mbanu

I've had Pernod but was wondering if it was worth the effort to seek out a bottle of Ricard. How do they compare against eachother? Same drink different name, or distinct in their own right?

It would be incredibly convenient if instead of coming up with brand new names for each and every cocktail, you could simply order them by category. The vodka sour probably has another name besides the vodka sour, but ordering it as a vodka sour makes it rather clear to both the person ordering and the person taking the order what in fact is being asked for. (I doubt that this will happen though, as it is admittedly more fun to ask for a Rob Roy or a Gin and It instead of for a scotch or gin Manhattan. ) Ratios are important if the ratio change is a big one. A Grand Marnier sour with a few dashes of Pernod and a Pernod sour with a few dashes of Grand Marnier don't taste quite the same.

Nice! How do you manage a drink like this with so many 1/4 ounce pours? It seems like it would be a terrible pain in the neck to make... I hadn't thought of adding bitters to a LIIT, it seems like something that might improve it... I'll have to add a bittered LIIT to my big list of random drinks to try.

After some tinkering with the recipe, I came up with a second version that's sweeter, to better replicate the use of sour mix and cheap triple sec. I also realized that in the recipe I listed (after all that harping about not adding enough cola) I didn't add enough mixer myself. (I think I forgot about that stray ounce of tequila) so I adjusted the cola ratio a bit as well. Drink mixing is a work in progress, eh? "Long Island Iced Tea - Snob Style (Mark 2)" 1 ounce gin 1 ounce vodka 1 ounce white rum 1 ounce white tequila 1 ounce simple syrup 1/2 ounce Cointreau 1/2 ounce lime juice 6 ounces cola

Using high end rum and tequila would probably be a mistake, as generally the thing that makes them more expensive is more time in oak. Here you want white spirits. (Can't say if using unaged straight tequila instead of unaged blended tequila would make any difference as I haven't tried switching them out.) High end vodka and gin usually aren't necessary for long drinks, assuming you're not starting out with rotgut. Gordon's gin and Smirnoff vodka should be fine. Most of the important improvements are just making sure you don't take any shortcuts, like making sure to use Rose's (or fresh sour mix) instead of lower-end sour mix (and not substituting margarita mix for the sour mix and triple sec, and not adding or substracting ingredients at random, etc.), and of course remembering to add enough cola. The trickiest part of the whole drink really (for me anyhow) is the gin. I believe the gin is what makes the end product taste enough like tea that it was given the name it has. However gin as a rule hates all the stuff you're mixing it with in a LIIT besides the vodka, triple sec and lime juice. Why these three ingredients calm the gin down enough to play well the other ingredients I don't quite understand, and whenever you don't understand why a recipe works exactly, fooling around with it tends to lead to disaster.

The problem is that a lot of bars botch the recipe. A lot of places don't add enough cola. 4 ounces of liquor plus triple sec will get you plastered quick enough as it is, but when the abv of the finished drink starts to creep above maybe 15%, it starts tasting kinda weird. Plus a lot of places will skip out on the triple sec, which seems to be one of the things keeping the gin from killing all the other mixers. Plus a lot of places don't use fresh lime juice, don't even use Rose's, but use Finest Call sour mix or cheaper. Cheap sour mix generally ruins anything you put it in. Plus the occasional recipe for the Long Island Iced Tea throws in vermouth as well. In addition to not being part of the proper recipe, cheap vermouth kills a drink much the same way cheap sour mix does.

