Cush (1:15:26)
That's alright. Listen, no problem with...

yeah, yeah, that's... You are gonna have an Angostura. Angostura, you know, that's an island product. That's from Trinidad and Tobago. That's a real tiki ingredient, Angostura Bitters is. So... No, no, please. Angostura... I got a friend, Nikki, who actually made my sign. She drinks Angostura straight. She goes to the store, she buys Angostura Bitters, pops it open...

Jessie Ott (1:15:39)
It's cool. Should I get another glass? Okay.

Dr. Cush (1:15:53)
pours it out and just drinks it. She's maybe this tall, she might weigh 90 pounds and is the toughest, one of the toughest people I've ever met in my life. She is a beast, Nikki. She does woodworking, she's a great singer, and yes, she built my side. I love Nikki. I think she still runs the room Santa Monica.

Jessie Ott (1:15:54)
my.

Nice.

So what are you smashing over there, the cube?

Dr. Cush (1:16:14)
She's a good person.

So, yeah, so just smashing the cube. Yeah, so now I have this paste, right? So this is Angostura and sugar paste because what I want is for that to stick to the sides. So I'm gonna grab this little orange right here. like we said earlier with making the sugar oils and whatnot, there's a lot of oils.

Jessie Ott (1:16:21)
Yeah.

Dr. Cush (1:16:37)
that are on the outside of these citrus and they're all flammable. So I'm gonna get this pulled here. If you don't mind, I'm gonna turn down my lights so that you can see it. I'm gonna disappear for a second, but I do think it's important that you guys, oh, not those ones, one second. Directing the whole show from where I am. Okay, we're gonna turn down this light. There we go, okay. So we'll turn down that.

Jessie Ott (1:16:57)
That's cool.

Dr. Cush (1:17:03)
Then we have our orange right here, and we're gonna take our two toothpicks. You can do this if you want, just by lighting the fire, but then you get butane in your cocktail, and that's not a great cocktail ingredient, the butane. So we're gonna light this up, get these going, and then we're gonna give this a little spin. This is...

Jessie Ott (1:17:17)
Yeah, that's not fun.

⁓ cool.

Dr. Cush (1:17:26)
7 % alcohol, so it will light up pretty darn quick. You can start to see the flames coming out of it. I'm give this a little shake. We're gonna squeeze.

Jessie Ott (1:17:35)
⁓ cool.

Dr. Cush (1:17:36)
We drop that in. So what we've done, so you'll squeeze afterwards. I think it's more important. If you're not lighting it on fire, it's a different cocktail. So we'll squeeze that orange afterwards. ⁓ so yeah, so what we've done is we have burnt out a lot of that neutral grain spirit that's just keeping those bitters alive. So now we're just left with this amazing smell that lives in here. ⁓ I call this thing, I call it the fajita effect.

Jessie Ott (1:17:37)
So I'm squeezing, oh, I'm.

Okay.

Okay, after.

Dr. Cush (1:18:02)
Because when I would make it in dark bars and you would squeeze and you would see that flame go up, you would have everybody, no matter what they were doing, they would stop and they'd say, I don't know what I was going to have, but I'll have that. Same thing in a Mexican restaurant. You're like, I'm going to have the burrito and the taco. And then the fajitas come out. You're like, screw that. I'm having the fajitas. Those sound good. They look good. I'm ready for those. So after that, we just fill it with a little bit of, of, uh,

Jessie Ott (1:18:17)
Yeah, I want that. ⁓

Dr. Cush (1:18:25)
⁓ Whiskey, I'm just gonna go ahead and put in two full ounces of an American bourbon called. Have you ever heard this? It's kind of a small brand. Makers You've heard of it? Alright, good. And then I'm gonna grab my ice. Yeah, listen, Makers should be a staple in every American's house. That's how this should work. I should have my stamp. Where do I put my stamp?

Jessie Ott (1:18:33)
Yeah, I've only been there twice.

It's a staple in my house.

Dr. Cush (1:18:47)
I guess we won't stamp it. I have a stamp with my face on it somewhere, but it's some, there it is, right here. This is my stamp right here. That's my logo. We'll just stamp our ice real quick before we put it into our drink. Let that melt it a little bit. And that way, as I'm drinking my drink, I can see myself looking at myself disapprovingly about drinking at.

