WITH the precision mixologists take these days in building their more ornate creations, customers have grown used to waiting a few minutes for a drink. For the latest innovation in elite libations, however, they’ll have to wait six weeks or so. 
 
 Barrel-aged cocktails are being poured at bars from San Francisco to Boston. They are exactly what they sound like, complete cocktails aged in barrels, just as if they were wine or whiskey. 
 
 At Dram in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, an aged Martinez, a 19th-century cocktail founded on gin and sweet vermouth, can be sampled. At the Gramercy Park Hotel’s Roof Club, there’s an cask-seasoned star cocktail, made of apple brandy and sweet vermouth. Temple Bar, near Boston, takes its time with a Negroni. 
 
 Barrels give whiskey much of its flavor, and all its color. With cocktails, the wood imparts flavors of vanilla, caramel and certain spice notes. Vermouth becomes a bit oxidized from exposure to air through the wood. And practitioners say the various alcohols integrate in the process. 
 
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 The trend took off last spring after the Portland, Ore., bartender Jeffrey Morgenthaler posted his experiments with barrel-aged drinks, and a few recipes, on his blog (jeffreymorgenthaler.com), well read in cocktail circles. 
 
 “Someone just e-mailed me from Australia saying they were doing an aged cocktail,” he said, laughing. 
 
 Mr. Morgenthaler had his eureka moment in fall 2009 when he threw back an ancient Manhattan at Tony Conigliaro’s London bar 69 Colebrooke Row. Mr. Conigliaro, who is known for his far-reaching experiments, has toyed with aging cocktails since 2004, when his eyes were opened by the surprising contents of a 1920s bottle of Dubonnet. He has been putting down batches of various drinks every year since, in glass, in wood and in glass filled with wooden staves. But, as he’s more interested in the possibilities of long aging, his preferred vessel of expression is glass. 
 
 “What I had found was that the original 2004 batches in barrel, and with glass and stave, got too woody too soon, and the barrel slightly oxidized,” he said. 
 
 At the bar he manages, Clyde Common, Mr. Morgenthaler fills 10 barrels with everything from Deshlers (rye, Dubonnet, Cointreau and Peychaud’s bitters) to more modern classics like the Trident (sherry, Cynar, aquavit and peach bitters). “We only have the Negroni on the menu right now,” he said. “I have to anticipate how much more I’m going to sell two months from now.” 
 
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 He sells his barrel-aged cocktails at $10, but in New York they can range from $13 to $25, high prices that bar owners say are justified by their limited quantities and the time that goes into making them. 
 
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 Most who have followed Mr. Morgenthaler’s lead put on their own twists. Kevin Denton, beverage director at the Gramercy Park Hotel, plans to fill a barrel with sherry, let it rest, dump it, then refill it with a tequila-based cocktail. At Girl & the Goat, a Chicago restaurant, the head mixologist Benjamin Schiller is going to put Buffalo Trace bourbon Manhattans back into a Buffalo Trace barrel, and serve patrons cocktails aged one month, two months and three months, either separately, or as a flight. 
 
 Also in Chicago, the chef Grant Achatz and Craig Schoettler — who plan to open the high-concept bar Aviary early next year — are aging neutral grain spirit, rum and Batavia arrack in Heaven Hill whiskey barrels that were previously used to age maple syrup and vinegar. The result, Mr. Achatz said, is something like a Shrub, a centuries-old class of vinegar-laced cocktail. 
 
 Unlike many bits of flair deployed behind today’s bars, this innovation was something I thought was well within my reach, so I tried it at home. 
 
 Like most bartenders who age cocktails, I got my barrel from Tuthilltown Spirits in Gardiner, N.Y., a distiller that uses a lot of two- and three-gallon barrels. A three-gallon barrel that once contained Hudson Valley 4-Grain Whiskey or Baby Bourbon can be bought on the distiller’s Web site (tuthilltown.com) for $76. 
 
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 I followed Mr. Morgenthaler’s advice and began with Negronis, using Beefeater gin, Cinzano sweet vermouth and Campari. I premixed a gallon of each and poured it through a funnel. 
 
 I didn’t know that the barrel, which arrives bone dry, needs a little moisturizing. I panicked when, while funneling in the Negronis, the liquor began to leak like blood (very expensive blood) all over my kitchen counter. Tuthilltown’s distiller, Gable Erenzo, told me to put the empty barrel in the bathtub and fill it and the vessel with water until the staves tightened up and the leaking ceased. After an hour or so, the barrel was tight as a drum. 
 
 I filled it and put it in my bedroom closet, the area in my steam-heated walk-up least subject to temperature fluctuations. 
 
