Sorry. I’ll try to distract y’all away from the horrors of my singing.
Tonight is Thursday Drink Night (TDN) at the Mixoloseum - and for the first time, it’s sponsored, this time by Leblon cachaca. I’m very excited about some stuff with that!
I’ve not experimented a lot with cachaca but I’ve got some real ideas in store. And speaking of “in store”, I still need to go to the store. I also need to get a haircut, but that’s for something special that we’ll tell you about soon enough.
It’s also almost the weekend. We’ve got trips to Bourbon and The Gibson planned, so obviously, that should be a lot of fun. If you see us out, say hi! Then it’s Thanksgiving, and I’m thinking of something to take home with me, and then there’s Repeal Day…not to mention my brother and his fiancee’ want me to come up with cocktails just for them for their wedding…
I’ll be putting up some of the drink ideas we come up with using cachaca after TDN. Not necessarily tomorrow, that’ll be dependent on hangover, I guess…
I’m not talking about the eponymous martini variation that utilizes the cocktail onion but rather the new bar not far from Cork and Marvin. The Gibson only opened this past Wednesday.
It was one of those random Saturdays - I had absolutely nothing planned to do. It was kind of weird, in fact. I mentioned such a fact on Facebook and heard from Jake. After a while we decided to head down to The Gibson, but since it didn’t open until 6 PM we swung by Cork to visit Tom Brown. I’d only been there once, but Tom had left early that time.
You’ve seen Marshall’s, so I guess it’s my turn. For those of you paying attention, if you’re looking at the banner, I’m the guy on the right.
Instructions:
1) Copy this list into your blog, with instructions.
2) Bold all the drinks you’ve imbibed.
3) Cross out any items that you won’t touch
4) Post a comment here and link to your results.
OR
If you don’t have a blog, just count the ones you’ve tried and post the number in the comments section.
So that puts me at a 79 out of 100. Not bad. I’ve heard of Barolo but never tried it. Perique is something I’ve been wanting to get and haven’t been able to find. I don’t know about Pulque or Chicha, but maybe I’ll hit a Hispanic market around here. The various rums are easy - yes, I’d like to try them. Some of these, like the cough syrup and the Screech - seem to be fairly uniquely Canadian. The Chateau Margaux is probably too expensive for me.
Mongolian fermented horse milk? Yikes. Same with the weasel coffee, but I’d probably try one of each just to say I had.
Aryan? Sure, what the heck.
The wines? Oh, sure, what’s the worst that could happen.
Darcy over at Art of Drink posted a list of 100 Drinks You Must Try Before You Expire. The list is a cocktailian send-up to the “Omnivores 100″ which is a list of 100 food that author believes one should eat at least once before they die. It is a pretty neat exercise. Below is my list (that’s Marshall for those out there who still can’t tell Sean and I apart).
Instructions:
1) Copy this list into your blog, with instructions.
2) Bold all the drinks you’ve imbibed.
3) Cross out any items that you won’t touch
4) Post a comment here and link to your results.
OR
If you don’t have a blog, just count the ones you’ve tried and post the number in the comments section.
1. I failed to do a Mixology Monday post this month for the first time in ages. My apologies to Pegu Doug, who had a good idea - but after spending the entire weekend basically wiped out, it just couldn’t happen.
Sorry.
2. Congratulations to mbrownerhamlin, who won the TDN from about two weeks ago (Irish whiskey) for his Knacker’s Conference. If you see this before I get ahold of you, shoot me an e-mail with your address and your choice of prize.
3. REPEAL DAY! December 5th is the 75th anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition. There’s going to be a bunch of super awesome bartenders there, plus cool folks Tony Abou-Ganim and Jeffrey Morgenthaler and others, and tickets are $80 before November 20th, and $90 after. You can get them via the DC Craft Bartender’s Guild or RepealDay.org.