Jessie Ott (1:18:51)
Hahaha

Nice.

Okay, so.

Dr. Cush (1:19:10)
at two o'clock in the afternoon on a Tuesday.

Jessie Ott (1:19:11)
What?

You're good. ⁓ this is for a good cause. wow. That's so cool.

Dr. Cush (1:19:17)
Yeah. Yeah. So there we go. That's my stamp right there.

Yeah. We'll drop that into the cocktail right there. Let's do it with my hands. Give that a little spin. Oh yeah. Two ounces of whiskey. And then you're going to take your, know what you can do? Do you have a, do you have a toothpicks?

Jessie Ott (1:19:27)
What should I be doing at this point?

Yes?

Dr. Cush (1:19:37)
Can I show you how to express an orange?

You have toothpicks and a lighter.

Jessie Ott (1:19:41)
Can I use an orange slice?

Dr. Cush (1:19:43)
long as you can take the skin off of it.

Jessie Ott (1:19:47)
like this.

Dr. Cush (1:19:47)
Yes, that's great. Yeah, perfect. Okay, so this is kind of an advanced technique, so if you don't get it on the first time, just try it, try, you know, try, try again, et cetera. So we're gonna take our ⁓ peel and we just wanna get the skin off of here, just the way that Jessie showed us there, like that. So we have a nice piece now. We wanna hold it like this.

Jessie Ott (1:19:48)
Okay.

Okay.

Dr. Cush (1:20:10)
So normally an orange bends like this, don't hold it like that, hold it the opposite way. So I twist it, yeah, there we go. Yes, perfect. Now don't squeeze it yet, because once it's been squoze, it can never be squoze again. That's the end of the squeezing. We're gonna take our lighter and we are going to light the ends of our toothpicks so that we have a really nice little flame. We're gonna take our orange.

like we're supposed to hold it, and we're gonna rub it on those flames. Just like this, nice and close, and then we're gonna squeeze as hard and fast as we can so it looks like this, There we go.

Jessie Ott (1:20:38)
What?

Okay.

Dr. Cush (1:20:45)
So it takes, when I was training bartenders, this was the hardest thing to teach them, is how to express that orange. But if you squeeze hard and fast, all those oils will come rushing out of it and they will create a little flame.

Jessie Ott (1:21:00)
My toothpicks aren't lighting. They're not really lighting on fire.

Dr. Cush (1:21:00)
And what you're adding to that, yeah, listen.

if you can't get the toothpicks, we might have a problem.

Jessie Ott (1:21:08)
Smells nice.

Dr. Cush (1:21:09)
Yeah, right? Like a campfire. Sammy Ross in some of his cocktails, in his revolver, referred to this as gun smoke. It smells like burnt oils. It smells like orange, but it really, gives you a big olfactory experience of just having burnt.

Jessie Ott (1:21:11)
I will work on that.

Dr. Cush (1:21:32)
going on and it's a really fun way to add something to a cocktail, especially if you drop that orange right into it because the outside of that orange, it's a little tough to tell on my camera, but you can see there's little burn marks right around here. So you're adding just a little bit of fire into the cocktail. Really a really fun thing to add to a cocktail. If you ever get a chance to have a cocktail called the Revolver, it's a rye whiskey, orange bitters, coffee liqueur.

Jessie Ott (1:21:45)
Yeah.

That's cool.

Dr. Cush (1:21:58)
And then an expressed orange, Sammy Ross. Another one of my heroes, if I can continue on that thread. Sammy Ross, one of the best bar dudes of all time. But yeah, it's great for smell. It's a garnish that adds something to the cocktail.

Jessie Ott (1:22:05)
Thank you.

All right, so.

So am I adding the ice cube now or do I shake, do I mix it? Now it's my ice. Okay, I got the cube. don't.

Dr. Cush (1:22:16)
yeah, now's your ice. Now's your ice time. Drop that ice.

You use simple. So I don't think you need as much stir for mine because there was granulated sugar. stirred a few times, but maybe two big stirs. Melt that ice a little bit.

And then cheers, if you don't mind, I'd like to do a little toast.

Jessie Ott (1:22:34)
Yeah, let's do it. So fun.

