Tonight’s drink comes with a tip of the hat to Rick at Kaiser Penguin, who is hosting this month’s Mixology Monday with the theme, Limit: One. Thanks to this theme, Rick has created an event that is guaranteed to be followed by “Hangover Tuesday.”

When in the need of a cocktail that comes in heavy, you have two options that are pretty safe, if such a word can be used in this situation: go with the rum-soaked goodness of tiki; or, reach for the green stuff*. Me, I’m fond of both, but considering our host and the eager participation of Blair and Craig, I was sure tiki would be well represented for this round. Just to be a contrarian, I’m reaching for the absinthe tonight.

Before you take a glimpse at the recipe and gag in disbelief, hear me out: this drink actually kind of works. Sweet? Oh, yeah — part of the reason you’d only want one — but the redeeming factors in the Weeper’s Joy far outweigh, in my mind, this detraction.

Consider this: between the absinthe, the vermouth and the kummel, you’ve got, what, a few dozen botanicals in the drink. So is it really that different from something like a Widow’s Kiss (which it resembles somewhat in terms of flavor intensity and its presentation of the taste of antiquity) or — okay, I’ll write the name one more time — the Flower Power Martini? And as for the horsepower: I’m not doing the math to see if this fits under the “3 oz. of 80-proof or higher booze” requirement Rick laid out, but anything with an ounce of absinthe in it comes on like a bucket full of knuckles.

This drink — originated by “The Only William” Schmidt and recently dusted off in IMBIBE! — is yet one more reason why David Wondrich is expected to take the top prize at the upcoming National Soused Book Award. Okay, I just made that up, but wouldn’t it be great if there was such a thing?

Weeper’s Joy, using Wondrich’s updated measurements from IMBIBE!

• 1 ounce absinthe
• 1 ounce vino vermouth [I used Carpano Antica, to toss a little extra bitterness in the mix]
• 1 ounce Kummel
• 1/2 teaspoon simple syrup
• 2 dashes curacao

Stir well with lots of ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

As Wondrich notes, you can leave out the simple syrup to cut back on the sweetness, but it does bring a fuller mouthfeel to the drink.

This Mixology Monday is brought to you by Gilka Kummel, the official spirit of Kaiser Penguin. Be sure to head over to Rick’s place to see how everyone else weighed in this round.

* OK, so I used a blanche absinthe instead of a verte. Poetic license and all; deal with it.

Tags: Absinthe, Drinks, Mixology Monday, Vermouth by Paul
1 Comment »

This one made me sweat. Over the past four years or so, I’ve gone pretty much full-tilt on learning everything I can about spirits and cocktails, but when tackling such a big field, there are inevitably some holes that will need to be filled at a later time. For me, tequila is a big one of those holes.

Part of the reason for this is the price — a decent 100 percent agave tequila costs roughly twice what a bourbon, rye or rum of comparable quality does — but versatility also plays a factor. Open any typical cocktail guide, and you’ll find acres of coverage for gin, rum and whiskey, but just a smattering of recipes for tequila. If you prefer more vintage books like I do, feel lucky if you turn up a tequila cocktail at all. And when you do, it’s mostly margaritas and tequila sunrises, with the occasional Freddie Fudpucker thrown in for comic effect.

But thanks to Matt over at My Bar, Your Bar, our gracious host for this round of Mixology Monday, I’ve been forced to start exploring the world of tequila, with mostly positive results. I’ll skip over my experiments with sangrita recipes — Jimmy nailed a good one a couple of rounds back — and the lovely Prado — which Anita already mixed up for this round — and cut right to two newish tequila cocktails that seemed promising: the Sangre de Agave and the Rosebud.

The Sangre de Agave comes from David Wondrich’s Killer Cocktails, and takes the classic marriage between tequila, lime juice and creme de cassis, and knocks it silly with a firm slap of dark, heavy rum.