The Long Island Iced Tea was supposedly invented in the late 1970s at the Oak Beach Inn in Babylon, New York, a place known more for its wild nights than it's good drinks. [Edited for location] It was probably invented the same way most people suspected it was invented, by mixing together a bunch of random liquors and adding coke and sour mix to blunt the burn. However, 9 times out of 10 this creates a terrible drink. In this case, judging by its popularity, it seems to have worked. Here's my deconstruction of the fluke: "The Long Island Iced Tea" 1 ounce gin 1 ounce vodka 1 ounce white rum 1 ounce triple sec 1 ounce white tequila 1 ounce Rose’s lime juice 4 ounces cola Basically this drink is a light gimlet and a light margarita combined and then turned into a long drink with cola. "Light Tequila Margarita" 1 ounce white rum 1 ounce white tequila 1 ounce triple sec 1/2 ounce Rose's lime juice The rum and tequila mix to make a lighter version of the same, much like a mixto tequila that's been a bit more heavily "mixtoed" than the norm. "Light Gin Gimlet" 1 ounce vodka 1 ounce gin 1/2 ounce Rose's lime juice Here again, the vodka and the gin have been blended to create a lighter gin for the gimlet. These two cocktails are combined together, and cola is added to turn it into a long drink. Now you have a Long Island Iced Tea. It's most popular variant, the Adios Motherfucker, runs along essentially the same principles, simply substituting blue curacao for triple sec, and lemon lime soda for cola. Edit: For purists who dislike the idea of using low proof triple sec and Rose's, despite the extra "authenticity", here's a Cocktail Snob's LIIT. "Long Island Iced Tea - Snob Style" 1 ounce gin 1 ounce vodka 1 ounce white rum 1/2 ounce Cointreau 1 ounce white tequila 1 ounce lime juice 5 ounces cola

Still haven't found a name, but I did find a name for a sister drink, the Alabazam, basically a Sidecar & Soda with bitters, although the recipes floating around on those online cocktail databases are kinda unbalanced.

Helpfully, there's a recipe for Velvet Falernum in RecipeGullet. But how is white falernum made? White falernum was supposedly the stuff that generally made it into most of those old American tropical drinks, so I was curious about any differences.

Scorpion for one Serves 1. The scorpion bowl recipe that Trader Vic uses is given for 12 people, and uses a bottle and a half of rum. I modified the recipe a bit for single person use. 2 oz light rum 1/2 oz orgeat 1/2 oz lemon juice 2 oz orange juice 2 oz champagne dash of brandy dash of gin mint Build all ingredients except mint, brandy, and gin in a glass on ice. Dash brandy and gin at the end for aroma, and garnish with mint. Keywords: Cocktail, Intermediate ( RG1374 )

Scorpion for one Serves 1. The scorpion bowl recipe that Trader Vic uses is given for 12 people, and uses a bottle and a half of rum. I modified the recipe a bit for single person use. 2 oz light rum 1/2 oz orgeat 1/2 oz lemon juice 2 oz orange juice 2 oz champagne dash of brandy dash of gin mint Build all ingredients except mint, brandy, and gin in a glass on ice. Dash brandy and gin at the end for aroma, and garnish with mint. Keywords: Cocktail, Intermediate ( RG1374 )

The difference between a Cosmo and a Sidecar isn't very great, from a mixological perspective, but from an image perspective it appears to be enormous. People who drink Sidecars tend to be (or want to be) discriminating folks who prefer their cocktails made the old-fashioned way, connoisseurs. Cosmo drinkers tend to be grown-up sorority girls of the same vein as those Sex in the City types who popularized it. Given the amount of putdowns it has recieved from Sidecar-types, I suspect the average Sidecar drinker would rather be caught dead than seen holding a Cosmo. This tickles me because really it's the same genus of drink, made the same way more or less (remove the dash of cranberry for color, switch out the brandy for vodka, change the citrus, and...), with the same ratios and same style of ingredients. It's not like we're comparing the Manhattan to the Alabama Slammer. So how does such an unusual situation come to be? Is it simply a matter of disliking a drink due to the people who drink them? Or is it something else?

My latest drink infatuation seems to be with a summertime version of the Sidecar, made by taking a Sidecar, sticking it in a highball glass and topping it off with soda water. Quite a refreshing drink, but I haven't a clue what it's called. Since I'm not so pretentious as to think that something this obvious could be an original idea of mine, I thought I would go fishing for its proper name. Any ideas??

I hadn't realized there were so many options available now. Is this an example of malt liquor becoming gentrified?? I remember a time when the only sort of beer stronger than 5% or so was stuff that people drank out of brown paper bags, the occasional European curiosity aside.

