bostonapothecary

today i got some seville oranges to make creole shrubb. after using all the peels for the orange liqueur i decided to juice a few to make a bronx... 2 oz. gin (seagram's extra dry) 1 oz. m&r sweet vermouth 1 oz. tart seville orange juice stir! (when i have sweet vermouth and citrus i still stir... drink it yourself and you will see...) this has all these wild shades of fruit like pomello... and this not too hightly regarded gin is awesome. quite a drink but hard to come by the seville juice. its amazing how little you get out of every orange. i made it again with vergano's barolo chinato instead of the m&r and the fruit was more like intense texas grapefruit with unique allspice notes of the chinato... i thought it was really special but my drinking companion prefered the subletely of the simpler vermouth... citrus rule or not i enjoyed these stirred...

so if major gin producers add no acidity what should we expect to find with regards to their PH level? it must be documented somewhere...

Here's what I understand about this, in brief (and apologies for the simplistic language; I'm just trying to lay things out clearly, as much for myself as for anyone). All distillation involves making a cut; discarding or reserving for redistillation morst of what comes through the still. The best distillers will make a very narrow cut. This is expensive--if you let more through, you get to bottle more booze. But the broader the cut, the more congeners you let through into your distillate. If these include some of the compounds that are more volatile than alcohol, your booze will smell nasty and taste harsh. You can cushion some of this harshness by adding sugar or glycerin. This will make your spirit taste sweet, though. If it's a vodka or a gin or a white rum you're making, that might mess with your marketing plan. So then you might want to throw in a little citric acid to cut the sweetness. The acidity will also mask some of the rank odors you get with a bad cut. You can taste the sugar/glycerin, because it will pool in the bottom of your mouth. You can test for the citric acid, because cream or milk will curdle if poured into a glass of alcohol dosed with the stuff and swirled around. Try it with a bottle of Georgi or Banker's Club. No need to taste. I agree that there are many good, cheap boozes out ther (see my bit in this month's Esquire), and that they should be sought out and supported. Long live Evan Williams! A Cheap Booze Project, wherein someone tasted all the $8-$12 bottles out there and noted the palatable ones, whould be a wonderful thing. ← to back up to what acid comes through the still even in the tales all i've found is acetic acid (think distilled vinegar) which is pretty inexcusable even in cheap spirits and probably doesn't effect the PH much before its aroma is easily detectable, but i'm still looking to pin down a more authoritative source on the subject. your describing these tricks as only used on the cheap stuff but i'm trying to say that anyone has an incentive to use them... especially the people that want to see their product (the gin) replacing the cheaper product (the vermouth) by taking the cheaper products function... i don't think all the salty stuff we put in our gin would be possible on the palate if it weren't structured like an acidic white wine... and maybe we shouldn't complain about the acid additive (if that is what it is)... maybe its just a thoughtful evolution because they know i like olives...

for starters we need to talk about them. understanding the monetarily cheap things we ignore helps justify all the money i spend on certain products and tells us what artisinal is. i know the differences in wine at all sorts of levels but not in spirits. people think spirits, cheap or not, are made by phantoms, corporate entities, or trolls under bridges. the highly regarded WSJ could not even interview anyone on the revisions to noilly dry production and now i'm going to inherit a superstitious clientele that is going to spout to me WSJ trivia they read on why noilly dry sucks and is no longer classic... "cheap" spirits are not always bad spirits to drink... so much of the country still would call overholt "cheap" and shun it (we know otherwise!). the bulk of the bar community still doesn't understand gin quality... are gordon's and seagram's cheap? because you can't really find them in many bars around here and even fancy places could afford to serve a $7 gin and tonic with them... lowering the price of a gin and tonic from $8 to $7 would do wonders for society... some guest recently confessed to me that i really changed his life financially when i taught him he could enjoy our $8 overholt manhattan over his usual $11 crown royal... he thought the stuff would taste awful or make him sick... (one down millions to go...) one of the reasons i'm curious about this acidity issue is that i think its important to the drastic evolution of the most famous mixed drink out there... the drink is so subtle and so important to many people's lives that delicate unpublished changes could really tip the scales over the course of many years... (with huge amounts of money to be gained) if sugar additives are regulated and can be found in print somewhere so probably are acid additives. and if they are not additives like allegedly the tales of distillates, their variance is probably explained somewhere in a distiller's reference that can be pointed out to me... thanks to anyone that can help me understand this...!

the acid could be added for taste. if a wine doesn't have enough acidity its "flabby"... dry vermouth gives martinis good structure to counter any potential flabbiness. i think i'm just talking about unaged spirits mainly rum, gin and vodka.

if the acidity is a post distillation additive...

do you have any references to the science or legalities governing spirits acidity? i'm slowly getting some small experiments done in regards to it... i'd love to acidify some samples of vodka with maybe three or four different types of acid and see what goes through the still... in any distillers manuels i've come across there is never any references to acidity beyond fermentation. but i should probably spend more time reading the forums... in most cocktails it is probably of negligible significance but when you start talking spirit plus dry vermouth and or chilled glass of alcohol there is some significance and you could see how over many years a gin producer could muscle the vermouth out of a drink... it is like the beginning of an anti vermouth conspiracy...

yes. at the same time.