Sangre de Agave

• 1 1/2 ounce reposado Tequila [Don Julio]
• 1/2 ounce dark, heavy rum [Pusser’s]
• 3/4 ounce lime juice
• 1/2 ounce creme de cassis
• 1/2 teaspoon rich simple syrup

Shake with ice and strain into chilled cocktail glass

I’m reserving judgement on this one — while mixing the drink I realized two things: my limes were lousy and my cassis was kaput. Taking this into account, the drink was still pretty intriguing, with the peppery funk of the tequila coming on right away, but with that smooth, round bass note of rum giving the concoction some welcome gravitas. My crappy cassis didn’t supply the full fruity richness I was looking for, but that’s easily remedied, as is the coarse bitterness that I’m blaming on the fine-looking but nasty-tasting limes I got at Trader Joe’s. A drink to come back to with more efficient ingredients.

But I didn’t want to leave Mixology Monday on a down note — I’ve already done that — so this evening I started going through the books, looking for a lime- and cassis-free tequila cocktail that showed promise. Wisely, I started my search with The Art of the Bar: Cocktails Inspired by the Classics, a really beautiful and spectacular book by Jeff Hollinger and Rob Schwartz from Absinthe in San Francisco. I’ve had this book on the shelf for months, and I keep meaning to dig into it for a post, so what better time. Plus, I’ve got a soft spot in my jaded heart for the pitch-black musings of Citizen Kane, and the touch of bitterness in this cocktail seemed entirely appropriate.

Rosebud

• Dash of rosewater
• 1 1/2 ounces silver tequila
• 1/2 ounce Carpano Antica sweet vermouth
• Dash of Campari
• 1 piece orange zest, about 1 1/2 inches long and 1/2 inch wide

Rinse a chilled cocktail glass with the dash of rosewater, discarding the excess. Stir the tequila and vermouth with ice and strain into the glass. Flame the orange zest over the drink (light a match and hold it above and just slightly to the side of the drink, point the zest at the flame and spray the oil through the fire onto the drink surface). Add a few drops of Campari to the surface.

Wowser. The rosewater rinse and the burnt orange oil make this a very fragrant drink, but the taste is crisp and smooth, like a martini with its collar button undone. It’s kind of deceptive — the aroma is very flowery and perfumey, with no trace of tequila’s telltale whiff of pepper, so you’re expecting the taste of a flower bomb, like a cocktail supercharged with an aromatic gin like Hendrick’s or Aviation and matched with chartreuse. Thing is, the flavor is nothing like that — the florals take a backseat to the gentle bitterness of the Antica slightly prodded by the Campari, and that bitterness meshes very well with the vegetal funk of the tequila. Nicely done — if you’re looking for a delicate tequila cocktail, this is a good candidate.

That’s my little tour of tequila for this round of Mixology Monday. Head on over to Matt’s place to see what everybody else is doing with tequila.

Tags: Drinks, Mixology Monday, Rum, Tequila, Vermouth by Paul
4 Comments »

As the creeping madness that is cocktailphilia gradually overtakes its victim, it’s not unusual for he or she to gradually become consumed with the pursuit of ever-more obscure ingredients. At first, depending on the victim’s location and his or her proximity to decent liquor stores, this obsession may focus on the hunt for maraschino liqueur, Parfait Amour and orange bitters. Later, more difficult-to-find items such as Dutch gin, rhum agricole, Carpano Antica and small-batch rye whiskies become the subjects of endless Internet searches and furtive shopping expeditions. Left untreated, the victim is soon doomed, consumed by a keening longing for Swedish Punsch, pimento dram and Amer Picon.

I write all this while basking in the glow of a recent obscure booze fix. I finally have in my liquor cabinet a bottle of creme de violette, a liqueur unavailable in the United States (and relatively hard to find, though available, in Europe and Japan) and a vital component to such golden-oldie cocktails as the Addie, the Blue Moon and the original (so I’m told) Aviation. A frantic search through wine and spirits shops in France last summer failed to turn up any violette, and I’d long been planning to special order a bottle from Sally Clarke’s in London, only to have my dreams shattered earlier this month by the news that they no longer stocked the item.

