Splificator

Yeah, over here there is a good deal of small-scale distilling going on. That is a very good thing in the long run; I don't think anyone would argue with that. But "small scale" is not automatically synonymous with "craft," just as "large-scale" is not antonymous (why do we never use that word?) to it. I think that's the gist of what Sam and I are saying (oh, and thanks, Sam!). We're far from the only ones--the whiskey writer Chuck Cowdery, for example, has been on about this for some time. Some of the small-scale producers are making traditional-style London gins, with purchased GNS and the usual botanicals. Their gins taste "normal" and work just fine in the classic gin cocktails. If their prices are within a few bucks of the Tanquerays, Plymouths and Beefeaters of this world, then I don't particularly mind spending a little bit extra to encourage a small local business, but I'm also not going to trumpet the stuff as the greatest thing since juniper met ethanol. If their prices are appreciably higher than that, then I'll pass. Others still use purchased GNS, but come up with their own, often hasty and random-seeming (although definitely not juniper driven), botanical formulae, wrap the mantle of art around themselves--"we're redefining the category of gin," etc. etc.--and charge people through the nose for the privilege of trying their "hand-crafted" formula. I'm tired of these. I participate in a lot of blind tastings, and they rarely fare well in them. Yet others actually are hand-crafting their gins: long-time, experienced distillers who are making all or at least a significant part of their base spirit from mash, coming up with either painstakingly-researched historical formulae that enable us to wake up old recipes or patiently developed new formulae that are balanced, clean and delightful. I don't think anybody's arguing against them. Unfortunately, they're in the minority. My hope is that as some of the enterpreneurs and career-changers who populate the first two categories gain experience they're going to step up their games; come out with better or more interesting products. We'll see.

See, this speaks to the heart of my objections--which are by no means universal--with a some of what's being called craft distilling these days. I don't see why I should have to pay a 25%+ premium to fund somebody's effort to compete head-to-head with an established brand, even if the product is just as refined, mature, perfected. And usually you can't even say that: given the choice between paying $45 for a half-bottle of speed-aged local rye and $25 for a full bottle of six-year-old, I'll take the latter. With many of these new gins, it looks very much to me like they're using the consumer to fund their learning curve, banking on the belief that local pride will create a market for them that they can't earn on taste alone. (Try tasting your local favorite blind in a line up of its peers; results can be eye-opening.) Again, there are many exceptions. But to me the beauty and utility of craft distilling lie in finding blank spots in the pallette of available spirits and filling them in; markets the big companies have either abandoned or not yet identified. The Kuchan Peach Brandy from California is a perfect example. Peach eau-de-vie, barrel aged and delicious. Sure, it costs $43 a half-bottle, but I can't go out and buy a six-year-old version of it from Wild Turkey or Sazerac at a quarter of the price. I wish more of these small distillers had the vision to do something like that, rather than bubbling GNS through a random assortment of botanicals, not omitting a hint of juniper, and calling it "gin." Square One are entirely to be applauded, IMHO, for throwing away that marketing crutch and calling their entry "Botanical Spirit." I wish we could get everyone else to adopt a similar label, but that ain't gonna happen. So gin it is.

That's because it is fun! Kopstootjes all around! Screw the Martinis. We'll never agree on them anyway.

Where I grew up in Boston, this was simply the way one pronounces "genever." And those Bostonites were originally from . . . ? What's yours?

. . . and "Geneva" is from Holland, not Switzerland, and if you make it anywhere but in the Benelux countries and tiny slivers of France and Germany you have to find some name of your own for it, and "London dry gin" can be made anywhere but Plymouth, where you have to call it "Plymouth gin," and "distilled gin" is distilled, but so is every other gin, and Old Tom gin is sweetened except when it isn't, and . . . . Ah, t'hell with it. I'll join you in that martini. Up, please, not too dry. Twist.

Well, ok, yeah. As long as there's a way to differentiate them from London gins (dry or Old Tom), Plymouth gins or Hollands, I'm fine with people calling them gin. I don't mind Canadian whisky being called whisky (kidding!). Seriously, American whiskey is a poor representation of Scotch/Irish whisk(e)y, although delicious in its own right, and English gin a piss-poor version of Hollands, although again wonderful in its own right. You can rarely make Scotch drinks with rye or Hollands drinks with Old Tom or London dry. (London gins' heavy use of botanicals was originally derided and held up as an example of adulteration, given that the Dutch only used juniper and perhaps a handful of hops, relying on expensive malt and rye to give flavor to their product.) If you think about it, these International-Style things do function as gins--they emphasize the botanicals, not the base spirit (obviously this is where Hollands differs from its many and more successful children) and, more importantly, they're invariably mixed, not drunk straight. You just have to invent your own cocktails for them. That, too, is nothing new: the Dry Martini was an English gin drink, not a Hollands one, and indeed helped kill the category. As long as that doesn't happen to London dry, I'm cool. What I'd like to see, then, is these things deciding on a goddamn subcategory and identifying themselves with it, so when I'm fixing to Mart up or drink some Aviations or whatnot i won't drop $35 on something that tastes like my grandmother's potpourri boiled in drilling mud. Chances o them doing that? Slim. Ah, well.

