I’d like to be able to claim that I’m writing up several Chartreuse drinks based solely on my enthusiasm for the liqueur. A claim like that would probably be about 80 percent right.

I mean, sure, I like the stuff, though I had an adaptation phase for Chartreuse that was almost as long as the one I had for more challenging flavors such as those in Campari or Fernet Branca. With its deep, sonorous potency and a flavor as elaborately rendered and as indecipherable as Sanskrit (for me, anyway), Chartreuse was just way too intense for me to get very close to for a very long time. Eventually, though, after repeat applications of Last Words and Chartreuse Swizzles and the like, I finally came to enjoy a more comfortable relationship with the liqueur.

Anyway, that 80 percent accurate thing, and the remaining 20 percent of the equation? Rack that up to my ongoing efforts to push chocolate into respectability in the cocktail world, and the mind-blowingly close yet weird relationship the two flavors have together.

I’ll get more into this later (and I’ve already touched on it in the past both in print and online), but many folks in the cocktail world seem to automatically dismiss chocolate as a flavor. I suspect this is due to a few reasons; chocolate is such an easily approachable flavor that it has all those candy connotations we try to avoid with more mature beverages; likewise, the sugary blur of chocolate martinis and things of that ilk have justifiably soured many bartenders and drink geeks against anything remotely related; and finally, we just don’t have good chocolate liqueurs available in the U.S. There have been a few steps in this direction, though; the debut of Bittermens Xocolatl Mole bitters have helped make chocolate more respectable, and the subsequent development of similar bitters from Fee Brothers and from Scrappy’s demonstrate there’s some enthusiasm out there, somewhere.

But anyway — back to Chartreuse. I can’t recall when this combo was first introduced to me, but a simple mix of green Chartreuse and hot chocolate apparently has quite a history, if not an accompanying story, especially among the après ski crowd. In cocktails, the pairing of flavors if not strictly speaking the same ingredients hasn’t shown up a lot, at least not until recently, but where it has popped up, the results have largely been devastatingly good.

Here’s a cocktail that blew my mind the first time I tried it: the Pago Pago Cocktail. I first came across this on the Tiki+ iPhone app, developed in conjunction with Jeff “Beachbum” Berry. Since then, the drink has appeared in Beachbum Berry Remixed, an essential volume in any serious drinking library (though the drink shouldn’t be confused with the similarly named Pago Pago, which is a completely different critter). According to Jeff, he came across the Pago Pago Cocktail in a 1940 book called The How and When. Starting with a base of gold Puerto Rican rum — Bacardi 8 works well here, but sometimes I’ll go just slightly richer with something like Cockspur or Mount Gay Eclipse — the drink matches green Chartreuse not only with crème de cacao, but with fresh pineapple as well (NOT pineapple juice — tried it before, and nuh-uh). As seen in drinks such as the Chartreuse Swizzle, pineapple has about as much love for Chartreuse as does chocolate, and the mix of the three (plus a little lime juice) is just an unforgettable combination. I mix this regularly at home, and I recall from one evening at Tales of the Cocktail last summer that there’s a certain love for this drink among the Boston LUPEC crowd; I couldn’t be in better company in my enthusiasm for this drink.

Pago Pago Cocktail
adapted from Beachbum Berry Remixed

• 1 1/2 ounces gold Puerto Rican rum
• 3-4 chunks fresh pineapple
• 1/2 ounce fresh lime juice
• 1/2 ounce green Chartreuse
• 1/4 ounce white crème de cacao

Muddle the pineapple in a cocktail shaker with the lime juice and liqueurs. Add the rum and a bunch of ice, and shake well for about 10 seconds. Strain through a fine-mesh strainer into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish? Hell, does a drink like this need garnish?

The Pago Pago Cocktail is what Chartreuse tastes like on a tropical cruise. But it’s almost December, there are Christmas lights going up — without going the simple & traditional Verte Chaud route, what else is there?

