Jack’s Lounge / Equus Restaurant
122 Sears Avenue
Louisville, KY 40205
(502) 897-9721
www.equusrestaurant.com
There are the purists that say, you know, bourbon should only be drunk straight or with a little splash of water; it shouldn’t be in a cocktail. But there are a whole lot of people who just don’t like the way bourbon tastes the first time they taste it, and these are the people that I try to reach. – Joy Perrine
A native of New Jersey, Joy Perrine is from a long line of bootleggers. Alcohol is in her blood. In 1965 she moved to the Virgin Islands, where she got a job behind a bar and started experimenting. It was there that Joy learned about a local tradition of making guava berry rum infusions, a technique she brought with her when she moved to Kentucky in 1978. Once in Bourbon Country, Joy started making bourbon infusions, as well as a variety of innovative cocktails. Eventually, Joy found herself mixing drinks at Louisville’s Equus Restaurant. In 2000 Equus’s chef and owner, Dean Corbett, opened Jack’s Lounge next door and gave Joy free reign. Joy gets ideas for new drinks from cookbooks, unusual ingredients, and her own specific memory of a place or a time. Whatever her inspiration, Joy’s passion for her work can be tasted in every sip. But after more than three decades tending bar, Joy is looking to retire. She may hang up her apron, but she’ll never stop making cocktails.
What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.
Subject: Joy Perrine
Date: January 15, 2008
Location: Jack’s Lounge
Interviewer & Photographer: Amy Evans
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Amy Evans: This is Amy Evans on Tuesday, January 15, 2008. I’m in Louisville, Kentucky at Jack’s Lounge adjacent to Equus Restaurant, and I’m with Joy Perrine, bartender here at Jack’s Lounge. Joy, would you please say your name and your age for the record please, ma’am?
Joy Perrine: Joy Perrine—sixty-one, soon to be sixty-two.
I wonder if we could…talk a little bit about growing up in New Jersey, which is where you’re from.
I’m from a small island off the coast called Long Beach Island, a little bit north of Atlantic City, and a little bit south of Asbury Park on the coast—a very small island, eighteen-miles long, four or five miles at sea, population in the winter of, maybe, 10,000 people. But that’s not where I learned to bartend. I learned to bartend in the Virgin Islands.
But your family has a long history of being in the restaurant and bar business, is that right?
Yes, Yes, my great-great-grandfather [Samuel Perrine] built one of the old Victorian hotels in Harvey Cedars on Long Beach Island, which is the only Victorian hotel that is still standing. It is now a Baptist Retreat…And he built the hotel, I want to say, 1840s and then sort of continued down. Right now, I’m the last; both sides of my family were big-time rumrunners—bootleggers—so we sort of never really stopped being in the liquor business. Sad but true. Or maybe not sad. I don’t know about that.
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Okay, so fade into when you left Long Island and headed to another island. Tell me about that.
I moved to the Virgin Islands in 1965. Pretty much, things were just starting to happen there…It was, you know, opportunity. Again, because I had always sort of been in the restaurant business, and I liked the restaurant business and, you know, the opportunity was there, and that’s where I decided to go.
And so can you tell me about when you first got there and how you got your first job down there?
I worked in the first pizza restaurant in St. Croix, which was like a totally new thing…We had a bar, and I was the waitress, and I sort of knew how to make the basic drinks because I was like twenty years old…They always said, “If you were big enough to put your quarter on the bar, you were big enough to buy a drink.” And I knew, you know, basic drinks: rum and Coke, you know, scotch and water. I knew because I had ordered these drinks all the time. And you watch the bartender make them, and you sort of learn, and you experiment on your own when you’re home and whatever. And one night the bartender walked out in the middle of the shift. And that left, basically, me and my boss, who was making pizza in the back. And he said, “Well, you’ll just have to make the drinks. If you don’t know how to make the drink, just yell and I’ll tell you how to make it.” And that’s how I learned to make drinks. I mean, literally, I would say, “Brandy Alexander,” and he would say, you know, “You put the ice in the shaker, you put, you know, brandy, you put Crème de Cocoa, you put heavy cream, and you shake the hell out of it. Strain it in the cocktail glass and put some nutmeg on the top.” And that’s basically how I learned to make cocktails, and I’ve been making them ever since...
...My one quest, an old, old tradition in St. Croix at Christmas is they make guava berry rum. This is something that is done with the families, not something that the bars do. I have tasted guava berry rum. Some of it was like forty years old—absolutely exquisite. I have never been able to find guava berries here, nor very much about them. I just know that is my one quest; I want to find guava berries. The only thing I can equate it to is…if you would take [Crème de Cassis] and mix it with a really, really rum and always like a dark sort of purple-y color but just absolutely delicious.
