bostonapothecary

I'm glad someone else pointed this out. Another ratio will likely follow this... just a reminder. this is more or less the forum that invented modern bartending (egullet even spawned modernist cuisine). some of the great contributors have come and gone. thousands of people have and do lurk here as a source for their ideas and education. you will see precedents on here for an astounding amount of trends used around the world. i'm pretty sure much of the success has come from a scholarly tone and an avoidance of guru-ism. i have a feeling that in the sous-vide topics, nathanm and vengroff, would always welcome another ratio in the hopes that their ideas scale. if anyone wants to perform any tests, the rules of two stage dilution should apply to more than just bitters. everything should scale to liqueurs, spirits, absinthe etc...

to enhance flavor, just add water keep in mind, when you are diluting something like scotch you are not only concerned with the aroma, but also the tension between aroma and the alcohol. similarly, many wines can have great aroma, but not always while maintaining enough acidity to contrast it. all of my experience with diluting high proof distillates confirms sam's thoughts on two stage dilution. the perceptual changes are explained by mcgee in the above linked NYTimes article. the aroma enhancement by water dilution change is mostly physical unlike other enhancement phenomenons like adding salt or sugar (or even texture) which are due to our highly constructed realities and relate to reward systems. using different proofs for infusion bases will give you different results, but keep in mind it is easy to over extract. most vermouth producers started extracting at the minimums of preservation to capture aroma, while avoiding bitter principles and resinous stuff that they deemed flaws. granted they were also looking for different intensity levels. most of the new bitters i've tasted on the market lack aromatic intensity, while unfortunately still giving you a feeling of being over extracted. sloppy garish stuff. i haven't bought a new bitters besides bittermen's mole in a few years now.

i tried to the blended nuts and water with the acme and only got semi success. the milk does not go through the machine as designed. the filter clogs and you end up with a mass of solids which has to be added to very slowly to keep it balanced enough. half goes through and half stays in the very center of the machine and can only be drained through the hole that mounts the drive shaft (or sucked out with a needle-less syringe which worked really well). the result of that is good nut milk, but if desired lots of fat and a small amount of extra solids can be separated with the 'fuge. i have a feeling that the acme is powerful enough a centrifuge to even execute agar clarification (clarified lime juice). the gel will clog the filter, but all the desirable liquid can be drained through the drive shaft hole. i'll have to test it. i love my acme, i can't believe every bar doesn't have one.

.75 oz. hazelnut "cream" 1.5 oz. pineau des charentes .75 oz. ransom old tom gin hazelnuts have skin which pollutes the cream layer so i ran it through the acme juicer. the result was more like "cream" than the super thick closer to butter other stuff. having no laphroaig i settled on ransom. results were delicious. i have some more cashews so once i blend i'm going to see what the acme does to them before i put them in the 'fuge. anyone else in love with pineau des charentes?

.75 oz. macallan cask strength 1.5 oz. pineau des charentes .75 oz. pistachio "cream" wow. the "cream" here is the fat separated when i made the pistachio-milk-syrup yesterday. the cream layer was also full of skin solids but it was nothing a double straining couldn't fix. another serious success for both the inverse alexander pattern and the nut fats.

next up i made an orgeat by blending slivered almonds with water, centrifuging, crudely separating the fat, then finishing off the almond water with the acme juicer. i sugar the almond water to 400g/l with a very aromatic jaggery sugar. the sugar smells of the most lovely coconut expression... something like a japanese.. 2 oz. 95 guyana finished in chateau y'quem barrels .5 oz. jaggery orgeat 2 dashes angostura bitters very nice with unique aromatic inflection from the sugar source.

today i made some "pistaceat" 25% nuts by weight blended. centrifuged to separate the fat and solids, then run through the acme juicer lined with coffee filters to get whatever else lurked around, then sugared to 400g/l with non aromatic white sugar. the resultant intensity of the aroma and tonality really impressed me. first up. .75 oz. lime. .5 oz. pistaceat .25 oz. green chartreuse .5 oz. mezcal 1 oz. blanco tequila i thought the syrup was intense enough, but it really got lost when competing for attention with the other... delicious, but fail.

