bostonapothecary

i think what they are doing is simply juicing the raspberries, preserving the juice to the minimum of microbiological stability (probably 20% alc.), and adjusting sugar to a fun ethic. so the problem is a multi variable equation with lots of room to just simply estimate. they probably don't infuse the raspberries in alcohol. its not necessary. you don't need a solvent, you need a preservative. what you need to do is figure out how to juice the raspberries. i've never used my wine maker's basket press on raspberries, but it works great on strawberries. its amazing how clear the juice runs. for raspberries, because they break apart so easily, you might have to line the press with a cloth press bag. the press is better than a grinding juicer because the "press cake" (fruit solids) filters the juice really well and the process doesn't whip lots of oxygen in the juice. now you need to figure out your sugar ethic. raspberries probably have from 70 to 100 grams of sugar per liter of juice. port is 100, sweet vermouth has 170 or so, chartreuse 200, cointreau 250, grenadine 350-400. if you want to make a sipping liqueur i'd stick with 170-200 g/l because i bet the raspberries have a lot of acidity so you can't go as low as port. if you want to mix it all in 2:1:1 sours, i'd try to hit 300-350 g/l. you could even split things up and make a sipping version and a cocktail version. the sugar you add has a dissolved volume that needs to be considered. then you have your spirit. the lower proof your spirit, the more water it has and therefore the less raspberry juice that will be in the liqueur. this means you probably want everclear so you can use as little as possible. an estimated cocktail centric sugar level recipe would be as follows. 200 ml everclear 250 grams non aromatic white sugar (estimated dissolved volume 150ml) 650 or so ml raspberry juice (basket pressed!) just stir to dissolve the sugar (definitely don't heat. it will spoil the color) this will give you a sugar content in the 300's. and be preserved close to the minimum of stability.

daiquiri 2 oz. joao a. monteiro aguardente velha (aged rum from santo antao) 1 oz. lime juice spoonful of sugar (non aromatic type, stirred to dissolve) shaken "commando" style with one large lump of ice (about 4 cubic inches) until i felt the shaker was stingingly cold. the large lump of ice doesn't have a lot of surface area, relative to 4 one inch cubic peices, so i knew i could shake the drink for a long time without things diluting to death. i've seen the same technique done with egg drinks. the result was serious froth akin to pictures i've seen of the hard shake. i strained the drink letting all the ice chips into the glass and they didn't seem to bother me or enhance the experience. i don't really like inhomogeneous textural elements in my drinks with the exception of egg foams. i think its symbolic value i place on "tidy-ness". the cleaned up drink, to me, is more calming than a chaotic mess of floating ice chips. the perception of the drink was definitely augmented by the physical exertion i put into making it. i was so unrelaxed that any result would do as long as it was cold and tart. drinks are often like sandwiches and can easily be better when someone else makes them for you. i still say the greatest contribution to perception and emotional content is the relationship between sugar and acid, at least in the daiquiri.

Anyone know what that means? these japanese bars seem to love creating a heightened degree of civilization through exclusivity of their form rather than the drink itself. your form isn't going to get its ass kicked by cultural relativism as much as appreciation for the drink itself. so shift your emphasis to where your effort goes farthest in making people happy. therefore focus on ice balls and not acquired tastes for inarticulate people with polarized food ways. i wonder if these bars cater to the japanese or to westerners and if this explains how their style evolved. with everything i've seen, i read that quote as "emphasize the process" because without having a history with them, an imbibers sense of harmony is too hard to pin down. bartending can't really go much further until we develop more methods of being articulate about the experience of the finished product. i think we need a "plane conscious" method of examining spatial effect (depth!) in a drink (and culinary in general). the method explains how relationships between identifiable planes like sugar, acid, alcohol, bitter, temperature, and dissolved gas (etc.) effect perception. we can articulate with intuitive analogies relationships we like to see (we already somewhat do!) and start expanding imbibers sense of harmony. there is no balance, there is only harmony. harmony is culturally relative. harmony can be catered to and expanded.

abridged gin mule 1 oz. gin (beefeater) .5 oz. lime juice 4 oz. kegged sweet potato ginger beer* over crushed ice the juniper ginger combo is most excellent. a lot of gins really bother me with their lame juniper expressions. beefeater is not one of them. i found its aroma uplifting and purifying amidst this cold dreary allergy season. *i averaged the sugar contents of a few commercial ginger beers by reading the disclosed amounts on the nutritional facts and settled on a 100g/l sugar model. the sugar was inverted to not degrade the ginger aroma, the ginger was juiced not steeped (one quart per three gallons), and the water was boiled with sweet potatoes to soak up a negligible amount of sugars but an awesome amount of aroma. gassed like a lager. a really fast ginger beer recipe if you have the right equipment.