I don't find it significantly sweeter, either, at least not in an actual cocktail. It's definitely fuller-bodied and more assertive. I've been using it for about a year now and find it makes a hell of a Fitty-Fitty and a great Clover Club, but a disappointing 1950s-style ultra-dry Gibson (it doesn't help that Beefeater, my go-to for that style, appears to have been sweetened a little since the recent retirement of Desmond Payne). All this is as one would expect. ← if enough people are curious enough and want to know exactly what the sugar contents are of the new and the old i could be motivated to perform a little experiment and find out... but please give these vermouths a little leeway in their acidity. they are made from wine and unless the producers adjust with industrial acids to an exacting PH expect deviation... and because of NPs wine maturing techniques are so bizzare you should expect changes year to year... i have a feeling that beefeater has not been noticeably sweetened because there are lots of origin control style laws that protect london dry style gin. they can add some sort of trace amount of sugar but my understanding is that its to protect their formula from being reverse engineered... (how i don't know). from simple PH pen experiments i've done on spirits i've found acidity that i'm pretty sure doesn't come from the distilling process... (acid additives?) maybe i can track down an old generation beefeater and compare its PH to one in the new packaging...

for some reason i wanted to make a madeira sour with an egg white... and so it goes the first person i made it for was from the canary islands... (his father any how...) and tells me the tale of how his father made madeira in the back yard here in america... (i have so many awesome stories of home wine making...) he knew cooperage and bought used whiskey barrels and knew how to shave them down and re-char them... 2 oz. genavieve... 1 oz. "boston" bual madeira from the rare wine co. .5 oz. lemon juice .5 oz. simple egg white shake and decorate with angostura bitters... the drink was cool and had fun flavors contrast, but may have been better with something other than the gin... pisco maybe or a barrel proof single malt like the glen livet nadurra that i've been making boston flips out of...

do the math and see how the alcohol averages out. over 15.5 won't turn to vinegar and over 18 is really stable in preventing most all bacterial spoilage... now you only have to care about the ravages (or enhancements!) of oxidation...

i love sherry and i give a taste of it to everyone that is really into macallan.

← I wonder what kind of Madiera? So frustrating when recipes call for Sherry or (less commonly) Madiera without specifying the types, which can vary wildly in sweetness and flavor. ← the style of madeira that most commonly has an orangey character is a bual if the drinks goal was to have only comparative fruit elements...

I used the Lustau Escuadrilla amontillado I mentioned above, and Rittenhouse BIB for the rye. Wow. This is a fantastic drink, with the spice of the rye and bitters picking up the nuttiness of the sherry, all shot through with the citrus from the Aperol and twist. ← so your drink ended up with significantly less sugar than if you used the sweeter "east india"? i'd probably personally enjoy it best with a drier sherry (manzanilla pasada is my favorite style... "la cigarrera"!) strange proportions but awesome sounding flavor contrasts!

aged rum punch was on my mind tonight... 2 oz. aged rum punch (from last february or so...) 1 oz. benedictine 1 oz. lemon juice 2 dashes peychaud's bitters this is pretty intense and its interesting how the large dose of benedictine dissolves into the drink and becomes hard to pick out. everything is massively extracted because the aromatized rum brings a super natural amount of flavor. with benedictine this drink works but the last time i subbed cointreau i couldn't drink it... too much flavor. its like when a new zealand sauv. blanc is too over the top or like an australian shiraz whose low yields has been pushed beyond wine making into motor oil territory. i think i need to make a french 75 style drink with the punch to dilute things back to elegance...

bar spoon of sugar 4 dashes angostura 1.5 oz. clear creek blue plum brandy 1.5 oz. suntory "yamazaki" 12 yr. single malt no garnish this was a lot of fun to drink. i've read that fermenting fruits together with grains can produce phenomenal whiskey. this was an attempt at what that might be like.

last night i made punch for NYE that looked something like this... 2 750's mango wine i made myself back in the spring. (structured like a spatlese) 1 cup lemon juice 1 cup simple syrup 1 quart green tea 1 pint gin 1 pint jamaican rum 2 750' cava mango-y and interesting. i didn't add too much lemon juice and sugar because of the intense structure of the wine. the fermented mangoes have a lot of mango fruit but also a chardonnay like quality. i would have rather used a more intense gin and rum st. james... there will be next time!

