Great cocktails can come from grapefruit juice. Consider the Hemingway Daiquiri (aka, Papa Dobles) — rum, lime juice, maraschino liqueur and, for a nice twist of character, grapefruit. Or the Comet — an obscure mixture of cognac, grapefruit juice and Van der Hum liqueur, brought to light a while back by David Wondrich. And don’t even get me started on the use of grapefruit juice in some of the better tiki drinks.

Too bad I hate it. Let me amend that — I hate it, and I always have. To my tastes, grapefruit was always the orange’s evil cousin, bitter while the orange was sweet, caustic while the orange was sparkly. My childhood memory of grapefruit juice is of having it served in my first-grade classroom during cold-and-flu season. I’d shudder over it, then choke it down with my nose pinched closed, barely containing my disgust (and my breakfast). In college, someone told me it paired well with cigarettes, which I was fond of back then, so I tried them together for a while until I realized that, hey — this is grapefruit juice. Other than that I’ve treated the stuff with a loathing I typically reserve for pedophiles and certain politicians.

But as part of the great modern alchemy that is mixology, certain bartenders have found ways to take this ingredient and make it palatable even to certifiable grapefruitaphobes such as me. One of the results of their endeavors is the Blinker, a classic that goes back at least to the 1930s. Originally composed of rye whiskey, grapefruit juice and grenadine, the Blinker uses rye’s funky assertiveness and grenadine’s sweet fruitiness to disarm the grapefruit of its malicious intent. The citrus bite remains, along with the grapefruit’s distinctive bitterness, but in a mix such as this it’s made to play its part.

Credit Ted Haigh with reviving this drink, and putting his own spin on it while tinkering with the Blinker. As he writes in Vintage Spirits & Forgotten Cocktails, he was experimenting with classic substitutions for grenadine, and tried this drink with raspberry syrup, then never looked back. After trying it both ways myself, I agree — the raspberry has that distinctive brightness that surpasses grenadine’s, and this works well in a drink like the Blinker.

While I was apprehensive at first, I now consider the Blinker an essential step on the road to a greater grapefruit detente.

Blinker

• 2 ounces rye whiskey
• 1 ounce grapefruit juice
• 1-2 teaspoons raspberry syrup (Haigh recommends the thick stuff, like Smucker’s or Knott’s Berry Farm; those can be hard to find, so I use Nutrafruit, an all-natural fruit syrup from Croatia that has more “raspberry” flavor than many of the coffee syrups I’ve tried)

Shake with ice and strain into chilled cocktail glass; garnish with a piece of lemon peel.

Tags: Drinks, Rye by Paul
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Seven sessions along, Mixology Monday continues to pick up steam. The “Goodbye, Summer” event had the largest turnout to date, with participants taking seasonal concoctions to heart, producing drinks with summery ingredients ranging from watermelon to fresh strawberries to homemade blackberry-infused rum.

Here’s what we had:

• Mickey at Kitchen Inferno was the first to join the party, sending in an entry nearly two weeks before the deadline. To say farewell to summer, Mickey suggested an aperitif that is all the more elegant for its simplicity: a chilled glass of blonde Lillet, garnished with a slice of nectarine. Read it here.

• Strawberries and fresh lemon basil from the garden were used in Matt’s Strawberry Basil Cocktail over at My Bar, Your Bar. In addition to the fresh produce, Matt used cranberry juice, apple liqueur, simple syrup, vodka and black pepper to create a fresh, and refreshing, cocktail.

• Anita over at Married…with Dinner continues the fresh fruit with spice theme with her Spicy Sangria. Starting with a basic sangria – composed of red wine, cointreau, brandy and chopped fruit – Anita perks it up with some club soda and sweetens and spices the mixture with a homemade spicy simple syrup that includes Mexican canela (cinnamon), star anise, cloves, black peppercorns and red chile flakes. Now Anita’s got me thinking about flavored syrups; this could prove useful as we move toward the holidays.

• DIY ingredients also feature in the drink from Imbibe Unfiltered, where Kate Darling (Hi, Kate!) tells how she made it through a hot summer by sipping daiquiris made with light rum that had been home-infused with fresh marionberries (that’s a type of blackberry grown in Oregon, for all you non-Pacific Northwesterners out there) and fresh mint. Check out her drink here:

• The homemade ingredient ethic also comes into play over at Hedonia, where Sean prepares a Hurricane Gordon using Myer’s dark rum, light rum, passion fruit juice, homemade sour mix and homemade grenadine (which I blush to note was based on the recipe I posted a few months back).

