Yes, I came up with a drink that when I made it tonight I thought “this had none of the original ingredients I thought to associate with Marshall but I think it works!”  Helped by the lovely and talented Ms. Sergi, we even came up with how to vary it up a bit.

So enough jibba jabba, let’s see the drink.

Another fuzzy pic, another lazy photographer moment

The TMF-aye-aye-aye
1 1/2 ounce cognac (Chalfonte VSOP)
1 1/2 ounce amer picon (Boudreau recipe, made by me)
2 dashes Marshall’s Moonshine Bitters
San Pellegrino Aranciata
Stir the first three ingredients over ice.  Strain into a double old fashioned glass and top with the Aranciata.

The amount of aranciata will determine the drink.  If you use the whole 6.75 bottle you get a nice, light drink, great for hot summer nights.  Use less – like half the bottle, for instance, and you get a stronger drink, with a stronger bitter component and something more of a sipper.

[Fifteenth in a series of drinks named after bloggers, mixologists, and random others who'll hopefully be at Tales.  The first post in the series is here.]

Tonight, as is usual on Thursdays, is Thursday Drink Night over in the Mixoloseum chat room.  The theme is “muddled drinks” and the other day I had an inspiration.  Like last night, it’s a chance to kill two birds with one stone, as the saying has it – this time, to present a new drink for TDN as well as to make one to honor somebody locally, Mr. Derek Brown.

The drink basically jumped almost fully formed into my head.  I just made one, after posting it in the chat room, and people seem to like it!  Kaiser Penguin was even kind enough to take a picture of it and let me use it:

Pretty, ain’t it?

The Derek
3-4 leaves of mint
1/2 ounce Domaine de Canton
3 ounces Dolin Blanc
1 dash orange bitters (Regans #6)
Lightly muddle the mint and Domaine de Canton in an old-fashioned glass.  Add the vermouth, bitters, and ice.  Stir gently to mix.  Garnish with a fresh sprig of mint.

In my opinion, this is a nice, sweet, light drink.  I think it’d make a wonderful digestif or apertif.  Someone else who made one (Chris aka DJ HawaiianShirt) said that it worked well with a “past its prime bottom shelf bottle of French vermouth”, so you have that, too.  Others who thought it was too sweet (such as JohnTheBastard) I suggested additional bitters, though he went with a bit of tonic syrup and something else (I believe club soda).

Enjoy!

[Fourth in a series of drinks named after bloggers, mixologists, and random others who'll hopefully be at Tales.  The first post in the series is here.]

Cognac, I feel, is often a misunderstood liquor.  People have an impression of it that it’s only for the rich, while that’s not true; on the other hand, when introducing people to the subtypes of brandy that are available, or even for other drinks, cognac is often easily used as an example because people are familiar with it.  All cognacs are brandy; not all brandies are cognac, it depends on where they come from.  (There are other requirements, too, but that’s the big one, at least, in my humble opinion.)

And where cognacs come from is the French area known as, well – Cognac.

I won’t get into Wikipedia-esque detail on VS versus VSOP versus XO, or the other different types.  The important thing to remember when using cognac in drinks, in my opinion, is to remember that while cognacs vary, you can use a cognac to replace a brandy but not vice versa.  Cognacs, in my experience, tend to be richer, and often sweeter – in my opinion – than other brandies from similar areas.  Armagnacs might be able to replace a cognac, but really, if a drink is so specific to request a cognac you should use it.

Not that many do.  You might see a “special” version of a drink using cognac that has it instead of brandy, but only a rare few use cognac as an ingredient, and there’s one in particular that I know catches more than a few eyes.

I know this because on the last, admittedly hazily remembered, night at Hummingbird to Mars I was offered one – and the bartender (I want to say it was Owen) I seem to remember was surprised that I knew what it was (and drank it anyways).   If you’ve got the Regan’s The Joy of Mixology you might already know where I’m going…

Tremblement De Terre (Earthquake)
2 1/2 ounces cognac
1/4 ounce absinthe
1 lemon twist, garnish
Stir and strain into a chilled cocktail glass.  Add the garnish.

Now, I’ve had that drink, and it’s a killer.  Not bad whatsoever, in my opinion, but oof!

My favorite cognac right now is Chalfonte VSOP.  I just got word that it’s back at my favorite liquor store, Ace in DC, and that makes me very happy.  It’s not expensive but it’s quote luscious in its taste.  My goal is to make sure I have a bottle of two to enjoy in the snow, around a big bonfire, with family and friends next winter.  It was that goal last winter but never happened.

Still, I need a drink for a blogger or mixologist for tonight, and I thought of that drink and Stevi’s blog name.  Hmmm.  It seems to insinuate that you can only have two of her drinks in a night, and what’s a good drink to base that off of, in addition to her love of Peruvian horses, I thought – oh.  I know.

Two At The Most
1 1/2 ounces cognac (Chalfonte VSOP)
1 ounce pisco brandy (Macchu Pisco)
1/4 ounce + 1 dash absinthe (Kubler)
1/4 ounce simple syrup
1-2 dashes Peruvian bitters
Stir and strain into a cocktail glass.  Garnish with a brandy soaked cherry, which sinks to the bottom, and a lemon twist.

Yummy!  But that’s quite a bit of booze there, so be warned – you won’t want to have more than two at the most!

