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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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We don’t often review books on Summit Sips. Sure, there’s the occasional mention when we consider it worthwhile or when we give credit for an inspiring recipe, but by and large, when we write about mixology we tend to stick to the mixing and drinking part of the craft and not the reading. That’s not to say you shouldn’t bother with books. On the contrary—it’s important to familiarize yourself with all of the great resources that are available. Just a few weeks ago we broke stride and wrote about the locally authored North Star Cocktails. But of all the books we have collected over the years, it’s Jim Meehan’s PDT Cocktail Book that is quickly becoming our favorite.
The Leapfrog cocktail was created in the summer of 2007 and in December of 2008 it appeared in the New York Times. Eventually, it found a home in this wonderfully illustrated book
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If we didn’t post something about this cocktail today we would have to wait four more years to get excited about it again. And you know what? It’s not a bad drink. Not at all. It comes to us by way of the Savoy Hotel in London. It was created by none other than Harry Craddock, author of the famous Savoy Cocktail Book. Craddock supposedly created it on February 29th back in 1928—exactly 84 years ago today—in order to celebrate Leap Day, although it would be another couple of years before the recipe saw print. We have seen 20 such days come and go since then, and today we have one more. Raise your cocktail to Harry Craddock and celebrate the 21st Leap Year since it’s creation.
Leap Year 2 oz gin .5 oz Grand Marnier .5 oz sweet vermouth .25 oz lemon juice
Stir with ice and strain
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Here’s a simple little cocktail that takes a bunch of ingredients we’ve described before and combines them into an unexpected party of flavors. Pooling dry gin with lime, liqueur and bitters isn’t new. We have seen this formula before with the Pegu Club cocktail, but the Pendennis is different. It’s—dare we say it—(sorry Doug) better? more interesting. To be fair, we can’t count how many times we’ve said that one recipe or another was our favorite. Ask us our favorite cocktail and we will probably ask you what base spirit you had in mind. So let’s give credit where credit is due and call this a Pegu Club variant, but one you really must try.
And like the Pegu Club which was named for the historic English gentleman’s club in Burma, this one references a similar establishment located in Louisville, Kentucky. The
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Over the past couple of years we have listed some of the best places in the Twin Cities to get a great cocktail. Although we firmly believe that the top of that list should be your very own home, it’s not always convenient to invite friends over or to make drinks for large groups. Knowing how to make a few great recipes is one thing, but having all of the ingredients to make anything or to try something new is something else. Even the best home bartender can learn a lot by watching the experts. It’s also nice to have someone else take care of everything for you from start to finish. Although such places don’t always last forever, a professional commitment to skillfully crafted drinks seems to be a growing trend, not just in
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The Anodyne Cocktail—for whatever ails you. The name means something that alleviates or eliminates pain, so I guess it could apply to any drink, but in this case it was chosen for a medicinal combination of ingredients first tried by Wesley Moore in 2009 when it appeared on Chuck Taggart’s Looka! Gumbo Pages weblog. According to Chuck, the cocktail was inspired by the Perfect Martini which is a Martini made using equal portions of both sweet and dry vermouth.
The first thing you might notice is that this drink doesn’t use a typical sweet vermouth, nor a typical dry one. It wouldn’t be very innovative if it did. Instead, the substitutions are far more interesting and the proportions are such that they setup a wonderful balance between them. As simple as it sounds, it’s much more than a basic substitution riff. What we have with the Anodyne is another
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Assorted Syrups
One of the best gifts you can give someone interested in cocktails is booze. You don’t even have to break the bank (although you might reconsider picking from the bottom shelf) because it doesn’t have to be the rarest or the most expensive item in the shop. Pick a decent base spirit and you really can’t go wrong. For example, there’s no such thing as having too much gin for classic cocktails, and who would turn away a nice bottle of whiskey or rum? Certainly not me, so if you want a no-brainer gift idea that will be used and appreciated, look no further. The problem with this approach is that a bottle of alcohol may not be the most personal or creative gift idea. It will work as a last resort, but you can do better!
If a bottle of booze is the baseline, or
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The name may not inspire you, but this drink actually surprised me. If you dig around in old cocktail books for this recipe you find that they are all different. Flipping through the pages of the Savoy, for example, you find a recipe that lacks the Applejack and has no citrus. It doesn’t sound like something I want to try. You can find versions that add brandy to the mix and even some with cream. One might specify lemon while another will call for lime. It seems that darn near anything that had a light pink hue was once called a Pink Lady—a name you could just pass by thinking it’s a girlie drink before you started comparing vintage recipes. Even Ted “Dr. Cocktail” Haigh goes to great lengths in his Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails to avoid revealing the name of this drink until you turn the page. But
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Last year during the month of October I shared a series of Halloween-themed cocktails that are all great classics. The Corpse Reviver No. 2, Satan’s Whiskers, Trader Vic’s El Diablo and Don the Beachcomber’s Zombie. I couldn’t let the month go by without adding another ghoulish recipe to the list. This year I am sharing my interpretation of something I had at the Bradstreet Crafthouse back in January.
Although it’s no longer on the menu at Bradstreet, every time I look at the ingredients I am bitten. This is not for the faint of heart. First of all, it’s an all-spirits drink, and while that has the benefit of avoiding fresh juices making it easier in some respects, it also packs
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Back in January, Camper English of Alcademics wrote a piece for the LA Times Magazine with an interesting observation. He suggested that the Martini no longer exists because everyone who makes one (or who orders one) expects something different. In other words, we don’t really have a universally accepted recipe today, partly because everyone has different ideas about what they like, what should or shouldn’t go into the mixing glass, the proportions and how it should be garnished. Blame it on history, marketing or even peer pressure—it has become a call drink that requires specifics about its construction every time it is requested. If you order a Martini, you should expect a bunch of questions in response. Gin or vodka? Which brand? How much vermouth? What kind of garnish? If you don’t get questions you probably shouldn’t be ordering one. There’s no telling what you will get. Same
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