bostonapothecary

Hi Chris, we do a fair amount of weddings and rehearsal dinners at the restaurant but they usually max out at 50 guests. My boss really likes a welcome cocktail and she is insistent that its a mixed drink and not just wine like prosecco. We try and take suggestions from the bride and groom, but lately they want our recommendations and we seem to gravitate to French 75's and Old Fashioneds. More out of inventory and stocking constraints than any other reason. These definitely get batched. The Old Fashioned is batched with no dilution and simply gets poured over ice with an expressed orange peel. For the French 75, the gin, lemon juice & sugar are batched and diluted then kept in an ice water bath. A big problem we've had with these drinks is that they are just too delicious and people get into trouble drinking them. I remember attending a wedding at probably the fanciest place in Boston. There was a cocktail chosen by the bride and groom but they were not batched. It really took absolutely forever to get a drink, BUT it really kept us all out of trouble. Their drinks were exquisite and I think the guests really respected the care it took to assemble them and were not aware of the batched possibilities. When you work these weddings its almost seems like slow drink times are better than having to cut off hoards of people. Though I would really love to hear other people's ideas in the age of automation. When I made the first craft kegged cocktails all those years ago, egullet member David Santucci in attendance was quick to names them Panty Dropper Party Killers. Back then I was even exploring High Extract drink making which is now a banned technique though few are even aware the potential exists. One important thing that has dawned on me after playing with this stuff for years is that the drink needs to cement a memory. And this memory will eventually have to be retrieved. I think the best way to do this is with classic cocktails rather than with inventing something. The fact that the memory needs to be retrieved means people need to be able to experience the drink again somewhere, maybe even across the country. So this is the power behind Moscow Mules, Negroni Sbagliatos, and French 75's. I've used invented cocktails for events like weddings and for that I love sparkling drinks so I now rely on my Champagne Bottle Manifold. Flutes are celebratory, but they just aren't used enough these days and the manifold has allowed me to make drinks with truly fluteworthy carbonation levels. You can also easily do non alcoholic drinks or bottle (with my newest tool) in small take home party favor bottles so attendees can retrieve that memory down the road. Carbonation as a trend has been a horrible crapshoot with too many people not hitting high enough carbonation levels or making these drinks far too alcoholic. I really try and hit the minimums of alcohol yet make people feel like they are definitely consuming a cocktail so that way you can be indifferent to serving wines like prosecco as far as inebriation is concerned. Next time I do a large wedding I'm definitely doing a Mule if its my choice. I'll keg the ginger beer with lime juice then simply add vodka or gin. This way I have a non-alcoholic option with the ginger beer and can short the pours for the bleary eyed. Not sure if any of that helps.

I think some of the answers here are contained in another thread, but I can't remember where it is. There are lots of commercial precedents for stabilized egg yolk liqueurs like advocaat and bombardino and I also did some exploring on the Bostonapothecary blog with Fluid Gels are Our Future: Fernet Bombardino, but I didn't get to take it as far as I wanted because of the expense. The secret is to low temp pasteurize the egg yolks into a gel, then shear thin the gel into alcohol to preserve it using a blender. Low alcohol percentages are not good at killing bacteria, unlike say 60%, but they do prevent bacterial growth and the magic number is 18% for the minimum of microbiological stability though I over shoot for 20% to err on the side of caution. It is hard to say how sensitive these liqueurs are to oxidation, and in my experiments I vacuum de-gassed them, but these days I favor pressure de-aeration with my champagne bottle manifold because it works better, is cheaper, and uses beautiful bottles that are easy to serve from. One of the stumbling blocks I couldn't develop a definitive best bet for was the thickening power of the yolks that sets in over time. The thickness on day one was very different than day seven. You could either add less egg yolks or you could re-shear-thin back to the original consistency. I was developing this as a way to batch flips and other high maintenance dessert drinks for high volume service or special events but I never really had to put it to the test. Lots of potential here and I'll revisit it someday.

you guys need to start distilling your own. or just buying cheap stuff and re-distilling it to get what you want. if you ever want to give it a go, I'll be glad to answer any questions you can come up with.

this might just be a masterpiece: .75 oz. campari .75 oz. "La Gita" manzanilla from Domingo Perez Marin .75 oz. Batavia Arrack Van Oosten .75 oz. Hennessy "Izambard" Single Distillery Cognac (probably from the 1990's) the template is so robust I bet any manzanilla or any cognac would do. I also bet some would prefer to change it to .5 oz. of Arrack and 1 oz. of Cognac, but I was killing off bottles and I love equal parts poetry.

