bostonapothecary

daiquiri 2 oz. rum (bershire mountain distillers ragged mountain rum) .75 oz. lime juice scant spoonful of raw sugar shaken! i'm really into this rum. it has a delicate "arrack-ness" that brings awesome complexity to it. it doesn't have dense, stuck flavors that remind me of wines that are too young like the rogue distillers rum i bought last time. pot distilled molasses goodness mellowed in oak probably just like the rogue but for some reason very different. the other half of the drink was made under pathetic circumstances with an ancient, tough skinned lime that only had 3/4 oz. of juice. yet i'm completely revived.

i've been drinking wine lately but have been trying to get back to the mixed drinks... 1.5 oz. glen fiddich 1 oz. 1979 pedro ximinez 1 oz. espresso .5 oz. cherry heering egg yolk double strain. tastes like an imperial porter with killer texture...

i never make grenadine from fresh pomegranites but i also don't like that stewed aroma that some brands have more than others. would it ever make sense to use fresh pomegranite juice and freeze concentrate it like a faux ice wine must?

since the european formula came out i drink more dry noilly straight out of the bottle. it has a nice stand alone balance. i can't drink the american version straight so enjoyably. to evaluate it solo, the american doesn't have enough extract for its loud proportions. it just doesn't taste unified. but in the context of a cocktail that doesn't really matter. many other brands can't be drank straight so enjoyably either because they have an obnoxious concord grape like fruitiness. how do people feel about the different noillys in drinks like the bamboo or half sinner half saint?

i'm curious about the custom ice trays, where do you even go for something like that? is there a market for custom trays or cube, bar, and spherical ice? i found one place that sold spherical ice trays, but the spheres were only 2" or so. i would think that 2.5 or even 3 would be a better choice. ← right now i'm into the 8 and 16 oz. shaker tins from barproducts.com they are thin and probably will wear out quickly but are cheap enough. they solved my problem of other bartenders not wanting to put enough ice into their drinks with larger shakers and the ice being poor quality in the first place. we make 3 oz. straight spirit drinks and 4 oz. citrus. the shaken citrus drinks comes out with perfect dilution for us. the faux cold draft cube trays are awesome and if you could afford to buy enough of them i'm sure you could perfectly remove some of the separators with an exacto knife.

bacardi eight year with its "rum oil" sort of character... (and it doesn't break the bank!) other heavy spirits have too many stuck flavors like vanilla or caramel.

Katie, what is the reason behind having both citric and tartaric acid in your recipe? I ask because, naturally, I only have citric, and am feeling lazy... what would I be losing if I only used the citric? ← differing acids have different impacts on taste and tartaric would be much sharper. a liqueur producer told me that he often uses malic acid when something might encounter a lot of sunlight because citric and tartaric tend to yellow... it may be part of the phenomenon that makes st. germain turn so golden.

corpse reviver no. 2. 1 oz. gin (seagram's) 1 oz. triple sec (homemade creole shrub) 1 oz. lillet (vergano luli) 1 oz. lemon juice 2 dashes absinthe (kubler) black dahlia 2 oz. cranberry-black tea vodka 1 oz. grenadine (not reduced down) 1 oz. lemon juice for beginners we get really good mileage out of the corpse reviver no. 2, but i'm always surprised about what people like as they begin to explore adult mixed drinks. the "black dahlia" cocktail seems to be universally liked as well even though its not scared of lemon juice. these drinks differ from others that can be just as sweet and just as tart because they have huge amounts of flavor extract dissolved into their ingredients. in a dessert wine, as sugar and acid increase, extract has to increase as well or you will end up with the "sweet-tart" phenomenon that characterizes bad dessert wines. cocktails share this phenomenon but unlike dessert wines, low extract drinks can be thrilling but tend to be for more seasoned drinks. new drinkers seem to be less afraid of fierce and refreshing sours if their drinks are over the top in extract. you can get more extract in a drink like a jack rose by reducing down the pomegranate juice in the grenadine. sugar contents equal, the higher extract should taste not exactly less tart but less disjointed and less like your eating an apple-pomegranate pie that someone topped with crushed sweet tart candies. we don't use a reduced grenadine in the black dahlia because it already has so much extract dissolved in the vodka from the cranberries. it would be just too much. i've made the same mistake with rum punches because you can potentially put too much flavor into them. its like getting an over the top new zealand sauvignon blanc versus a crisp, minerally, and leaner chablis or muscadet. one other way to make sours appeal to new drinkers is to go heavy the on bitters. besides a cocktail condiment, or something literally bitter, another way of thinking about "bitters" is just as a flavor concentrate or extract that can change the "sweet tart" perception of your drinks. so for new drinkers, just like a dessert wine, as sugar and acid increases, so too does extract!

i just picked up a "parisian" shaker because i thought it might be good for egg drinks... flip 1 oz. cognac (gaston lagrange vsop) .5 oz. mezcal (del maguey chichicapa) 1 oz. pineau de charentes (brillet) scant spoonful of sugar stirrd in entire very small egg the smokiness of the mezcal was awesome contrast to the comparative nature of the cognac and pineau de charentes... and the shaker worked nicely as well. a good liquid lunch.

i wanted to make a high alcohol fruit liqueur like cointreau. because there really isn't many. i tried making an infusion but the seeds have so much acid that even with sugar you could never add lime juice. but if you distill it you leave the acid behind because its the volatile type. i used arrack because i put it in everything i drink. i sugared to the same level as cointreau. results tastey. the seeds seem to distill just as naturally as a citrus peel.

