Splificator

Alas, the virginia snakeroot I have soaking in alcohol here at the North Gowanus Institute has an utterly bewitching aroma all its own. I've never smelled or tasted anything like it.

I say it's garbage and I say to hell with it. So there.

It's a history of Punch, with recipes. Due in--well, whenever I finish it.

Hey, thanks very much! It's most gratifying, I won't deny it. On to the next book!

Website glitch. It's back there--try the link again. Oh, and when I said "both books," I meant Kindred Spirits 2 and Imbibe!--a $75 value right there. Thanks, Mr.D, for the kind words about BAR, in whose hallowed precints you are well remembered. About vodka. Down the road here in 2008, I'm feeling a little embarrassed about some of the intemperate statements I've made about the stuff. Five or ten years ago, when just about all new cocktails were based on it, there was cause for resentment. Now, not so much, at least not where I live and tipple. There are plenty of good vodkas out there among the mediocre ones, and when deeply chilled and served in little shots alongside plates of zakuski, they can make for a truly sublime drinking experience. That said, Paul and I will be dissecting rye, cognac, tequila and rhum agricole, and not vodka.

Kicking this up yet again to let anyone who might be interested know that you can have what amounts to a little taste of the B.A.R. experience next Thursday, June 12th, at Morrell & Co here in New York. Paul Pacult, our head poobah (and author of, most recently, the monumental and awe-inspiring Kindred Spirits 2) and I will be leading a spirit and cocktail tasting. Paul chose the spirits and I chose the cocktails that we'll make from them. Should be fun. Plus you get signed copies of both books.

Also, there are distinct recipes for an Old Tom Gin Cocktail and an Old Tom Gin (Cordial) Cocktail: Hmmm. Interesting. Some brands of English gin sold here--Charles', Messenger's--were advertised as "Cordial Gin." Others--the famous Hodges'--were marketed as "Old Tom Cordial Gin" while yet others were simply "Old Tom." (Boord's--the one with the cat on the barrel--used this approach.) But "Old Tom" was also a generic term for any English gin of quality, virtually all of which were sweetened, at least until unsweetened gin caught on in the 1890s. Sugar levels in English gins did vary, though, from some 3 oz a gallon to some 13 oz, according to one study in the 1850s (the average was about 6). Did this have any correlation with the brands that emphasized the "cordial"? The first two examples from Boothby seem to indicate that it does, but this is the only evidence of it I've seen.

Erik-- I think you're running into a common problem with old cocktail books here, which is that the recipes are not consistent because they're drawn from different sources. I say this because Old Tom gin and Old Tom cordial gin are as far as I can determine one and the same thing--at least, "Old Tom gin," "cordial gin" and "Old Tom cordial gin" are used interchangeably in British sources from the mid-nineteenth century, when Old Tom first rose to prominence. As with all things relating to Old Tom, I could be wrong.

Really? Water? Water? To quote Jim Backus in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World, "Stop kidding!" Of course, he went on to say "...and make me an Old Fashioned," which is nowadays generally unobtainable. But what's wrong with a Scotch and Soda?

These are two different Toms here--the 1730s one was a brand, if we can use that word, for gin bought at the sign of the cat; it later was appropriated by one of the makers of Old Tom-style gin, but much later. Thomas Norris was, according to "Notes and Queries," the owner of a Covent Garden gin palace in the early 19th century who featured the reserve/extra-special "cordial" gin made by "Old Tom" Chamberlin, master distiller at Hodges' distillery in Millbank (in central London); Hodges' was the iconic gin brand of the Regency and reign of George the IV. This is the Old Tom that, according to people at the time, gave high-quality English gin its generic name. According to G. B. Wilson's Alcohol and the Nation (1940), between 1830 and 1840 half the distillers in England had switched to continuous distillation for their raw spirit; by 1850, all of them had, but many (all the good ones) still used pot stills for rectifying the spirit with the botanicals. So for an early Old Tom, I think it would be very much like a jonge genever; for a later one, it all depends on the efficiency of the column distillation and the degree of neutrality of the spirit. If you could get an unaged grain whisky from Scotland and redistill it in a pot with botanicals, touch it with sugar and age it for a while in used oak, you'd pretty much be there.

This is a tough one, particularly since gins were proprietary and formulae closely guarded. But Old Tom was a transitional style, and hence a moving target. As far as I know, it first starts turning up as a style of gin (and not a brand or nickname for gin in general) in the early mid-nineteenth century, when English distillers were supplementing, rather than replacing, the pot still with the continuous still, and also moving away from the older idea that any botanicals beyond juniper were likely to be there as adulterants and substitutes rather than as adjuncts to the flavor. At the time, the gin was still largely shipped and stored in oaken casks. This would yield, for a mid-century style Old Tom, a spirit in between a London Dry/Plymouth gin and a Dutch-style gin, a thick-textured, slightly sweet spirit with a balance of botanicals, although with juniper dominant, and a bit of color from the barrel. Later in the century and into the twentieth century, once continuous distillation moved to the fore, one would be likely to get what was essentially a sweetened London Dry gin, with no age on it. Again, until we unearth a cache of mid-19th century Booth's, this is a matter of conjecture and (I hope somewhat informed) opinion.

They have bars but no bartenders; the definition of "cocktail" they use is "liquor plus a bottled mixer". Plus most planes don't even have bars at all (the only one I know that does is Virgin Atlantic). Not only would this be a golden opportunity, but whoever made it possible for one to secure a real gin martini inflight would deserve the title of Benefactor Humani Generis. There might possibly be a Nobel Prize in it.

