While most of the online coverage I’ve seen regarding the new Food & Wine 2009 Cocktail Guide has been in relation to Eric Felten’s excellent Wall Street Journal piece, “A Welcome Sign of Vodka’s Decline” (though Anita also gives a good rundown of the book over at Married…With Dinner), I thought I’d dip into the book in search of some good recipes.

I only started picking up the Food & Wine Cocktails series a couple of years ago, so I don’t have much of a long-term perspective on how the drinks have changed over the years. But what I do find appealing is the way the current book is organized, with some themed chapters arranged by individual bartenders — such as the Aperitif section from Jamie Boudreau and the Seasonal Drinks section from Todd Thrasher — while other chapters were compiled by Jim Meehan and include drinks both classic and modern from a range of different bartenders and approaches to mixology.

I’ve already gone through the book and tagged a number of promising recipes with Post-It notes; here’s one that caught my eye: the Flor de Jalisco. Included in the Latin Drinks chapter that was arranged by Death & Co. bartender Joaquin Simo, this original cocktail by Simo is somewhat similar to another drink I really enjoy, Jamie’s Marmalade Sour. A basic tequila sour with a citrusy twist, the Flor de Jalisco seems like the kind of cocktail that’s inventive enough to appeal to a crowd of discriminating drinkers, yet easy enough to construct so it could be cranked out in quantity.

Flor de Jalisco

• 2 ounces blanco tequila
• 3/4 ounce fresh lemon juice
• 1/2 ounce agave nectar
• 1 teaspoon orange marmalade

Combine ingredients in a shaker and shake well with ice. Strain into chilled coupe glass and garnish with an orange twist.

I used Milagro blanco, because they recently sent me a sample and I wanted to give it a test drive. I can see some real potential in this drink; when I make it again (and it’s good enough to break out a few more times), I might try using lime instead of lemon (though maybe I’m stuck in that tequila = lime mindset), along with a slightly larger dose of marmalade, as its rich citric jamminess is somewhat obscured by the acid from the lemon juice.

Anyone give this a try? Let me know what you think–

This drink is part of 30/30, a series of 30 drinks in 30 days — or as much as I can keep up before collapsing in a weary, booze-addled heap.

Tags: Drinks, Tequila, Thirty in 30 by Paul
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In the late fall and early winter, I fell into a swoon regarding the perfect marriage between two ingredients: rye whiskey and apple brandy. While I’d flirted with this combination before, I’d never really explored its potential. By November, though, I was reaching for the black-labeled bottles of Rittenhouse bonded rye and Laird’s bonded apple brandy on most nights, trying different liqueurs and other flavoring agents to take the drinks in different directions. While there were a couple of loser drinks in the trials, most came through incredibly well. Here’s the drink that first sparked my interest in this flavor combination, a cocktail that I tried several years ago and have kept coming back to on a regular basis: the Diamondback.

The first appearance I know of for this drink is in Ted Saucier’s Bottoms Up, from 1951, and Saucier describes it as composed of two parts Old Schenley rye whiskey, with one part each of applejack and yellow Chartreuse. I initially came across this drink on Chuck Taggart’s blog way back in 2005, when my blog was in its infancy, and the comment I posted for the drink was, I think, my first exchange with Chuck. The recipe he posted (using the more potent green Chartreuse in place of the yellow) had likewise been suggested in a blog comment by Murray Stenson, who had posted the Diamondback on Zig Zag’s bar menu. After reading Chuck’s post I became an occasional fan of the Diamondback, and even included it in an Imbibe story on applejack a couple years back.