A couple of years ago, this is the question Jamie Boudreau tackled, and the result was this: the Green Glacier. Taking the Chartreuse / chocolate combo to heart, Jamie placed these ingredients on a rich base of brandy, accented with a little Angostura. This has become a regular winter drink in my house, when I’m in the mood for a little richness and, honestly, a little potency (remember that green Chartreuse clocks in at 120 proof, so with nothing more than liquor and liqueur in the glass, the Green Glacier packs some heat). I started by mixing this drink with cognac, but depending on the brand, it can weigh in on the sweet side; recently I’ve gone to using Armagnac, which seems a bit drier and has an earthy flavor that offsets well against the liqueurs.

Green Glacier
created by Jamie Boudreau

• 2 ounces brandy
• 3/4 ounce green Chartreuse
• 1/4 ounce white crème de cacao
• 2 dashes Angostura bitters

Stir with ice, strain into chilled cocktail glass. Again, no garnish.

A very similar drink came across my radar a few months after I first encountered the Green Glacier, but to be honest I didn’t even think about the similarity between the two until just recently. The Prospector was introduced to me by Jay Jones, then a partner and head bartender at Pourhouse in Vancouver, now a consultant with Barjonesing and an organizer for the upcoming Tales of the Cocktail in Vancouver. Jay’s a longtime fixture of Vancouver’s impressive cocktail scene, and I talked to him in the summer of 2009 for an article that later ran in Imbibe. Jay named The Prospector after Gassy Jack Deighton, a prospector and saloonkeeper who built the first bar in what came to become Vancouver’s Gastown neighborhood (also named after him) almost 150 years ago.

The drink is nearly identical to the Green Glacier — nearly, in that it prunes the brandy (Jones specifies cognac) back by a half-ounce, and similarly docks the Chartreuse by a quarter-ounce but makes up for the liqueur reduction with a bump in the cacao and a little Cointreau (The Prospector is also served over ice, while the Green Glacier is served up, so call that another difference if you like, and while we’re at it 86 the bitters and give it a lemon twist).

But while they look so similar on paper, the drinks are sufficiently different in flavor to merit giving each a try. Where the Green Glacier is rich, heavy and powerful, the Prospector is a bit more relaxed; the Cointreau, even though it’s a liqueur, applies a subtle drying action to the drink, keeping the flavor from sagging, and Cointreau’s resonant orange note also lightens the impact of the Chartreuse, letting it still take center stage at first sip but giving the cacao an opportunity to round out on the finish.

The Prospector
created by Jay Jones, Barjonesing

• 1 1/2 ounces cognac
• 1/2 ounce green Chartreuse
• 1/2 ounce white crème de cacao
• 1/2 ounce Cointreau

Stir ingredients with ice until chilled, about 20 seconds; strain into ice-filled rocks glass; garnish with a big lemon twist.

And while I’d only meant to write up three Chartreuse / chocolate drinks that I really enjoy, there’s one more that really should be mentioned: the Brigadier, from San Francisco bartender Neyah White. Neyah gave me this recipe a couple of years ago, while I was working on an article for Imbibe about Cherry Heering. I used another of Neyah’s recipes in the article, but I did put this up on Serious Eats a while back, and I break this out at home sometimes on cold nights; I don’t usually go for sweet, dessert kinds of drinks, but on a nasty night this very simple variation on the hot chocolate-and-Chartreuse combo can be particularly comforting.

Brigadier
created by Neyah White

• 1 ounce green Chartreuse
• 1 ounce Cherry Heering
• About 4 ounces decent hot chocolate, to taste

Mix ingredients in a warmed mug; stir. Ta-da!

Anyway, there’s four drinks with Chartreuse and chocolate. Okay, I’ll shut up now.

Tags: Brandy, Drinks, Rum, Sixty in 30 by Paul
12 Comments »

A little over five years ago, when I first started this blog, mezcal hadn’t even risen high enough in the cocktail world to be considered an afterthought. Sure, Ron Cooper had begun importing his Del Maguey single-village mezcals back in the ‘90s, but these things take time, and while tequila was in full bloom following the turn of the century, mezcal took its time to step into the cocktail-geek spotlight.