A man's reach should extend his grasp, or what's a heaven for? Airplanes, though, would be eminently practical.

Yes. I agree that the handling of the juice will be by far the trickiest thing here. Could it be frozen in individual portions and flash-defrosted as needed? No substitute for real fresh juice, but not so very bad either, provided it's real, fresh-squeezed, filtered juice without additives of any kind that's being frozen. More venues where a machine like this would be welcome: Trains/planes/automobiles (well, autobuses, anyway) The New York Public Library (okay, maybe it's just me, but I like a drink at hand when reading about the things) The laundromat

I think we've got to think outside of the box here, or rather the bar. A brief anecdote. Last year, I found myself waiting for a plane in a business class lounge at Tokyo's Narita airport. As soon as I sat down, I noticed a steady stream of people walking by carrying large glasses of perfectly-poured draft beer, each with an inch of creamy head and no more. Finding this rather tempting, I thought I would go and say hello to the bartender. After looking around, I realized that there was no bar in the lounge, let alone a skilled bartender. Those beers were coming from a little machine on the counter, next to the club soda and Pocari Sweat and what have you. You simply took a chilled glass out of the refrigerator below, put it in the thing and pushed a button. A probe would then extend to the bottom of the glass and squirt beer in along the side of the glass (so that there would be no foam), rising with the level of the liquid. An inch from the top, it switched nozzles and squirted the beer straight down, thus creating the head. Done. Now, if there were a machine there that was prepared to offer a limited but sufficient range of precisely-prepared cocktails, would I have pushed that button? That's a rhetorical question. There are many places where one wants--nay, needs--a good drink where it would be impractical to keep a skilled bartender hanging around. Hotel lobbies, transit lounges, theaters, executive offices, IRS centers, hospital waiting rooms, PTA meetings.... So I say tally ho! If you build it, they will drink.

Yep. That's certainly what I was trying to say, in my own obscure way.

I think this is the real distinction here: fractionating columns, whether clapped on top of pots or used on their own, allow the volatile compounds in the steam to condense separately from each other and be drawn off accordingly. The old-fashioned swan's neck-style alembic condenses all the steam together. This forces one to fractionate afterwards, by separating the condensed steam out into heads, heart and tails. Inherently a much cruder process. Depending on where you place your condensing plates and tap your column, you can get an approximately comparable product (if perhaps missing some of the rich oiliness an alembic-stilled product has), or you can get something practically pure. The latter is easier.

It's worth bearing in mind that most American whiskeys--bourbons, ryes, corn whiskeys--are made in column stills, some of them the approximate size of something you would find near the Houston Ship Channel. It's entirely possible to make heavy, flavorful spirit in a column still, if you know what you're doing.

It is indeed; I've been using it for a while. Not for sipping, though.

I worry about those kittens....

Chuck Cowdery had an excellent rant about this (scroll down) a while back; here's the heart of it: I can understand feeling that you need to do a vodka in order to pay your bills until the whiskey is aged, but why not do, say, a Hollands-style gin, which is simply flavored young whiskey? Why not market a young whiskey and teach people to how to drink it and appreciate it? I know the answer to that--it's too hard. But that's what being an artisan is all about, isn't it?

"fairly...a lot" <"very...all" But we all know that.

Jesus wept! Why go to all the trouble of malting and pot-distilling if you're just going to strip all the flavor away from your whisky before it goes into the bottle? It's like force-feeding geese and then throwing away the livers. Edited for tsk tsk tsk grammar.

edit - added quote. ← I came across this a couple of years ago and did a little digging at the time. A couple of things really stood out in Duffy's account. One: I couldn't find any reference to the Highball that predates Duffy's story, which is set IIRC in 1893-1894. The Highball achieved widespread popularity in 1899 and 1900, so that dovetails pretty well with Duffy's story, allowing a few years for underground dissemination. I just did a quick whip through the sources available here at home, and didn't find anything that changes this. Then there's the name. It's ironic that Duffy credits a Brit with coming up with it, since the Highball was long used as an example of America's outlandish take on nomenclature--in Britain, of course, the same drink being known as a "whisky and soda." But, as Sam noted upthread, one of the meanings of "ball" is "a drink." This was particularly an Irish usage, a "ball of malt" being a standard drink order in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Dublin. I don't know whether Edward J. Ratcliffe (?1863-1948), the Brit in question, had worked in Ireland, but Dublin and Belfast were definitely part of the British theatrical circuit and Ratcliffe had definitely toured Britain, so there may be some connection there. Ratcliffe, by the way, was a piece of work, He was a bigamist and a brute who came over here, got in trouble with the law for his ways and ended up as a Hollywood character actor. Fun.

Had they really not been storing or aging Scotch Whisky in charred barrels by that time? ← A couple of interesting things (to the likes of me, anyway) about that letter, but I'll address them in the Highball thread. As for the Scotch, I think "white as gin" is an exaggeration. The stuff was shipped over in the barrel (not charred; only American whiskeys used those, and only some of them at that). If it came right over, and the barrel was used (and hence had much of its coloring power washed away), and it was bought and drained in good order, the whisky would be pretty damn light. If you left it in your cellar, though, like the "very fine Scotch (Caol Isla) whisky made in 1856" Jerry Thomas had in his cellar in 1870, then it would definitely have a fair amount of color--no different from single malts today.