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
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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
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The Tchoupitoulas Street Guzzle has, in my opinion, one of the greatest names in mixology; the recipe, however, needs a little reimagining.

As noted by Stanley Clisby Arthur in Famous New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix ‘em, first published in 1937, the Tchoupitoulas Street Guzzle was a regular tipple at the Iron Horse Tavern in New Orleans in the years before the Civil War. Over time its popularity spread beyond the tavern, with fans up and down the street for which it became named.

Arthur describes the drink as being composed of 1 jigger Cuban-type rum and a split of ginger beer. Refreshing, no doubt, and certainly a nice cooler if made with a good ginger beer. But flavorwise the Cuban-type rum — which is now typically understood to be a light rum, such as Bacardi — contributes very little to the drink, and ultimately the guzzle is akin to a Dark & Stormy with a bit less character. What an ignoble end for a wonderfully named drink.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. A couple of years ago, while Darcy O’Neil and I were preparing for a Spirited Dinner at Tales of the Cocktail, our chef, Chris DeBarr, proposed serving a Lafcadio Hearn-inspired meal starting with an amuse bouche of Pontchartrain flounder sushi on rose-petal rice. I thought a fresh approach on the Tchoupitoulas Street Guzzle might make an appropriate pairing for this tidbit, so I started working with the recipe.

Keeping the original ingredients in mind and not wishing to stray too far from the drink as described, I started sizing it down; instead of the initial impulse to mix rum and ginger beer in an ice-filled highball glass, creating a long, slow sipper, I thought it would better match the “guzzle” in the title as well as the atmosphere at the beginning of the meal if we sized this drink down as much as possible, concentrating the flavors as we went. To do this we started with a house ginger-beer concentrate much like the one I blogged about several years ago — there are other versions out there, some of them calling for fermentation; some people like them, but it’s my understanding that if you go that route you’re setting yourself up to appear in Playboy at some point — which brings a mighty ginger heat and flavor. We paired about a jigger of this with the same amount of rum (in that case, Cruzan Single Barrel; for this round, I’m using Havana Club 7-year) and a dash of Angostura bitters for depth, briefly shaken with ice and strained into a chilled tumbler, then zapped with about an ounce of seltzer for dilution and effervescence (you could instead run the ginger beer through a soda siphon, but you may want to check the flavor to make sure you’ve adequately diluted the sharpest of the ginger’s heat).

With no ice in the glass, this is more of a quick guzzle than a slow-sipper, and with the powerful ginger flavor from the homemade ginger beer, the drink has the effect of a firecracker as compared to a highball’s slow sparkler. While this version of the drink I’ve photographed (and that I’m now sipping) was made with the Havana Club, which I used to maintain the spirit of the original, I prefer the drink with a richer, more vanilla-ey rum such as Bacardi 8 or Cruzan Single Barrel.

Anyway, I like this as a good, simple short drink that’s meant to be finished quickly before moving on.

Tchoupitoulas Street Guzzle

• 1 1/2 ounces rum (Cruzan Single Barrel or Bacardi 8 work well)
• 1 1/2 ounces homemade ginger beer concentrate
• 1 ounce seltzer
• 2 dashes Angostura bitters

Combine rum, ginger beer and bitters in a cocktail shaker and briefly shake with ice. Strain into chilled 6-ounce tumbler and add seltzer. Give a brief stir, and don’t let it sit too long.

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, Rum, Thirty in 30 by Paul
1 Comment »

This is a new addition to Casa Chronicles, though since it’s a drink that Julie Reiner came up with for Flatiron Lounge a couple of years back, I suspect it’s thoroughly made the rounds in some circles.

Since the 3,000-mile commute precludes frequent visits to Flatiron, I missed this drink when it was first introduced. Fortunately, Dale DeGroff included the recipe in The Essential Cocktail, one of the best recent additions to my libation-related library. (And now that I’ve gone searching, I see that Gary wrote it up for the Chronicle in late ’06, and it’s popped up on assorted websites, and that it was on PDT’s winter menu last year, and that basically I’m the last person who’s ever tried this drink. Ah, hell — good thing I’m used to that, though I am so demoralized that I’m not gonna worry about a photo right now.)

Three things regarding the Cuzco appealed to me: first, it uses pisco as its base, a spirit that I don’t use nearly often enough but am always on the lookout for good recipes that call for it; second, it uses Aperol, which was the aperitif/mixer of the moment a couple years back based mainly on the fact that it tastes so damn good; and third, the recipe calls for the glass to be rinsed with kirsch, and y’know, wow — you don’t see that too often, so I just had to give it a shot.

I’d probably appreciate this drink more if it wasn’t cloudy and in the 50s today; as a summer refresher, this thing has mondo potential. I’m listing it here so I don’t forget about it come summer; if you happen to live in a warmer climate — which is pretty much everyone — I’d suggest giving the Cuzco a try (assuming that, like me, you’re one of the 4 billion people who haven’t already).

Cuzco

• 2 ounces pisco (Barsol Italia recommended)
• 3/4 ounce Aperol
• 1/2 ounce fresh lemon juice
• 1/2 ounce fresh grapefruit juice
• 3/4 ounce simple syrup
• dash of kirschwasser

Combine everything except kirsch in a cocktail shaker and shake well with ice. Rinse a highball glass with the kirsch and fill with fresh ice, then strain drink into rinsed glass. Garnish with grapefruit twist.

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: Brandy, Drinks, Thirty in 30 by Paul
2 Comments »