Dr. Cush (1:22:36)
Come guess me this riddle,

what beats pipe and fiddle? What's hotter than mustard and milder than cream? What bests wet your whistle? What's clearer than crystal? What's sweeter than honey and stronger than steam? What can make the dumb talk? What can make the lame walk? The elixir of life and philosopher's stone. And what helped Mr. Brunnel to dig the Thames Tunnel? wasn't that whiskey ould Inishowen?

Jessie Ott (1:22:56)
Cheers!

Dr. Cush (1:22:57)
Mm. Mm!

Nothing like a good old-fashioned. It's the basis for all cocktails. Bitters, sugar, booze. Bitters to calm your stomach, sugar to wake you up, booze to cure your hangover. This is a morning drink and that's when I choose to drink my old-fashioneds.

Jessie Ott (1:22:58)
Yeah. ⁓

Is it really?

Dr. Cush (1:23:17)
The old fashioned, so my idea of where the cocktail came from, it's the first thing to tail the cox crow. You drank straight whiskey the night before, so now you put a little bit of medicine, you put a little bit of sugar. Like in breakfast, we still put sugar into everything. Muffins are basically just breakfast cake. Cereal is just sugar puffs. So it's that sugar to sort of get you awake and get you going.

And then booze is a hangover cure. know, a little bit of the hair of the dog that bit you. So the three things that go into the old fashioned, the bitters, the booze, and the sugar, supposed to be drank after the cry. It's supposed to tail the cock's crow, the cocktail.

Jessie Ott (1:23:53)
I love it. That's great. I'm going to remember that when I wake up. I'll remember that when I'm eating breakfast tomorrow. I'm going to switch it out.

Dr. Cush (1:23:54)
So if you aren't drinking before noon, you're doing it incorrect. ⁓

Absolutely.

Yeah. And explain it to your wife. I explain to my wife all the time. She is not caught on, but if your wife could call my wife, I feel like maybe we could get a coalition of old fashioned drinkers in the morning. Yes. Yes. Starting out. Yeah. Uh, Thursday, Thursday at, uh, at 6 a.m. Yes. Day. Yeah. I feel like, you know, you got the branding. Let's go.

Jessie Ott (1:24:11)
Maybe we should start another podcast.

You

We got a meat for the morning cocktail. Move over coffee.

Dr. Cush (1:24:29)
Yes, that's when a cocktail's supposed

to be drank. First thing in the morning, you drink a cocktail, cure the hangover, get your day going. We got work to do.

Jessie Ott (1:24:40)
that's fun. I wish I could have figured that out, but I'm to work on that Kush.

Dr. Cush (1:24:44)
Yeah, yeah, it takes a while. If there's nobody, I've never seen anybody get it on their first try, but you now have the video of it, so you'll see how we're doing it quick and fast to get that big burst of flame. And then after that, you can work on the spinning inside the glass to light the glass on fire and then go from there. That is my, that's the Dr. Kush Old Fashioned. I know they still make it the association. They've tried multiple times to rename it, but that is mine.

I take great pride over that guy. I've stamped it. It's on Kindred Cocktails. So they can't take that away from me. Yeah, exactly.

Jessie Ott (1:25:11)
And you stand by that.

They can't take it away. That's great.

man,

this has been so fun. We're gonna, I think what we need to do is do an educational series on cocktails. And okay, I think, you know, there's the seven different ones. So maybe we just take one cocktail at a time and break it down. Maybe that'll actually educate me.

Dr. Cush (1:25:28)
Great.

I'm ready.

Yeah, love

it. Yeah, I mean, once you understand what a daiquiri is, once you understand what a sour is and how it's most cocktail, it's a lot of cocktails, and then what's the difference between that and a daisy is versus all the rest of it. Yeah, I think you're, this is not hard. It just took a while to figure it out. For me, it took about 10 years to figure it out, and then once I figured it out, now I can explain it much easier.

Jessie Ott (1:25:46)
Right.

Yeah. Well, I think a lot of people, once they understand the basics behind it, it'll make them want to drink more cocktails and maybe even at home. And understanding the science behind it. It's like understanding, like you said, a recipe, whether that be a sauce or whatever it may be, I think is important for people to understand the basics of it. Yeah, for sure.