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So how long were you in St. Croix, in total?
Fourteen years.
So, during that time…were you developing this taste for cocktails and kind of thinking about, you know, developing new and different things while you were there?
Like the guava berry rum that the Croixian people made from the green coconuts with the rum or gin; sometimes they put gin in the green coconuts to just all kinds of just wonderful refreshing fruit juices and things and you would combine it with the rum. And rum has gotten a bad rap. I think people think that rum, you know, has to be in like all of these foo-foo drinks and that rum is—if you drink rum straight, it’s like, you know, it’s rough but it’s not. There are some wonderfully fine aged old rums out there that are very, very similar to bourbon—very, very similar to bourbon. So I mean, basically, rum was my first love; that’s what I first started to play with. My first infusions that I did, you know, twenty-five, thirty years ago, they were all rum infusions because I wanted to capture some of the tastes that I remembered.
Can you kind of describe, looking back, what that means to you now to have had that time there and been able to experiment so much with different things?
Well it’s like being a chef. I don’t think going to the best culinary school in the world will make you a chef. You have to have the passion and you have to want to learn…I learn something new about liquor almost everyday. And this was a wonderful experience for me because number one, I had all of the different liqueurs and stuff that were not available in the states. And also, that it was relatively inexpensive there because it’s duty-free, so there was no tax on liquor, so you could really, really—a bar could really, really experiment and not have to put a lot of money doing it.
So I’m wondering if you were surprised at all with yourself and your passion that you developed for cocktails and…your palate that you’ve developed for it over the years?
I don’t think it surprised me. I think it surprised other people particularly being a woman and, at the time that I got into bartending, there really were not a lot of women in the field. Now there are, which I’m glad to see. It’s something that’s always interested me, and I think it goes back, well, you know, my family history of the bootlegging and the rum running and, you know, running the Victorian hotels. It’s always been, to me, extraordinarily interesting…Liquor is just fascinating. And I think also from a bartender’s point of view…I like people to taste my drinks and sip my drinks, enjoy my drinks…But a lot of my drinks are all liquor, and it’s pretty well masked that they don’t even taste like liquor, but it’s there. But, then again, you know, I want my drinks to be enjoyed…I don’t want people taking advantage of my drinks.
They’re your creation—expression.
Yes, they’re my children. That’s how I view them. They’re my children…I sort of know what goes together, what doesn’t go together. You have to know whatever your base is, be it bourbon or rum or scotch or brandy, gin or vodka—whatever you’re using as your base, you really need to know what that tastes like, and then whatever flavors you can pull out of, say, your bourbon, then you take it from there. If you taste a really nice bourbon, and you taste brown sugar, you taste caramel. I taste pineapple, you taste cinnamon, and then you start playing. Well I can take bourbon, I can take some brown sugar syrup, I can take some fresh pineapple, I can, you know, infuse this, let it sit for a day or two, taste it and see what it looks like. When it tastes the way I want it to taste, strain it off and maybe mix it with some pineapple juice, maybe throw a little coconut in there and then voila, all of the sudden you’ve got a wonderful drink. You know, that’s the creating—I guess the creating process. Or sometimes you just get back there, and you want to create a color, you know. It’s, again, years and years ago we didn’t have red liquor and blue liquor and green liquor and purple liquor and orange liquor and, you know, yellow liquor. You were sort of limited by what was there. St. Patrick’s Day was always a problem because if you wanted a green drink, you had green Crème de Menthe, and you had green Chartreuse; neither one of these pair well with Irish whiskey. But now there are all kinds of things. I mean there’s green pear liqueur out there. There’s green melon liqueur out there. There’s, you know, a green apple liqueur. There’s a number of different liqueurs in the green palette, as are the reds and the pinks and the oranges and the blues and the purples—they’re all out there….
…I make a lot of Christmas drinks…And what I try to do with a lot of my Christmas drinks is I try to recreate flavors from Christmas past that make people think about when they were kids. I make one drink, which is an Orange Slice, which is like an orange slice candy. We make another drink, Ambrosia, and if you’re from the South, everybody’s grand-mom made ambrosia salad. Now we do it a little differently. We use a Finlandia grapefruit, vodka, with some coconut and some tangerine. And it really does taste like the salad, and the first sip, you know, you’re in grand-mom’s dining room with that bowl of ambrosia salad.