I’m running late in getting this post up, so I’ll keep it short; I’m also a couple of drinks behind on this 60/30 thing due to taking the day off for Thanksgiving, so I’ll toss in a third drink (plus, a bonus / screwup drink that’s still kinda tasty) to help move things along.

For the handful of people out there who still haven’t ventured to the artisanal mezcal well, mezcal in many ways tastes like tequila without makeup. While a blanco tequila can have flavors of peppers, slate and wildflowers, all on top of a gentle, juicy agave sweetness, mezcal is just kind of more everything – more dark spices, more jammy richness of cooked pears and baked apples, more earthy minerality, more firey, more smoky, more primal, more visceral, more grrrrr…. A single mezcal can have most, or all, or none of these characteristics, venturing out into its own part of the spirituous universe where nothing at all tastes quite the way it does.

Given its potency of flavor, not to mention its cost, perhaps the best way to slip into mezcal mixology is to use it as an accent ingredient, where its rich smoky everything can play off the other flavors in the glass without taking over the show. Here’s a drink that uses mezcal as an accent to very good effect: the Red Ant.

I wrote this up for the September/October 2010 issue of Imbibe, as part of a feature on cocktail bitters. The Red Ant was created by Thomas Waugh, then a bartender at The Alembic in San Francisco but now at Death & Co. in New York. The drink is named for the Rio Hormiga Colorada, or Red Ant River, in Oaxaca, and uses a mere barspoon Del Maguey Chichicapa in a mix that includes big, vibrant flavors from Rittenhouse 100-proof rye whiskey, Cherry Heering and kirschwasser. The mezcal hangs over the drink like a plume of smoke from a wood stove, and the combination of mezcal and kirschwasser — which brings its own ethereal drama to the mix in a big way — is really quite enchanting.

Red Ant
From Thomas Waugh, Death & Co., NYC

• 1 1/2 oz. rye whiskey (Rittenhouse bonded; failing that, Wild Turkey 101)
• 1/2 oz. kirschwasser
• 1/2 oz. Cherry Heering
• 1 barspoon mezcal (Chichicapa if you got it)
• 2 dashes Bittermens Xocolatl Mole bitters
• –3 cherries skewered on a pick, as garnish. Sneer all you like, but it looks like an ant; besides, I’m still kind of a sucker for Toschi Amarena

Stir well with ice & strain into chilled coupe. Stick that cherry ant in there and shut up for a while about the damn cherries.

Excellent, excellent drink — but there’s an accidental variation on this drink that I also like quite a bit. See, I first heard about this drink from Avery Glasser, who with his wife Janet is the mastermind behind Bittermens Bitters. Somewhere in talking about this drink with Avery, there was a mixup in the ingredients, and for a couple of weeks I was sampling this lovely drink using the wrong recipe. Thomas Waugh set me right, and the recipe above is the correct version; but, the “mistake” version also kinda rocked, so I’ll pass that along as well. Keep in mind that this alternate doesn’t include mezcal, so the whole “Red Ant” idea is out the window, as is the rationale for including this drink in a mezcal post, but hey, it’s just liquor.

Mistaken Ant

–same recipe as above, except substitute 1 barspoon cinnamon syrup for the mezcal; Trader Tiki Cinnamon Syrup is quite nice here

Sure, you lack the smoke and a little bit of the complexity, but cinnamon, Cherry Heering and kirschwasser, with some mole bitters in the mix? There’s nothing wrong at all with that mistake.

Anyway, the next step in mezcal mixing is often to bump up the mezcal to a full ounce or so, matching it step for step with the mediating effects of tequila. Julian Cox at Rivera in Los Angeles passed along this recipe for his Poblano Escobar, which ran last summer in Imbibe. Julian mixes the drink with mezcal or with blanco tequila; I’ve made these a few times at home, to try out each variation, and for the most recent round I used equal parts Cabo Wabo blanco (it had been sent as a sample and isn’t half bad, so I thought I’d give it a spin in this drink) and Del Maguey Mezcal Vida (not a sample, bought with my own damn cash, and at about $34 a bottle, much more affordable than the rest of the Del Maguey line).

