Cocktail experiment. Given the ingredients, I couldn’t not call it this.
Serve on the rocks.
This is really tasty. It’s a bit much before salting, but the salt nicely balances it out by suppressing a bit of the bitterness and accenting the tastes-like-a-bonfire smokiness of the Laphroaig. I think I over-salted it a bit, but definitely a fan even with the excess salt.
I don’t have a name for this but it’s tasty:
The campari nicely offsets the spiciness of the rye and the dram, and seems to be a nice bridge between the two. This was weirdly off balance until the addition of the campari but afterwards is a very nice drink.
I’m quite a fan of the Martini. No surprise really. I like gin, I like vermouth. I pretty much like any combination thereof.
There’s a huge variety of different Martinis. They vary by type of vermouth, type of gin, quantities, type of bitters. Different ones are to different tastes, and different people prefer different styles. It’s all subjective whether one is better than another.
Except this one. This one is the best Martini recipe. You should make this one.
Stirred, not shaken, obviously. What are we, monsters?
In my other life I do complicated things with computers. As such, I’m currently attending the Software Practice Advancement conference.
Tonight, as you do at tech conferences, we engaged in a blind gin taste testing. The game was as follows: There were 5 gins, poured into plastic shot glasses. You had to guess which was which and fill in a form. The correct answers would win, of course, gin.
The gins were as follows:
Needless to say, I was amongst the winners.
How, you may ask, did I so keenly deduce the answer amongst the nearly indistinguishably subtle difference of flavours?
Well. A magician never reveals his secrets.
But I’m not a magician. I’m just a software developer who masquerades as a gin fiend. So I’m totally OK with revealing my secrets.
So here’s how I figured it out.
The Genever was yellow. Really, honestly, that was all there was to it. There were four clear drinks and one yellow one. It couldn’t be anything other than the genever.
Gordons and Caurunn? You can cover a distinctively shaped bottle with brown paper, but the bottle is still distinctively shaped. The Gordon’s came out of a Gordon’s shaped bottle. The Caurunn came out of a Caurunn shaped bottle.
The Whitley Neill? It tasted like the bottle of Whitley Neill I bought on Saturday.
The Portobello Road? It tasted like being smacked in the face with a juniper bush.
Truly, the secret mysteries of the magincian are mysterious and secret.
The prize was a bottle of portobello road. Except I’m already owed one of those when I finally get around to using my ticket to the Ginstitute, so I ceded that to Seb, the only other person to get it all right, and instead claimed a nearly full bottle of Caurunn instead.
By the way, the genever in question is really good. If there were any left and I’d been able to weedle my way into it I would have totally claimed that instead. I have a bottle of Bols’ aged genever, which is nice, but this was exceptional. I drank a lot of it. I’m currently hoping not to miss tomorrow’s sesions as a result, because they look rather interesting.
Yes, that’s the name of the cocktail.
First, let me state up front: This cocktail is not the result of me just throwing things together at random. It’s not the result of me desperately trying to rescue something that wasn’t quite working. This is something I put together with malice aforethought because I thought it might actually be good. This is how you can tell that I am wrong in the head.
Without further ado, let me tell you what goes in a This Cocktail Scares Me.
Let me tell you about the death water.
At one point my brother, Jamie, and I were living together. We got into a thing of experimenting with making spice infused vodkas. They were about halfway between bitters and a spirit. Some of them were good (the cinnamon one went very quickly), some of them were interesting (the cardamom one got used in a lot of drinks, but I was never really convinced it worked), some of them were just a bit weird (one friend loved the black pepper vodka to a slightly scary degree. The rest of us weren’t sure what to think).
Then there was the death water.
The death water was supposed to just be a chilli vodka. A bit brutal, but nothing too painful. Put some dried chillis in the vodka (I think we used absolut), take them out after a few days, voila chilli vodka.
There were just two problems.
The first was the very simple one that we used quite a lot of chilli. I think it was somewhere in the region of 50-100g of fairly spicy dried red chillis for a 500ml bottle of vodka.
The second was that about a month later we said “Huh. Are there supposed to still be chillis in there?”
It’s definitely not the spiciest chilli vodka in the world. I’ve had a drop of a Naga chilli vodka which set my mouth on fire. This is not that. But it’s definitely heading quite far in that direction, and 2ml of it is more than enough to give this drink some serious fire.
What’s the drink like?
You know… it’s actually kinda good.
As I discovered with the FEW rye whiskey, the Cocchi and Campari mix appears to work rather well with spiciness - it provides a nice strong base layer on which you can build spices. Sweet, but very able to stand up to other flavours. The spiciness of the pimento dram adds an interesting level of cinammon and clove (yes I know it’s allspice, but allspice tastes like cinammon and clove) to it without quite dominating and the chocolate bitters provide a nice bridge between the two to balance it out. The chilli vodka then adds heat at the end which really nicely finishes the whole thing off.
It’s definitely a curious drink, and it’s not going to be to everyone’s taste, but I think it might be a bit of a winner.
I had a really nice Boulevardier (part of the Negroni metacocktail family) made with the Buffalo Trace white dog at the Climpsons’s Arch recently. Although I’m normally of the opinion that Cynar makes a vastly superior Negroni than Campari, the bitterness of the Campari really nicely balanced the spiciness of the white dog and produced a truly excellent drink.