tonight i had some guests that wanted to drink a million variations of something i had on the list as "alto cucina". i liked this variation and drank one at the end of my shift... 1 oz. bookers 1 oz. stock dry vermouth .5 oz. cynar .5 oz. primi frutti fragola (strawberry) stirred with no garnish... this was really interesting with some serious intensity. for some reason the cynar tasted more bitter than other versions of this i had made before but not in any way that was unbearable... more like alluring... these primi frutti products are really interesting. they are not as sweet as other liqueurs and seem to have the same sugar ethic as a sweet vermouth. this one also discloses that it uses grape skin extract to color it... (a.k.a. the evil yet natural wine additive "mega purple"). i've found that strawberries are harder to get color from than you would expect so i guess you can't blame them. i would even say that if you tracked this particular strawberry product down that you could mix it with bianco vermouth in such a way that could probably replicate chamberyzette quite well...

A question in return. Are we talking a fancy hotel bar, or a low frontier doggery? Where supply lines were good and the clientele discriminating, you'd get the good stuff. Otherwise, you never knew. As often as not, the saloonkeeper, or the wholesaler he bought from, made his whole line of liquors from cheap "Cincinnati rectified," which was essentially vodka. You paid your money and you took your choice. For what it's worth, one bottle of Grand Marnier will make something like 150 Fancy Whiskey Cocktails. ← because i'm trying to figure out the orange liqueurs lately... do many of the products discussed use multiple types of peels? (sweet, bitter, and green) to create shades of orange flavor? i know the base spirits and maybe the orange intensity can change a lot but is everyone really assuming the shade of orange character is pretty constant. i know that belgium beers are about playing with shades of orange amongst the malt and that lillet is about a particular blend of orange peels... the orange flavored genre is massive and so many people have been interested in its tonality... is the blending and sourcing of peels more significant than people think to really explaining the differences in the products?

i run into this same feeling all the time most often at the end of the night... and no bartenders seem to understand this style of drink... socially i need one more. but i can't metabolize the usual so i look to low alcohol high flavor sherry and vermouth... i think the last time i tried to order a bamboo i was charged $12. and it took a lot of explaining why i would want something like that in the first place... (at a cocktail spot) with the ingredients in the bamboo (or even the half sinner, half saint) so affordable you should be able to get it near anywhere for less and $8. some day.

for dry sherries i'm in love with la cigarrera's manzanilla pasada for something dry but it does parish fast. the 30 year matuselem is fairly common and is the best reasonably priced sweet sherry i've ever had. sub it for coffee liqueur in an espresso martini and you've got something serious... port lasts long enough but doesn't often come in half bottles. i've never had any particular one where its nuance really showed well in a cocktail. a cheap disposable ruby is fun to play with. a good bang for your buck is with madeira and it lasts for a long time. a really cool bottling is the stuff by the "rare wine co"... "boston bual" or "new york malmsey" these are sweet but have awesome acidity. i haven't experimented too far from the rare wine co. because like sherry so much of what you see on the shelves is jug wine junk... but if the price is right you can make awesome punch or nog out of jug wine junk...

i stopped making aromatized wines for the restaurant because demand was really low but i am serving the chamberyzette replica which is really well received. right now i'm trying to figure out the differences in the brands that are available and the rules of thumb in using a particular option because i haven't abandoned any of them. i've had a lot of failed experiments but have learned a lot from amerine's "technology of wine making" the first thing we need to do (because i haven't mastered it) is to figure out how to take a dry wine and "protect it"... with x starting alcohol how much of y proof spirit do we have to add to hit a selected final %alc. once we increase the volume with z grams of sugar increasing the volume in a certain way...? and so by what volume will z grams of the sugar add once dissolved? this and one more thing has to be figured out before we get to the herbs... certain botanicals change the fruit character of the vermouth. this what is left to be desired about stock, cinzano, m&r, etc. and why people identify more with carpano antica. and why products like vergano and lillet are so much fun. (lillet brags about the "fruit liqueur" they marry their wine with. if as consumers we can't really get three types of orange peel or fresh elder flowers. we could use creole shrub, or fees orange bitters, or st. germain in our "fruit liqueur" but that might be outside our artistic constraint. we are left with eccentric wine bases like the moscadello that have wild fruit and options like dried dates and apricots, cherries, etc... once we know how much fortifier we have to put in we can use it as our solvent for these available sources or we could even use percentages of grappa and eau de vie's as our fortifier. now we are to selecting and macerating our botanicals... there are guidelines for how g/l or oz. per gallon are acceptable to modern tastes. .5 oz. to 1 oz. per gallons is the ball park but this does include some of the "fruit augmentors" (orange peels and maybe coriander for its orangey-ness, etc...) that i say should be split off and focused on first. to start, i'd say you can macerate even after you sugar. this will leave no guessing as to how sugar will suppress the bitter. amerine's book gives a perfumers table of how many grams of oil a kilogram of botanical produces for every major botanical... besides the fruit augmentors the trend is to more or less equate the weights of everything by oil (though yields vary with a million factors) to achieve the harmonious aesthetic goal of "vermouth"... i'm still on perfecting the "protection" phase... when you get into the "fruit augmentation stage" you really see why certain products are so special and other products like amer picon can't simply be replicated by adding quinine and gentian to any random orange liqueur... it probably has a nice variety of orange peels to its blend that need to be taken into consideration... anyhow on the origional question if you go bland on the wine (and i would to start) i'd go intense on the augmentors like the apricots... and i'd buy a simple specific gravity hydrometer so you can match the SG of any sweet vermouth you like... (1.06?)