Did anyone else notice that if you added soda water to an Aviation, you ended up with a drink surprisingly similar to a Singapore Sling??

Most of the famous vermouth manufacturers nowadays seem to be relying more on their 200 year old reputations, low low prices, and the fact that they are used by the dash in mixed drinks more than anything good about their products. Martini at least is becoming more honest about how their vermouth is made. They're still talking about it in a round about way, but if I understand correctly, Martini & Rossi is now made as a compound vermouth, made by adding extracts to filtered wine sweetened with sugar and fortified with neutral spirits, which is then combined, chill-filtered, and bottled. Noilly Pratt seems to imply that its production methods are different, which makes the fact that it is no better slightly mystifying. They start with a blend of two wines, a flabby, high alcohol one that madierizes quickly, and a tart, thin one which if blended properly into the former, and aged correctly, produces a relatively neutral, high-alcohol madierized wine. It is then fortified and sweetened with mistelle, and raspberry and lemon flavoring extracts are added to bolster the wine a bit. Then, supposedly real botanicals are macerated in the wine for three weeks (although "botanicals" seems to be a very all-encompassing word, as caramel is added to their sweet vermouth somewhere along the line), then the botanicals are filtered out, the wine is rested, chill filtered, and bottled. Besides a little cheating with the raspberry and lemon flavorings, all seems quite reasonable. I *want* to like Noilly Pratt vermouth, but for some reason they're making it very difficult for me to do so. Every couple of months or so after the last wretched bottle, I'll buy another, hoping the last 1, 3, 5 bottles have been flukes. So far I've been terribly disappointed.

There *is* such a thing as a good margarita mix, but unless you're prepping to make a *lot* of margaritas, there's really no point. It's called equal parts lime juice and Cointreau. You end up with a 40 proof liqueur-type mixer that you can make ahead of time and then just add tequila to when the need arises. (This doesn't work as well with those 15% abv triple secs because premixing would knock down the alcohol content enough to shorten the shelf life quite a bit)

Buy some cheap brandy, pour it in a large jar with some sugar syrup (3:1 ratio seems to work best for me) and add the cherries. Then wait a month or so and they're done. As a side effect, when you're done with the cherries, you'll have some homemade cherry liqueur. You could also substitute vodka for brandy if you simply want to preserve the cherries and not toy with the flavor as much. White rum seems like a happy medium between the two. Some people here have substituted bourbon or rye for brandy, but whether or not it was a success I don't remember.

I don't even bother with 1:1 syrup anymore. There's just not enough sugar for it to be stable. I suppose the most instructive moment I had was when my 1:1 grenadine (which technically contains more sugar than 1:1 simple syrup, mind you) spontaneously fermented when I left it out of the fridge. :) I haven't had any problems at all with 2:1 syrup, even left out at room temperature, and it mixes just as easily as 1:1. Granted I usually go through a batch a month, so I can't really say anything about the shelf life beyond that, but it seems like a good basepoint.

Given a distinct lack of good rye where I live and an overwhelming amount of good bourbon, I've been attempting to use my mixological skills to coax bourbon into doing things which it normally dislikes to do. Not to imply that bourbon is an inferior choice stacked up against a rye of similar quality, they simply have different flavor profiles, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. While deconstructing old recipes where bourbon was switched for rye but still seemed to work, one thing I noticed that wasn't quite so common in the rye originals was the addition of bitters. So I started experimenting and noticed that with the addition of bitters, many drinks which "just didn't taste the same" without rye suddenly worked much nicer. :) Bourbon & Ginger Ale? Drinkable I guess, but there's something about bourbon that just seems to resent carbonation I've noticed. Nothing that will ruin the drink, mind you, just something not quite right. Add some bitters to the drink and the complaints seem to vanish. Bourbon Manhattan? Ok, I guess, but nothing to write home about like a good Rye Manhattan. But add some bitters, and suddenly it's got its groove back. Homemade Rock & Rye? Love the stuff. Too bad it's not still considered good for you when you have a head cold. Bourbon liqueur is great stuff, but it has a different flavor profile entirely. Doesn't have the same spicy backbone. Add some bitters though, and suddenly we're back in business . But then on the other hand, I could just be so wrapped up in my "tasting discovery" that I'm seeing things that aren't really there, so I thought I'd check in with the folks here. Has anyone here had any success subsituting bourbon & bitters for rye in any of the old rye recipes? Or not so much?