I’ve also been guilty in the past of being dismissive of muddled ingredients, a position I still hold on a certain level because it’s so overdone, and so badly in many places, that I wish it’d be approached more seriously, but I’ve also sampled some fantastic drinks made with the “garden fresh” approach, so I’d now like to extend a cautious and respectful gesture of welcome to the muddlers of the world. In this drink, poblano peppers and pineapple are both crushed into the mix; hey, it works.

Poblano Escobar
From Julian Cox, Rivera, Los Angeles

• 2 oz. blanco tequila or mezcal, or some combination thereof
• 3/4 oz. Royal Combier (Julian’s call; I like it, but if you don’t have it you can sub Cointreau)
• 1 oz. fresh lime juice
• 1/2 tsp. agave nectar
• 4 chunks fresh pineapple
• 2 or 3 1/4-inch-think rings of sliced poblano chiles, seeds removed
• 1/4 tsp. ground cumin

Muddle chiles in a cocktail shaker with lime juice and liqueur. Add pineapple, cumin and agave nectar and muddle again. Add tequila and/or mescal and load up on ice; shake well and double-strain into chilled rocks glass filled with a large cube of ice. Garnish with slices of poblano pepper and orange.

Of course, no discussion of mezcal cocktails is complete without mentioning Phil Ward at Mayahuel in NYC. I’ve written up a bunch of Phil’s drinks in the past, both online and in print, and he’s always one of my favorite bartenders to interview (though, I’m ashamed to say I still haven’t had the chance to sit across the bar from him). I have another of Phil’s drinks coming up later on, but a couple of weeks ago a Mayahuel drink called Jacko’s End (created, apparently, on the day MJ performed that moonwalk into the great beyond) was listed on Tasting Table’s list of “The Year’s Best Cocktails” for NYC. In this one, mezcal is matched against an equal measure of Laird’s bonded apple brandy — a combo I could automatically taste in my mind, with that rich body of smoky mezcal up against the sharp bite of apple brandy — fleshed out with a little Benedictine and a couple of dashes of bitters. Simple, basic, classically designed and with premium ingredients: that’s all I needed to know.

Jacko’s End
From Mayahuel, NYC

• 1 ounce mezcal (I used Vida, for the reasons stated above)
• 1 ounce Laird’s 100-proof apple brandy
• 1/2 ounce Benedictine
• 2 dashes Peychaud’s bitters
• –pear slice, for garnish

You know the drill – ice, stir, strain into chilled glass, garnish. Like I said, simple.

Between the Benedictine and the mezcal, there’s a silky, honeyed texture to this drink. The sharpness of the Laird’s bonded and the peppery serrations in the mezcal combine in a really pleasant assertiveness in the drink, followed by the ghostly herbaceousness of mezcal-meets-Benedictine, finishing with that little wisp of smoke. This one’s going into the regular rotation.

Tags: Brandy, Drinks, mezcal, Rye, Sixty in 30, Tequila by Paul
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Alright, it’s the night before Thanksgiving, so I’m gonna make this quick (and I’m also going to take High Turkey Day off from the 60/30 project, then toss in two more drinks over the weekend to make up, just because I can).

About a year ago, as we were descending once again into the holiday season, I became enamored with brandy-based cocktails. I’d always been something of a fan of the brandy realm of mixology, and old-school Brandy Crustas and East India Cocktails satisfied me in ways that many other base spirits and cocktails just couldn’t. But brandy drinks can be clunky; as I mentioned in passing in a piece on California brandy I wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle last month, cognac and similar brandies have a real or implied sweetness about them; as a result, drinks made with these spirits take well to the drying qualities of citrus, but in spirit-forward drinks it’s quite easy to slip into the trap of making a cognac cocktail too cloying. There are alternatives, of course — Armagnac is usually earthier and drier, and has a good backbone as a cocktail ingredient, and then there are California brandies such as Germain-Robin, which I wrote about earlier this week — but for cognac-cocktail fans such as me, what other paths are there to follow?

