Jack Rose and Old-Fashioned Gin cocktail

Welcome to the first installment of Hardly Thirsty! No? Hmm... Hardly Dehydrated? Hardly Parched? In any case, I've been wanting to do a drinks post since I started and here we are!

First, from Rachel Maddow* comes the Jack Rose:
* whatever your politics (although if you're reading a vegetarian cooking blog, I'd guess the odds are kind of stacked) this woman has never steered me wrong liquor-wise

This drink looks seriously frou-frou but it is a real, classic American cocktail. The little bit of sweet and little bit of sour adds a lot to, without covering up, the apple jack (sort of an old timey whiskey. Calvados works too according to Rachel)

2 oz apple jack (but mom, it doesn't taste like apples!)
1/2 oz grenadine
juice from half a lime

Shake and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Lime garnish is nice but makes it dangerously indistinguishable from a cosmo.

Second (it was an expensive trip to BevMo), the old-fashioned gin cocktail. Having completely exhausted every other good TV show on Hulu, we watched an episode of Three Sheets about Amsterdam and learned about genever -- Holland (as opposed to London) gin, which sort of  sounds like it is distilled from maltwine before they add the ginny botanicals... As you can imagine it has an interesting taste.

I picked up a bottle of Anchor Distilling's Genevieve which even
had  a cool little warning hanging around the neck of the bottle "Warning: This gin is not for martinis!". Acknowledging first that martinis are made with gin and second that the gin you are buying is special and different is like the equivalent to the girl at Criminal Records telling me that I picked a cool album (Elbow - Asleep in the Back) when I was a kid.

So far I've only tried this old fashioned gin in an old fashioned cocktail (cool because it is basically the same as a rye/bourbon old-fashioned).

2 oz genever
1/2 tsp simple syrup
2 dashes angostura bitters

Shake and pour into a chilled glass. Alternatively, use a sugar cube instead of the simple syrup. Mash it up with the bitters before adding the ice, liquor, and stirring (like a real old-fashioned)