Really, really small but of quality, but I guess nothing to be taken too seriously. When home distillation becomes a thing, we can't have people deluded into thinking their rickety products are of higher quality than commercial products. Bars already make that mistake with their sloppy house make stuff. I still think you can play with distillation on astoundingly small levels. We can probably even have toy whiskey/gin competitions where you have to make the best small scale product possible. They make little desktop alembics that people probably only think of as decorations but you can make liqueurs with them, gins, and probably even whiskeys. Bigger stills have a longer time under heat for ingredients than small stills, so there is that difference when scale changes, but for things like whiskey, ingredients can spend time in canning jars sous-vide to gain time under heat. Often what culinary people using roto-vaps are trying to do requires time under heat so they are using the wrong still, but they can heat things in canning jars first. I've worked out a lot of techniques for messing around on the small scale but there are a lot of things left to be resolved like best bets for recipe starting points, especially when playing with botanicals.

Improved gin cocktail 2 oz. Vice Rei Genebra Superfina gin 4 g. non aromatic white sugar bar spoon compounded toy curacao 4 dashes angostura bitters this is nothing amazing but a test of a new project. the gin here is Portugeuse and after finally tasting Spanish Mahon gin last week, I'd say there are really similar. the toy curacao is created from the steam distilled essential oils of my new clevenger apparatus. this is a completely legal process and the instrument is used to measure the oil yield of botanicals. I think dissolved the collected oil from 50 grams of common fresh sweet orange peels into a measure of Industry City Distillery's Technical Reserve 95.6% spirits and then cut that down to about 67% where I had 55 mL of liquid. I then added non aromatic white sugar scaled to be 285 g/L. this all created a very tiny portion of orange liqueur follow the 1879 temple of Joseph Konig. I'd say its flawed for a few reasons. first only using sweet peels makes it too one dimensional, secondly it doesn't have enough aroma, but atleast I know where its at and where I'll take it next. and thirdly terpene separation was never performed which is a part of most all orange liqueurs. but now I can do terpene separation and change the essential oil content and try so different peels. If I come up with some best bets for a gin recipe written for oil yields instead of grams of botanicals, I may be able to make really exciting, high quality toy gins, from very unique sourcing.

'tis the season. sous vide, oxygen free, hot drinks anyone? I juiced and quickly de-aerated some honey crisp apples similar to what I did to make the green apple soda way back when. I then used my latest bottling device to transfer the juice from champagne magnum to de-aerated 100 mL and 187 mL bottles. I capped them then started to heat them in a 90C water bath. twice, I cracked a cap to let out pressure then reformed the cap. eventually I had extra fresh hot apple cider with all the most volatile top notes still intact. 1 oz. asbach uralt german brandy 4 oz. oxygen free, fresh, 90C, organic, honey, crisp apple cider grated mace. the mace was really nice but I suspect cinnamon which wasn't at arms reach might be even nicer. this seems pretty high concept but makes service pretty easy, especially for places that do not do good numbers for hot drinks. you can warm the cups in the water bath and even add botanicals to the water bath so you can fill the room with aroma. I suspect there are other nice ways to improve this like macerating a little spiced hibiscus tea in the apple juice to tart it up and add color. or, hell, offering six different hot drinks and quickly pulling it off because everything is micro batched and preserved.

oh wow, you know I was wondering that myself. I haven't touched the st. Elizabeths in years because of the price and I wonder if its changed. I think originally it was made with a pot distilled spirit which made it expensive and might have been overkill. I actually might have chosen the first sugar content, because Eric called me up back then to ask how I made my homemade version. but we all didn't know as much back then. Haus Alpenz has really evolved a bit and mastered so many things. I had always wondered how old the pimento dram tradition was and recently I found a reference to it from the 1862 International Exhibition.

oh geez, that is non-aromatic white sugar. I like white sugar because it doesn't overshadow other aromas, but in Boston bars are in love with Demerara sugar syrups. I've mopped this floor for years, but its a porous white tile floor. mom is coming tomorrow for dinner so I got down on my hands and knees and scrubbed it with 3M magic erasers.

priming myself for a trip to wholefoods in the freezing rain. 1 oz. lime juice 1 oz. benedictine 2 oz. whiskey re-distilled with pecans 2 dashes peychaud's bitters this is lovely. I haven't made drink with benedictine in years, probably because its not Portugeuse enough. I remember having my first Frisco so many years ago down the street at the B-Side lounge. good times. the pecan-benedictine-tart thing is meant to be.