OK, so now I have changed the oil and the lid gasket, however the maximum vacuum didn't get any better. I have also cleaned the oil exhaust filter with petroleum ether according to the instructions of the seller (it was not dirty at all, but there was an oil spill from the transport on the bottom side). This was actually the first measure I took. Since it didn't change the vacuum level at all, I'm inclined to think that replacing the filter wouldn't help either. I don't know what the problem is, but it seems there is something wrong with the machine after all are you relying on maximum vacuum from a gauge or have you been using it with any bags or trying to boil water at zero celsius?

I presume Brandymel is available because of the large Portuguese population in the Boston area? Not something you see in these parts that I am aware of. But is it really a Vesper without the vodka? Seems a bit like calling a Margarita without tequila a Margarita. Or is this brandy of brandymel one of your homemade centrifuged vodka and honey combos? You do have a quite a bit of interesting stuff! I just can't usually replicate any of it. there is a really big portugeuse language community around here so there is a few tiny importers that bring in stuff from portugal proper, the azores, cape verde, and brazil. the quality is amazing, the prices are a gift, and no restaurant has ever touched them. i use brandymel and algarvihna from portugal maracuja liqueur from the azores the rums of cape verde (i think they are the greatest fresh sugar cane juice rums of the world) from brazil there is a liqueur of jabuticaba and some epic cachacas from salinas in minas gerais at really low prices. my brother buys a cachaca called "diva" for $12/L which is really gorgeous. i didn't believe him when he told me the price and had to walk down to the store and see for myself. i think it is priced as some sort of deal. brandy of brandymel is the product of distilling a liqueur. sugar is not volatile and beverage distillation never reaches temperatures high enough to caramelize. the liqueur is only $12 retail and 27% alc. centrifuging just removes the wax and has been really great for some of the weird honeys i like to use. the vesper rendering doesnt compare to a margarita because there is no significant acidity. the aroma from the brandy of brandymel just creates inflections of aroma as would adding the oil of an orange peel. i never think of cocktails as specific drinks but rather just patterns that can be re-used.

i wanted to re-render PDT's brilliant looking cocktail "kina miele" with things i had laying around the house... their's looks like this: 1 oz. dolin dry vermouth .75 oz. cocchi americano .5 oz. nonino gioiello (brandy of chestnut honey) .25 oz. clear creak pear brandy 1 dash bitter truth lemon bitters my rendering: 1 oz. m&r dry vermouth 1 o.z cocchi americano .75 oz. brandy of brandymel (brandy of algarve honey) .25 oz. st. george aqua perfecta 2 dashes regan's orange bitters for starters i made the drink slightly larger than theirs and thought i should make it slightly sweeter by increasing the cocchi americano. my choice of honey brandy is more affordable so i used a little more. a brilliant flourish to the kina miele is their addition of pear liqueur. luckily i had a nice pear brandy laying around. i don't stock lemon bitters and thought regan's might create similar inflections of aroma. as it warms, the contributions of the honey and pear brandies get more pronounced. this rivaled the vesper i had for lunch. props to PDT.

vesper! 1.5 oz. cascade mountain gin (my second favorite after seagram's) 1 oz. brandy of brandymel .5 oz. cocchi americano gin from a giant juniper forest, distillate of algarve honey and moonshine made from old men from a "strawberry tree", exotic aromatized wine imported by an indiana jones like character. all spectacular symbolic values with the extraordinary sensory attributes to match...! amazeballs!