It’s another Mixology Monday and this month we are hosted by that Pegu drinking wild man Doug over at The Pegu Blog. Doug’s chosen theme is “Made From Scratch” wherein he instructs “mix up a drink which is produced with one or more ingredients that you make yourself, be it bitters, infused liquors, liqueurs, syrups, or even the garnish!” Well, that is certainly something up my alley as much as I love to make syrups, tinctures, infusions and the like.
I looked around the kitchen at my sundry bottles and decided I wanted to use two homemade ingredients - one that everyone should have in their repetois and one that is more esoteric. The two chosen made from scratch ingredients? Grenadine and Swedish Punsch!
Let’s begin with the grenadine. If you are used to Rose’s Grenadine, then you aren’t using grenadine. What you have there is red-dye-number-5-colored-high-fructose-corn-syrup, most likely with some sort of artificial cherry flavoring. Real, honest to goodness grenadine is pomegranate syrup. Further, homemade grenadine is one of the easiest bar staples anyone can make. There are tons of recipes for making homemade grenadine. Don’t believe me? Go ahead, google it. I’ll wait.
See?!?! A vertiable cornocopia of recipes. To me though, everything can be distilled down to two basic methods - cold and hot. The cold method is straight forward. Equal parts pomegranate juice and sugar; shaken until the sugar dissolves. That’s it. Simple. You get the fresh tart flavor of the pomegranate and the sweetening power of the sugar.
The second method, the hot method, is a little more complicated. At its most basic level, you heat the pomegranate juice and sugar and stir to dissolve. Some recipes tell you to reduce this down by a certain amount to make it thick and even more syrupy. Some have you add orange flower water after everything is reduced and cooled. The only thing I can tell you is to try out different recipes and find one you like. The last recipe I used came from Food & Wine’s 2008 Cocktail Book.
This particular recipe says to simmer two cups of pomegranate juice with one cup plus two tablespoons of sugar until thick enough to coat a spoon. Then add 1/8 teaspoon of orange flower water. Bottle and refrigerate for up to two weeks. I also add about an ounce of 100 proof vodka to the final, cooled, syrup to help with shelf life. And I’ll tell you, this is some tasty grenadine. Damn tasty!
The second “made from scratch” ingredient I wanted to highlight was swedish punsch. If you aren’t familiar with this ingredient, don’t be surprised. It comes up most often in old cocktail books and recipes usually dating prior to Prohibition. After reading through several old cocktail books and online discussions (especially on eGullet) I turned to the recipe used by Erik over at Underhill-Lounge. I won’t recreate Erik’s recipe here, but here is a link to his site.
The swedish punsch is some tasty stuff and personally, I hope I find more things to use it in. Everytime I see a recipe, I copy it down, but unfortunately, tend to forget about it until I find my bottle of punsch in the cabinet. Shame on me! The mixture of tea, arrack, rum and lemon is fragrant, pungent and completely enrapturing.
Now to find a cocktail that uses both of these ingredients. Whipping out my trusty Iphone, I started searching the Cocktails app for drinks contains swedish punsch. As an aside, if you have an Iphone and are a cocktail geek, you really should have this on your phone. It is by far one of the top three apps I have and worth way more than it cost. Seriously, buy it. DO IT!!!
Anyway, I found a drink that I had never tried before that used both grenadine and swedish punsch - C.F.H. Cocktail. The app tells me it is from page 43 of Harry Craddock’s Savoy Cocktail Book, circa 1930. So that is where I turned.
C.F.H. Cocktail 1/6 grenadine
1/6 Swedish Punch
1/6 Calvados
1/6 lemon juice
1/3 Burrough’s Beefeater Gin
That is the recipe - no instructions given in the Savoy. Luckily the Cocktails app instructs to shake with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. The other problem is the ratios - why can’t these guys use a standard measure?!?! Sheesh! Well, looking at the recipe we can see that each ingredient, except the gin, is exactly one-half of the measure of the gin (1/6 v. 1/3). Knowing this, and not wanting to drink a humongous cocktail (at least not yet), I used one ounce of gin. This provided the following drink:
.5oz grenadine (homemade)
.5oz Swedish Punsch (homemade)
.5oz Calvados (Clear Creek Distillery’s Eau-de-vie-de-Pomme)
.5oz fresh lemon juice
1oz gin
This is one tasty beverage. Seriously, I was kind of surprised, but WOW! It is just sweet enough and everything plays so nicely in the glass. For the first one I made (and yes I made more than one!), I used Plymouth gin. The second one I made, I used Aviation gin. I was a little worried that the extra oomph of the Aviation would throw the drink out of whack. I was wrong. It adds an extra layer of flavor and really highlights the calvados and the punsch. This is certainly a cocktail that requires a little bit of experimenting with using various gins. Something I plan to do in spades!