Fortunately for me at the time, Murray Stenson at Zig Zag Café was already on top of that question. I was in the habit for a few weeks of having a very simple drink made with cognac, Root liqueur and bitters, which is way more of an alluring mixture than it has any right to be, but one night Murray asked if I’d like an Epicurean — a drink I couldn’t recall ever coming across.

Murray is largely a proponent of the David Embury school of mixing, and not surprisingly the Epicurean came from Embury’s The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks. I haven’t done a careful sort through the library, but a casual breeze through a few books and a few minutes of stray Googling didn’t turn up any other citations for this drink. Pity, that — I’ll admit the recipe doesn’t look that exciting on paper, simply a 2:1 mixture of brandy and dry vermouth, with a modifier of kummel liqueur and a dash of bitters. I could be just biased about this, but the mix of aged spirits and dry vermouth has rarely taken me anywhere I’d like to go again, and while I find the caraway/cumin flavor of kummel interesting in an academic kind of way, it’s rarely a flavor I find myself really jonesing for — unlike certain other spirits writers, who manage to work it into all kinds of things.

But somehow in this drink, the things I’d ordinarily think of as negative characteristics in dry vermouth and kummel in a brandy context — vermouth’s flattening powers with the light floral flourishes, so nice in gin drinks but distracting with aged spirits; and kummel’s sonorous savory notes, which seem to be dressed in out-of-fashion clothes and come across as stuffy and awkward next to the elegant delicacy of cognac — manage to cancel each other out, mostly, leaving a drink that still has the plushness of brandy but is streamlined, with little pops of spicy filigree out at the edges of the palate.

Anyway, the Epicurean: check it out.

Epicurean

• 2 ounces cognac or other good brandy
• 1 ounce dry vermouth
• 1/2 ounce kummel
• 1 dash Angostura bitters

Stir well with ice, strain into chilled glass. Embury doesn’t call for it, but a slender wisp of lemon zest emancipated from the fruit and sent, with a quick twist, into the depths of the drink, certainly isn’t a bad idea.

Of course, once I started thinking about dry vermouth and kummel, the immediately obvious drink to pop up on the radar is the Allies Cocktail. This drink appears in The Savoy Cocktail Book as 1:1 gin to vermouth, with a couple of dashes of kummel; I’ve seen it elsewhere as a 2:1 ratio with a couple of dashes (Embury) to a quarter-ounce (Gary Regan’s The Joy of Mixology) of kummel, essentially a wet martini with the spiced liqueur in place of orange bitters. And as to its name, story goes (which I can’t seem to find right now — help on a source for this, anyone?) that the ingredients — English gin, French vermouth, Russian kummel — represent the Triple Entente at the outbreak of World War I. Of course, the only kummel I’ve seen around lately is Gilka, from Germany, which kind of screws that whole thing up, so maybe best not to play up that story too much.

Anyway, the Allies has made the rounds of the cocktail guides and Internet searches way more than has the Epicurean. Which is one more example of a mediocre drink trumping a middling-to-good drink, for no discernable reason whatsoever. Not that the Allies is bad, not in any way — indeed, if you’ve got some kummel kicking around, whip out one of these (I vote with Embury on the tight-fistedness with the kummel); it has the lean brutality of a dry martini, with that little extra something that’s sometimes fun to have in the glass, like the brightness of orange bitters or the casual savagery of a little absinthe; the kummel adds a little archaic-yet-endearing Sally Bowles edge to the drink, which isn’t something you might want all the time, but when you want it, it works.

Allies Cocktail

• 2 ounces London dry gin
• 1 ounce dry vermouth
• 2-3 dashes kummel, to taste

Ice, of course; stir, of course; strain – now you’re getting it. Garnish? Lemon zest, why not.

Tags: Brandy, Drinks, Gin, Sixty in 30, Vermouth by Paul
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Earlier this fall I wrote a piece for the San Francisco Chronicle on a topic that just a few years ago would have made me roll my eyes: California brandy.