As punishment, I was sent to Jamaica a couple years ago by my boss to house sit for three weeks. I scoured the island looking for it, and in the end after I finally found it, it turned out to also be available at the airport's duty free for $12. Its really fantastic stuff, so much more elegant than any homemade I've ever had.

while I clean the floor: .75 oz. lime juice .25 oz. wray & nephews berry hill pimento dram .50 oz. brandymel limao 2 oz. whiskey re-distilled with pecans there has been a moratorium on buying new booze around here so I've had to get creative hence salvaging old failed project. pecans in a tart context, who'd have thought that could be so wonderful? this is particularly wonderful.

while I cook: old fashioned 1 oz. old overholt 1 oz. whiskey re-distilled with pecans 4 g. non-aromatic 4 dashes angostura bitters the pecans had been sitting in whiskey for quite some time now and was chalked up to a failed experiment because it was so oily. there was also some kind of mystery whiskey thing laying around that someone had left here which I think was chai infused. so I combined them. the pecan aroma is a really nice. this could probably be optimized.

Inspired by heated discussions here many months ago I analyzed the works of the Jamaican Agricultural Experiment Station in 1911 where they started to reverse engineer the heavy Jamaican rum process. Now to close it in on the other side I annotated and strung together the collected writing of the angsty, precocious, Victorian madman W.F. Whitehouse, the great latin quoting Agricola, who letters in 1843 lay the investigative foundation for the jump to high ester heavy rum. It all starts with meditations on rum making while trying to prove an interloping huckster a fraud.

I've had a lot of fun with the Force 53 when friends have brought it back from NYC. I used to make a sort of inverse Sidecar where the overproof cognac was averaged into an lower than usual proof orange liqueur to give a drink with more cognac aroma but a typical Sidecar alcohol level. the best fringe cognac options really seem to vary market to market. my favorite in MA is gaston lagrange. raisin brandies are weird and pretty common when you go further east. they often use grand age statements to make them seem attractive but I think in some cases it might refer to solera style aging. I used to buy one from the country of Georgia but I've slowly found its worth paying extra to go unraisined.

not a lot of value. there is this illusion that bar programs explore all their options to bring you the most extraordinary stuff to drink but when you really start talking to people you find they've actually only had very few different options in their life. it happens in wine a lot especially with young buyers. there is often talk about viognier or cornas like someone has really had thirty plus experiences with them across many years and then it really turns out they've only had tastes of three or four and never really made love to any of it. Its all my overly critical reaction to cocktail lists being covered in combier and pampelmouse. when you see certain products decorating a list, its pretty much a flag no really explored anything.

doubleplusgood 1 oz. campari 1 oz. greenhook ginsmiths beach plum liqueur 1 oz. asbach uralt brandy rinse of laphroaig cask strength the beach plum liqueur has an commonly low sugar content, almost to the point that it might be a regret or a missed opportunity, but cocktails just don't care. they can fix anything. flaws can become features and a plane is a fragment of the architecture of space so we can just assemble a bunch of fragments being sympathetic to all the planes and voila! this drink is doubleplusgood delicious. the Asbach is some special stuff and resembles Armagnac most closely, I'd say. only one creative importer/liquor store in Boston seems to sell it and we won't rat them out because they don't even bother to put a surgeon generals warning on it. in a post modern cocktail world where most people can't drink past cute things like Pierre Ferrand 1840 after they read about them five times in junk magazines, we have no trouble still finding the gems.

I'm pretty sure that one of the products of these enzymes breaking down pectin is methanol and this is one reason they are not used in wines make for distillation. in the context of a fruit juice or even a table wine it is absolutely not a big deal, but in an nth degree scenario like a marmalade, it might not be something you want. I recently visited Greenhook Ginsmiths where they make a really cool beach plumb liqueur. beach plumbs have an extremely high pectin content but they don't use a pectic enzyme on it, they use other fining agents which are enough to precipitate enough of the pectin which floats to the top as a scum. it is then scooped out leaving far less to clog the filters. if you are working with a fruit where pectin is a big concern but you want to be less invasive, you can perform your infusion at a very high proof which is often enough to precipitate much of the pectin. after that you can cut it down to your desired %. you might also just be over infusing by using too much contact time. I think bar fabrication is going to go through a phase where people use all sorts of invasive techniques then eventually retreat back to less invasive techniques once everyone gets a better handle on all their options. I filter far less than other people. some of the recipes I tried from the Booker & Dax catalog seemed pretty much stripped of flavor to me.