2 oz. pecan (poorly) aromatized rye whiskey 4 g. non aromatic white sugar 4 dashes peychaud's bitters rinse of yerba mate-sloe berry absinthe i tried aromatizing the rye whiskey by blending the pecans with the spirit, letting it sit a few days and then centrifuging for 20 minutes @ approx 4000g's. the result was more like a nut milk than a spirit infusion. i will have to try again by just cracking the nuts and infusing then spinning. something about the texture and aroma makes you think you are drinking a milk punch. it is definitely good but not as i had envision nor worthy of the name sazerac. also in the 'fuge was more flaked rye aromatized bourbon. last time it was gone too quickly, but the empty jar after a few days took on an amazing cinnamony aroma. i suspect rye oxidizes into gorgeous aromas. i might aerate it in the blender and then let it sit for a while and see what happens. the flaked rye clarifies nicely due to whatever gelatinous stuff is in it. i may take the remainder of the pecan rye and try some agar clarification, but if the yield sucks the recipe isn't economically viable.

a coworker requested i make some cashew milk using the amazing centrifuge technique from the FCI. their recipe adapted spectacularly well to cashews. besides the milk, i ended up with a sizable amount of cashew "cream". the cream is thicker than heavy cream, but definitely not butter. perfect for cocktails. 1.5 oz. pineau des charents .75 oz. cocoa aromatized "whitened" bourbon (100 proof!) .75 oz. cashew "cream" this was formatted as an inverse alexander. quite lovely. 1.5 oz. 1995 guyana rum finished in chateau y'quem barrels 1 oz. pineau des charents .5 oz. wray & nephews pimento dram yolk sized glob of cashew "cream" this was formatted as a flip. holy wow. spectacular. my favorite drink of recent memory.

it was an interesting paper and it really highlights the complexity of modeling this stuff. to me it looks like there are two flavor pairing strategies; alliteration favored by the west and a collage favored by the east. if you look at cocktail recipes, you can see both strategies commonly employed. cocktail recipes might actually be a more useful thing to study because they are slightly more simplified and there is lots of data. if you watch beginner mixologists (unfortunatley i've only known western ones), they favor really simple alliteration, but that might be because they mix things based on symbolic attributes and not aesthetic sensory attributes. chocolate and blue cheese might be harmonic on a sensory level, but it is likely not harmonic on a symbolic level and just like we have a hard time detaching olfaction from gustation, so to do we have a hard time unraveling the sensory and symbolic. the "if it grow together, it goes together" hypothesis gives us symbolic harmony which might influence our perceived sensory harmony of the pairing. i think the food pairing hypothesis needs to be integrated into an attentional context. we like and probably need attentional things. extraordinary tonality is more attentional than ordinary tonality. alliteration might help build extraordinary tonality. the attentional points of a collage might also draw us in. my guess is that specific types of attentional experiences help us dispel anxiety as well as cement and retrieve memories. acquired tastes are definitely attentional and each culture sure has their favorites. patterns can definitely be found between acquired tastes, but i don't think the data sets in the paper could capture them. cocktails again might be a simplified and useful way of measuring harmonic bounds. i've seen the food pairing hypothesis used in wine & food interaction but it has never seemed to work for me. things like salt can reveal to us how constructed reality is when we eat and food & wine pairings explore this. sensory after images (every sense has them) influence food interactions with a delay which results in contrast detection being changed. this has been explored in the black art theater of musicians. i think advancements in flavor perception are going to really take off in the next few years. fun stuff.

i finally got around to making the FCI's clarified lime juice recipe. the recipe was definitely easy enough to execute. the agar clarification strips the majority of the color and seems to change the aroma as well. it almost seems like a lot of the pininess is stripped away. the result is almost like roses lime acid. the acidity seems slightly lessened as well. which might be a result of the 4:1 lime to water ratio for the recipe. the water is used to hydrate the agar. i tried to use a PH testing strip to compare the results to plain lime juice but i wasn't confident in my results which measured them to be the same. the difference could definitely be a result of perception due to the loss of color and part of the aroma. i did find a cocktail to enjoy it in. .75 oz. mezcal (vida) .75 oz. milagro mandarin (not sure how this made it into the house) .75 oz. der lachs danzig goldwasser (i gave up on yellow chartreuse) .75 oz. FCI clarified lime juice really enjoyable. the color (or lack their of) is a great feature. the goldwasser also contributes beautiful flecks of gold.