2 oz. cognac (gaston lagrange VSOP) 1 oz. lime juice 1 oz. arrack based pomegranate seed triple-sec (*) dash peychaud's bitters so i made a distilled liqueur from batavia arrack van oosten and pomegranite seeds. it has a grand alcohol content like cointreau and has the same sugar content. the liqueur makes the drink very familiar in structure (sidecar, margarita, etc.) but awesomely different. i should probably make it again with a neutral spirit but definitely keep the epic triple-sec structure. if someone brought this to market it could probably do pretty well. i'd buy it.

NP 375s keep very well in my experience (that's how I've normally bought it to have on hand). And again, dry French vermouth is handy as an herbed wine in old-fashioned cooking (like, chicken with a wine-cream sauce, pearl onions, mushrooms, serve over rice; or cold chaud-froid sauces). It was often specified in recipes, through about the 1960s. Being old enough to remember the 1960s somewhat, I remember Vermouth was commonly ordered in US restaurants as an apéritif, then and somewhet later, compared to today. General US public also drank cocktails much more than wine then, which gradually shifted. Like cocktails, Vermouth seems to've been reborn. ← I'm sure it'll be fine in the medium term, but I don't think I'll really want to explore what happens to Noilly Prat with ten years of bottle age. ← i bought a couple bottles of cinzano reserva dry last year and though there is no references to them on the web, i think i've dated them to the mid nineties from a strange PR claiming an attempt to re-energize the category with the product in the canadian market. i'd drank all but one. mainly unmixed. at ten plus years the wine is frail but not dead. there isn't much sugar to give it longevity which is probably more important than alcohol but who knows... but similarly i've been drinking Pineau Brillet, pineau des charentes and it has a reputation for aging a bit, but floc de gascogne with a really similar alcohol, acid, sugar structure needs to be drank within a year. the floc even has a tiny born on date. i just bought one with out looking at the date and at three years old it tastes really frail if not dead. there is absolutely no fruit in the aroma as opposed to the killer apple-y Brillet. makes me wonder how my bottles of 2004 jean de lillet is doing...

This should help. Here's the text of a 1964 ad from my archives: So. Pre-1964 (note that "new"), what we're getting now, or at least something different from the "old" one we grew up with. I say that because for all I know there may have been an intermediate stage--or there may not have been. ← (all learned from amerines "annotated bibliography of vermouth") this paler style was not just a noilly thing but a trend with everyone. early out the gates of WWII america was set to reclaim dominance in its vermouth market so there was tons of research on the subject. wisdom then said that you had to have a high quality, full bodied and flavorful wine base to produce a good dry vermouth. eventually the americans figured things out and tribuno dominated the domestic market. many said tribuno was the best in the world. (it was also 20% or so cheaper than the imports) then in the early sixties articles from sources like the san fransisco wine institute said the europeans were changing their wine bases in favor of very neutral flavored wines. the americans followed suit and supposedly there was tons of different styles of dry on the market. a sources said that americans were very sensitive to color and tricks had to be used to remove it while the europeans were more tolerent. another thing that happened concurrently was light whiskey becoming popular and new labeling guidelines to handle it... the sixties were bland times...

i tried making a half size, ommitting the gomme, going full eggwhite instead of water and hitting it with a tiny charge of soda. i got very little froth and couldn't really deal with the lack of acid. i though that the liqueurs and angostura bitters were especially cool together but i didn't even finish my drink... i'm going to reformat it as a sour and try again.

this is a strange recipe. water and a half an egg white. then lots more sugar than i can metabolize. if i made something like this i'd use a whole egg white and assume there was an ounce of water in that... then i'd charge the drink with soda water like a fizz. but can you even get a froth with all that sugar and is it supposed to have any?