I'll jump in briefly to note that I've taken to calling these spirits "International Style" gins, since like International Style architecture they're not grounded in any one nation's historical tradition of spirit-making, they're cheap to construct, sleek and anodyne. I think the real key to the sudden deluge of these things is the saturation of the vodka market, as has been pointed out here. Gin is almost as cheap to make as vodka, since it requires no aging before it can be sold (as opposed to, say, old rye whiskey, peach brandy or maple rum, to pick three things I'd like to see much more of) and the botanicals aren't all that expensive in the greater scheme of things. You're still working with GNS, and that's easy. Yet it has a marketable cachet (as has also been pointed out), if perhaps one that requires a little more work than vodka.

Mike-- My bottle is still 100 proof, but has alas lost the age statement. They were lucky indeed back when 8 to 10-year-old rye was readily available. Perhaps the best rye I ever had was some 10-year-old Rittenhouse, bottled at 100 proof for the Paris/Tokyo collectors markets. Mmmmmmmmmmm.

Seconding the Rittenhouse, along with Tanqueray and any and all cognac--if it's VSOP-grade, into the shaker it goes toute suite; if better, let's just say that Brooklyn has some pretty damn thirsty angels.

After much fiddling and wishful thinking, I finally came to the conclusion that while London Dry gin is good for a great many things, making hot drinks isn't one of them. I'd keep the madeira and try it again with a good genever. And Craig--I'll have to try the Regent's Punch with blood oranges. They must help the color as well, no?

Tad Seestedt, the man who makes Ransom, is an old friend of mine from before we found ourselves in the booze business. Fortunately, he's also a hell of a distiller (his eaux de vie are to die for). That skill came in handy with this project, since it is indeed very different from most modern gins. Outside of genever, almost every modern gin is based on grain neutral spirits, redistilled with botanicals (often in copper pot stills). That makes sense if you're doing a London dry, or even a late 19th century Old-Tom style. But Old Tom gin is a moving target. At the beginning of the 19th century, when English gin distillers began really focusing on quality (in part due to a naval blockade that cut off the supplies of high-end Dutch gins), there was no such thing as grain neutral spirit. There was rectified spirit, to be sure, which was whiskey redistilled and filtered, but it was still a pot-still spirit and would have displayed artifacts of its origin, so to speak. High-proof continuous distillation didn't come into play until the 1830s, and even then it wasn't universally adopted. Ransom Old Tom is an attempt to capture this transitional phase. Rather than monkeying with the botanicals, as most modern New-Testament gins do, Tad chose to monkey with the base spirit; to bring back he grain. To do that, he cut the GNS with a large proportion of fermented wort, and then ran it through the still. It's an unusual process, but it works. The result is then barrel-aged, since most Old Tom gins were stored and shipped in barrels, although perhaps not always such active ones as Tad uses. The result may not be an ideal Martini gin, but it makes an ass-kicking Gin Punch, IMHO. Hope this helps!

Would it be impermissibly curmudgeonly of me to suggest that the best variation is to just make the damn thing properly, with no monkey business or dashes of whatever's trendy? Two parts rye, one part sweet vermouth, a couple of dashes of Angostura, stirred and served up with a squeeze of lemon oil over the top. No variation ever mixed or mooted can beat that.

Another place to look is the Floridita; Constante used the bitters/sour combo. As did the great Albert Martin, one of the celebrity bartenders of the 1930s, at the Bon Ton in New Orleans to create his Rum Ramsey: 1 1/2 oz light rum, 1 teaspoon bourbon, juice 1/4 lime, 1/2 teaspoon bar sugar, 1 dash Peychaud's, shake, strain, up. This is a fun drink to play around with. Havana Club 3 and George T. Stagg are pretty cool, but I've also tried it with Philippine lambanog for the rum and a good rye (extremely fine, IMHO) and any number of other combos.

Interesting perspective. I think this is what makes the New York Sour--i.e., a Sour with a float of dry red wine--work so spectacularly. As for bittered sours in general, I suggest looking into Donn Beach's drinks; he was an early bitters + sour guy. It's not a combination that turns up frequently before Prohibition, if at all outside, the narrow bounds of the Crusta. It's not even in the 1912 Angostura guide I have. I'll keep an eye out, though.

FWIW, if I'm making Aviations Ensslin-style, these days I go with 2 teaspoons Luxardo and 1 teaspoon R&W creme de violette (the newer, reformulated version, not the initial release, which is less deeply blue) to 1/2 oz lemon and 2 oz Plymouth. Color comes out right, not too sweet, not too tart (for me, anyway) and no one ingredient eiher dominates or gets lost.

Agree about the lemon peel. That's why I don's twist them into the glass first or anything like that--I love the aroma of lemon oil that greets your nose as you lift the glass up to drink, and in this kind of all-alcohol drink, it's an essential bright accent.