Another drink I do is I found a recipe in one of the Courier-Journal cookbooks from like the [nineteen] ‘60s, and it was for a Kentucky Sauce, and it was basically strawberry preserves with the juice and rind of an orange and a lemon, brown sugar, white sugar, a whole lot of bourbon and some pecans. And it was all cooked down together, with the exception of the bourbon; it was cooled and the bourbon was added, and it was like a sauce for ice cream or pound cake or whatever. Well, I thought, “Well I’m going to try this. I want to make a drink.” And but I still haven't decided what I want to call it. I just called it like The Saucy, and I basically used—I took Woodford [Reserve] bourbon, I infused it with strawberries, and then I added brown sugar; I added a squeeze of lemon and a squeeze of orange; I used a little bit of praline liqueur, which is like a pecan liqueur and some strawberry liqueur and, you know, shake, shake, shake. There was my, you know. My little Saucy Kentucky and that’s pretty much how I come up with things.
Jack’s [Lounge] will be open eight years this coming June, and when we first opened up, I wanted a signature drink, and I thought well blah-blah, you know, what can I do? Well I wanted to use bourbon, I knew that. And I thought, well, I wanted to sort of do something traditional, so I came up with the Bourbon Ball, and it’s one part Woodford Reserve, one part dark Crème de Cocoa, one part Tuaca liqueur from Italy, which is like a vanilla-based liqueur. You shake it up, and you put it in a cocktail glass. This tastes just like the bourbon ball of candy. And in the eight years that I have been making this drink, I don’t know how many times I have been ripped off and people have made a drink called the Bourbon Ball, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the ingredients in my drink, except the bourbon. And I don’t care, you know, fine. If they want to roll with it, let them roll with it, but it’s still my drink. And when people say, you know, “Well I want to drink a Bourbon Ball,” most of the time they think of me when they say Bourbon Ball, so that makes me happy.
I want to ask you about infusions and when you started doing that and where that came from?
I first started doing infusions, like I said, twenty-five, thirty years ago with rum because I wanted flavors. Rum is a good base. But I wanted flavors; I wanted true fruit flavors that I could only get from, pretty much, doing an infusion. I didn’t want to do, you know, like extracts. I didn’t want a process where I was going to have to cook anything down, particularly when you’re using alcohol because it’s flammable. I just wanted to see what I could see, you know—do. And probably one of the first things I did is I did spice; I did spiced rum. I wanted something to do at Christmas that I could give away as, you know, like a little token that wouldn’t be really expensive because I wanted to make a lot of them, and I thought, well, I’ll do a spiced rum, and then that way they can add it to eggnog or they can put it with orange juice, whatever they want to do and that was basically my first infusion. I used a white rum. Now it took me a while to get my spices down, and my spice mix is I use all ground spices. I use a blend of six. It’s basically equal parts clove, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, allspice—equal parts, put it in a jar, shake it up, and then usually to one liter of liquor, be it bourbon or rum, whatever you’re using, it’s about a tablespoon of that spice mix. You let it sit for about three to five days. It’s very important that you strain it off, and you also you want to shake it the period that it’s infusing, you want to maybe shake it once a day. But it’s very important that you strain it off because the bottom of the bottle you get like some gunky stuff, which is basically where the spices have just gotten saturated with the liquor, and they’ve sunk. And I just strain it all through a coffee filter and a little mesh strainer and put it into a clean jar and refrigerate it. Once the stuff is refrigerated, it sort of pretty much lasts forever.
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So when you came to Kentucky and you started working with bourbons…was that something that you just personally were trying, or is it something that you were asked to do because people knew of your time making these rum infusions?
Sort of—no, the bourbon industry here is divided. There are the purists that say, you know, bourbon should only be drunk straight or with a little splash of water; it shouldn’t, you know, have any kind of mix; it shouldn’t have any kind of, you know, cocktail—you know, but there is a whole lot of people who just don’t like the way bourbon tastes the first time they taste it. And these are basically people that I try to reach. The infusions started here with, like I said, I had sort of always played…And it just sort of went from there. Again, like one of my Christmas drinks, it’s just Woodford [Reserve] bourbon, candy canes, and it turns this beautiful shade of red. And when you shake it over ice it, is absolutely delicious, and it looks truly beautiful in a—you know, a martini glass garnished with just a little candy cane. And it tastes really good.
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So do you ever work with the chef at Equus in developing pairings of cocktails with food at all?