I want to thank Doug at The Pegu Blog again for hosting this month. This should be a great theme that will keep plenty of people in the kitchen for a bit.
Now that the election is over and things have quieted down a little, I wanted to take a moment to share the cocktail menu from my Halloween party. I had lucky thirteen of my close friends over for drinks, conversation and Halloween merriment. The party was a great success. At least that’s what people told me. And I guess since no one passed out or fell off the 12th story balcony, I can chalk it up as a win. I also have to thank Sean for helping me make the drinks. People got served much faster with booze slinging skills helping me out behind the stick (metaphorically.)
For this year’s party, I decided to print up a cocktail menu. The reasons were simple. First, I didn’t want to end up making forty-five different drinks or deal with the inevitable “Make me something fruity.” Number B, I didn’t want drunk people rummaging around my hooch. (Wow, that sounds kind of scandalous and dirty.) Finally, I wanted to have a little something for everyone in addition to wine, beer and non-alcoholic drinks.
Here is what the menu looked like:
Once opened, guests were treated to six possible drinks, the non-alcoholic options mentioned above and, for the brave, a traditional absinthe drip. (Or as traditional as I can get without having the huge water faucet drippy thing.) Below are the drinks, their descriptions as printed on the menu, and the recipe.
Devil’s Daughter
Sugar and spice and everything nice with a heart as black as the night.
Vodka, Lemon, Lime, Egg White
This cocktail is actually a riff on Eben Freeman’s Bazooka Bubblegum Cocktail served at Tailor. You can find the original recipe here. I followed Eben’s recipe to the letter, except I replaced the regular vodka with Blavod. The resulting cocktail was dark violet in color but tasted just like bubblegum. It was a hit with everyone who tried it.
Corpse Reviver #2 The dead will rise over this little refresher.
Gin, Cointreau, Lillet, Lemon, Absinthe
This was the basic Corpse Reviver #2 recipe. Corpse Reviver #2
1oz Gin
1oz Cointreau
1oz Lillet Blanc
1oz fresh lemon juice
2-3 drops of absinthe
Shake everything with ice and strain into chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a maraschino cherry.
Murderous Manhattan
Reportedly the very recipe drunk by David Berkowitz after each kill.
Bourbon or Rye, Vermouth, Maraschino, Bitters
The twist on this Manhattan was that I used Bianco vermouth and added a barspoon of maraschino to the mix. I also used some cherry bitters and aromatic bitters. Here’s the recipe:
2oz Bourbon or Rye
1oz Bianco Vermouth
1 barspoon maraschino liqueur
dash of cherry bitters and aromatic bitters
Stir over ice, strain and garnish with a maraschino cherry.
Ignis Fatuus The hellish flames found in the dark deadly swamps.
Chardonnay, Cognac, Pumpkin, Cider
This is another borrowed recipe. This time from that crazy Canadian media hound Jamie Boudreau. His original recipe is here. This is another cocktail that went over really well. A few months ago, our friend Roy tasked me with finding a cocktail using pumpkin. His wife Danielle loves pumpkin and he wanted something that he could make for her. At the time, he wanted me to use this “Pumpkin Spice Liqueur” that will remain nameless. But you know what I’m talking about. Yes, you do. Well, I toyed around with playing with an actual pumpkin and doing an infusion of some sort, but then Jamie came along with this little number. I’m still planning on doing a pumpkin infusion this fall/winter (keep your eyes peeled!) but Jamie’s creation was spot on. Great drink. Go to his site and see how it’s done. You won’t be sorry.