 After two weeks, I began testing the contents every several days or so. Mr. Morgenthaler correctly pinpointed the seven-week mark as the moment to transfer the liquid mixture to a glass vessel. The Negronis were just on the edge of taking on too much wood. If you use a funnel, as I did, be sure to line it with cheesecloth to capture the bits of wood and sediment that will fall out. For glass containers, I found large growlers worked fine. 
 
 So what do you get for your patience and time? A Negroni that’s smoother, mellower and with deeper flavor notes. It’s a cocktail for slow, contemplative sipping. 
 
 Mr. Erenzo said that my barrel could be used a few more times, but that I should rinse it with water if I’m trying out a different cocktail. “The flavors will change and the time you leave it in should increase,” he said, “but you may find you like the third and fourth uses better.” 
 
 (Reusing the barrel is a matter of debate. Mr. Morgenthaler does, while Tom Chadwick of Dram does not.) 
 
 The Deshlers should be ready by New Year’s Eve. ||||| Latest Drink Recipe Southbound Suarez Man, there are few things out there more polarizing to people than creamy drinks. And it’s funny, you know, because I think it’s a pretty universal thing that our mouths just water at the sight of a creamy cocktail. Look at a properly made Ramos Gin Fizz. Or a White Russian. Or Egg Nog. How delicious do they look? But then there’s this guilty feeling that I think kicks in for most people, where it’s like, “I can’t justify drinking something that contains a bunch of fucking cream.” And I get it, I totally do. Personally, I also try to save up those points and spend them during the holidays. But there’s no getting around the delicious factor. So what about alternatives? I like almond milk in my coffee. I even make my own at home. But one creamy substitute that I can’t live without in my life is horchata. See the previous post for more on that. Anyway, as someone who has been making drinks for almost half of his life at this point, I had to try making something with horchata. My partner in crime at Clyde Common is a gentleman named Benjamin Amberg. But we all call him (among other things), simply Banjo. Banjo and I have a great way of working on cocktails together. It’s very collaborative, and nobody gets too attached to an idea if a better one comes along. (I wrote more about this process for Playboy, check it out) And so it happened that we started working on our new horchata cocktail. And, of course, we broke out all of the typical formulas that we’d both seen on menus before: aged rum and horchata; aged tequila and horchata; variations on a White Russian with horchata instead of cream. And none of them were working, and we were about to scrap the whole idea. But then we had a thought: what if instead of a flabby, creamy drink, we did something more bright and citrusy? We certainly hadn’t seen that done before, and we know rice milk isn’t going to curdle the way cream would. And suddenly, within minutes, we’d assembled what is quickly becoming one of our most popular new drinks, the Southbound Suarez. Named after our favorite song on our least favorite Led Zeppelin album, I like to think the same stands of a reminder of just how tough this one was to create. Southbound Suarez 1½ oz. reposado tequila 
 
 ½ oz. agave syrup 
 
 ½ oz. lime juice 
 
 1 tsp. Becherovka 
 
 1½ oz horchata Combine ingredients with ice cubes and shake until cold. Strain over fresh ice in an Old Fashioned glass and garnish with a lime wedge. 
 
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 About Me 
 
 My name is Jeff Morgenthaler and I'm the bar manager at Clyde Common in Portland, Oregon. 
 
 I've been tending bar since 1996 and writing about it since 2004. I started tending bar while getting my degree in Interior Architecture, and slowly I came to the conclusion that bartending was what I really loved, and that I might as well drop everything and focus on being a professional bartender. Over the years I have strived, both behind the bar and with this website, to elevate the experience of having a drink from something mundane to something more culinary. 
 
 The writing I do here is intended as a work in progress. My recipes are like my opinions: they are constantly being revised and refined as I work them through my mind and my fingers. Comments and participation are encouraged, so please don't feel the need to tread lightly here.
– The New York Times declares a trend in the bartending world: barrel-aged cocktails. Barkeeps across the country are applying the same principle that works on whiskey to their concoctions, writes Robert Simonson. It's as simple as it sounds: Make up a batch, stick it in a barrel for about six weeks, then serve with higher prices. "The wood imparts flavors of vanilla, caramel, and certain spice notes," writes Simonson, who even experimented at home. "Vermouth becomes a bit oxidized from exposure to air through the wood. And practitioners say the various alcohols integrate in the process." Much of the credit goes to Jeffrey Morgenthaler, a Portland bartender with a popular blog who experimented in the spring and posted his results. "Someone just emailed me from Australia saying they were doing an aged cocktail,” he said.