I took over the cocktail list where I'm at probably four years now. It has been a tremendous success and there is probably 20 regulars we know by name that must have each of the drinks any time they come in. Margins on the drinks are great (better than wine even) and the prep is easy and cocktail sales are up staggeringly in those four years. We sell more gin than vodka and probably make only one cosmo a week. Probably less than 10 gin & tonics a week relative to the 500 cocktails we sell in a week (we are only a small one million dollars restaurant). But the staff hates the list. They always think classics are played out (we rock the bees knees, southside and old fashioned), they want everything to be more premium without increasing prices (which would erode the margins and piss guests off that don't want to pay $12), and they want all the drinks to have the same structure (bitter & boozy) instead of well differentiated structures. And then when they want it more complicated, they don't want to help with the prep. My drinks make my guests happy and when I want to make myself happy, I make myself a drink. I also keep probably 5-10 aces up my sleeve where I can entertain 4 jaded had everything drinkers for many rounds to the pinacles of delight. For some reason the staff never uses the aces, they want everything already in print because they are afraid to talk their way through it. They want to sell these new fangled drinks that they don't even want to drink themselves! Well the list works and its built on modesty, patience, and pragmatism and then the classics, even though the staff is always trying to burn it down to satisfy some weird itches that have nothing to do with the guests. I can totally see why so many other lists go to shit so quickly.

I often batch without citrus for relatively smaller volumes then add it in at the end. some funny things can happen when they sit for a while at an elevated alcohol content but its really nothing a little agitation can't fix. the only place to go from there is pressure de-aeration of the citrus with tap caps or my champagne bottle manifold but its a commitment, though invaluable at massive volume in case you ever get invited to make drinks for a stadium. flip top growlers are great. when you are in someone else's space they are really the best. big size and the caps can't get lost. I also swear by half gallon canning jars which are graduated and turn into a great shaker and fit those smallish two prong strainers. best tool for making eight rounds at a time.

either using the centrifugal force to push liquid through the filter paper or using agar, clogging all the filter paper then letting the liquid accumulate (very slowly to stay balanced) and separate centrifugally, then improperly draining out the retaining nut hole. you can get really good results on equipment many people already own. sometimes high tech chefs get results from serious equipment like a re-purposed blood bank centrifuge but then they never take the time to work backwards to see if the same results can still be achieved with cheaper or more widely available equipment. I have a Jouan centrifuge and I mainly use it now for de-gassing really high durometer food safe silicon for my champagne bottle manifold seals. I found it pretty much impossible to de-gas the stuff with vaccuum & pressure but spinning it up to 5000 rpms and dropping it works like a charm.

not really a centrifuge like you'd think, they are small juicers. so using them as a typical centrifuge is sort of a hack. pricey when new, but they can be had affordably on ebay.

sometimes I use an acme centrifugal juicer to filter liquids. it works because the walls aren't slanted like others to create a pulp ejects. you just put extra filter pads in it or coffee filters then trickle the liquid through it in a slow stream so it doesn't go off balance. this type of filtration does aerate the liquid so for sensitive stuff you have to de-aerate afterwards which you can do with a tap cap or my champagne bottle manifold. high pectin stuff or gelatin stuff can be down as well. the liquid doesn't go through the filter paper but gets blocked and fills the spinning basket. so you let it build up at a trickle (to stay balanced) and be centrifugally separated. then when you stop you let the liquid improperly run out the bottom where the lock nut is. its a not too graceful maneuver. undo the lock nut, lift the basket quickly and put your finger under it to block it, then finally drain it into something else. the agar clarifying technique does strip a ton of flavor which can be a flaw or a feature depending on the context.

We talked for hours but I didn't get a chance to taste through all their cuts which I know they separate into small bottles. All their fractions are a little wacky because their ferment is so clean due to the UV sterilized mash, ICT yeast process, continuous still with staggeringly high alcohol percentage draw. I would have to go back to various schools for more than 20 years to learn all the disciplines of engineering, machining, electronics, advanced fermentation, etc. that it took to create their setup. They didn't invent the ICT processes, but they are from fairly current research papers and I bet no one would have thought anyone could have applied them to a commercial project in such a short amount of time, especially the sixth floor of a Brooklyn warehouse on a shoe string budget.

when you scale the price for the ethanol content its will seem more affordable. pretty much smirnoff money. its also a really unique organization. I just read all the research papers they based their unique fermentation process on. the unique aspect is the use of immobilized cell technology which basically encapsulates the yeasts in alginate beads which is a process many chefs are exploring. it gives them a small foot print and spectacular efficiency to make them very environmentally friendly. the technique sounds industrial but its already making its way into sparkling wine production because it makes it easier to disgorge and prevents yeast aroma from leaking into more delicate wine varietals. for these varietals it wasn't previously possible to make a delicious sparkler. its also creeping into dessert wine production and its likely the secret fermentation technique I think Denis Dubourdieu uses in his Doisy Daene Barsac which is one of the great dessert wines of the world (unconfirmed but I really think I'm correct). so yep, you are also buying a bunch of design precedents and in the art world that is what makes things expensive. unfortunately in the highly ephemeral culinary arts nothing is around long enough for anyone to realize that, and if you are ahead of your time you are too often doomed.