Archive for the ‘Cocktails’ Category
August 17th, 2007
One of the Chartreuse cocktails that the boozin’ broads of LUPEC Boston created for Sunday night’s Chartreuse Cocktails event at Green Street is a winner in Salon.com’s first summer cocktail contest. Congrats, ladies! LUPEC is Ladies United for the Preservation of Endangered Cocktails, and the Boston chapter’s blog is here. The winning cocktail’s called the Irma La Douce. “Take a green French liqueur and a movie in which Shirley MacLaine plays a Parisian prostitute dressed in bright green stockings — and it adds up to a cocktail called the Irma la Douce,” the article reads. One Salon taster described the drink as “spicy and tart, like its namesake.” Santé!
Posted in Cocktails, drinkboston in the news, Liqueur | 3 Comments »
August 16th, 2007
As a proselytizer for “classic cocktails,” I am often at a loss when I try to explain to people what I mean by that term. My mind gropes futilely, trying to single out that obscure recipe that represents the vast treasury of pre-Prohibition drinks. Then, one day, I was flipping through the Old Waldorf Astoria Bar Book and noticed something that would astonish most modern drinkers: over one-third of the recipes in that book contain vermouth — either sweet (red/Italian) or dry (white/French), or both together. Ha, now there was a fact that would both grab the attention of the uninitiated and give them an example of what makes classic cocktails classic.
In the present day, vermouth is viewed as a relic from an era when people apparently enjoyed drinking poison. At least, that’s what you’d think vermouth was given the way modern Martini drinkers shudder at the notion of more than a drop of the stuff mucking up their chilled vodka with olives. That’s how we’ve all been conditioned for decades: the drier the Martini the better, so lose the vermouth. And while you’re at it, strip the drink of all remaining flavor by replacing gin with vodka.
When you think about it, that’s just weird. I mean, why did the Martini ever become popular in the first place? Because it used to be a great drink. Try this: two-thirds London dry gin and one-third dry vermouth stirred for a good minute over cracked ice and served straight up with a lemon twist. (Add a dash of orange bitters and an olive if you want to.) It’ll make you understand why vermouth is worthy of respect. Without a liberal dose of it, the Martini would never have achieved fame.
Not just in the Martini, but in many classic cocktails, vermouth adds roundness to the strong taste of spirits. It can also knit together other flavors. It’s kind of like the standard onion-celery-carrot base of many soups — you don’t taste those flavors up front, but without them the soup lacks savoriness and dimension.
Take, for instance, the El Presidente and the Scoff Law. Without dry vermouth, the former would be a forgettable, sweet drink, and the latter would be a disjointed combination of flavors. The Independent has a slight variation of the El Presidente on its current menu; it contains a little fresh lime juice, and it’s delicious and refreshing. The Scoff Law is a drink that’ll probably wind up on the menu for drinkboston’s upcoming Chartreuse Cocktails event at Green Street. The flavors balance each other out and create an entirely new taste. (There’s a Scoff Law variation, also delicious, with rye, dry vermouth, lemon juice and grenadine.)
Now that you realize vermouth is not poison, but instead an indispensible cocktail ingredient, here are the rules for stocking it in your home bar: buy small bottles, which take less time to finish; keep vermouth refrigerated after you open it; and choose decent brands like Noilly Prat or Martini & Rossi. The good brands are still cheap — a 375ml bottle of Martini & Rossi will set you back $4. Simply keep in mind that vermouth is essentially red or white wine that’s flavored with herbs and lightly fortified to an alcohol content of 16 percent (compared to 12-14 percent for regular wine), so it should be treated similarly to wine. That means throw away those bottles you last opened for a party in 1995 and start fresh. Then mix up a batch of old-school Martinis, invite your friends over, and change their lives.
Posted in Cocktails, Vermouth | 9 Comments »
August 2nd, 2007
Drinkboston.com will join boozy forces with the recently founded Boston chapter of LUPEC (Ladies United for the Preservation of Endangered Cocktails) on Sunday, August 19 to host Chartreuse Cocktails at Green Street in Cambridge. The event starts at 7:00 p.m. (More on LUPEC Boston below.)
