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When we first saw the ingredients for this cocktail at The Violet Hour in Chicago, we couldn't bring ourselves to order it. It seemed just too over-the-top with bitter ingredients. That was our first mistake. When the recipe appeared in Beta Cocktails, a book we recently mentioned in conjunction with the Art of Choke, we thought it might be time to check it out, but we never had the right combination of ingredients—most notably, we didn't have a Blanc vermouth. That was our second mistake. Today, we finally corrected both situations by picking up a bottle of Dolin Blanc and using it to construct one of the most interesting and surprising results we have tasted in a very long time.
Eeyore's Requiem is another recipe we have collected by Toby "Alchemist" Maloney, one of the
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Pursuing a casual interest in cocktails will lead you through some delicious modern recipes and most of the classics. In fact, many cocktail books, either by way of documenting recipe categories and development, or out of respectful obligation, take their readers through the same forty classic cocktails adding just a handful of embellishments and additions. While that may satisfy some, the more adventurous among us are constantly seeking new flavors and exciting combinations. It's not always necessary to go out of your way to track down hard-to-find ingredients—there are still plenty of daring and innovative drinks that any well-stocked bar can create. Such recipes may break a few rules and challenge conventional thinking, but together they serve, at the very least, as a reference and a source of inspiration for trade professionals. That was the idea, anyway, behind Kirk Estopinal and Maksym Pazuniak's Rogue Cocktails book.
The collectible
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Some of you may recognize the name of this cocktail as another Brooklyn neighborhood. That's because it's one of the variations of the Brooklyn cocktail, one of several modern recipes following the tradition of the Red Hook. We have already covered that and the Greenpoint and there are still many more to enjoy. All of them are essentially Manhattan variations using rye as the base, but they each have their own twist, swapping one liqueur for another or exploring something creative with the vermouth.
This one takes the somewhat unusual approach of using dry vermouth instead of sweet. It was created by Chad Solomon, once a bartender at New York's Milk & Honey. The result is a lovely golden gem of a cocktail that remains true to the style.
So, here's the thing with this drink. It's strong.
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Some time ago when we featured the Negroni as our Drink of the Week, we included the Americano as a bonus recipe. Today, we'd like to give the Americano it's due. It's a simple and light cocktail that works great as a late summer refresher. But despite its simplicity, we have to say more than just recommend this drink to beat the heat or to enjoy at a backyard barbecue. If you aren't expecting the bitter nuance that comes from the Campari you could be in for a bit of a shock. That's because most Americans are not used to Campari's bitter flavors (an ironic twist, considering this cocktail's name). These days, most carbonated beverages familiar to Americans are packed with high-fuctose corn syrup. However, anyone who already enjoys the Negroni or one of its many variants should recognize that the Americano was the
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Here's a great and somewhat unusual cocktail for those of you looking for a spirit-driven tipple that's a bit out of the ordinary. It comes by way of Ben Dougherty of Seattle's Zig Zag Café. It contains equal portions of bourbon, dry sherry and Ramazzotti, with a splash of Cointreau and a couple dashes of o-bits. Wait. Back up. Ramazzotti? I guess we couldn't slip that one past you. Like we said, this drink is a bit unusual, so it stands to reason that it might include an odd ingredient.
So, bourbon—no problem. Sherry isn't that common in cocktails but it's not unheard of. Cointreau and orange bitters—easy. But what's with this Ramazzotti? Actually, it's not that hard to find. It's another Italian Amaro, or potable bitters that happens to be a lovely aperitif. This one comes from Milan and it's not very bitter at
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Between the heat and the thunderstorms, it's a wonder anyone in the Twin Cities is getting any sleep. This week, some of us awoke without electricity to a neighborhood full of snapped branches and uprooted trees while our northern neighbors in Duluth, Minnesota are dealing with massive flooding. With so much going on related to weather, we half considered creating a cocktail called Straight Line Winds. We might still, but this being the longest day of the year (and this week feeling like the hottest) we decided to look for something that sounded a bit more refreshing and not so menacing. Today, as if coming to our rescue, the postman delivered the July-August 2012 issue of Imbibe Magazine.
If you aren't a subscriber, we highly recommend it. Like every issue, this one contains some fantastic recipes and we'd like to share one of them. It's called the Pontarlier Julep.
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After our first sip of Fernet-Branca we doubted there would ever come a time that we would actually enjoy the stuff. It's a common reaction. Since then, we have proven over and over that the rumors of its miraculous medicinal effects as a remedy for an upset stomach are all true, and through the years of occasional doses to help us ease digestion, it happened. Fernet was no longer the vile and bitter solution to mystery meal after-effects. Instead, we found ourselves actually enjoying the herbal complexity. We began to seek it out on bar menus looking forward to sampling cocktails whose creators attempted to incorporate its not-so-subtle signature. It's fair to say that today, we're big fans!
One of the first recipes you might run across when armed with a bottle of Fernet-Branca is the Hanky-Panky cocktail. Its creator, Ada "Coley" Coleman ran the American Bar at the Savoy
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ChamPino Cocktail
We have said it before and it still holds true: It’s never a bad time to open a bottle of champagne. Although we like to keep a bottle of bubbly in the refrigerator ready for any event, sometimes all it takes is dinner at home. There’s no reason it should only come out on special occasions. Whether you open a bottle of cava, prosecco, or real champagne from France, sparkling wine is great all by itself or as an ingredient for cocktails. Flavors vary, and so does quality and price, but you can make decent drinks with just about anything. We aren’t saying you should drink the cheapest stuff you can find, but you don’t have to break the bank either.
Over the years we have featured some popular uses for sparkling wine—the Mimosa, the French 75,
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In some respects, our Drink of the Week was an inevitable recipe. It’s analogous to the primordial soup of amino acids that first coalesced to create life—given the right conditions, it was only a matter of time before tiny miracles started to happen. Now, imagine you are a bartender (or a famous Italian chef) mixing a classic cocktail, the Negroni, time and time again. One day, as you reach for your ingredients, instead of grabbing Campari, you pull out a bottle of Cynar. It’s an easy mistake—they were sitting right next to each other. Suddenly, you are experimenting with reckless abandon, swapping this for that and thinking, “Hey, this just might work!” Put a few good ingredients next to each other along with a basic formula for success and you are bound to create some tiny miracles of your own.
The Cin Cyn isn’t
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Click here for Part 1 to find out how this started.
Several weeks ago we featured a technique involving oak barrels and batched cocktails. In that post we described some of the details to help anyone get started aging their own cocktails in barrels. After many weeks of anxious anticipation (and a few sips along the way) we are finally able to share our results. Was it worth the wait? Are the cocktails really that good after sitting in charred oak barrels for over a month? Should you try this yourself? In a word, absolutely positively beyond-a-doubt YES.
You can see from the images that we reused empty bottles from the original base spirits and decorated them with the taped-on paper labels we made for the barrels while they were aging. We probably should grab a marker and write the dates that the barrels were opened
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