That's what my bottles says on the back, but my bottle is at least a year old since it took me a while to get around to opening it. It would appear that Vergano Americano is not licensed for sale in Georgia yet so no local opportunity to try it that I know of. It was suggested that Cocchi Vermouth di Torino might be a decent sub. I have that but without the Vergano to compare to it is hard for me to say if that is so. Anyone have any thoughts on that? Vergano Americano is pink, not red, so in a basic way they are not going to be terribly similar. It would probably work ok as a highly imperfect substitute, certainly in the case of the Campari Swizzle it's fine. another way to differentiate the two is that cocchi vermouth di torino probably has about 165g/l of sugar like most sweet vermouths while vergano americano has well over 200+g/l. maybe even 240g/l because the sugar is well constrasted by bitterness. long ago i had strange budgetary cuts and could not afford to stock punt y mes which the VA is probably modeled after.. i thought i'd just add a few drops of quinine tincture to sweet vermouth and everything would be fine. what i found was that to make them even remotely similar i had to increase the sugar by about 60g/l to contrast the quinine tincture. in the end it was doable, but only after broadening the tension in both directions between sweetness and bitterness. if you understand how to properly change the sugar content, you can make some pretty cool modifications to sweet vermouths on the cheap.

what were the cocktails? i adore glen fiddich.

"lord byron" 1 oz. brandy from brandymel (nonino gioiello castagno might be an acceptable substitute) .5 oz. mezcal (vida) .75 oz. lime juice 8 g. non aromatic white sugar the 8 g. could even go as far as 9 or 10. the drink wants to give priority to the aromas of the two decadent and exotic distillates which means gustation has to be "simplified" to not cause a distraction. simplifying gustation requires perceived sweetness in line with port wine. brandy from brandymel was a successful proof of concept.

over engineered colada (or maybe not enough engineering?) 3 oz. goya coconut cream & st. james rhum (2:1) centrifuged for 20 minutes at approx 4000g 1 oz. lime juice the results are no doubt delicious and everything was very easy to construct. goya is my favorite coconut cream. the idea was to try and avoid all the flecks of denatured stuff that are produced by making a colada. i hate when they cling to the glass. i thought they were due to alcohol and could easily be centrifuged away once they were mixed. the flecks are probably due to acidity and might not be so easily avoidable unless you want to pre-acidify the drink and therefore totally batch it. the centrifuging produced four distinct layers. the very top was oily. then there was a floating layer of solids. then the rum with the majority of aroma and sugar. the more solids on the bottom. no layer seemed devoid of aroma. i separated the solids layer and the oil layer and proceeded into a cocktail with the rest. curiously (as seen in the flaked rye aromatized bourbon) the gelatinous nature of the coconut helped suck up lots of color from the st. james. where to go from here i don't know.

2 oz. chocolate malt aromatized "whitened" whiskey 1 oz. carpano antica tsp luxardo maraschino this was interesting but tasted vaguely of coffee grounds from the grains. if you know they are grains the aroma is interesting but if you consume it blind and therefore aesthetically detached you might be slightly bored... well chosen aromatic "bitters" probably should have been used to augment the tonality of the aroma. if i can ever master the chocolate and coffee malt idea i aspire to make the all grain espresso martini. 1 oz. chocolate malt aromatized "whitened" whiskey 1 oz. brandymel (greatest honey liqueur ever!) 1 oz. green chartreuese 1 oz. lime juice dash peychaud's after less than success in the sweet realm i thought i'd try the whiskey in a tart contest. here to use an analogy and a bad pun aromas are compared where the grains run in the same direction (chartreuse and the chocolate malt). aroma is also set up to converge with gustation from the lime (but only if you believe in olfactory-gustatory synaesthesia). all in all most excellent.