Charon’s Dingy Only the most damned have to cross the River Styx in this leaky vessel.
Brandy, Amaro, Lemon, Cinnamon, Honey, Bitters
This was actually a renaming of a drink I created during Thursday Drink Night at the Mixoloseum. I based the drink off a standard Sidecar recipe - with a few tweaks of course. First, I substituted the Cointreau with Ramazzotti Amaro. Then, to compensate for the lack of sweetness, I added cinnamon and honey syrups. I also guilded the lilly with whiskey barrel bitters and a flamed lemon peel. I called the drink “A Sidecar to Milan” to highlight the origin of the Ramazzotti. For the Halloween party, I simply renamed the drink. Charon ferried the dead across the river Styx and I thought what would the the sidecar equivalent to a ferry? A dingy! So you’ve got Charon’s Dingy. Here is the recipe (and the original name):
Sidecar to Milan 1.5oz Brandy
1oz Ramazzotti Amaro
.75oz fresh lemon juice
.50oz cinnamon syrup
.50oz honey syrup (or can substitute rich simple syrup, but may need to adjust proportions)
2 dashes whiskey barrel bitters
Shake everything with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a flamed lemon peel. After flamed, rub peel around edge of glass and drop in.
Luckily, one of my guests, Victor, brought along his video recorder and through the magic of the interwebs you can see the flamed lemon peel. And before any of you say it, I was using plastic cups for the cocktails. I don’t have enough nice glassware for everybody and plastic is a lot easier to get rid of.
Kill-Devil Punch A misnomer: The Devil will kill YOU over this punch.
Rum, LIme, Pineapple, Bubbly
I found this recipe at Epicurious and it turns out to have been supplied by Phil Ward of Death & Co. Everyone seemed to really like this punch and by the end of the night I had gone through an entire bottle of prosecco. The recipe makes enough for six drinks.
Kill-Devil Punch 9oz Rum
6oz Pineapple Juice
5oz Simple Syrup
4oz Fresh Lime Juice
5oz Champagne/Cava/Prosecco
Combine everything except the bubbly in a container and chill in the fridge for a few hours. Pour over ice and top with the champagne/cava/prosecco. Garnish with lime wheels, frozen raspberries, blackberries or other fruit. Or garnish as I did, with a stick of sugar cane. One note regarding the recipe, depending on how sweet/dry your bubbly is, you will probably want to adjust the amount of simple syrup. For a dry champagne, leave at 5oz. If using a sweeter sparkling wine, you may want to use less.
There you have it. My Halloween 2008 cocktail menu. Give these drinks a try and feel free to leave a comment and let us know what you think.
Thanks to some kind of lame excuse that I couldn’t be bothered to remember, Kaiser Penguin had to relinquish control of Thursday Drink Night this week. Laughing maniacally, I seized the opportunity to run it with an iron fist in an iron glove, only if by iron you mean “flabby white flesh”, but also to use the week to try the theme of “Irish whiskey”.
If I’m doing shots at a bar, it seems like they’re almost inevitably Jameson’s. Part of that is that I hang out with my neighbor Conroy a lot and he loves him some Jameson’s (and Redbreast, which I introduced him to). The other part is that as a shot, it’s a smooth whiskey to drink. I could drink a ton more of those than I could of, say, Southern Comfort (a shot that almost put paid to your humble narrator last weekend in Pittsburgh when he was trying to get a SoCo shirt for a rather drunk guy in his party) or Jim Beam (which I haven’t been able to stand since I drank a handle of it on a bus ride from Charlottesville to Miami for a bowl game, but that’s a story for another day).
Conroy pointed out to me the other day, however, that there are very few cocktails seem to use the Irish whiskey. Sure, you have some, a few of which are just variations on drinks using other whiskeys, but I wanted to see what the mixologists on TDN came up with.
We started with one from someone (Will) in my Wednesday night cocktail class, a drink he called the Irish Ambien.