Leave it to the readers of this humble little blog to fix me up, though. Thanks to Chris and Julia, who live in Tokyo but frequently visit Seattle, I’m the proud owner of a bottle of Suntory’s Hermes Creme de Violette, a bright-tasting liqueur with a deep violet color. (As a matter of taste comparison, last night I had the pleasure to sample some G. Miele Liqueur de Violette — thanks to John Pyles, who shares this affliction — which had a more subtle violet flavor but a longer finish than the Hermes.) Obscure ingredient in hand, I was ready to set my shaker in motion.

First drink to try? A Blue Moon — simply a gin sour with the violette in place of the sugar (or, if you like, an aviation with violette in place of the maraschino). No easier said than done…

Except, it’s not quite that easy (Warning: If you’d rather not geek out over this too much, feel free to skip down to the recipe). I’d been accustomed to thinking of the Blue Moon along the lines of the recipe listed by David Embury in The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks: 8 parts gin, 2 parts lemon juice, 1 part violette (Crosby Gaige lists a similar recipe, of the 4:1:1 ratio, in his Standard Cocktail Guide from 1944; a year later, he sweetened it up to a 2:1:1 ratio in his Cocktail Guide and Ladies Companion, and Vic Bergeron used this same recipe in his Trader Vic’s Bartender’s Guide). Still, proportions aside, it seems fairly straightforward.

But then, I checked the Esquire Drink Book from 1956, and found another Blue Moon, this one in the form of a standard 2:1 dry martini with a dash of orange bitters and an added dash of Creme d’Yvette, a defunct brand of the violette. Patrick Gavin Duffy confuses matters even further — something he’s good at doing — in his Standard Bartender’s Guide from 1948 (I don’t have an earlier version; maybe someone who does can help me out) by offering this same recipe, but then indicating that after the drink is mixed and strained into a cocktail glass, it should be topped off with Claret. Weird, huh?

So, nothing to do but to try them both (using Embury’s drier recipe for the first, and Esquire’s claret-free version for the second). The verdict? Equally lovely.

Blue Moon #1 (adapted from David Embury’s The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks*)

• 2 ounces gin (I used Bombay)
• 1/2 ounce fresh lemon juice
• 1/4 ounce creme de violette

Shake with ice and strain into chilled cocktail glass.

* Embury also calls this drink a Blue Devil, and indicates an egg white may be added to the cocktail for extra body.

Blue Moon #2 (adapted from Esquire Drinks Book)

• 2 ounces gin (I used Plymouth)
• 1 ounce dry vermouth
• 1 dash orange bitters
• 1 dash creme de violette

Stir with ice and strain into chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a lemon twist.

Tags: Drinks, Gin, Vermouth by Paul
24 Comments »

“Temperate temperance is best. Intemperate temperance injures the cause of temperance, while temperate temperance helps it in its fight against intemperate intemperance. Fanatics will never learn that, though it be written in letters of gold across the sky.”
–Mark Twain, 1896

In case you haven’t wandered anywhere near a booze blog in the past couple of weeks, today is the anniversary of the official repeal of the 18th amendment, the demise of which gave Americans the right to enjoy a tipple or two for the first time in 13 years. Those years weren’t quite “dry” of course — google “speakeasy” and you’ll see what I mean — but for the first time in a generation, an American of appropriate age could once again step into the local to hoist a pint or a pour of their favorite alcoholic libation. Over the course of Prohibition, countless lives were damaged or destroyed by sub-standard booze, over-zealous prosecutors and criminal organizations, while otherwise upstanding citizens found themselves regularly flouting the law in order to enjoy a glass of beer or a touch of whiskey when the mood struck. The “Noble Experiment” was one hell of a mess.

