There’ve been plenty of times we’ve wanted a drink in our 20 years as finance and accounting gurus to some of Silicon Valley’s fastest-moving companies. So what better way to celebrate our 20th anniversary than with 20 custom cocktails?
Thus the RoseRyan 20th Anniversary Cocktail Collection was born. Since releasing the recipes last week, we’ve been getting questions: “How did you do that?” “Which ones are appropriate before noon?” and “Why wasn’t I invited to the tasting?”
Well, it was an arduous task, which we approached with an accountant’s attention to detail.
The mixing
Fortunately we had connections, and asked the mixologists at the Bull Valley Roadhouse (an up-and-coming Bay Area restaurant and bar) to create 10 original cocktails and 10 nonalcoholic counterparts (these are clearly appropriate before noon; otherwise, you’re on your own recognizance). Their mission was simple: be fun, different, sophisticated; give us some festive party drinks and some we could mix up any time.
The tasting
Jaime Rossini and Kathryn Mussell sent us 24 superlative recipes, so the RoseRyan marketing team had no choice but to spend an afternoon at the Bull Valley Roadhouse in Port Costa sampling each one to arrive at the final cut. (In re: question three—sometimes marketing has all the fun; that’s just how it is.) Jaime and Kathryn told us about the more esoteric ingredients (blackberry shrub, gomme syrup, rhubarb bitters) as they mixed and we sipped, scribbling our impressions on worksheets. We compared tasting notes and winnowed the list down to the final 20 with cool accountant-like efficiency.
The naming
Now we had to name them—a task almost as much fun as the tasting. We wanted clever finance names that didn’t veer into the land of cheesy accountant jokes, so we called in the entire brain trust. The marketing team created a starter list and then called for contributions. Almost 100 names poured in. We narrowed the list and put it to a vote.
Many great names didn’t make the final cut: Double Ledger, FASB Fling, Rev Rec Detonator, Mind the GAAP, Slush Fund, Auditor Exterminator and Fiscal Freeze, among others. Winning names from RoseRyan gurus are the 10K-O, from Miranda Chook; Knock Your SOX Off, from Moira Berman; and Lori Young’s Per Diem.
To find out the rest of the winning names—and most importantly, start mixing—download the RoseRyan 20th Anniversary Cocktail Collection recipe book.
The drinking
To whet your appetite, here’s the recipe for our signature anniversary drink, the RoseRyan Roaring Twenty. Multifaceted, well rounded, easy to love, and of course, orange, this concoction is RoseRyan in a glass:
1 oz vodka
½ oz Cointreau
½ oz sweet Italian vermouth
½ oz orange juice
¼ oz lemon juice
Shake all ingredients in a cocktail shaker and strain into a chilled small coupe glass. Garnish with orange wheel.