• Summer also means taking it easy, and KT at Gastronomy 101 takes this ethic to heart by letting someone else do the work in making her drink. Her cocktail, the Coolest Cucumber, is a riff on a drink posted by Gary Regan in the SF Chronicle; KT’s version uses Plymouth gin, fresh cucumber, Campari and blood orange juice.

• Summer puts people in the mood for lighter spirits, and over at Barbie2Be, the virtues of tequila are considered, along with a recipe for the classic summer anesthetic, the frozen margarita.

• Meeta at What’s For Lunch, Honey? approaches the summer theme in a festive mood, presenting an ode to bright-colored “girlie” drinks, along with a recipe for an apricot daiquiri.

• Over at Avenue Food, Sarah pursues total seasonal refreshment in her Limoncello Lush, made with limoncello, vodka and lemon juice, topped with Prosecco.

This month also marks the debut appearance of several of the good folks from eGullet’s Fine Spirits and Cocktails forum in a Mixology Monday event. Thanks to Erik Ellestad, MxMoVII got its own thread, which led to several great ideas for marking the end of the summer:

• For Erik, this was the “summer of the Sazerac,” and for Mixology Monday he prepared this classic cocktail in the original fashion, using cognac instead of rye (in the process, learning why rye became the preferred base).
• Chris Hoist (CDH) suggests the Algonquin as a good cocktail for the season transition, with the festive, summery pineapple juice meeting the dark, woody rye, with dry vermouth as a mediator.
• Janet Zimmerman suggests a complex concoction she terms the Ballet, made with Lillet, gin, fresh orange juice, orange bitters and basil, topped with soda or – even better – dry champagne. To kick it into summer overdrive, you can add fresh strawberries to the mix, producing a drink Janet christens a Strawberry Blonde.
• Chris Amirault bid farewell to Salty Dogs (made with tequila, lime juice, salt and Mexican grapefruit soda) and Gingered Gentlemen. The gingered gentleman — made with bourbon, lime juice, gingered simple syrup and club soda — sounds like another drink to pursue this fall.
• Tequila and grapefruit soda also appear in Katie Loeb’s suggested cocktail, which includes these two ingredients plus a touch of Marco Polo Sour Cherry syrup. Katie also recommends a drink that appears to be becoming a new summer classic, at least in cocktail aficionado circles: the rhum agricole-based ‘Ti Punch.

• As Darcy over at The Art of Drink prepares for a Canadian winter – and face it, they need some preparing for — he ponders his summer of rum and winds up needing a cab ride home. Finding himself unable to settle on any particular drink, he orders a full round: a Mai Tai, a Mojito, a ‘Ti Punch and a Caipirinha.

A pair of Australian bloggers joined the party this month, and pointed out to all of us (especially me) the hazards of drinking a Manhattan before coming up with a Mixology Monday theme. When I proposed the “Goodbye, Summer” theme for this month’s event, I of course overlooked the entire Southern Hemisphere, which is now approaching summer as we up north are bidding it adieu. Oops – sorry, Southern Hemisphere! Happily, they took it in stride–

• Over at Morsels & Musings, Anna didn’t let my befuddlement of the seasons get in her way, and went on to prepare a Pia y Menta – made of tequila, lime and pineapple juices, brown sugar, fresh pineapple and mint. The drink sounds fascinating, and refreshing – no doubt Anna will be enjoying these at the peak of summer, while I’m slogging through the frigid downpours that mark winter in Seattle. Consider it karmic retribution.

• Haalo at Cook (almost) Anything at Least Once also shrugged off my oversight and prepared a summery mix of watermelon and berries-in-season – heavily fortified with vodka, of course — for the Watermelon Vodka Cooler.

• Sliding in just before the deadline is the talented Jimmy Patrick over at Jimmy’s Cocktail Hour. Jimmy suggests a cocktail designed to help those of us up north get accustomed to the idea of autumn, the Jose MacGregor, made with Scotch, Licor 43, Regan’s orange bitters and a lemon twist.

• And then, of course, there’s my little tale of having my breath knocked out of me two ways: one, caused by gravity, and the other, by Campari. While the former has left me permanently afraid of leaping from high places, the second eventually led to my current passion for the Jasmine.