Chartreuse, the brilliant green, 110-proof spirit made by Carthusian monks in France and flavored with 130 herbs and other botanicals, is perhaps the noblest of liqueurs. If you’ve had Chartreuse, you know that nothing else tastes quite like it. How do you even begin to describe its bright, herbal complexity? You don’t. You just mix it into a cocktail and admire the distinctive result. At the Green Street event, you’ll taste cocktails made with green Chartreuse, described above, and its sibling, yellow Chartreuse.
On the menu: Two classic Chartreuse cocktails and two new-school Chartreuse cocktails, the latter created exclusively for this event by members of LUPEC Boston. Passed appetizers with fresh, in-season ingredients will accompany the drinks. But wait, there’s more:
- LUPEC Boston members will mix, pour, and discuss Chartreuse cocktails.
- A special guest bartender will, in the guise of a Carthusian monk, be on hand to discuss the history and ingredients of this storied liqueur.
- An additional menu of Chartreuse cocktails will be available for purchase at the bar.
- Ticket price is $35/person including 4 Chartreuse cocktails and passed appetizers.
LUPEC Boston is a classic cocktail society dedicated to “breeding, raising, and releasing nearly extinct drinks into the wild” (a.k.a. Boston-area bars and restaurants.) Founded in February 2007 by Misty Kalkofen of Green Street and 10 fellow cocktail enthusiasts (including moi), LUPEC Boston is the city’s first and only female-oriented cocktail society. The ladies of LUPEC Boston meet once a month to sample delicious cocktails from a bygone era, and learn about the important and nearly forgotten forebroads who sipped them. They also work to improve the lives of Boston-area women, and proceeds from their upcoming events will benefit local women’s charities.
Proceeds from Chartreuse Cocktails at Green Street will benefit LUPEC Boston and the fundraising events they are ramping up for this fall.
Reserve tickets in advance by calling Green Street at 617-876-1655 or emailing LUPEC Boston at lupecboston “at” gmail “dot” com. Or purchase tickets by visiting Green Street at 280 Green St., Cambridge, MA. See ya there!
Posted in Cocktails, Events, Liqueur | 10 Comments »
July 27th, 2007
Wow. As we say in New England, that was wicked awesome. The last time I was in New Orleans, I was a dumb college kid hanging out on Bourbon St. drinking Hurricanes with the rest of the tourists. Fast-forward many years to Tales of the Cocktail 2007, where I attended seminars on vermouth and pimento dram and drank Pimm’s Cups at the honorable Napoleon House. The older, wiser me had a much better time.
If drinking cocktails for breakfast, lunch and dinner, then going out at night for more cocktails, is your idea of heaven, this is the event — and the town — for you. At a 10 a.m. session on applejack, we were served a Golden Dawn, a Jack Rose and a Wicked Kiss (a Widow’s Kiss with the addition of rye whiskey). Haigh (Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails), Gary Regan (The Joy of Mixology, Regan’s Orange Bitters), and Chad Solomon and Christy Pope (Cuff & Buttons) presided over the seminar with an unofficial fifth panelist: Lisa Laird of the Laird family. Yes, that Laird family, the ones who have produced Laird’s Applejack since the 1700s and who had George Washington over for dinner before the Battle of Monmouth. The cocktails were made with bonded Applejack, which is distilled with 100-percent apples (no grain neutral spirits) and aged for four years — and which, as far as I know, cannot be had in the Boston area. Too bad.
At Prohibition’s Shadow, which featured Haigh, David Wondrich, Robert Hess (drinkboy.com) and John Hall (distiller of Forty Creek Canadian whiskey), we sipped samples of Forty Creek, a blend of rye, corn and barley whiskies, all distilled separately then blended. That stuff was righteously smooth and had flavors of an old ale, like Thomas Hardy’s. Why Canadian whiskey? Well, where do you think speakeasies got their whiskey during Prohibition? The session itself turned into a bit of a speakeasy when John Myers, bartender, cocktail historian and author of the Thirstin’ Howl, suddenly pulled a bottle of Fernet out of his bag and began dispensing shots. Perfectly appropriate at this sort of convention.