Dr. Cush (1:26:15)
Yeah, 100%.

Yeah.

It can all be broken down into its ⁓ smallest parts and then built upon again. We are all standing on the shoulders of giants. Joseph Santini created the Brandy Crusta and from there we have gone into all kinds of amazing sour cocktails. It's finding that first little spark, putting lemon into a cocktail and now we're all standing on Joseph's shoulders.

Jessie Ott (1:26:52)
Look, I'll tell you, I've been using lemon as an ingredient in cooking lately and it's a game changer.

Dr. Cush (1:26:53)
It's a...

Yeah,

absolutely.

Jessie Ott (1:27:00)
It's so flavorful and so, ⁓ like, it kind of just massages itself within the food. And I don't know that if it breaks it down in some way, that just makes it so soft and so flavorful. And it doesn't, the flavor isn't necessarily prominent in the end result. It just, it's like a mixer.

Dr. Cush (1:27:02)
Yeah.

Yeah, it's a mixer. That's exactly right, an emulsifier. Yeah.

Jessie Ott (1:27:23)
It's silky and yeah, it's nice. It's like

a rediscovered, cause I love citrus. put lime on almost everything. I love it so much. And I love lemon and I mean, I love oranges. And so, you know, I'm a citrus kind of person and it sucks that it's so expensive.

Dr. Cush (1:27:42)
You are, you

are, you're sour and daisy type.

Jessie Ott (1:27:45)
I'm a sour and daisy type, okay?

Dr. Cush (1:27:47)
Sour and daisy type, yeah? Yeah.

Jessie Ott (1:27:49)
Well then I guess that's going to have to be the foray. Okay. Well, that'll be really fun.

Dr. Cush (1:27:53)
I'm in. You let me know.

Jessie Ott (1:27:57)
Is there anything else that you want to talk about that we haven't mentioned yet on the show?

Dr. Cush (1:28:02)
No, I mean, I do classes Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, youtube.com at Dr. Kush. I have the greatest community of people that exist online where we just talk about cocktails. That's, I think that's it. Maybe we'll do another one at some point about ice, because we can get real deep into ice, but that's for a whole nother two hour podcast. Yeah.

Jessie Ott (1:28:21)
Honestly, yeah. But that's important. It's become very important.

Yeah, 100%.

Dr. Cush (1:28:28)
It's the most important

thing. The reason that America created cocktails is not because we were more brilliant or needed something else. It's because we invented the way to deliver ice to places. And ice is always included in cocktails.

Jessie Ott (1:28:43)
Well, you know, that goes back to the Southland Corporation in Dallas, Texas, which is an Oak Cliff, which created ICE. It was an ICE company, which then had ⁓ convenience stores where farmers brought in milk and bread, which then created a convenience store all over the country, which then they got over leveraged in the eighties and gas went crazy.

Dr. Cush (1:28:49)
Right?

Jessie Ott (1:29:06)
And so 7-Eleven ended up buying them out. so Texas is a big starting point for ICE.

Dr. Cush (1:29:13)
We can never discount Texas's influence in cocktails. Because yeah, you're right, ice was a big part of that whole thing. We always talk about New York, we talk about New Orleans, but we don't talk about Texas enough because the ice out there was huge.

Jessie Ott (1:29:28)
Yeah. I was going to buy a property long time ago and put, I'm a dreamer, so, and I'm a creative and visionary. And so I had a whole lot of plans for this place. So I ended up really researching this Southland Company and it's an historical building and whatnot. And, and, really got into the, to the nerdy part of the history of, of it and, and, and how the Japanese came in and actually bought out.

Dr. Cush (1:29:35)
you

Yeah!

Jessie Ott (1:29:53)
Southland because it was over leveraged and over capitalized. But yeah, mean, nobody knows that.

Dr. Cush (1:29:53)
Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, you know, no non-nerds know that and you and I, you and I seem to run on the nerd side, so I do love that about us. You know, yeah, all in, absolutely. Why wouldn't you wanna be a nerd? Why wouldn't you wanna know a lot about a subject? You know.

Jessie Ott (1:30:08)
I'm all in.