Yes. Yes, we do. Sometimes, if they’re doing a special, you know, a special dinner or something and they want a special cocktail, we’ve done a lot of that where we’ve, you know, paired cocktails to fit a certain menu…My chefs are very good about, like if I want something, you know, if I can't find it, then they’ll look around and see if they can find it. Like one of my latest discoveries, last year I discovered these wonderful—these oranges called Cara Cara, which are a delicate pink and they’re so pink, it’s almost really hard to see it with the orange, but they have just this wonderful honey orange flavor. So last year I did some infusions with those. You know, they get me Myer lemons, they get me blood oranges. Pretty much, you know, if it’s strange and exotic, you know, they found me the sugarcane sticks. They found me some celery straws…So yeah, we work together.
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Can you talk about the creative and artistic part of what you do a little bit more because in the course of our conversation you’ve talked about being inspired by ingredients, by colors, by memory, by the region of the South. Can you talk a little bit about those things that pass through your head when you’re making a drink?
Number one is taste; it’s got to taste good. Number two is probably presentation: the color, the garnish, the glass that it’s in. It’s all like a dance, you know. It starts and—and you develop and you think, well this is what I want to do…And also, you know, the time of the year. Are there any special holidays? And that’s pretty much what I do, just I try to put it all together and it, you know—and when people sort of read the little drink list, I just, you know—if I can just see them like smile, you know, I’m happy. You don’t necessarily have to order one of the drinks, but if I can make you smile, that’s fine.
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What precipitated your move to Kentucky from St. Croix?
I moved to Kentucky in 1978…St. Croix was going through a lot of problems. I had two young children, and I just didn’t want to deal with those problems anymore…The people that I had worked for there also had a big rock-and-roll club here, so pretty much, if I wanted to move to Kentucky, I had a job. I did some research, you know, the schools were okay…And then we decided we would move to Kentucky, and we’ve been here ever since.
What was the club that was here at that time?
Eddie Donaldson’s, which was probably one of the first really big rock-and-roll clubs in Louisville.
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And then being here at Jack’s, when did you come here?
Dean [Corbett] is my boss, the owner. He also owns Equus Restaurant next door, and I started basically part time as a service bartender for Equus, and I’ve been with Dean for twenty-one years. And then, like I said, seven-and-a-half years ago we opened Jack’s.
And so then can we talk about the character that is a bartender and the service you provide that is not only the service of drinks, but conversation and advice and that kind of role that you play in what you do?
Oh, God, how many different hats do I wear? A bartender is many things. I mean first and foremost, you’re a bartender. You are a mother, a father, a priest, a lawyer, a doctor, a psychologist, a shoulder to cry on, a policeman…You just learn to judge. And one thing I’ve learned—because I’ve been doing this for forty-plus years—is you go with your gut instinct. When they come in the door, your first reaction is usually your true reaction, as to how this person is going to behave. A lot of times by even behave, you can almost tell what they’re going to drink, what they’re going to eat, you know, how much their bill is going to be, what they’re going to tip, whether or not they’re going to cause a problem. It’s a gut instinct.
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I want to touch a little bit, too, on kind of the history of drinking cocktails in Louisville, specifically the Old-Fashioned, and kind of where your thoughts on that kind of mythology and then kind of the future of bartending, too.
Well I mean Louisville is—is Southern but, again, because of being the home of the Old-Fashioned, I mean people have always drank Old-Fashioneds there. They’ve sort of never gone out of style. Just like the Manhattans, they’ve never gone out of style in Louisville. People in Louisville love their bourbon, and they drink a tremendous amount of it. I hope to see bourbon become bigger and grander on a national scale and on a worldwide scale, where it will be as prominent as it once was. I mean if you read any of the old cocktail books from the 1800s, bourbon was one of the primary ingredients in all of the cocktails. That’s what I would like to see. I would like to see for the future generations of the bartenders coming up—again, I can see us getting back to too many of these ready-made products, this like, you know, instant, you know, drink-in-a-bottle kind of stuff. No. I want to see the creativity; I want to see the good ingredients, you know. I want to see the love of the drink, and I want them to produce something that tastes and looks good or, you know, tastes as good as it looks, and I guess that’s really it.
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How much longer do you think you’ll be [bartending]?
Oh, God. Hopefully I’ll retire in probably four years but I’ll never really—I mean I’ll never—I don’t think I’ll ever really have my hands out of the industry. I’m sure that I really want to write; I want to do some writing, and I want to do some consulting, you know, because simply because and I certainly don’t mean this to sound vain, but I have a tremendous amount of knowledge and experience and talent, and I would like to pass that on. That would make me happy. But right now what would make me happiest is I want a book in print and, hopefully here within the next year and a half, I will get that wish.
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