I mention this connection because I’m coming off a busy weekend, one that was filled with eating and drinking with Chuck and Wes (and a whole slew of Seattle cocktail people) during their long-overdue visit to Seattle. Murray even dropped by during last night’s cocktail party at Dayne & Wendy’s, and at some point Keith Waldbauer mixed up a Diamondback. This may seem a trivial personal detail to many, but the way I’ve come to know people like Chuck and Murray over the almost four years since I first came across this recipe made covering this drink appropriate, in a sentimental kinda way. Don’t care for the sentimentality? Mix one anyway — with the alcoholic firepower supplied by three ingredients in the 100-proof and up range, the Diamondback will put you in a reflective state of mind pretty fast.

Diamondback

• 1 1/2 ounces rye whiskey (Rittenhouse bonded strongly recommended)
• 3/4 ounce applejack (Laird’s bonded apple brandy strongly recommended)
• 3/4 ounce Chartreuse (yellow works, but green works better)*

Stir well with ice and strain into chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a cherry if that’s your thing.

* As Dietsch noted when he wrote up this drink for Mixology Monday, this amount of Chartreuse can push the drink over to the sweet side; you may wish to dial it back to a half-ounce or so and see how that suits your tastes.

This drink is part of 30/30, a series of 30 drinks in 30 days — or as much as I can keep up before collapsing in a weary, booze-addled heap.

Tags: Applejack, Drinks, Rye, Thirty in 30 by Paul
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Last spring, while working on a liqueurs article for Imbibe, I interviewed Toby Maloney, a veteran of a number of bars, notably including The Violet Hour in Chicago. While talking about Campari, Toby suggested a drink that he’d placed on the spring bar menu, and described it as a “Campari gateway drink”.

I’ve been a fan of Campari for years, but my first encounters with this garnet aperitif were not exactly pleasant — I recall one grueling experience in a Munich bar about 20 years ago, trying to gulp down a Campari and soda so as not to embarass myself in front of some new acquaintances who were absolutely in love with the stuff. More recently, after the booze bug bit, I powered through a string of Negronis and Americanos until I developed a taste for Campari (my discover of the Jasmine helped, a lot), and now I heart the stuff.

Toby’s Riviera is not only a great introduction to Campari for amari beginners, but it’s a fantastic spring cocktail. I don’t have a picture as the drink’s main component — a mixture of assorted booze and fresh pineapple — takes a couple of days of soaking time, and the morning sunshine coming into my living room just reminded me that the season is right to put together another batch. Anyway, I’m off to the store this afternoon to pick up some pineapple, and this is what I’ll be drinking later in the week. The recipe makes a large batch suitable for parties, but you can size it down if you just want to have it around the house for a couple of days (don’t let it linger too long, though — as the pineapple oxidizes, it gets a funky flavor). Let me know if you made this last year after the recipe ran in Imbibe, or if you’re giving it a shot this season.

Riviera, by Toby Maloney

The base:

• 4 cups gin (use an old standby like Bombay, Beefeater or Tanqueray)
• 2 cups maraschino liqueur
• 1 cup Campari
• 1 pineapple

Skin the pineapple and cut into wedges, then soak in a big jar filled with all the booze for at least 24 hours, and no more than 48 hours. Strain out the pineapple — it’s actually pretty tasty if you start snacking on it — and refrigerate the base until ready to use.

The drink:

• 2 ounces base mixture
• 3/4 ounce fresh lemon juice
• 3/4 ounce simple syrup
• 1 egg white

Combine ingredients and shake hard without ice for a good 10 seconds to aerate the egg white; add ice and shake again for another 10 seconds. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass; garnish with a mint leaf and a few drops (not dashes) of orange bitters.

This drink is part of 30/30, a series of 30 drinks in 30 days — or as much as I can keep up before collapsing in a weary, booze-addled heap.