if anyone wants to be further confused by amer picon i measured another bottling and found it to use a significantly different sugar model. one had a gravity of 1.031 which is a sugar content of about 142g/l and another that i came across had a gravity of 1.066 (same alcohol content) which is a sugar content of about 234 g/l. to give a comparison cynar has a gravity of 1.081 which gives an approx sugar content of 270 g/l. a problem with the sugar measurements so far is that at the low end of alcohol contents the margin of error seems to increase more. i think the reason being is that chart i have isn't the greatest. i think i need to buy two more special hydrometers so i can replicate low alcohol test solutions and translate alcohol by volume to gravity. this will improve figuring out alcohol's influence on the over all specific gravity of these liqueurs.

tropico in roxbury sells schweppes bitter lemon bottled in africa and probably made with cane sguar. it comes in a really heavy bottle with a painted on label because in africa, i think they recycle by sterilizing the bottles rather than melting them down and reforming them.

if anyone has any nice orange peels laying around... i just did a little analysis of amer picon and found they used a 142g/l as sucrose sugar model with a low twenty something alcohol content. the goal of picon may have been to synthesize the character of belgium beers like chimay by adding it to simple lagers. serious ingenuity. to get closer to a "chimay concentrate", picon may have used a percentage of beat molasses as a botanical for the sake of creating aromatic intervals akin to a beer experience. so if you can replicate their sugar ethic (which is the exact same as a few other notable aperitifs), a sweetener of specific aromatic character might be the missing link to a gorgeous easy to assemble replica.

within a bar you can only make something that resembles "creole shrubb" which is just a product of infusion. triple-sec implies clarity, which can add an element of expectation and anticipation when used in the right way. but luckily orange peel are very volatile so very little is left behind after distillation making creole shrubb a great product for bars to make. one of the most significant aspects of triple-sec is your emotional reaction to its structure. 80 proof with 250 grams of sugar per liter. this means you start with a 92 proof base spirit. to extract the aroma you don't need a high proof solvent. 80 to 92 proof will work fine. the louching probably came from over extraction or maybe terpenes from oxidation. many orange extracts are "terpeneless". if you chill the infusion they come out of solution and you can usually skim them off the top. i make all the my orange peel infusions into a concentrate so i don't tie up a lot of product. with a concentrate you need to assemble a tasting panel to determine how much volume needs to go into the final blend to match the aroma of commercial version without any sophisticated analytical tools. i used to make countless liters using seville peels that i got in the winter and preserved in the concentrates. the orange expression from wonderful.

the pictures make the space look pretty cool (besides the lack of shelving on the back). what equipment creates the 12 inch narrowing of the pass behind the bar? i've worked spaces like that and we just became really good at communicating and passing stuff to each other. i worked a less than ideal two man bar where we serve tons of food and all drinks came off one station. one person stuck to the drinks station and the other was the waiter, dishwasher, and conversationalist. you just ordered all your mixed drinks from the other guy. we were able to do 4k in sales on 16 seats with $20 entrees and $7 cocktails. we could have every seat eating dinner from 20 minutes after opening to the kitchen closing at 1:30 a.m. that space only had one single door fridge for the four whites by the glass and the back bar was only 10 inches deep. definitely no chilled glassware. i don't like sliding door fridges. the swinging door is your friend as long as it can be opened all the way, you just learn to reach over it in different ways. think, "what would jackie chan do?" at my previous bar, we were selling more beer in the summer than our fridges could hold. and you could never restock in a shift because the bar walk-in was a maze of hallways and floors away in the hotel. bottles just weren't taking advantage of the square footage of the fridge so i switched quite a few beers to cans, stacked them three high and solved the problem. you can get good quality cans these days. we were doing pork slap, dales pale ale, tecate, brooklyn lager, and i wanted to do the sea hag i.p.a. i would never put glasses in the fridge, for starters its really unsanitary. i'd rather have a stainless steel or copper box with a drain that i could fill with shaved ice to chill glasses. an awesome ice shaver is $300. a fridge or freezer is a few thousand. when it come to mint drinks, many bartenders i know just toss them ice and all in to the trash. often times it just better than clogging up the sink. to free up that hand washing sink you may want to think of installing a "t & s brand glass filler" on the counter. they are really easy to plumb. you just split off the cold water supply from under your sink and run a plastic hose. with some better shelves on the back, that space looks workable. the photos look great.

1 oz. pisco (caesar) 1 oz. slivovitz (clear creak) 1 oz. strawberry syrup (basket pressed!) 1 oz. lemon juice scant float of mezcal (chichicapa) i thought it would be cool to create some sort of weird overtone by mixing the aroma of blue plums with the (non quite summer) strawberry syrup. it worked out. they gained strength and when ameliorated with lemon juice and sugar, the inner sound of the strawberry was more real than before i had juiced it. the mezcal was cool but maybe i need dueling floats of mezcal and lemonhart 151. epic abstracted inner sound!