It occurred to me I own something which was similar to the white dog: the FEW Spirits rye. It’s lovely, but overpoweringly spicy in most cocktails. I’ve tried it in a Little Italy (aka “Cynar-Rye Negroni”) before, but even then it managed to intimidate the Cynar into submission. Given the experience of the white dog, I was hopeful that the Campari might be able to stand up to it.
Turns out, yes!
Recipe:
I normally find Campari Negronis a little on the bitter side, but the spiciness of the rye managed to offset that really nicely. Given the normally overwhelming nature of the two ingredients the result was remarkably mild. Mild but extremely pleasant.
This is roughly based on the cocktail South of No North, which I’ve never had, but I was looking for something which combined both coffee and alcohol and it sounded interesting.
I built this in glass: Pour the coffee into the glass, stir in the sugar until it’s dissolved, add the other ingredients.
I was originally going to ice it, but I liked it lukewarm so much I decided not to.
What does it taste like? It tastes like beautifully spiced coffee. The primary flavours are coffee and the woodiness of the aged tequila, but the chocolate and the herbal flavours from the cynar accent it well.
Seriously, try this one. It’s really good.
Supercherry are a company who import Italian food and spirits to the UK. Last night I got to try some of their products with the London Cocktail Society.
We tried three products: Their Visciolata cherry wine, their Aquavite del Cardinale, and their pistachio cream liqueur.
The cherry wine was rich and fruity, with quite a lovely almond finish. While it was clearly a dessert wine, and was correspondingly quite sweet, it stopped well short of being excessively so to me. It had a richness that was possibly heading slightly in the direction of a port. We only tried it in small quantities, and I feel like a full wine glass of it would be overwhelming, but as a small drink it was delicious. There was also a cocktail on the menu using it (which I didn’t try), and I think it would work well with mixing - you could almost use it as a sweet vermouth substitute. I’m definitely going to be buying a bottle of this to experiment with (or just drink straight!).
The aquavite was… interesting. Rob described as “Like a grappa but more heteronormative” (excuse me, “feminine”), which is about right. It was clearly a strong spirit, but it was much softer and more drinkable than you’d expect, with a sensation like the very gentlest of whiskies. The flavour was mostly the almonds of the cherry stones with just a hint of the fruity sweetness. It was a little reminiscent of the core flavour of sloe gin, but with none of the tartness or sugar.
My reservation about the aquavite is simply that I don’t know what to do with it. There were no cocktails on the menu using it, though apparently they do exist, and I can’t imagine myself being in a situation where I wanted to drink neat spirits and this was what I reached for. Given some recipes to use it in I’d buy it in a heartbeat, but I think first I need to find a bar with some cocktails that use it.
The pistachio cream liqueur… my feelings about are much more mixed. I had a cocktail with it in - basically a flip with this, lime and vanilla vodka - which was very pleasant indeed. More of a dessert than what I normally look for in a cocktail (and it vanished correspondingly quickly), but still very good - like pistachio ice cream in cocktail form. On it’s own however the liqueur was far too cloying. This isn’t a problem per se - many ingredients don’t work on their own - but it’s compounded by the fact that it’s a milk based liqueur with a low ABV so isn’t going to last. So for my part I think if I really wanted pistachio cream based cocktails I would just… make pistachio cream. There’s no complicated hard to replicate distillation process going on here - it’s basically just pistachios, sugar, milk and vodka. On the other hand, if you’re less inclined to make pistachio cream from scratch and think you’ll get through a bottle of this at an acceptable rate, it is a very nice ingredient and I recommend it too. It’s apparently also very good as a sauce on ice cream, so there’s that.
All in all, a good evening. An interesting company with some very good products, and at least one “excuse me I’m going to go buy this now” product.
This was tasty and interesting. It was very recognisably a Negroni despite having no ingredients in common with one (though it still fit into the general theme of a spirit, a bitter and a fortified wine). The flavour of the rum came through very strongly, especially as the drink cooled, which made for a pleasant variation on the normal experience.
Supposedly Winston Churchill’s instructions for making a Martini were “you should observe the vermouth from across the room while making it”. I suspect this is apocryphal, but nevertheless the term “Churchill Martini” seems to get colloquially used for what is basically a cocktail glass full of cold gin.
That’s not what I’m drinking tonight.
Having previously observed that Cocchi Americano is delicious, it seemed a shame to give it such a minor role in the cocktail, so I thought I’d try a Martini which was much heavier on it that was traditional. So basically we have the opposite of a Churchill Martini. Let’s call it a, well, Godwin’s Martini.
Just to complete the sacrilege (by which I mean “Because I’m lazy, drinking on my own and they’re easier to wash up”) I served it in a tumbler rather than in a cocktail glass (not on the rocks though. That would be a step too far).
This is actually pretty good.
Between the Gin Mare and the celery bitters this drink is almost savoury on the initial sip. You get the celery and rosemary flavours quite strongly up front, then as you swallow you get more of the sweetness from the Cocchi, then the bitterness you’d expect from the Cocchi on the swallow with the celery flavours joining back in on the party.
I don’t think this is how I’ll be drinking my Martinis in general, but it does nicely demonstrate that you can go heavier on the vermouth (ok, Cocchi isn’t a vermouth, but same idea) and still get a very pleasant drink. In future I’d probably dial down the cocchi to 1 part in 4 rather than 1 in 3, but I’ll definitely happily keep it more pronounced than the more standard 1 in 5 or 1 in 6.
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