Irish Ambien 1 oz. Irish whiskey
1 oz. vanilla vodka
1 oz. Bailey’s Irish cream Shake and strain into a cocktail glass
First “real” drink of the night was from jimmyp - and it’ll be after the cut.
First off, before I forget: I’m hosting Thursday Drink Night tonight. We’re starting at 7 PM EDT and the theme is “Irish Whiskey”. Get out that Jameson’s, the Bushmill’s, Powers, Tullamore Dew, and come up with a drink - preferably with as little fruit juice as possible - for us to try out.
With the help of my neighbor Conroy we’ll be trying out the drinks and the best one of the evening will win a great prize! You’ll get your choice of: Gary Regan’s The Joy of Mixology, a book that I believe any true cocktail fan must own, A.J. Rathbun’s Good Spirits, which I got as a birthday present and enjoyed a good bit, or, since tomorrow is Halloween, I’m friends with the owners, and they’re making a video game of it, a copy of Twilight Creations’ ZOMBIES!!! board game.
Last night was our “Halloween” - actually more like “Molecular Mixology” - cocktail class at EatBar under the direction of the irascible Gina Chersevani. Like the first class, I had a great time, and this time I didn’t fall and bust myself up afterwards. It was also great meeting Kristen (again), along with Lisa, Will, Stephanie, Jamie, and others whose names I’m either not remembering or misremembering in all odds.
Speaking of that class and Irish whiskey tonight, Will gave me a drink that he makes with it:
Irish Ambien 1 oz. Irish whiskey
1 oz. vanilla vodka
1 oz. Bailey’s Irish Creme Shake and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. If you wanted to experiment with a dash of maybe mint bitters or something like that, who am I to tell you not to do so? Heck, if you had some chocolate bitters, or wanted to grate some chocolate or nutmeg or cinnamon on top, I’d bet that’d be money.
As for recovery period…
I’ve been extremely brain dead recently thanks to the events of last weekend - I, in my role of official brother and best man to my roommate and (uh) brother Matt - had to plan the Bachelor’s Party. We went to Morgantown, WV, on Friday to visit our cousins and granddad, then up to Pittsburgh, PA, on Saturday to meet up with the rest of the group (eight of us, total) to hit the town and the Giants-Steelers game on Sunday.
Perhaps unfortunately, we watched a YouTube video about “My New Haircut” (caution: NSFW, language) before going out. Which meant more than a few Jager bombs.
Saturday we killed a bottle of JD, there were multiple Bloody Marys made (from a mix, I didn’t want to bring the material prep), and no matter what anyone says, the combination of vodka, cranberry juice cocktail, and Red Bull is not a good idea.
I did have one good cocktail while in Pittsburgh, not counting the Shirley Temple I was sent during a froo-froo shot war (don’t ask, we sent back white wine spritzers). At the bar in the Omni William Penn I had a martini, specifying the gin (Plymouth), heavy on dry vermouth, slightly dirty.
Perfectly made. And it cost - after tip - around eight times as much as the beers we’d been drinking at the first bar of the night (and I’m not counting the $.26 ones we also had) and over twice as much as the huge IC Lights, Rolling Rocks, and Miller Lites they had at Heinz Field.
Also, I had rum out of a plastic “pocket“. More on those later. Maybe.
Also, Jim Beam shots after the game. Not a good idea, either.
Anyways, I’m going to cut this off. Hope to see y’all tonight at TDN!
Last Sunday, October 19th to be exact, I attended the fall pot-luck picnic with the kind and generous folks on DonRockwell.com at the Fort Hunt Park in Alexandria, Virginia. This was the first event I’ve attended with these folks, though SeanMike has been to several events. Prior to this picnic, he told me that at the last one, he was good-naturedly ribbed for not bringing any “Scofflaw-esque” beverages. This was something he didn’t want to repeat at this picnic. Naturally, I decided to take something “Scofflaw-esque” as well.
