Some Words

So, I am moving to Portland soon, and this entails shipping a large number of bottles across country, some of which I don’t really think I’ll ever buy again. One of those? Mathilde Pear Liqueur, which I got for the pear cocktails competition a while back, and didn’t use much of since. It’s pretty damned sweet, and I spent much of the time mixing with it wishing I had something that I could use in larger quantities without things getting thick and syrupy. So now I have just a little bit of it left, and thought I’d try playing with it, so I didn’t have to take it with me.

I came up with a cocktail that tastes like PEZ candy. Drink at your own risk. Personally I hate PEZ and have always figured that only the little dispensers keep them in business. Ah well, such is life.

The PEZ Cocktail

1 1/2 oz. Gin
1/2 oz. Mathilde Pear Liqueur
1/2 oz. Benedictine
2 dashes of Fees Orange Bitters

Stir over ice and strain into cocktail glass, repent.

Can’t say as I really recommend it, unless you like orange PEZ more than I do.

The Appletini is dead. They held a funeral and everything. This is not some sort of king is dead long live king formulation. That green syrup in a glass? It’s six feet under.

Tomorrow I head to Portland, hopefully to find an apartment, and a place that sells Lemon Hart demerara rum. While there, I’m going to get to see Dosh and Anathallo at the Doug Fir Lounge. Dosh is on tour with Michael Lewis and from what my brother tells me, they’ve been turning in some awesome sets. Until Dosh, I had only really seen Lewis working with Happy Apple. Indeed, it had been long enough since I had seen Happy Apple that I had forgotten how amazing the man was. Watch him stretch his multi-instrumental chops:

Now, check them out if you get the chance.

I read too many cocktail blogs. That wouldn’t normally be a bad thing, but it can get you to do things you probably shouldn’t. I probably shouldn’t be planning to make my own pimmento dram, but I’m really tempted. There are a lot of tasty looking drinks that use it. I probably shouldn’t be spending money on obscure ingredients that I can only use in a handful of cocktails, but I do. There is always something interesting to try. The next one on my list is probably stone pine liqueur. But if anyone sees any of that creme de Violette around Minnesota, let me know.

There are places where I draw the line. These lines are generally agreed upon by most people, as near as I can tell. They see the line, clearly marked, and they avoid it. They would not, for example, put mayo in a cocktail. They also wouldn’t rim a glass with it. There are certain cocktail combinations you cannot unsee. As I drank some scotch tonight, I could not help thinking, “what would this single malt taste like with mayo?” Alas, my fragile mind has been soiled.

It is indeed a dark world in which we live.

Over the past year, I’ve moved from all the wonderful cheap cocktails I started learning on, and into the weird cocktails that have strange ingredients that I would never have thought to buy. That’s all well and good, but sometimes I want to mix a drink that is new to me, but doesn’t mean laying down for something that costs $20+ when I don’t even know if I will like the drinks I can make with it (Parfait Amour, I’m looking at you.). I don’t mind playing around with these things, but it can be a drag sometimes, like when I mixed a Mood Indigo Cocktail. That one was a huge mistake.

A couple of months ago I figured what the hell, I’ll try something that seems plain. I found a drink call a “Bronx Terrace” and mixed it up. It looked like a weird cross between a Gimlet and a Martini. It turned out to be quite good. I’ve started using it as a go to drink when people come over and I need to mix up three or four cocktails quickly.

1 1/2 oz. Gin
3/4 oz. Lime Juice
1/2 oz. Dry Vermouth
1/2 tsp. Sugar

If your friends like things sweeter, stir before shaking, if not, shake straight away and strain.

Nice, easy, you probably have the ingredients. Maybe it won’t change the way you look at cocktails, or become your favorite drink of all time, but it’s nice to not head out to the store.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted any drinking stuff here. That might be because I’ve been leery of doing it, when so many other people already do it so well. The other day though, I had a drink that changed the way I looked at an ingredient, and sweet ingredients in general. It’s called a Bee’s Knees cocktail. Not very surprisingly, it has honey in it.

Now, Mark had had this cocktail before, and he wasn’t very impressed with it. But I had just purchased some wildflower honey, as opposed to clover honey, from a nearby co-op. This turned out to make all the difference. I’m not sure how much changing the gin would effect this cocktail, we used the cheap stuff. What I can say is that clover honey (and I’ve tried it in this drink now) is not the way to go. I wouldn’t even suggest making it with clover honey. Then again, I don’t know that I can go back after having wildflower honey. Anyhow, here’s what it is.

Bee’s Knees Cocktail
1 1/2 oz. Gin
1/2 oz. Lemon Juice
1/2 oz. Wildflower Honey

Stir before adding the ice to dissolve the honey. Shake well and strain.

If you had told me this is good before I drank it, I would not have believed you. It’s certainly not dry. But the honey has a very nice fiery sort of sweetness that goes well with the gin and lemon.

At the reunion, a friend of mine said he’d checked out this site, and was amazed by how pretentious it was. That’s a little out of context, but it wasn’t meant as an insult. I suppose this is the kind of thing he was talking about, but the Bee’s Knees cocktail is some seriously delicious pretension. My thanks to the Cocktail DB for another good one. They also have two variations that might be worth trying, though I haven’t gotten to them.

All my life I’ve made a habit of starting to do more than I know I can handle. It’s not hard to forsee that this will have mixed results. And so, amid a miriad of projects, posting fell to the wayside. And now, suddenly, I find myself with two places to post.