This is fun: Puschglühbowle Over a low flame, heat 3 bottles light, red wine and 1 750-ml bottle Batavia Arrack van Oosten. While this is simmering, stir in ½ cup sugar and 1 Seville orange or regular orange and 1 lemon, cut into slices and with seeds removed. After everything has simmered together for 5 minutes, pour this into a heavy earthenware bowl, set it alight and ladle flaming into small, heat-resistant cups. There's also the Feuerzangenbowle, which is more or less the same thing, but instead of stirring the sugar and the spirits in, you put the former in loaf-form on a set of tongs over the bow, saturate it with the latter and light it up, ladling more booze onto the fire to taste.

If you did try it, as I did last night (hadn't made one in a while) you probably found that a smidgen less Grand Marnier and a smidgen more brandy and/or vermouth would be an improvement. With the old 1960s-formula Noilly, you could get away with more liqueur; with the stuff we get now, I found the drink slightly over-ripe, if still pretty damn tasty. For round two, I went with 1 1/4 oz cognac, 1 oz vermouth and 3/4 oz GrandMa. Nice.

As far as I know, it made its debut in Hugo Ensslin's 1916 Recipes for Mixed Drinks (Ensslin tended bar at the Hotel Wallick, in Times Square). Here's an article on its origin, from the Cooperstown Glimmerglass in late 1934: Edited for prettiness.

Here's another forgotten favorite of mine; because I'm lazy, I'll just paste in the write-up I did for Drinks magazine back in 2005: Simple construction, complex flavor, good backstory--exactly what I like in a drink.

Here's one I've been enjoying rather too much lately; it's from the Hoffman House bartender's guide, circa 1910: Modern Cocktail (ca. 1910) Stir with cracked ice: 1 1/2 oz blended Scotch 1 1/2 oz Sloe Gin 1/4 oz lemon juice 1/4 oz 1:1 simple syrup 1 dash Absinthe 1 dash orange bitters Strain into chilled cocktail glass and add cherry. I like it with Johnny Walker Black (cut back to 1 oz), Plymouth Sloe, Vieux Pontarlier absinthe and Gary Fee/Joe Regan bitters; the cherry depends on your feelings about cherries.

The earliest I've found it in a quick whip-round of the archives is in the Savoy book; while there are XYZ Cocktails in both Robert Vermiere (1922) and Jimmy of Ciro's (1930), neither one is this XYZ. Theis version had some currency, at least, as I see from Dan Thomas's "About Hollywood" column from December 5, 1933, where he writes that "Wynne Gibson favors an 'XYZ' cocktail, made with one-half bacardi, one-fourth ciointreau, and one-fourth lemon juice. Stir this well and strain into cocktail glasses." Wynne Gibson was a starlet in good repute at the time.

The state of knowledge about cocktail history within the cocktail geek community is quite different from that in the wild. I can't say how many times I've been interviewed by lifestyle journalists who begin with the premise that cocktails were created during Prohibition. Informed authorities do not promulgate that theory, but considered as a subset of the population at large, the number of people who consult said authorites and take their information to heart cannot be considered as anything but miniscule.

Overholt used to be bonded (and, as far as I know, only bonded) as recently as the 1980s. I've still got half a bottle left of an '80s bottling, still made in PA (but bottled in Cincinnati). Shaggy, but not bad. Edited for geographical accuracy.

Don't say that! There are those of us to whom the stuff is an essential staple. It was hard enough to get it back. I'd rather not have to have a case of it airfreighted over from Germany every time I want to mix up a bowl of Regent's Punch. A bowl here and a bowl there and soon you're spending real money. That said, Jonathan Swift couldn't stand the stuff either, so you're in good company. ← I suspected this would get your attention (embarrassing ...). Every time I think about how much I hate arrack I have to come to terms with the fact that I'm disappointing Dave Wondrich - no joke, I think of you every time it comes up. I call it the cilantro of spirits. But I got over my cilantro aversion by eating a ton of it in Mexico. Regent's Punch, you say? ← Well, see, I feel partly responsible for your being forced to drink the stuff, and it makes me defensive. Seriously, though, batavia arrack is not something to be splashed around lightly. I barely use it myself, except when I'm making one or two specific drinks, and even then it's always accompanied by citrus juice, sugar, perhaps another liquor or two (invariably old fashioned Jamaican-style rum, as detailed above by Sam, and maybe a little cognac), and lots of water, or, of course, champagne. And really, do try a bowl of Regent's Punch some time. You can barely taste the arrack--it's there to add depth of flavor and keep things from being insipid, more than to blow your sinuses out. Many of these ingredients we're discussing here suffer from the same problem as the Arrack: they're pungent and not very versatile, so when people splash them about liberally and inflict them on their friends and customers for novelty's sake, pretty soon the novelty wears off and then some real aversions have been created. Back in the day, (as has been observed) there were, e.g., very few drinks that called for creme de violette, and fewer that were at all popular (the Blue Moon and--well, that wasn't even very popular, and that was about the leader). To have it as an unusual accent is a wonderful thing; as a staple, less so. Put me down for more ryes, more genevers and more base spirits in general. And yes, a clone of Medford rum would be nice. But nothing comes before peach brandy, distilled off the crushed kernels and left to slumber in the wood. More Japanese whiskeys would be really nice as well--I'd rather have Nikka here than any number of floral liqueurs.