My parents kept a liquor cabinet when I was a kid, but except for a bottle or two of decent whisky, much of the inventory was, I’d later realize, kind of ho-hum: Gilbey’s gin, in the frosted bottle that I thought was the height of ‘70s glamor; Cutty Sark; a few liqueurs as garishly colored and as artificially hued as the shirts in my parents’ guests’ wardrobes.

Among the regular selection, as I recall, was a squat bottle of E&J Brandy. It would be a few more decades before I’d learn from Jim Meehan that while working in bars in Madison, Wisconsin, in his years before Pegu Club and PDT, bartenders referred to the brand as “Easy Juice” — but I knew from even that young age that there was something suspicious about that particular liquor. As a teenager, sneaking illicit sips from the bottles, I quickly learned the E&J just wasn’t for me (and to be fair, had it been a bottle of a truly tasty brandy such as something from Germain-Robin or Pierre Ferrand, I’d likely have thought the same thing). Once I was actually of legal age, and would come home to visit at Christmas, I’d reluctantly add a slug of the stuff to my cup of carton eggnog, figuring the sugar and the fat would somehow render it approachable.

This was all long ago, and once again to be fair, if a glass of E&J were placed in front of me now, I’d probably enjoy it more than I would have back then, even if “enjoy” isn’t exactly the word I’m looking for. My point is, for me and countless other drinkers, an introduction to brandy through the lens of the California-made spirit was usually an experience that didn’t bear repeating.

Today, of course, it’s all different, and there are some excellent brandies made in California; and in yet another case of “what’s old is new again,” California brandy did enjoy a certain degree of quality and respectability before Prohibition; afterwards, as with so much else, quality was primarily an afterthought. I’ve mentioned Germain-Robin as the producer of great California brandies, and there are others (read the full article for a few suggestions); and while working on the story, I came across two of my very favorite bartenders in the country who are both working with California brandy for what it can bring to a drink.

Thad Vogler, now proprietor at Bar Agricole in San Francisco, was the one who really got me thinking about California brandy to begin with. Thad’s primarily using the stuff from Marian Farms, near Fresno, which has a kind of rugged, Armagnac-style quality to it. It’s also a bit drier than some more familiar cognacs (and this also applies to brandies such as those from Germain-Robin). This is a big plus; while I love cognac cocktails, one of my prime concerns (aside from cost) is the overall sweetness level of the finished drink. Hit a cognac cocktail with sweet vermouth and a liqueur, and often the flavors get muddied, much like mixing with bourbon instead of a drier rye whiskey. With some of the California brandies (and with Armagnac, in many cases), there’s an earthy dryness that really makes for a more balanced drink, and that enables the base spirit to keep more of its distinctive flavor even when mixed with strong-flavored ingredients.

Here’s an example of a spirit-forward brandy drink that shines with these drier brandies: the Bombay Cocktail. This is on Bar Agricole’s menu, and is adapted from the Savoy Cocktail Book; Agricole makes it with the Marian Farms brandy, and locally made curacao and absinthe, along with Dolin vermouth. For my version, I’m going with Germain-Robin Fine Alambic brandy (now sold as “Craft Method” brandy), Marie Brizard curacao, Marteau absinthe and Dolin dry / Martelletti sweet vermouth, as this is what I have on hand / like / can get.

(I should also chime in here before I get too much further along: this post is part of Mixology Monday, the monthly online cocktail gathering; hosting this round is Dennis at Rock & Rye, and Dennis has chosen “Forgotten Cocktails” as the theme. While both of these drinks can currently be found on bar menus at top cocktail bars on the West Coast, so they’re not exactly “forgotten,” until recently they were pretty damn close, so cin cin and let’s keep playing.)

Bombay Cocktail

• 1 1/2 ounces brandy
• 3/4 ounce sweet vermouth
• 3/4 ounce dry vermouth
• 1/4 ounce curacao
• 2 dashes orange bitters
• 2 dashes absinthe

Combine in a mixing glass and fill with ice; stir well until chilled, about 30 seconds; strain into chilled cocktail glass. Twist a piece of lemon peel over the drink and use as garnish.

