Winning Tastes: Charlie Sheen Cocktails by LA Bartenders

— by Caroline on Crack

Charlie Sheen cocktail The Bitter End by Liza Gershman

The Bitter End cocktail. Photo by Liza Gershman.

Charlie Sheen meme. I was over it before it even started and I definitely didn’t want to jump on the Twitter bandwagon by hashtagging everything with “winning” (ugh, kill me) or follow his Twitter. But when I saw this story about how New York bartenders like Christy Pope and Chad Solomon of Cuff and Buttons created a Charlie Sheen cocktail recipe for their bars, I wondered where our Tiger’s Blood cocktails were. We’re L.A. after all. Sheen is our resident crazy!

So I started tapping into my bartender contacts on Facebook. Interestingly enough, no one responded right away. Even my fave Matt Biancaniello of Library Bar said that he wasn’t interested. Bah! Apparently no one wanted to touch this one with a 10-foot bar spoon.

But then the recipes started trickling in and these folks had a lot of fun with it. Joseph Brooke of the Edison gave me two recipes, one of which involves anything “ending in -caine” depending on availability. The Tasting Kitchen‘s Devon Espinosa figured his “Malibu Messiah” would give “anyone a nice break from reality.” And The Spare Room‘s Naomi Schimek, whom I accosted last night while she was pulling a shift at the Library Bar, came up with a cocktail recipe on the spot, inspired by Sheen’s stint as the sexy con at the police station in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. He was hot and had such promise. Ah well.

You can check out all eight Charlie Sheen-inspired cocktails on my LA Weekly Squid Ink post.

The sad thing is that their cocktails are only available if you make them yourself since their bars won’t be serving them any time soon. Unless you ask for the Extremely Highball or One-Shift F-18 from Joseph at the Edison directly. “Oh, I’ll absolutely make one (sans -caine) if somebody requests it from me, but it’s not going on the list anytime soon. Maybe if the Edison opens up on Mars…”