I'm embarrassed to admit that I can't find the original source reference by searching eGullet. I almost certainly collected this before I created Kindred Cocktails. This leads me to believe that I may have modified the recipe with ingredients that I had on hand. If BostonApothecary cares to confirm/correct the recipe and/or name it, I'd be more than happy to update the entry on Kindred Cocktails. If it keeps the Rob Roy name, it should probably be Perfect. I need to revisit this recipe myself. Rob Roy (Smokey and Funky) by Boston Apothecary 1 oz Scotch, Laphroaig (Quarter cask) 1 oz Dry vermouth, Dolin 1 oz Sweet vermouth, Carpano Antica Formula 1/2 t Orange liqueur, Clément Créole Shrubb 1/2 t Maraschino Liqueur 1 ds Peychaud's Bitters 1 ds Orange bitters, Regans' orange bitters Stir, strain, rocks, lowball that is an interesting looking drink. i've never owned the quarter cask. which means if i wrote about it the drink was made for me by egullet member David Santucci who relocated to boston. David was an active member here a few years back and is a master of the aroma driven sweet & boozey style.

i've been making single varietal honey "liqueurs" for years now. the past technique has always been to simply stir the vodka into the honey. the results have always been slightly rustic with waxy sediment and a small amount of haze, but now i have the centrifuge... equal volumes of vodka (or other spirit for aromatic inflection) & basswood honey from ames farm of minnesota centrifuge for 15 minutes @ 4000g's. enjoy the resultant liqueur in cocktails and reserve the wax for single varietal bees wax lip balms. with the centrifuge you can represent your own favorite apiaries with commercial liqueur technique who might not be commercial liqueur producers like barenjager, drambuie, irish mist, or brandymel of the algarve.

900 ML basket pressed organic july strawberry juice (from my freezer) sugared to 400 g/l and centrifuged for 20 minutes at 4000g's approx. 300 ML 80% alcohol brandy constructed of formerly brandymel ("strawberry tree" brandy fortified al garve honey (honey likely derived from the same tree)) the resultant math yields something just under 1.2L of 20% alc. 300g/l liqueur. the inflections of aroma from the spirit are quite lovely. the color is spectacular. lets see how clear it stays.

I'm feeling a little better now! I asked a while back about the feasibility of infusing with grains, mainly because of the absence of a true rye via the LCBO (which is no longer the case, fortunately) and the idea that I could infuse something with rye to at least get on the same general page, and I distinctly remember feeling as if I was being stared at like there was a horn growing out of my forehead after posting the question. Nobody actually said anything negative but nobody actually said anything directly regarding the idea. Kinda nice to see someone with much more experience in this area than me having the idea as well and finding a useful application for it. Makes me wish I'd went beyond the idea stage and actually played with it. the flaked rye seemed to work much better than the three other grains (chocolate malt, pale chocolate malt, and coffee malt) the flaked rye actually lightened the color of the bourbon while the dark malts turned it black. one difference in technique was that i blended all the dark malts to see if they would separate better. i centrifuged for an hour @ 4000 rpms and the separation wasn't that impressive. the yield wasn't that impressive either. one of the three dark malts got put through an acme juicer lined with coffee filters before centrifuging. that malt only lost 1/8 its volume to the acme while the other two lots about lost about 1/2 their volume to the grounds even after centrifuging. the resultant liquid of the dark malts had a bitterness similar to espresso which might have been exacerbated by the blending. the plain flaked rye wasn't bitter at all. i sugared the samples to see how they would be as liqueurs and the results were astoundingly close to any coffee liqueurs i've ever had. all grain espresso martinis anyone? next up is respinning with some clarifying agents. centrifuging sounds cool but distillation is so much easier. if this stuff could be distilled i'd be done and drinking something wonderful by now... #luckynewzealanders

i can attest to the deliciousness of der lach's danzig goldwasser. the aroma and gustatory proportions are very similar to yellow chartreuse. the alcohol content is 40% same as yellow and i bet their sugar contents are the same. goldwasser seems to trade yellow chartreuse's acacia honey aromas for one of orange peels. i pay $29 retails and $22 wholesale for goldwasser. the distributor in massachusetts is ruby wines. the only thing imported to the states and close to green chartreuse is centerbe from italy. unfortunately they are usually just as expensive and not as elegant.