So whose bright idea was this catastrophe, anyway? Fingers can be pointed in a lot of different directions, but one especially deserving group is the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. The W.C.T.U. dates to 1874 (and yes, they’re still around), and took as their primary mission the elimination of all alcoholic beverages. Under the leadership of Frances Willard, the W.C.T.U. mobilized communities throughout the country to ban the sale and consumption of alcohol, culminating in the passage of the 18th amendment. At its peak, the group had hundreds of thousands of members (though the W.C.T.U. were, ahem, selective — no Catholics, Jews, African Americans or women born outside of North America were admitted), and Willard was considered the most famous woman in the world after Queen Victoria (there’s still a statue of her in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol).

Repeal, no doubt, was a setback to the organization, but it still exists today. They’re still thumping the tub for the drys, but to expand their message and keep them contemporary, the W.C.T.U. also campaigns on more modern causes including abortion and gay marriage (I’ll let you guess which side they come down on).

This repeal day, I’m lifting a glass in memory of the thankfully brief time that this group of pathologically obsessive busybodies managed to dictate the manner in which responsible adults can behave. The drink is adapted from Crosby Gaige’s Cocktail Guide and Ladies’ Companion, from 1941, a time when Americans were still unwinding from the long, dark era.

W.C.T.U. (”Much too good for them,” writes Gaige)

• 1 1/4 ounce brandy
• 1 1/4 ounce dry vermouth
• 2 dashes Angostura bitters
• 2 dashes orange bitters

Stir with ice and strain into chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a lemon twist.

Thanks to Jeffrey Morgenthaler for alerting me to Repeal Day activities — given the weight Dewar’s is throwing into the party, and the number of drink blogs it’s showing up on, today should be a grand, grand day.

(And while I normally recoil at the whole viral marketing thing, this Repeal Day ad from Dewar’s is actually pretty damn funny)

Tags: Brandy, Drinks, Vermouth by Paul
6 Comments »

A long time ago, I lamented the fact that there weren’t many cocktails that called for limoncello as an ingredient. After a few rounds of experimentation I moved on to other things, but still, from time to time, I’d glance at the bottle of limoncello in my freezer and wish I could do something with it beyond simply enjoying the occasional chilled shot.

Call this wish fulfillment. I first tried this drink last week, at a newish Seattle lounge called Licorous (and which actually isn’t all that new, but since it took me several months to actually drag myself over there, it was new to me). Licorous’ cocktails have generated a lot of local attention, partially because of its pairings menu: an $8.50 drink is transformed into a $10.50 experience when a small, pre-selected appetizer is served alongside. Considering that the lounge is adjacent to and closely related to Lark, Jonathan Sundstrom’s acclaimed small-plate restaurant, the paired tidbits are blow-me-away ventures of the fois-gras-bon-bon and Armandino-Batali’s-oregano-salumi persuasion, and the bar similarly sets its mark high.

The Renaissance is a Robert Hess original, and is one of the best uses of limoncello in a cocktail since … well, maybe ever, at least in my experience. The brandy and the vermouth give it a nice, lush base, and the touch of limoncello spiked with bitters lend a mildly sweet, fruity perfume.

While Licorous prepares the cocktail using one of its house-made bitters, Robert says the drink was crafted with Fee’s Peach Bitters in mind. Having tried it both ways, I’ve found I prefer the brightness of the peach / lemon interplay, but if you haven’t got peach bitters on hand, I’d suggest taking a crack at this with a couple of dashes of orange bitters. It’ll be a slightly different drink, but still mighty tasty.

Renaissance

• 2 oz. brandy
• 1 1/3 oz. sweet vermouth
• 1/3 oz. limoncello
• 2 dashes Fee’s Peach Bitters (or try orange bitters, if you don’t have peach)

Stir with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a lemon twist.

Tags: Brandy, Drinks, Establishments, Vermouth by Paul
6 Comments »