Tag Archive for Pisco Punch

A Conversation with Duggan McDonnell about the Pisco Punch, the Cocktail of San Francisco

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The Pisco Punch at Cantina, San Francisco

The Pisco Punch at Cantina, San Francisco

San Francisco has attracted travelers and fortune seekers to the West Coast since the Gold Rush Days, a time when one of its most notorious neighborhoods was known as the Barbary Coast. At its border, in the heart of the City’s financial center is where the most important cocktail in San Francisco’s history was born, the Pisco Punch, at the Bank Exchange Saloon. You might think, then, that the Pisco Punch is the official cocktail of the City, but it isn’t. Not yet. Not because it lost out to the Martinez or to Boothby’s Manhattan, but because  in spite of San Francisco being a renowned culinary destination, it does not yet have an official cocktail. But that is about to change, and in this conversation with Duggan McDonnell, Barman and Founder of Campo de Encanto Pisco, Pisco Trail learned about his campaign to make the Pisco Punch the official cocktail of San Francisco.
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Pisco Punch

by  on  in Cocktails
Pisco Punch

Pisco Punch, born during the Gold Rush days of the Barbary Coast

Born during the Gold Rush days of the Barbary Coast, the Pisco Punch is one of the most important cocktails in the history of San Francisco. It was imbibed by Mark Twain and a real-life Tom Sawyer over 100 years ago at Duncan Nicol’s Bank Exchange bar on Montgomery Street where the Transamerica Pyramid now stands. Kipling compared its color to the “glory of a tropical dawn” and “red clouds of sunset.” And from the late 1800’s, through the Great Earthquake of 1906, until the beginning of Prohibition, the Pisco Punch defined the culinary identity of San Francisco.
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Pisco Yerba Buena

Pisco Yerba Buena

by  on  in Cocktails

Imagine that you are a mixologist in the late 1800’s and just sampled some of Duncan Nicol’s famous Pisco Punch at the Bank Exchange on Montgomery Street in San Francisco. You are inspired and want to create a Pisco cocktail that pays homage to the Pisco Punch and to San Francisco. But you want it to be different and meaningful.… Read more →