Archive for the ‘Whiskey’ Category
January 25th, 2008
Things I learned this week:
1. Jeff “Beachbum” Berry’s Grog Blog features a post titled “Monks + Drunks x Sisterhood = the Pago Pago Cocktail.” It seems Berry made the acquaintance of some of the ladies of LUPEC Boston (that’s the Boston chapter of Ladies United for the Preservation of Endangered Cocktails) a couple of months ago when he was in town for the Sippin’ Safari. He became intrigued by the cocktails that LUPEC Boston and drinkboston.com created for a Chartreuse event at Green Street back in August.
“Inspired by LUPEC Boston’s creations,” writes the tiki guru, “we combed through our cocktail library in search of vintage tropical drinks that call for Chartreuse. In a 1940 book entitled The How And When, we finally found a good one: the Pago Pago. To make it, place 1 ounce of diced fresh pineapple in your cocktail shaker, then muddle the pineapple in 1/2 ounce fresh lime juice. Add 1/4 ounce white creme de cacao, 3 teaspoons green Chartreuse, and 1 1/2 ounces gold Puerto Rican rum. Shake well with ice cubes and strain into a cocktail glass.”
I have only tasted this drink in my mind, but it’s one of the most delicious imaginary cocktails I’ve ever had. I vow to mix one up for myself soon.
2. Blackberrying me from the bar at KO Prime, a friend of mine made me aware of the steak house’s “Retro Sundays.” He said he and his wife were drinking Pink Squirrels (creme de noyaux, creme de cacao and cream). Apparently, the bartenders robe up like Hugh Hefner, Chef Jamie Bisonnette parades around in a cartoonish toque, and the dinner menu includes old-school steak house specialties like all-you-can-eat prime rib, Oysters Rockefeller and shrimp cocktail. Cool.
3. Meanwhile, speaking of old-school … over at the Independent, bartender Evan Harrison is dreaming up a special menu of “cheap scotch cocktails.” It seems the bar has a surplus of Cluny blended scotch on hand (in 1.5 liter plastic bottles of course), and, well, Evan’s going to do his own version of your grandfather’s night out. I took a sniff from the Cluny bottle during a recent visit, and it smelled like … it smelled like the first time I ever smelled whiskey: dangerous and slightly sickening. I’m anxiously awaiting that menu. (Oh, and by the way, Evan also re-did the Indo’s website, and I think it looks damn cool.)
Posted in Cocktails, Liqueur, Whiskey | 4 Comments »
November 27th, 2007
The first time I tried a Moto Guzzi, I had no idea that all it was was equal parts Booker’s bourbon* and Punt e Mes. I thought there were at least some bitters in there, or two kinds of vermouth. Nope. Turns out the Moto Guzzi is the White Stripes of cocktails: like the guitarist and drummer that make up the entire band, the two ingredients in the cocktail create something raucous, deep and compelling. You can find the complete recipe here.
Moto Guzzi is an Italian motorcycle manufacturer established in 1921. It’s famous for its eagle logo, its racing achievements, and its cool bikes. Kevin Montuori, a motorcycle enthusiast and regular at No. 9 Park, invented this cocktail with 9 Park’s principal bartender, John Gertsen. This is their story.
John: “One fuzzy night at the bar at No. 9 … Kevin Montuori and I were discussing the possibility of using Booker’s in a cocktail. Given the alcohol content, we discussed manhattans and the various ratios. It seemed like Booker’s could support as much vermouth as we could give it. With all that vermouth the Angostura bitters sorta disappeared. Enter, stage right: Punt e Mes. It was perfect. I was thinking of some Manly Italian Name, and Kevin is a motorcycle/scooter aficionado. Somehow Moto Guzzi was brought up. It probably sounded more like ‘mrtigtzy’ after all of that Booker’s. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”
Kevin: “That’s it exactly. I always remember the amount of restraint it takes to make one: no bitters, no lemon oil spritzed over the top. Just the Punt e Mes and Booker’s. And it really was ‘mrtigtzy’ after a couple. The name was, if I recall, also influenced by the texture, which is sort of like used engine oil. Certainly one of my favorite drinks. Damn, now I’m thirsty.”
*From the Small Batch website: Booker’s is 6-8 year-old bourbon, 121-127 proof (uncut, straight from the barrel). “Big oak, vanilla, smoky charcoal” aroma. “Intense, fruit, tannin, tobacco” taste.
Posted in Cocktails, Vermouth, Whiskey | 1 Comment »
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 19th, 2007
Max Toste, bartender and co-partner of the Allston beer and cocktail bar Deep Ellum, is quite pleased when he tells me that he sells more sweet vermouth than Absolut, and more rye whiskey than Jack Daniels, as if all is going according to plan. Well, it is. When you put four different Manhattans on your cocktail menu, you’re going to go through some rye and vermouth. Here are the historically correct options under Deep Ellum’s “Manhattan 4 Ways”:
All of the below are 2 parts whiskey to 1 part sweet vermouth, except for the New School.
1930s – Rye (my fave)
Sugar cube muddled with 2 dashes Peychaud’s, 1 dash Angostura; twist
Stirred, straight-up
1950s – Bourbon (Deep Ellum uses W.L. Weller)
Angostura, bourbon-and-vermouth-soaked cherry
Stirred, straight-up
1970s – Canadian Club (Max’s grandfather’s recipe)
Angostura, twist
On the rocks
New School – Maker’s Mark
2 1/2 oz Maker’s Mark, 1/2 oz sweet vermouth; Angostura, cherry
Stirred, straight-up
And congrats to Max! He recently welcomed a baby daughter into the world.
Posted in Boston bars, Cocktails, Vermouth, Whiskey | 6 Comments »
June 12th, 2007
Yeah, it’s summertime, but that doesn’t mean you have to fight for sidewalk seating at a trendy Boylston Street restaurant and drink mango margaritas. Just find a dark, cool bar that stocks Fernet Branca and crushed ice and order a Fanciulli. This is the perfect drink to have when you quietly slip out of work at 2:30 on a sweltering afternoon to assume the role of an anonymous barfly in a film noir.
Fanciulli
1/2 bourbon
1/4 sweet vermouth
1/4 Fernet Branca
Frappé. (In other words, mix the ingredients together in a shaker and pour over crushed ice.) Tip: last Christmas, I received a Groggy ice crusher from Ikea; it’s a perfect home bar tool for frappé cocktails.
I found the recipe for this bracingly refreshing drink in that good, old yardsale paperback The Art of Mixing Drinks, based on the Esquire Drink Book, where I also found the Marconi Wireless.
Coming up … a back-of-the-napkin account of our recent trip to L.A.
Posted in Bitters, Cocktails, Drinking supplies, Whiskey | 9 Comments »