But what to take? Taking various bottles of spirits, mixers, mixing tins, strainers, jiggers, etc. would be a hassle and too labor intensive. So I decided to make a bottled cocktail. For those of you looking for more information on bottling cocktails, I highly recommend reading this post. But what cocktail to bottle? I wanted something that said “HEY IT’s FALL AND KIND OF CHILLY. DRINK ME BECAUSE I’M LIKE FALL.” Okay, so maybe not so much with the yelling, but you get my gist.
I searched through my cocktail books and even tried out the Virginia Autumn that I made last year but nothing was really tickling my fancy. I then came across Paul Clarke’s site and more specifically, this post on the Northern Spy. Now this little number had promise. So I whipped one up to give a try before committing to an entire bottles’ worth. It was good. But still wasn’t exactly what I wanted. I was afraid that the dryness of the cocktail, and the inherent boozyness, would be off-putting to some people. I wanted something that was a little sweeter, mainly because I wasn’t sure of my audience. Usually, sweeter things are more appealing to the masses and I certainly wanted my drink to be a hit.
Paul mentions that the Orchard Apricot can be replaced with ginger liqueur, pimento dram or another flavor enhancer. Well, I don’t have Orchard Apricot. I know, I know! I should have some, but every now and again, something slips through the cracks when I go booze shopping. (Shhhhh . . . don’t tell Joe at Ace Beverage. He’ll have me buying some within 15 minutes of reading this!) Anyway, I do have the Orchard Pear, so I figure that’s a good place to start. I also wanted to get some extra fall flavors into the drink, so I thought about a few dashes of Fee’s Whiskey Barrel Bitters. But then again, Paul unknowingly guided my hand with his suggestion of using pimento dram.
So after a few tasty trials and errors, here is the recipe for my finished cocktail. Which I have called,
Fort Hunt Fall 2oz Applejack
1oz Apple Cider*
.5oz lemon juice
.5oz Pear Brandy (I used Rothman & Winter Orchard Pear)
.5oz Pimento Dram
.5oz Apple Cider Syrup**
-Shake everything with ice and strain into an ice filled rocks glass.
*For those of you not in the US, by “apple cider,” I’m referring to fresh pressed apple juice. Not the hard stuff.
**To make apple cider syrup: Take one cup of apple cider and reduce by half on the stove. Stir in a quarter cup of sugar. Let cool and bottle. You can play around with the sugar you add to get a sweetness you like. The cider will have a lot of residual sugar already so you may not need too much. This is a great syrup to add an intense apple flavor wherever you like.
I’m happy to report that this drink was very well received. In fact, the bottle was empty when I went to gather my belongings. Some even topped it off with champagne; which was very delicious as well. I saw a few people (cough, cough Heather) go back for seconds. I was just happy that those who tried it, seemed to enjoy it and that their introduction to my cocktails was a pleasant one.
Of course, in true Scofflaw fashion, I couldn’t just show up with one drink. I also brought along a small bottle of Trader Tiki’s Primitiva which I had just bottled a couple of weeks prior. If you want to make a tasty liqueur, this stuff is money! The Trader knows his spirits and is second to none in concoctioneering. Seriously. Make this stuff. It’s fantastic. Anyway, back to the picnic. I brought a small bottle of primitiva and was pouring about an ounce in a small, ice-filled plastic cup and topping it with champagne. Fantastic! Mixed together with a Fort Hunt Fall - fantastic. Swigging straight from the bottle maniacally laughing at the poor poor people who couldn’t fathom the tasty treat they were missing out on - fantastic. You catch my drift.
As we’ve already written about here and here the picnic was awesome.
Next up on my calender is the second cocktail class by Gina Chersevani at EatBar. This is the Halloween themed class and I’m really excited about it. Friday night, I have my Halloween party and am in the process of creating the cocktail menu for it. I need two more cocktails for the menu and I’m hoping Gina gives me some good ideas. I won’t give anything away until after the party, but expect to see plenty of pictures and the recipes for all the drinks from the menu later that weekend.
Hope everyone has a frightful (and safe) Halloween! Cheers!