i really like the styles of aromatized wines that really show the wine base... (barolo chinato is cool but its not one of them...) the top of my list would be vergano's "luli" and "americano". vergano uses really good wine which i bet is part of the reason they are so expensive. the luli uses muscato to show off all of its elderflowery-melony fruit. the wine augments the shades of orange created from further elaborating it with three different types of peels... the americano uses a weed grape called grignolino which can only make a rose. this gives incredible color and ample acidity with no tannins and probably only contributes some watery strawberry-watermelon fruit (which does get amplified when you add sugar... but i've never really figured out why that happens). maybe it still gets colored red like campari but i'm not sure. trebbiano is basically synonymous with chardonnay. drinking trebbiano and vermouth trebbiano are probably two different things. the vermouth probably gets bland high yields and near no fruit that you would want to show off. its just like a blank starter vessel with some built in acid and alcohol... if i could use any one wine i know to make a decadent aromatized wine it would be capanna's moscadello di montalcino. intense oxidized elderflower meets orange fruit with some residual sugar, awesome acidity, very long lived in the mouth and it doesn't break the bank.

tonight was sort of slow so i fit in splitting some cocktails with the host... the first drink came out of an arguement towards whether yellow chartreuse was superior to strega... because my budget doesn't allow both i'd take yellow chartreuse any day of the week and say they are less comparable than you'd think... anyhow... 1 oz. glen morangie (almost done with the bottle!) 1 oz. stock dry vermouth .5 oz. strega .5 oz. stock maraschino (we are in a recession...) orange twist. well this was very tastey and brought out all the minty flavors buried in the strega. a higher proof scotch and it would be a formidable drink... the strega-maraschino combo was far more amusing than i expected. we then invented a hot drink and practical method of serving it for our poor logistics... we added the booze to our 2 cup loose tea pots, added boiling water and served as so in very tiny glasses. this really seemed to keep things warmer than any of our other methods. 1 oz. balvenie 15 1 oz. op anderson aquavite (caraway!) .5 oz. melati di bosco alpine spruce tree honey liqueur 3 spoonfuls of MEMs spiced hibiscus flower tea 1 cup 5 oz. of boiling water the relative strength of this isn't really high but the flavors really seemed to balance perfectly. lately i love single malts and this particular aquavite. then i wanted an egg so i made. 1.5 oz. cask strength glen livet "nadurra" 1 oz. "boston" bual madeira from the rare wine co. .5 oz. simple syrup 1 egg minus most but not all of the whites. grated nutmeg this was super tastey, but you might be able to maximize the awesomeness by subbing some of the simple syrup with benedictine. i keep tasting lots of flip style drinks that seem too watery. IMO they either need higher proof spirits or two egg yolks to be really good.

so very popular at the bar lately is a riff of the half sinner half saint. i've put down quite a few. 1.5 oz. chamberyzette (replica) 1.5 oz. dry vermouth floated spoonful of absinthe lemon twist. the chamberyzette, relative to a standard sweet vermouth adds some serious fruit to contrast the absinthe. a nice, easy to metabolize treat. we have also been drinking lots of single malt vermouthy cocktails "alto cucina" 1 oz. balvenie 15 (ninety something proof...) 1 oz. dry vermouth .5 oz. st. germain .5 oz. cynar orange twist. or with glenmorangie (to get rid of it), dry vermouth, canton and vergano's "americano". this has gone over really well with many people doing three rounds of it and variations. we are pouring something like two bottles of dry vermouth to every one of sweet. are there any other great amaro & liqueur duo's that i should be sweetening cocktails with?