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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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Here's a nice cocktail to drink while curled up next to the fireplace. It's big and bold, salty and sweet, and a little bitter too. You could say it's everything but sour. It comes by way of Marvel Bar's Pip Hanson and appears in both The American Cocktail book and Northstar Cocktails. During the colder, darker months, it's hard not to get excited about cocktails like this one. It's also pretty easy to make for how complex it tastes, and it uses an ingredient we've never featured on Summit Sips until now.
The unusual ingredient is Nocino (no-CHEE-no), a dark Italian walnut flavored liqueur made from unripe green walnuts. The flavor is sweet, luscious and deeply nutty, but often still high in alcohol. We were first introduced to it a couple years back at the Bradstreet Crafthouse where it plays prominently in their Black Walnut Old Fashioned, a
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As the cooler months of autumn begin to replace the summer's heat, we often think of cocktails made with apples and darker spirits. So often, the drinks we post here at Summit Sips are either spirit-driven, bitter, or they end up balanced slightly toward the sour side of the spectrum. Here's a drink that will appeal to those of you who like something a little sweeter looking for a pleasant sipper as the leaves change. There are several versions of the Golden Dawn which originated around 1930, but this one seems to be the most interesting because it retains a depth of flavor while keeping the sugar under control. It comes to us by way of Ted Saucier's Bottoms Up, a risqué cocktail book first published in 1951. It's also one of those drinks that gets away with exactly equal proportions.
Golden Dawn .75 oz Calvados .75 oz
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This is another forgotten drink recipe from the Prohibition era. It appears in print as early as Harry Craddock's Savoy Cocktail Book but we picked it up in Ted Haigh's excellent Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails. As you might have guessed, it uses calvados as the base spirit. Like cognac, calvados is a type of brandy from France, although instead of grapes it comes from apples. Past recipes on Summit Sips that have featured apple brandy are divided among drinks like the Jack Rose and the Newark that make use of its American cousin, Applejack, and others such as the Widow's Kiss and our own Circean that contain the more refined French calvados. It's one of those spirits that seems to be overlooked by a lot of people and that's a shame, but it's not why this cocktail recipe almost disappeared.
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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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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 post enough tropical Tiki rum drinks on Summit Sips. It's not intentional—it just works out that way. With winter behind us now and the magnolias in bloom, we thought it might be nice to catch up on a classic that we mentioned back in April of last year. We may not be quite ready to kick off our sandals and relax in the luxurious sunshine, but this string of 70-degree days and thundershowers has us thinking maybe we should get few summer recipes prepared. The Painkiller is a perfect drink to put on the summer menu, and unlike a lot of Tiki tranquilizers, this one is easy to make.
In order to make the Painkiller, you need to gather a few ingredients, but it's not nearly as difficult as you might think. First and foremost, you need coconut cream. Don't worry, we aren't
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Over the past couple of years we’ve discussed recipes, spirits, commercial and homemade ingredients, technique and even our favorite tools—but a subject we haven’t spent a lot of time on is the cocktail garnish. We’ve shared a few details as recipes required, but we thought it might be helpful to compile a list of terms and techniques so our readers have a place to go for reference and suggestions. After all, the garnish is part the cocktail. Sometimes there’s flexibility and other times skipping or changing it can make or break the recipe. Why Garnish? It’s important to understand the reasons for a garnish because it will help you recognize when you might be able to get away with an adjustment versus those times when it’s absolutely crucial to nailing a recipe’s intended flavor profile. You may decide you cannot make a particular
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There’s nothing wrong with documenting the hunt for odd ingredients or describing exploits in the glass. We’ve waxed poetic about Italian bitters, extolled the virtues of herbal liqueurs, and even promoted the benefits of exotic rum. And while we may not inspire every reader to expand their liquor cabinet or cocktail repertoire, we continue to build a foundation of information that anyone can appreciate. It’s easy to get completely carried away with stuff many folks can’t find or won’t even try, so as much as we like the unusual and obscure, nothing gets us more excited than revealing details about something that is common, whether it’s mixing up delicious homemade ingredients, borrowing
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This Drink of the Week week is actually three drinks in one. The Eastern Sour is the first of a small family of sour cocktails invented by none other than Trader Vic, one of the founding fathers of the mid-century Tiki movement. Although it isn't as complex or as difficult as many Tiki drinks, for some people that's not necessarily a bad thing. The more ingredients—or often, the more obscure the ingredients—the less likely most folks will be able to execute the recipe. At least that was my theory as I looked for a tropical style drink to post this week. I thought we needed a change from all of the Manhattan variations I have been posting.
My source of reference is a groovy little iPhone/iPad app called Beachbum Berry's Tiki+. This app was developed with the full endorsement of Jeff "Beachbum" Berry and it's filled with recipes
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