Tags: Drinks, Gin, Thirty in 30 by Paul
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Unless you’re one of the people who reads every cocktail blog that’s popped up online over the past few years — and this may cover a good chunk of my regular readership — you may have missed a regular little gathering that happens every week called Thursday Drink Night, hosted at the Mixoloseum. The idea is simple: there’s a theme (typically a particular brand or spirit, or a certain style of drink), and anyone who has some extra time on their hands logs in to the chat room on Thursday night and starts proposing original recipes along that theme, and trying recipes suggested by others. The drink quality ranges from surprisingly good to execrably vile, and once the whole boozy mess has been cleared away, a few drinks are somewhat arbitrarily selected as the best, and readers can vote on their favorites; the participant who created the winning drink is awarded, well, something.

Anyway, a couple of brands recently chose to participate in TDNs with a live component held at Vessel, here in Seattle. The most recent event was sponsored by Mount Gay Extra Old Rum; here’s one of the drinks that I came up with for the event that I’ve revisited in recent days and, in my humble opinion, ain’t too bad — the dry coconut note I always get from the MGXO is accentuated by the tawny port, and the apricot liqueur adds a touch of fruity lusciousness. And the name? Stifferino was already taken, so I thought I’d reach for another bit of nonsense.

Maisy Dotes

• 2 ounces aged rum (Mount Gay Extra Old works well)
• 3/4 ounce tawny port (I used Sandeman’s 10-year)
• 1-2 teaspoons apricot liqueur, to taste
• 2 dashes aromatic bitters (The Bitter Truth Aromatic Bitters are excellent here; Fee Brothers Whiskey Barrel is next-best option, followed by Angostura)

Stir well with ice and strain into chilled cocktail glass. Twist a big piece of orange peel over the drink and use as garnish.

My drink didn’t win that week — hell, it wasn’t even nominated; must not have used enough cinnamon syrup or ginger beer — but to my taste it has some staying power, and I can see breaking it out on occasion. Try it yourself and let me know what you think.

This drink is part of 30/30, a series of 30 drinks in 30 days — or as much as I can keep up before collapsing in a weary, booze-addled heap.

Tags: Drinks, Port, Rum, Thirty in 30 by Paul
1 Comment »

I really wish I could say that I didn’t pick this drink largely because of its name (and because of the resultant off-topic Google searches that will lead people to this blog), but that wouldn’t be quite true. I also wish I could say that I liked this drink a lot more than I did, but that wouldn’t quite be the case either.

Not that this is a bad drink, not by any means — well, not as long as you like Fernet Branca. Fetched from the pages of Barflies and Cocktails, the Stifferino was allegedly created by “Man-About-Town” W.C. Weaver, who dedicated it to “Doc Voronoff” — a name you usually come across in relation to the Monkey Gland (another drink that I realize I’ve never covered on this blog, and may get to as part of the 30/30, even though the recipe’s been thoroughly blogged before, including by myself over at Serious Eats). Here’s how Arthur Moss relates it: “The wintergreen Weaver says its good for all young boys over forty-five like ‘Sparrow’ or George Bowles […] Methusaleh would think he was Ponce de Leon.”

Fernet Branca so thoroughly takes over most cocktails that I was attracted to its use as the foundation for this drink — especially seeing how it was paired with equal parts of dry and sweet vermouth, and experience has taught me that vermouth works wonderfully with the more aggressive Fernet, perhaps because its weaker and more docile nature gives the alpha-booze amari full license to dominate without overreacting in a surly way.

Ultimately, though, this drink is a spruced-up and more elaborate shot of Fernet; the other flavors play nicely together, but there’s not a unifying center. I can see trotting this out for an unusual (and lower alcohol) aperitif for someone who appreciates Italian amari, but otherwise this won’t get a lot of play around the house, no matter what properties it’s alleged to have.

Stifferino

• 1 ounce Fernet Branca
• 1 ounce sweet vermouth
• 1 ounce dry vermouth
• 1 dash brandy

Stir well with ice, strain into chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with strip of orange peel.

This drink is part of 30/30, a series of 30 drinks in 30 days — or as much as I can keep up before collapsing in a weary, booze-addled heap.

Tags: Drinks, Thirty in 30, Vermouth by Paul
2 Comments »