[Third in a series of drinks named after bloggers, mixologists, and random others who'll hopefully be at Tales.  The first post in the series is here.]

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.

Halloween 2008 from Marshall on Vimeo.

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.

While most of the cocktail bloggers seemed to be having a joyous ole time down in N’awlins for Tales of the Cocktail (note: I haven’t actually read any of the blog posts, so maybe everybody came down with salmonella or something, not that I’d actually hope that’d happen but if something did happen and I’m sounding like an incredible jerkwad, well, uh, I’ve been fairly incommunicado all week) I got stuck with my usual July assignment – going to E3 on behest of the other site I write for, GamersInfo.net.

If you want my thoughts on the 28+ games I saw at E3, check out that site. If you want my thoughts on Irish Coffee, a bitters-less Manhattan, and other travesties of the LA bar scene, I’ll post on that later.

And then there’s the theme for this month: New Orleans. Or N’awlins, as I am wont to put it all the time whenever I’m writing out the name. I blame my psuedo-Southern heritage.

But what to make? The easy choice is the obvious one – the Sazerac. I do love me a Sazerac. But I didn’t want to do one of those, and though I briefly toyed with the idea of making my own version of the Hand Grenade I didn’t get around to doing any of those until too late, so I whipped out what I got, in other words, a couple of books, and decided to try a couple of cocktails that I hadn’t had before.

Because, you know, this is the Scofflaw’s Den, and even if I’m having to hand key in the HTML (and teach Marshall a bit about HTML) until we figure out why WordPress’s visual editor isn’t working, we’re still going to be doing multiple cocktails for MxMo ’cause that’s the way we roll.

First I went to one of the tried-and-true boosk – Ted Haigh’s Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails. There I read about the Vieux Carre’ (no, I can’t do the accent in HTML right yet), named after N’awlins’ famous French Quarter (i.e. “The Old Square”) and according to Dr. Cocktail, invented by Walter Bergeron in the soon-to-be (at the time) Carousel bar in the Monteleone Hotel. The drink reminded me a lot of the Cocktail a la Louisiane, for more than one reason.

Vieux Carre’ Cocktail
1 ounce rye whiskey (Wild Turkey Russell Reserve)
1 ounce cognac (Hennessy VS)
1 ounce sweet vermouth (Noilly Prat)
1/2 teaspoon Benedictine
2 dashes Angostura bitters
2 dashes Peychaud’s bitters

Shake and strain into a rocks glass. Garnish with a twist of lemon.

This reminded me of the previously-mentioned cocktail for a couple of reasons. For one thing, look at the list of ingredients – take out the absinthe, add in cognac, and you’ve got this one. That also goes for the second thing, which is that it tastes very similar, but to me the sweet vermouth really cut through everything else. That might be my choice of vermouth, but as I gave my Cinzano to my mom (awwww!) and I didn’t think to try the Vya, and I know that the Carpano might be even stronger, that’s what I’ve got right now.

All that being said, it wasn’t a bad drink, but I’d probably go with the Louisiane when going with this style cocktail.

At this point in the evening, I was sans eggs, necessary for the next cocktail. I took my Vieux Carre’ cocktail outside with me for the first cigar I’ve had since E3, where I proceeded to read my copy of Future Washington from cover to cover while smoking a La Gloria Cubana Serie R and later a Cavalier Cigar while sipping Miller Lite after finishing the cocktail. I am, after all, on a diet. Supposedly.

My brother finally got home with the eggs (along with a steam cleaner and other things, thanks to – well, I’ll talk about that later) and so it was time for my next drink: the Coffee Cocktail.

Coffee Cocktail
Take 1 tea-spoonful powdered white sugar
1 fresh egg
1 large wine-glass [2 oz.] of port wine
1 pony [1 oz.] of brandy
2 or 3 lumps of ice
Break the egg in the glass, add the sugar, then the port, brandy, and ice. Shake thoroughly and strain into a glass. Grate a little nutmeg on top.

I initially chilled a cocktail glass for this and realized belatedly it was too small, so it was another Jack Daniels rocks glass for me.

This was definitely an interesting cocktail. I used a Horton Vineyards 2000 vintage port – one of my favorite vintage ports, especially for the price. You could quite tell the taste of the port over the armagnac that I ended up using and the rest, but it was still a tasty beverage.

If you couldn’t tell from the formatting of the ingredients, despite the fact that it’s on the next page of Vintage Cocktails and Forgotten Spirits from the Vieux Carre’ cocktail I had no idea about the N’awlins connection of this cocktail until I saw it in David Wondrich’s Imbibe!, with proper credit to Jerry Thomas, and David mentions that according to rumor it came from N’awlins. I can definitely see it.

Unlike Dr. Cocktail’s recipe, I used the whole egg in this recipe, and it was definitely lush and luxurious. Very tasty, but definitely perhaps maybe more appropriate as a digestif than a “post-dinner, post-cigars, post-beer” drink. It did lead very nicely into the brie, dry salami, and baguette that Matt brought home with the steam cleaner.

But that’ll do it for this month’s Mixology Monday. It was definitely good to try some random cocktails that I might not have had an impetus to try without this theme, so I’ve gotta give the shout out to Paul at Cocktail Chronicles for hosting this month. Tomorrow, once I’m safely back on the taxpayer’s dime, I’ll have to catch up on what I missed at Tales last week, and think fondly of next year when I’ll definitely be there!