This strikes me as a kind of flavor balance between two old favorites, the Saratoga Cocktail (the rye/brandy/sweet vermouth one; there are other drinks with the same name) and the El Presidente, with its balance of dry vermouth and curacao. There is a measured richness to the drink, through the three darker, heavier ingredients, but the dry vermouth helps keep things in line (and I really do think the Dolin would work better here than Noilly Prat — you need light and bright for this drink), and the absinthe adds some complex aromatics to the finished product, along with a snaking taste of decadence.

While working on this article, and wondering who the hell else I should talk to, I went to Portland, Ore. and parked myself at Daniel Shoemaker’s Teardrop Lounge. Daniel is another fantastically talented bartender, and has one of the most finely tuned palates I’ve ever encountered. When I noticed that his bar menu listed a Brandy Scaffa made with Germain-Robin, I knew it wasn’t merely by chance that he was using that brandy. Daniel said that especially with a drink such as the Scaffa, which has a large dose of green Chartreuse and is served, sans ice or dilution, at full, just-you-and-god strength, the spark of California brandy just made sense.

The Brandy Scaffa is an old-timey kind of thing; versions of the drink appear in both Jerry Thomas’ 1863 guide and in Harry Johnson’s Bartender’s Manual that appeared a few years later (and I’ll spare you the blow-by-blow recap, but here’s a thread on the Scaffa on the Chanticleer Society – go, learn something). There are some differences between the two, but Teardrop’s version balances between them, notching up the already boisterous character of the drink with a little maraschino liqueur and a good shake of Boker’s bitters. This is a drink with tremendous flavor: not for the novice, no way, huh-uh, but as a nightcap for someone who really enjoys the taste of good spirits, the Brandy Scaffa is a fantastic choice – though since it’s served room-temp and full-strength, it’s also somewhat unexpected. I know it’s strong, I know it’s warm – if necessary to enjoy this drink, please feel free to grow a pair.

Brandy Scaffa

Adapted by Daniel Shoemaker, Teardrop Lounge, Portland, Ore.

• 1 1/4 ounce brandy
• 3/4 ounce green Chartreuse
• 1/2 ounce Luxardo maraschino
• 3 dashes Boker’s Bitters*

Build ingredients in a small rocks glass, without ice, stirring or garnish…

* Teardrop uses a housemade Boker’s bitters, and serves more in the drink, maybe a barspoon; for this version, try Adam Elmegirab’s Boker’s Bitters, available here and there and way over here.

And there you go – the first round to get the rest of the month underway, and for November’s Mixology Monday.

Tags: Brandy, Drinks, Mixology Monday, Sixty in 30 by Paul
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This week was the start of school here in Seattle, which means that promptly at 9:15 Wednesday morning I hustled my offspring through the doors of their elementary school and — while their new shoes were still squeaking in the hallways and before they’d had a chance to lose a backpack or a lunch box — I was on my way back home to enjoy the first uninterrupted work week (a three-day one, at that) I’ve had since June. So of course, I’m spending part of it blogging.

I guess “of course” isn’t entirely correct, considering how little attention I’ve given this site of late. But while my recent days have been filled more with driving my kids to play dates than with tinkering with cocktail ingredients, it hasn’t been a dry summer. And on the days that passed for sweltering here in the Pacific Northwest, more often than not I’d find my thoughts drifting in the direction of punch.

Part of this desire for tall, frosty glasses of drinks both potent and voluptuous could be due to the impending release of David Wondrich’s new book that covers the topic in depth — a priming of the palate, as it were, in anticipation of the rigorous experimentation the book will no doubt incite — but there’s more to it than that.