That sounds interesting. How did you infuse the gin? Just empty a bottle of gin into a container, add some amount of dried flowers, then steep at room temp for some period of time? ← we used to steep two teaspoons in a liter of gin for 40 minutes but if you shake vigorously you can probably be done in 30 seconds because it starts to infuse really fast. i like the hibiscus & spice blends but too much mono hibiscus reminds me of hawaiian punch and socialism. my favorite contrast for spiced hibiscus is caraway aquavit like linie or o.p. anderson. hibiscus and juniper can be tasty but in a hot drink that i put on the menu i added a potent spruce tree honey for its exotic shades of piney freshness-meets molasses

Where did you get this information? ← one of maynard amerine's abstracts from "vermouth an annotated bibliography" there was lots of turn of the century vermouth analysis and one that even examined what was at the paris exposition of 1900, supposedly representing the best available. the analysis explains sugar, acid, alcohol, and extract. the bianco coloring was explained in the abstract of a source from 1917 which analyzed 142 samples.

zummy cocktail from robert hess' book... .75 oz. gin (seagram's) .75 oz. benedictine .5 oz. sweet vermouth (stock) .5 oz. dry vermouth (stock) bar spoon of campari stir. this drink was pretty cool. rather sophisticated and aperitify. strangely i tasted a subtle anise flavor which i know isn't prominent in any of the ingredients but probably just got brought into focus by the magic of mixing random things... i would be happy to drink it again.

You're right--I keep forgetting that. I paid $18 for Vya, so this is isn't all that much more. I might just bite the bullet and try the CAF. Sam, could you elaborate on what you mean about the Dolin not working "exactly like most sweet red vermouths"? BTW, what exactly are blanc vermouths? Are they simply semi-sweet white vermouths? How are they used? I noticed that M&R has a blanc which has shown up in my area. ← blancs or biancos are vermouths decolored with carbon. i haven't had every bianco but they seem to be as sweet as the traditional sweet vermouth and have the same botanical intensity maybe even more so making them come across as slightly bitter. they are fun but they really don't seem to be worth too much more than their color... we use them mainly in the pastry department.

Two questions: how long do you let this infuse, and I assume you add the sugar after straining? I'd like to try this with bergamots, if there are still any left at my farmer's market this weekend. ← i probably have no good recommendation on how long to infuse them. a week? or two days if your alcohol is strong enough. i didn't dehydrate the peels either. i thought the water in them might bring something nice if it wasn't negligible... i used to add whispers of bergamot peel (scraps from the pastry chef) and cardamoms to existing orange liqueur. it can be an over whelming flavor pretty fast but still worth playing with.

if you have interesting oranges you can still make something amusing like "creole shrubb". triple sec might imply distillation but what does that really do to the peels? citrus peels have so much volatile stuff that i think far less is transformed or left behind in distillation than other botanicals. therefore all you really gain is clear liquid in my limited experience. the juice doesn't add much relative to the peel. probably acidity which is more important to something like lemoncello which is mainly a stand alone beverage. i wouldn't put orange juice in my shrubb. it would compromise the large amount of alcohol that differentiates it from other liqueurs. i've seen some strange industrial orange liqueur recipes. some were compounded and some were distilled but all focus on terpene removal as really imporant. some recipes were aromatized with cloves, cinnamon, etc... and things as strange as significant amounts of pepper mint. orange aromatization is a tricky subject. its hard to describe things in words. i can't even thing of something that rhymes with orange...

the peel of approximately three seville sour oranges 260 grams of sugar 850ml or so of 94 proof spirit to bring the liquid total to a liter this should end up with more or less the same sugar content as cointreau and be 80 proof. this is what i'm using at the bar. i made enough sour orange concentrate to last the entire year. probably like 50 liters worth.

some rare individual the other night wanted a cask-strength-single-malt-madeira flip but tragically i had run out of madeira... so i substituted a strange dessert wine from pojer e sandri that i had just picked up. the wine is called "merlino" and is made in the style of port but fortified with a more distinct grappa. i'd say that the merlino differs from port in the way thats its flavors are more focused, electric, and maybe even neon. there are no muted tones... kind of awesome and probably very reactive with food. 1.5 macallan cask strength (or overproof lemon heart!) 1 oz. merlino .5 oz. simple syrup one entire small egg. the merlino has the color of a bright port but something strange happens here and a surprising violet color is created like if chambord was in the mix. the first drinker preferred the merlino substitution to the usual malmsey but i thought all the components were too comparative with not enough contrast... lately i've been smoking straight latakia (maybe syrian and not the cyprus variety) which is a really intense blending tobacco with an over the top smokey character a shade between laphroaig and mezcal. smokiness seemed like the perfect contrast to the drink so i added a laphroaig rinse... pretty good. though on one iteration i traded out the scotch for over proof lemon heart and it may have even been more fun...

tropical cocktail 1.5 oz. glen fiddich 12 year 1 oz. clayton's kola nut tonic .5 oz. grenadine .5 o.z lemon juice dash angostura stir! don't shake! garnish with a flamed sour orange peel. this was enjoyed by quite a few people despite its low alcohol nature.

The value of theatrics cannot be overstated in a commercial setting. They shouldn't take the place of quality and flavor, of course, but when you can combine both, rest assured you'll have a top seller on your hands. People love to see tableside presentations and the like. ← the cafe diablo is confined nowadays to being a french quarter drink. i can't drink and enjoy it, but its really awesome to see a waiter that is good at it. i used to have to debone the dover soles then flambe the pepper steaks, baked alaskas, and banana's foster... i never had to make salads table side luckily... some times it was like iron chef and people loved it.