Thanks to all who participated – I’ll also put up reminders for the next two events in a separate post.

Tags: Mixology Monday by Paul
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Thirty-some summers ago, when I was a kid taking swim lessons, I had a very rude experience, courtesy of the high-dive at my local pool. All that summer I’d been an enthusiastic swimmer, sticking my face under the surface, venturing into the deep end, and even getting past that natural animal fear of climbing up a ladder then leaping into the open air. Then, one day on the high-dive, something went wrong. Just a little wrong, mind you — despite what some people may think from time to time, I didn’t plummet head-first into the concrete. Instead, as I was jumping from the board, I twisted just a little bit — perhaps I was indecisive about entering the water head- or feet-first, and gravity did its thing while I was still making up my mind — and I hit the water surface in full belly-flop. It was the kind of smack that makes you instantly lose your breath from the shock and the shame, and even from under the water I could hear all the other kids and the instructors let out an “ooh!” in unison.

For a novice drinker, the first taste of Campari is akin to a belly-flop at the bar. As partisans on either side of the great Campari gap would no doubt agree, this Italian bitter is, to put it gently, an acquired taste. An enticing garnet color in the glass — making one think of gentle, welcoming drinks such as Port or Marsala — Campari shocks the taste buds with an instant and complex bitterness. After the first taste, the flavor lingers with various levels of brisk dryness, teaching you with every corner of its nuanced flavor that there are many more forms of bitterness than you’d ever previously imagined.

I first tried Campari while backpacking around Europe at the age of 20. At the time, my tastes ran no more exotic than lager, and the sip of Campari came as an assertive slap. It’s only been over the last few years that I’ve forced myself to come to terms with Campari’s distinctive flavor, and only this summer that I’ve come to truly crave it.

Part of the credit for this Campari satori goes to a modern classic cocktail called the Jasmine. First created by Paul Harrington, a master bartender-turned-architect, the Jasmine is a complex and refreshing mixture that tastes surprisingly like grapefruit juice. As Harrington relates in his indispensible yet woefully hard-to-find bartending guide, Cocktail: The Drinks Bible for the 21st Century (written with Laura Moorhead), he created this drink for a regular customer named Matt Jasmine while working at the Townhouse Bar & Grill in Emeryville, California. Inspired by the classic Prohibition cocktail, the Pegu, Harrington used gin as his base spirit then added lemon, Cointreau and Campari, and served the mix straight-up with a twist of lemon.

Don’t let the drink’s appearance be deceiving — as Harrington notes, “Put a pink drink on the bar, and everybody wants one. They think it’s a Cosmopolitan — then they make a face when they taste it.” But unlike Campari cocktails such as the Negroni and the Americano, in the Jasmine, Campari’s assertive bitterness is happy to let someone else drive. The Cointreau nicely counters the bitterness without overly sweetening the drink, and the lemon helps keep the edges sharp, so after finishing a Jasmine, you’re ready to proceed to dinner.

The Jasmine isn’t, strictly speaking, a summer drink — I can see being perfectly happy with one at most any time of year. But it’s a drink I first encountered in the summer (a couple of years ago), and it’s the drink I’ve become very fond of this summer, even having the luck to have been served one (a small, taster cup of one, at least) by Harrington himself, at Tales of the Cocktail in July. For this Mixology Monday, I chose the theme, “Goodbye, Summer,” and I can think of no cocktail I’ve learned more from or enjoyed more this particular summer than the Jasmine.

Jasmine

• 1 1/2 ounces gin
• 1/4 ounce Cointreau
• 1/4 ounce Campari
• 3/4 ounce lemon juice

Shake with cracked ice until very cold, strain into chilled cocktail glass and garnish with a lemon twist. Pucker up.

Did I say Mixology Monday? Yep, it’s that time again — if you haven’t already, send your contribution my way (just stick a link in the comments section), and I’ll be putting together a wrap-up promptly.

Tags: Drinks, Gin, Mixology Monday by Paul
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Remember the old saw about how, if you took a million monkeys and gave them each a typewriter, they’d eventually come up with the works of Shakespeare? Well edit “typewriter” to read “cocktail shaker,” and stick the monkeys in a well-stocked bar, and the banana-addled mixologists would come up with a Cameron’s Kick in about the same amount of time it’d take that set of simian scribes to work their way around to Titus Andronicus.