And so, fortified with a little gin, some lime, and a few other things mixed in, I’m trying to dig out of that hole.

Oh, and the lime was squeezed by one of these. I honestly can’t say enough good things about it. It’s totally simplified the most annoying part of drink making for me. God bless eBay.

And before I really dig in, there has been a lot of talk about books and length here and over at Iceland Spar. Here is a link to Marginal Revolution that relates nicely to what I’ve been saying. Remember, you will be tested.

Three glasses, a pile of pickles, and two friends, recently convinced me that my birthday party should be all vodka and pickles. Reading Absurdistan might have helped in that as well.

Before that though, I’ve gone on a mixing spree. This lead to another look around the cocktail blog scene, which took me back to Slakethirst by way of Brilliant Cocktails. You might also want to check out A Dash of Bitters

Brilliant Cocktails is a nice little site that has a video podcast feed of the cocktails being made, which is nice. That said, I don’t always go for the same stuff that the host, Chris Doig does.

He seems to be a professional bar tender at some place that actually cares. So the ways in which drinks differed from how I mixed them always had a reason, sometimes the simple fact that he can get better booze than I can. In some ways it’s just refreshing to watch a guy mix a drink and clearly know what he’s doing and care about the tradition. Sometimes I order a gimlet, just to gauge the bartender. A martini is going to lead to all sorts of trouble, a gimlet is so simple I usually figure it for a good, if sugary, baseline. At least I did, until a guy put hazelnuts in one. Two little brown nuts in a lime green concoction filled with ice. I’m never going back to that bar.

Anyhow, watching the podcasts was a nice diversion, and I learned a few cool sounding variants on what I’d been doing. Thank you Mr. Doig.

Slakethirst also recently mentioned a drink called the Lucien Gaudin. It was a piss pour night at work (Redefined it as a matter of fact. I can now die, having heard a woman call upon the power of Jesus to fix her son’s Xbox. It wasn’t broken.) and so I mixed myself up one of these. It did not disappoint.

The other day, on a whim, I picked up a bottle of Parfait Amour. It’s a purple colored orange liquor, with some floral things added. I’m really not that sure what, maybe lilac.

It tastes like candy, in a fluffy sort of way, and it looks deeply unnatural.

So far we’ve tried three things.

The Jupiter Cocktail
1 1/2 oz Gin
1/2 oz Dry Vermouth
1/4 oz Orange Juice
1/4 oz Parfait Amour

This was interesting, but not amazing. The purple color was muted and somewhat muddy looking, because if you were adding enough Parfait Amour to make it really purple, it would taste like marshmallow. Dr. Cocktail’s book has this made with Creme Yvette (lilac flavored), which I get the impression is going to be more than a little different. The orange would be more muted of course, but unless lilac is a flavor that brings a lot to the table, I don’t see it popping the drink into the regular rotation.

Trilby Variation
3/4 oz Blended Scotch
3/4 oz Sweet Vermouth
3/4 oz Parfait Amour
1/4 oz Pastis
2 dashes Orange Bitters

Ok… I only made this one because I had all the ingredients. I didn’t expect much, and I was disappointed. The best way that I could describe this is: a complex root beer barrel. Super sweet and very strange. It wasn’t something I’d like to drink again, but I also didn’t feel that I should waste the booze by sending it down the drain, like I did that one time I mixed a Godfather. I don’t know what I was thinking that time.

The last one was a variation on the Delilah cocktail. I can’t find a recipe off hand, but it’s basically gin, lemon, and curacao. Mark subbed the Parfait Amour for the curacao. Not bad, but not amazing.

The two recepies given here were from Cocktail DB.

Oh, and here’s a non Parfait Amour cocktail that’s got me thinking I should pick up a bottle of Yellow Chartreuse next: The Champs Elysées Cocktail

Ok, wow, I had no idea there were this many rye brands available.

That is all.

So, Mark gave me some Cointreau for the holidays. I picked up some citrus the other day, and went looking for something to mix. I found a little thing over at CocktailDB. It was called the Boxcar. They had a different recipe than most of the other sites, one that called for lime instead of lemon, and more of it. I hadn’t been led astray there yet. (Though I’m sure it will happen one day. Everyone has different taste blah blah…)

I mixed up their version. Sweet damn was it good. I just made a second tonight, and it seems I got the proportions just right, a little more of the bitterness came out, and it really balanced perfectly. The first try had been just a touch sweet. I probably used too much grenadine, as I don’t have a quarter measure.

Boxcar
1 1/2 oz. Gin
1 oz. Fresh Lime Juice
1/2 oz. Cointreau
1/4 oz. Grenadine
1 Egg Yoke

Bonus for Mark, it’s pink.

A while ago I read A Wild Sheep Chase by Murakami. I kept talking about it until Mark asked me to let him borrow it. He liked it too. The other day we came up with a drink we were both quite happy with, and we decided to name it A Wild Sheep Chase. While it’s served cold, I do think think it’s a nice winter drink. Here’s how we made it.

A Wild Sheep Chase
2 1/4 oz dark or medium rum
3/4 oz sweet vermouth
2 dashes lemon bitters (we had Fees)
1 dash aromatic bitters (again, Fees)

I’m thinking of making it two dashes of the aromatic, but that’s because I love aromatic bitters, and on some level I want to add them to every drink I make.

Enjoy.