2 oz. unaged cape verdean rum (from a new producer: fortaleza "grogue") 1 oz. lime juice 1 oz. basket pressed strawberry syrup (400g/l sugar) dash peychaud's bitters today was nice so i hit up hay market and found everyone selling strawberries. the basket press worked really well to yield a clear juice which was really surprising because the centrifugal acme juicers have a really hard time with them. i put them in the press whole which i regret because there was quite a few uncrushed berries in the press cake which means my yield could have been better if i actually crushed them beforehand. because these aren't perfectly ripe summer strawberries, their skin is tougher than i thought. a great simple sour with epic fresh strawberry aroma. this rum is great and barely different than the unaged JM which was distributed by grape moments who supposedly ran out. fortaleza is distributed by a small firm in brockton.

i did revisit this with the chestnut flower honey and it was exactly what i was looking for. unfortunately peat smoke as opposed to mezcal smoke proved dissonant for many in my focus group so who knows if it will make the menu. i just retried a version at home as: .5 oz. del maguey "chichicapa" 1.5 oz. cognac (gaston lagrange) 1 oz. vergano americano spoonful of benedictine fairly cool, but the benedictine as opposed to the focused flavors of the varietal honeys i keep at work, created this weird nut like character. it reminded me of luxardo abano amaro. fairly cool but not what i wanted. i want a focused futuristic roundness with strange intervals from the honey, americano, and cognac. i should have also added a dash of peychaud's bitters. what i really need is the bitter corsican strawberry tree honey, but i have to wait for the next vintage because i sold too much. not inharmonious but too stodgy.

use "18 quart carlisle containers" and you can stick a few of them next to each other in the well. sometimes four. two regular ice, one crushed, one shaved for your various bottles like lemon juice or wine. get the white versions and not the clear because they handle the freezer better without cracking the plastic. sometimes places use compartment sinks instead of proper ice bins because they are far cheaper, come in better shapes, and if you don't have soda on the gun, you don't need a cold plate. i also keep a zero dollar button in the computer so the chef or food runner can bring ice in a pinch.

i've been making a ward 8 lately at work. we don't keep many bottles around and it fits into our small inventory. my recipe looks like this. 1.5 oz. bourbon .75 oz. lemon juice .25 oz. simple syrup .5 oz. grenadine (ice wine method) dash regan's orange bitters i categorize this as a drink with no literal recipe like a daiquiri. it can be stretched up and down however you like. my idea is that the ward 8 should be a relatively low extract sour. and i only try to add enough aroma from the grenadine to barely overshadow the round aromatic quality of the bourbon. this leaves you with a juxtaposition of sexy tarted up pomegranite fruit and the angular spiciness of bourbon as well as all the cardamom from regan's bitters. the less spicy your bourbon, the less grenadine you add filling it in the difference with simple syrup. as you increase the grenadine and therefore all that dense overshadowing aroma it may be more interesting to switch to a spirit like rye.

i just whipped one up with vergano's "americano" instead of punt y mes which i lacked and a chichicapa rinse. i may do it again switching to lemonhart 151 instead of smith & cross. there is a lot of wisdom to three equal parts with two being aromatized wines. the savoy would be proud. delicious.

i noted this change and it got me thinking. that is a pretty big volumetric change, so what happened? did we get more apricot or did we get more water. that alcohol is potentially important to the structural expression of the drink, but was it quality stuff with a tonal effect on the fruit expression or just junk, barely cut grain neutral spirits. if that later it might not be worth its emotional contribution to a drink's structure... and then what are the implications of moving from a syrup to a liqueur. does a fruit syrup imply there is more aroma than a fortified syrup(liqueur) which has been diluted with alcohol. and could we jack our syrups and replace a portion of water with alcohol to create liqueurs with the syrup level aromatics. the state of california would not be happy with me making five gallon batches of "ice wine method" apricot liqueur fortified with st. james amber or cape verdean rum, sugared to the same ethic as brizard, and dispensed into 375ml decanters from air purged cornelius kegs tucked away in the basement.

1.5 oz. auchentoshan "select" .5 oz. ardbeg 10 1 oz. vergano "americano" spoonful of rhododendron flower honey syrup this was a really interesting drink. i think i'm going to put it on the menu as a "bobby burns", but with a chestnut flower honey. the only scotch we keep on the bar is the auchentoshan "select" which is kind of bland, and in the context of the drink doesn't have enough contrasting aroma to create solid spatial effect with honey and the fruity bittered wine. the peatyness of ardbeg definitely solves the depth problem. another fun way to come to a similar result would be to use cognac and mezcal. ingredient esoterism. epic spatial effect!