Y’see, in case you haven’t noticed in this whole cocktail renaissance that’s been under way for some time, there’s been a great deal of emphasis placed on precision, nuance and the ideal of esoteric ingredients. God knows I’ve done my part to push this whole thing along, but recently — and I’m certainly not alone in this — it’s all begun to seem a bit much. While I can still bore a bystander to tears when chatting with another cocktail geek, I’ve been at the point for a while where I honestly don’t give a shit about all the dogma and detail anymore. For all the heated debate about historical ingredients and the true origins of certain old classics, ultimately these are just drinks we’re talking about — they’re just fucking drinks. By getting too caught up in rigid formulae and absolute rules, we as a generation of drinkers are at risk of missing the most essential point: a drink is made for simple enjoyment, and different drinks please the drinker in different ways. And for me, with the whole sloughing off of rigidity and relaxing with things that simply taste good, few drinks fit the bill better than old-fashioned punches.

When you look at some of the old punch recipes — and here I’m talking about the single-serving punches of the sort that populate the old tomes of mixology, most notably Jerry Thomas’ book — there’s a certain “oh, what the hell” nature to them. Sure, they’re compounds of spirits, juices and other ingredients that all taste good together; but there’s also a carefree aspect to them. The Brandy Punch is a fine thing, but if you’re not in the mood for a cognac-heavy mix redolent of raspberries? No problem — Thomas has got you covered, and you can mix-and-match other ingredients to find a drink that does suit the bill. Punch is also forgiving, and for someone fatigued with the precision required for many high-falutin’ cocktails, this is a good thing; a splash this way or that of syrup or citrus won’t damage the drink, just give it more personality once it’s in the context of all the other ingredients.

Anyway — while this summer I worked my way through various manifestations of Gin Punch, Whiskey Punch and Brandy Punch, it was in the offshoots where I found my happiness; here’s one drink I came to enjoy: West Indian Punch.

The recipe is from Jerry Thomas, though it first came to my attention in Wondrich’s Imbibe! The punch starts with the formula for a Brandy Punch, but has a couple of diversions that attracted my interest. First, the cognac is knocked down from 3 to 2 ounces, and an ounce of rum (I used a buttery Cockspur, from Barbados) is substituted; as a longtime sucker for drinks mixing cognac and rum, I couldn’t resist this version. Additionally, the raspberry syrup that sweetens the Brandy Punch is eliminated; instead, the sugar is bumped up a tad and additional sweetness, and a dose of spice, comes with a scoop of preserved ginger in syrup – and since I’m also a sucker for the bite of ginger, this drink had my name written all over it.

A couple of points on preparation: Wondrich notes that shaking the drink (with the bits of orange and pineapple involved) can result in a mushy mess. Agreed – I followed his suggestion of preparing the drink with crushed ice and then rolling the mix between the halves of a shaker, which keeps the fruit more-or-less intact. Also, for a good delivery of pineapple-ey goodness, I’ve substituted pineapple gomme for the simple syrup when the mood has hit. And since preserved ginger doesn’t have quite the intensity of bite I’d like, I’ve taken to supplementing it with a few slices of fresh ginger, just tossed into the mix (and why do I continue to use the preserved ginger, then, if I find it lacking? Because I bought the whole damn jar and I’ve got to use it somehow). Finally, Thomas calls for two ounces of water in the mix, to soften the drink from sour to punch territory; I add this at the end, in the form of chilled club soda, just because I like bubbles.

Garnished with a few blackberries picked last month and kept whole in the freezer, this is my closing drink of summer.

West Indian Punch
(adapted from Jerry Thomas’ How to Mix Drinks, with suggestions from David Wondrich’s Imbibe!)

• 2 ounces cognac
• 1 ounce rum (something with some age to it)
• Juice of 1/2 a lemon
• 1/4 – 1/2 ounce simple syrup, to taste
• Several chunks preserved ginger with a spoonful of syrup
• A few chunks of pineapple
• 1 slice of orange, cut in half
• Chilled club soda

Combine ingredients in a mixing glass, stirring the syrups with the citrus and booze until well mixed. Add about a half-cup of crushed ice and roll between the glass and a mixing tin several times. Pour unstrained into a tall glass; add about 2 ounces chilled club soda and additional ice to fill. Garnish with an orange slice, berries in season, a pineapple stick or whatever the hell you want. Straws, gentlemen.

Tags: Brandy, Drinks, Rum by Paul
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