Cocktails and the Blogosphere, another 10 a.m. session (oh, my head!) involved Fancy Free and Police Gazette cocktails by way of illustrating how obscure drinks get re-discovered and popularized through blogs. Full of whiskey and bitters, these are two libations that’ll set the vintage-cocktail enthusiast’s heart aflutter. Paul Clark (Cocktail Chronicles), Chuck Taggart (Gumbo Pages), Darcy O’Neil (The Art of Drink) and Rick Stutz (Kaiser Penguin) presided. The session’s money quote (by Paul, I think): “At the 10th anniversary of Tales of the Cocktail, we’ll be talking about the recently launched 100,000th drink blog.”
The money quote from the session simply titled Vermouth (with Haigh and Martin Doudoroff, the geniuses behind cocktaildb.com) came from Haigh just as we started: “It’s 11:30 in the morning, and you guys are at a session on vermouth? Get a life!” We sipped a Marconi Wireless (speaking of bloggers rediscovering old drinks) and a Rose and learned that it’s really hard to get information from vermouth producers (Martini & Rossi, Noilly Prat, etc.) on the spices they use to turn red or white wine into a classic cocktail ingredient. One of the panelists did manage to get hold of some info, and she recited a list of ingredients used in M&R and NP, but I was way beyond note taking at that point.
The Lost Ingredients session was a trip. I had never even heard of pimento dram or Batavia arrack, much less tasted them, before that day. The session was basically a live interpretation of “Gone but Not Forgotten,” the article Clarke wrote for the current issue of Imbibe. I urge any cocktail enthusiast to pick up that issue, because Clarke’s article includes info (and some recipes) on some of the amazing, re-emerging spirits we sampled at Lost Ingredients, including: pimento dram, a rum-based, allspice-flavored liqueur rarely found outside Jamaica — we sampled Taggart’s homemade version; Batavia arrack, a sugar cane- and fermented rice-based spirit produced in Java (formerly the Dutch colony of Batavia) and the basis of Swedish punsch; and falernum, a low-alcohol syrup flavored with limes, ginger, almonds and clove and a key ingredient in many tiki drinks. Read more about the Lost Ingredients session here.
Finally, Sunday brunch: absinthe with a little sugar. I walked into that session a little late, and when I entered the room … wow, the licorice perfume enveloped me, a sensory experience I’ll never forget. Chemist and absinthe expert Ted Breaux gave a comprehensive presentation about absinthe history, myth and legal status, which is apparently still kind of fuzzy in the U.S. He devised the recipe for the new, legal-in-the-U.S. absinthe Lucid, which contains wormwood but only a barely measurable amount of wormwood’s active and feared ingredient, thujone. Anyhoo… somehow we were drinking real Swiss and French absinthe (the latter produced from a recipe of Breaux’s) in the traditional way, by very slowly letting ice water drip into the glass until the liquid became cloudy. This stuff was strong — over 130 proof! I don’t think absinthe should be banned, but I’m not sure if I recommend it as the first meal of the day.
In my next post, I’ll provide some snapshots of what happened outside of the Tales of the Cocktail sessions.
Posted in Absinthe, Applejack, Cocktails, Events, New Orleans, Vermouth, Whiskey | 6 Comments »
July 21st, 2007
Pimm’s Cups at the Napoleon House. Sazeracs at Tujaque’s. Herbsaint & waters at Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop. Miller High Lifes at Vaughan’s. PBRs at the Circle Bar.
Well, that just about covers my past 48 hours in New Orleans. I’m down here for Tales of the Cocktail (my first year, the conference’s fifth), visiting NOLA’s best bars and attending seminars on applejack, vermouth, lost ingredients, cocktail blogs, etc. The locals seem pleased that the event has drawn a pack of tourists to town during the slow season, and I keep running into fellow Bostonians in bars — that never happens back home!
I’ve been tickled to meet many of the people whom I previously knew only in print through their books and blogs: Esteemed author-mixologists Dale DeGroff, Ted Haigh, Paul Harrington and Wayne Curtis; NYC cocktail celebs Audrey Sanders, Chad Solomon and Christy Pope; and influential fellow bloggers Paul Clarke (Cocktail Chronicles), Chuck Taggart (Gumbo Pages), Darcy O’Neil (The Art of Drink) and Rick Stutz (Kaiser Penguin). What fun!
More on Tales to come. In the meantime, we Bostonians down here are plotting to infiltrate a few of next year’s panels.
Posted in Cocktails, New Orleans | 4 Comments »