the bar i'm working now is impossibly busy and besides making drinks you are also the host and work the phones which ring a lot. we probably should have been beer and wine only. to keep it all possible i batch the two straight spirit drinks. old fashioned 18 oz. bourbon (grand dad) 4.5 oz. simple syrup* 1.25 oz. angostura bitters get it on the rocks by any means necessary express orange oil over it for top notes. *a little matilde pear liqueur goes into the sugar blend (maybe .75 oz. out of 4.5) to create a slightly more fun fruit expression. the other bartender just pours it on the rocks. i manage to stir it with ice and strain it over fresh ice. i swear by the weighted stirring pitchers so i can multi task by while stirring without knocking anything over. because it is batched we also can top people up or make very tiny ones. we fly through them.

a lot of the production standards are spelled out in commercial products. wines worry about various bacterias and controls much of it by focusing on acid levels. ph of 3.3-3.7. sherry have the additional worry about acetification by bacteria and therefore keep there alcohol levels just over the limit of that bacteria which is about 15.5% vermouths spell out the standards for more conservative minimums. most lactic bacteria can't grow in alcohol levels over 18% which is why that level is chosen for dry vermouth. a sizable sugar content like sweet vermouth (150-170g) allows that to go a little lower and you can be stable at about 16%. egg yolk liqueurs are also made with structures similar to sweet vermouth. Bombardino brand uses an alcohol content of 17%. that level won't kill bacteria but supposedly suppress its growth for years. to actually kill stuff i think you need to be in the realms of 60% plus or rubbing alcohol.

S- do you have a name for it? :-> We actually just changed the recipes on the bottle and Bali Passion is gone. IRRC it now has the Bombay Govt Punch. "the shining path". if maoist rebels had a drink, it is what it would be.

dry vermouth is a great acid for coffee liqueur, but i'd bet you'd want more than 1/4 part. you could also trade the white rum for an eau de vie like kirschwasser and add an aromatic interval. if the ramazotti still seems too drastic, i'd try cynar.

i used to make a chocolate martini for people that requested it with some pedro ximinez in it. 1.5 oz. vanilla vodka .75 oz. creme de cocoa .75 oz. pedro ximinez it always stuck and people would go for a couple rounds of it. we used really low budget brands of vanilla vodka and creme de cocoa so the sherry really elevates them and adds gentle depth. this drink was a "solution" and not something we really wanted to promote. weddings would descend upon the bar in the hotel and ask for lots of mono-flavored drinks. we used to have a "wedding kit" with apple pucker and everything. we'd break it out and keep everybody happy while making nice margins for the bar. dessert sherry and creme de cocoa is pretty cool. sub glen fiddich or highland park, stretch the proportions to 2:.5:.5, maybe add an egg yolk and you've got a real serious drink.

1.5 oz. batavia arrack van oosten .75 oz. apricot liqueur .75 oz. lemon juice dash angostura bitters .25 oz. float of smith & cross for some reason i've sought this out time and time again. i think the "bali passion" recipe on the side of the arrack bottle should change to this recipe. eric seed, any chance?

I just triedb this and think it's a little better than Sam's recipe that I had used before. I freeze reduced (I'm making this term up) it three times. When you thaw it out half-way, you get out about 75% of the concentrated pomegranate juice. You could stop it then but you'd be throwing away quite a bit of the good stuff. But if you let it thaw out to 75% you can get out about 95% and have a leftover frozen block of almost entirely water. So to get it reduced to one-third the original volume, I had to repeat this process three times. Then I added 2x the volume of sugar to the volume of the concentrated juice. Compared to the previous batch I made using Sam's recipe, it tastes brighter, and has more of the pure pomegranate essence, but I'm not sure if it's a really scientific comparison as the previous batch is three months old and the proportions may have been slightly different. I wonder if you can make other syrups this way too. Take any fruit juice, freeze reduce it a few times, then add a bunch of sugar. Maybe pineapple juice would be worth trying? For the 1.25 liters of grenadine I just made, I spent $6.25 on the juice and sugar. when its too concentrated i feel like it can over shadow some of the nuances of the gin. i also swear by the refractometer for syrups. you can get your perfectly desired sugar content every time really quickly. i bought mine for $20. i've been using the same process on pineapples with great success. but to juice them, i use a ratcheting wine maker's basket press. the juice runs really clean and you barely have to run it through a sieve. the press also does a good job of juicing without introducing too much oxygen and it does large quantities. i only concentrate a percentage of the juice to make it only slightly larger than life and then i sugar to 400g/l. my freezer has a nice library of the concentrates that i marry into stuff i juice fresh when i'm ready for the syrup.

i was on the red line so i followed your tip and made a detour. i picked up two bottles as well. what did you think of the stuff? i don't think i've ever had an extra anejo. the bottle claims it spent seven years in wood. its kind of opulent and rich stuff. has all the hallmarks of tequila but also a dessert sherry kind of feel to it.