Yeah, it's just very interesting

and it's part of our culture. You know, I learned about thoroughbreds and actually how bourbon was a part of that whole culture where in Kentucky, they would ship barrels of whiskey down to Bourbon Street in Louisiana, and then they would break down their flats. You know, they had flat bottom boats and then they'd sell the wood.

And then they'd buy horses and they would take the horses back to Kentucky. And that's where the thoroughbreds came from, which is super interesting. Yeah. I mean, it's fascinating. The amount of culture that bourbon has on our country is actually really surprising.

Dr. Cush (1:30:46)
No kidding.

Yeah.

I mean, NASCAR started with prohibition. There was all those cars that would be souped up to be able to go faster than the cops to get to Canada. It's crazy. Yeah, NASCAR. NASCAR started with Al Capone. They would throw a bunch of whiskey and they say, listen, they can see us, but if they can't catch us, then we're gonna go. So they get the cars going fastest and that's how it started. Yeah, yeah, a lot of American, a lot of...

Jessie Ott (1:31:06)
I didn't know that. That's funny.

Catch us!

Dr. Cush (1:31:24)
great American history is because for a little bit that Volstead character in Minnesota said we couldn't drink. And after that, ⁓ we got real creative and we got real innovative. And then, you know, we're still seeing all of that, ⁓ all that residual.

Jessie Ott (1:31:31)
Yeah.

Yeah.

It'd be really fun to talk about the history of our country and in terms of, you know, how alcohol played a role in its history.

Dr. Cush (1:31:47)
Yeah. I would be surprised if there wasn't a book. I mean, I know there's, and a bottle of rum, which is the history of the world through rum. That's a really interesting book. but there's gotta be like, you know, the history of the world through bourbon or the history of the United States through bourbon.

Jessie Ott (1:32:01)
Yeah, there are some, but I think, I don't know. We'll have to, I'll have to, Michael Veach, he does a lot. He's too shy to come on my podcast, but so I've heard. But he's a real bourbon historian. But you know, there's other things like it was safer to drink rum than it was water because when we were pioneering our country, the water wasn't safe.

Dr. Cush (1:32:13)
Yeah.

Mm.

course.

Jessie Ott (1:32:27)
So there's a lot of interesting, you know, historical context to, you know, where we are today.

Dr. Cush (1:32:27)
Right? Yeah.

Humanity's only around because we learned about fermentation. mean, to take the yeast, kill everything else in the water, and drink that water, yeah, there's a little alcohol in it, but there's no tuberculosis. Better to drink some alcohol than to drink straight tuberculosis.

Jessie Ott (1:32:47)
Right?

Yeah, it's crazy.

Dr. Cush (1:32:52)
I think I lost it there for a sec.

Jessie Ott (1:32:53)
Well, it sounds like we have a lot to talk about Dr. Kush and I think that's gonna be a lot of fun. Yeah, it's so fun.

Dr. Cush (1:32:57)
Can't wait, Jessie, as always. Good, yeah, you let me know. I'm usually

just behind this bar, so if you just call up, I'll probably be here.

Jessie Ott (1:33:06)
Well did you ever watch Drunk History?

Dr. Cush (1:33:08)
yeah, of course, a lot of my friends, a lot of my comedy friends are on that show. Like I'm like, gosh, that's cool. Matt Jones is playing Abraham Lincoln. my gosh, how cool. Yeah, I love that show.

Jessie Ott (1:33:17)
Yeah, we could,

maybe we do our own version.

Dr. Cush (1:33:22)
I would love to tell the story of Don Beach and Victor Bergeron as a drunk history thing, because they have one of the greatest rivalries and the beginnings of Tiki and all that. I think that that is a fascinating story. They hated each other, but they needed each other. It was amazing.

Jessie Ott (1:33:38)
Okay.

Kind of like the McCoys and the real Hatfields and McCoys. Yeah. that's funny. Okay. Well, we've got a lot of topics that we need to cover then. Okay. All right. Cool. Well, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a blast and I've really enjoyed spending time with you on your podcast and on mine. So let's see what we can do together.

Dr. Cush (1:33:43)
Hatfields and the McCoys, 100%. Hated each other, but needed each other. Yeah, yeah.

Can't wait? You let me know.

Thank you, Jessie.

Yeah.

can't wait. All right, bye.

Jessie Ott (1:34:08)
Okay, bye.