Along with other head-scratchers such as the Blood & Sand, the Floridita and the Last Word, the Cameron’s Kick has a distinctive air of the implausible about it. With two (related, though still very different) base spirits in equal measure matched with lemon juice and — of all things — orgeat in the sweetness role, the Cameron’s Kick seems like something that no bartender would ever intentionally put together, and it’s a mix that, for all reasonable purposes, just –shouldn’t — WORK. But somehow, it does.

This cocktail first pops up (to the best of my knowledge) in Harry Craddock’s Savoy Cocktail Book from 1930. Craddock doesn’t list the bartender behind the Cameron’s Kick (or the basis for the weird name), so it’s left to us to wonder if the creator was blessed with divine inspiration, or was maybe just tossing stuff together like a bunch of monkeys trashing a bar. I’d come across the recipe a number of times while browsing the book, and kept ignoring it, put off by the use of two spirits in the base — two notoriously difficult-to-mix-with spirits, at that — and the funky-sounding recipe. Chances are, I’d still be neglecting this drink if David Wondrich hadn’t resuscitated it for Killer Cocktails, and served it to the assembled guests (myself included) during the Spirited Dinner he hosted at the most recent Tales of the Cocktail. Wondrich uses Craddock’s recipe, with the addition of a piece of orange peel for garnish. It’s a nice touch, and lends a hint of freshness to this long-forgotten drink that deserves to be discovered all over again.

Cameron’s Kick

• 1 ounce Scotch (blended, please — Famous Grouse works well)
• 1 ounce Irish whiskey
• 1/2 ounce fresh lemon juice
• 1/2 ounce orgeat

Shake with ice and strain into chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with orange twist.

Of course, not everything with the Cameron’s Kick can be as easy as it looks — search for the recipe on cocktaildb.com or any of a number of other web sites, and you’ll find a similar though very different recipe, one that uses the Scotch and Irish base (in different proportions), but then swaps the orgeat for orange bitters. In a word, no.

Tags: Drinks, Irish Whiskey, Scotch by Paul
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A new month, and a new issue of Imbibe magazine is out.

Along with features about the drinks of Jamaica and 15 beverage innovators (and a nice quote by Darcy in the Distilled section, and a drink by Jamie Boudreau in the Uncorked section), and a piece about vermouth in the Elements department (there’s the self-serving reference for the day), this issue includes a new regular column, “What the Doctor Orders,” by Ted “Dr. Cocktail” Haigh.

Doc doesn’t mess around with this debut column, and heads right for the 19th century with a full-bore effort to revive the Fix. As he writes, “In its short 38-year lifespan, even bartenders pondered what made a fix a fix.” Starting with a mix of booze, lemon juice, water, sugar and ice, the fix evolved into a concoction made with pineapple or raspberry syrups, and occasionally liqueurs, before disappearing as the new century dawned. Haigh takes his fixes from this later stage of development, and prescribes two fixes that include a homemade pineapple syrup.

Obscure cocktail … exacting preparation … ingredients that require special shopping trips and at least 24 hours of preparation time … sounds like my kind of drink!

To make one of these fixes, you need to have pineapple syrup on hand. While I suppose you can buy it, the idea of processed pineapple-flavored syrups kind of gives me the shudders, so I elected to follow the home-brew method.

Pineapple Syrup

• 4 cups sugar
• 2 cups water
• 1 small pineapple
• smidgen of vodka or other neutral-flavored spirits

Mix the sugar and water until fully dissolved. Add the pineapple (skinned and cubed), and let sit for 24 hours. Remove the pineapple, pressing with a hand juicer to get some juice into the mix. Strain through cheesecloth or a fine strainer, and add the spirits for preservative. Refrigerate.

Brandy Fix (Haigh credits this to Harry Johnson’s Bartender’s Manual, 1888)

• 2 ounces brandy
• 1/2 ounce fresh lime juice
• 1/2 ounce pineapple syrup
• dash of green Chartreuse
• 1/4 ounce simple syrup

Shake with ice and strain into a wine glass or tumbler filled with crushed ice. Add a splash of seltzer, adorn with lots of fruit and go to it.

I think the Chartreuse was what prompted me to make this — combined with the pineapple syrup and the always kind of haughty taste of brandy, the Chartreuse made the Fix taste like a true 19th century creature.

Pick up a copy of Imbibe (or, of course, subscribe) to find the full details, along with other recipes. And if you’re curious about vermouth….

Tags: Brandy, Drinks, Special Projects by Paul
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