I suggest El Tesoro Anejo being one of the three.

I noticed a while back that muddling was viewed rather favorably in some places. Like higher up the ladder on the quest for a perfect cocktail or omething... It's the sort of mentality I think that makes someone decide "if a fresh whiskey sour is good, a whiskey sour made with cube sugar muddled on a slice of lemon will be even better!" So why do people bother with muddling? Does it have a time and place, or is it just a gimmick?? (Or is it actually a superior method??) I mean yeah, crushing sugar has that old-timey feel some people really enjoy, but even back in the day bartenders in the know recommended using sugar syrup, because sugar doesn't like to disolve in either alcohol or cold liquids, two ingredients commonly found in almost all mixed drinks. As to muddling fruit, I never quite understood that either... is it because all you've got on hand fresh fruit wise are slice-sized garnishes?? I suppose that would make sense... But if that's not the case, and you're looking to extract the juice and oil from the peel, simply squeezing the fruit or giving the peel a twist seems like it would work more effectively. Is muddling just for those rare occasions you find things like fresh blueberries at the bar for some reason and no juicer anywhere in sight??? I get muddling herbs in non-shaken carbonated drinks, like the Mojito, since I can see how shaking the non-carbonated ingredients and then adding the soda might seem like making additional work... In uncarbonated shaken drinks you can just throw the herbs into the shaker along with everything else, and the ice cubes will give it more than enough of a muddling to unleash the essential oils. Am I missing something obvious here?

Here are a few of mine. :) "Almost anyone can learn to mix drinks accurately and fast. That is the least of it. I have always believed success behind the bar comes from an ability to understand the man or woman I am serving, to enter into his joys or woes, make him feel the need of me as a person rather than a servant. And yet - and this is so important - to keep my place. It is sometimes hard to draw the line. There are men I have addressed as 'Mister' for ten years, and probably will for another ten years, whom I know better than their best friends." -- Jimmie Charters "We don't drink cocktails on our knees and there's no point in making them that way; so no ritual, be off-hand, be casual and decently fast. An appearance of habituated ease will get you off to a running start." -- Bernard DeVoto "Originality is the key to success. Therefore, always try to work accordingly; make a change in the old system, if you see it needs improvement; introduce it to your guests instead of being taught by them what to do. A bartender ought to be leading and not to be led." -- William Schmidt What are some of yours? :)

I've been using a big bottle of Herradura silver I got on sale a while back. For Margaritas, I tend to just use the least expensive 100% agave silver tequila I can find. Most any 100% agave tequila is more than good enough for mixing (unless there are some real clunkers our members can warn me away from). I also tend to stay away from Cuervo products. I should add that regular Sausa Blanca, while not 100% agave, is a pretty good tequila if you're mixing for a crowd, especially if you're making drinks with a lot of flavors going on, and easier on the wallet than most 100% agave tequilas. ← Maybe I'm being a bit heretical saying this, but if you're just starting off making cocktails, you might have better luck with a good quality mixto than with a 100% agave tequila. When spirits have more assertive flavors, they tend to be a bit more challenging to mix with. When you're just starting out, you wanna keep that enthusiasm high, and it's a bit harder to mix an undrinkable drink with light stuff and blended liquor than it is with the heavier straight stuff.

I think it'd be sort of a funny version of the future where people order their Margaritas dry, with a dash of triple sec and a squeeze of lime. Next thing you know they'll be ordering their Margaritas "extra dry"; a shot of cold tequila with a twist of lime that's had the bottlecap from the triple sec waved over it. :P