bostonapothecary

so booze comprising of water and alcohol, and liqueurs with sugars, and citrus, etc... are all solutions. do you think there is any advantage to them being added to each other at room temp then chilled with ice. adding citrus to frozen vodka may not integrate properly? even when you dilute high proof alcohol out of the still, even after its rested a while, you can notice when drinking it that the water and alcohol are not integrated. things taste hotter than usual which disguising is often many people's objective when making a cocktail... so when integrating all these solutions are there any advantages in the room temp mixed to order that is common practice?

so i've been starving for something really exotic lately and have been unfortunately back to drinking wine... but john at Drink in southie came to my rescue with his own mezcal milk punch... it seemed to be in more of the preserved punch format. i think he boiled the milk to remove the fats. there was also pineapple and mace. the end result was amazing flavor contrasts. the recipe seemed to add up to alcohol of about 20% but the diluted mezcal brought awesome aromas with a particular smokiness that seems more fun with fruit than those of the scotches. the milk contributes a delicate "lactic" character that is definitely strange but alluring. this was by far the coolest thing i've had to drink in a while...

so i use chilled pints at work. and they can really chill things down really quick even with not so ideal ice. so to make something with comparable dilution to normal i'd have to let it sit for a few seconds or so and dilute. well i'm primarily mixing manhattans. and i only have overholt at 80 proof. i'd like to give that more concentrated higher proof rittenhouse feel. is it appropriate to just let my drinks "cook" less. i try to do the same with 80 proof gins to increase their proof and intensity... i don't do this for every drink but there are lots of times when i want a higher proof feel... a viable technique?

Thanks, Tim. But are you assuming that the alcohol and water of the spirit get absorbed into the solid matter at an identical rate? Because it's been my experience that the solids (fruit, herbs, etc.) absorb more alcohol than water. If you taste a piece of fruit that's been macerating in booze for some time, it hardly tastes like fruit, just fibrous booze. And the resultant liquid is much more flavorful and has a lower proof than the spirit used, hence the ability to freeze. Without a hydrometer, how can you tell what the proof is? ← if your making an infusion of only lemon peels or a culinary herb or spice you may have to assume their impact is very minimal. (but some peels like seville oranges are like 80% water if you don't dehydrate them) you could try playing with an proof hydrometer. i think i paid 7 dollars for mine. measure you spirit before you embellish it. and then measure it afterwards (but definitely without sugar!). this may tell you something about peels or spices but as soon as you introduce even low levels of sugar it will totally throw off your proof hydrometer. but if you are working with sugar you would still have an option... you could distill off the water, alcohol, and essential oils leaving the sugar behind. dilute with distilled water to your original volume then you could more accurately measure the alcohol (its still effected by the lemon oil by probably negligibly) and you could measure the sugar of whats left in your still to also learn something... my understanding is this procedure is what government used to have to do to analyze new products coming to market but you only get fairly accurate estimates and labor is huge. now they use weird tricks with light like ultrasonic spectroscopy which can parse the materials definitely. i started using a final gravity hydrometer at work for some wine experiments. it has a very narrow scale that will tell you if you have fermented to dryness or maybe how intense the extract is in a beer (i think i described that correctly). well the idea was to prove that some wines like viogniers that many people thought were sweet were actually fermented to dryness as proved by the hydrometer (and their 14.7% alcohol levels!). what was being perceived as sweetness was being low acid and high in extract.

Yes, I feared that would be the case - but will the resulting damage be less than repeatedly opening a large bottle, rather than this procedure of opening once and then resealing? Is using a vacuvin or similar a possibility, or is that pointless, too? ← i'd say these vermouths are less parishable than you think... pouring a vermouth into a new vessel will technically oxidize it but you can minimize the effect down to a negligable level. table wines are racked and exposed to air all the time for brief periods and they come out just fine. i separate my liters of sweet vermouth into tiny canning jars and find no ill effects. i fill them to the vary brim and use a spoon to put them into my oxo jigger when i'm ready to use them. some wine makers warm their wines to slightly above room temp because that way the act of pouring will dissolve less oxygen into the wine. a normal bottle of wine takes many hours to absorb its terminal level of oxygen that sets the ball rolling on spoilage so the mere seconds of racking at a high room temp into a vessel filled to max capacity should be no problem. i endorse the tiny canning jars. they are hard to pour from but if you are patient and at home a spoon works fine. any high volume bars using 375's that want to be really anal should consider that they don't know the born on date of their vermouths and they could be trapped in the distribution system for a while (i see two or three different label styles at many liquor stores from any one brand). if a bar really uses alot they may get better performance out of liters or bigger because they age slower than the 375's. sweet vermouths have the lowest amount of alcohol, maybe comparable to dessert wines, and its known that dessert wines age very fast in their early life and then even out to a slow crawl... i can't imagine sweet vermouth would be too different. using all the wine rules of thumb, a larger size would decrease that effect... if i did serious volume and was really anal, i may even buy handles of vermouth to decrease the effects of the distribution system then decant it all into small bottles for all my stations and inert gas the left overs...

i think the old bar stars relied on being funny, quick and remembering every name they ever came across. you can still be a star for selecting whiskey, wine, and beer. cocktails for me right now are a thing i mainly do in my own house... a lot of people can't seem to make them fast enough to please the pace of my evening. jigger or not... i mainly drink them out when a place is slow.

So, like the heads and tails in the arrack, it's about extra weird stuff left hanging around? i think that all the examples sited have a variety of causes but in general i think you just enjoy dirty distilates. keeping extra amounts of congeners adds lots of extra flavors. they overlap with other stuff into this general "funkiness". wray and nephews could be pretty close to uncut. maraschino liqueur might be pretty close to uncut preserving as much of the fruit aroma as possible before the sugar is added. congeners probably do not explain the character of quinine or gentian's aromas. its probably just similar in the fact that its bizarre. so a lot of us apparently love rotgut booze. what good examples of it have i not been turned on to yet?

i talked to the noilly guy at TOTC. he gave me a bottle of the new version which he claimed was just exactly the same as what the euros drink. maybe demand is increasing and to increase production they had to use one process. i don't feel too compelled to do a comparative tasting. i just accept that these things change all the time.

so i dont' think you can really have an antica formula. in my understanding the noilly production process is so elaborate that the only way they did deviate is the aging of the wine and one particularly bitter botanical... when you enjoy single barrel bourbon you embrace a certain uniqueness. anything in the vermouth alcohol range and made from something volatile like wine will also be unique. i really wish some producers used born on dates. i'm sure i could find ancient inventories of noilly prat all over boston that might be easily differentiated from each other in a blind taste test.

i'd say part of geneva gin's funkiness is the malt character. it might be funky because its just new to people or it could by Funky because of the vegetal character that comes with malt. like the smell of a beer mash being cooked before you add the hops. i'm a huge fan of both batavia arrack and wray and nephews. they have serious commonalities of Funkiness which i think primarily comes from how much heads and tales are left on the distillates. i have a feeling that both are barely cut down. you can also find their industrial, comparative to burnt rubber character in some grappas which in my understanding rely on huge amounts of heads and tales to create their uniqueness. i don't drink alot of wild turkey but maybe they make their cuts significantly different creating extra riske character. i don't really enjoy luxardo maraschino. i think its Funkiness is all about the cherry stones that dominate the flavor. they unnerve me. smelling them makes me feel like i'm being poisoned but i can see flavor fetishists liking to flirt with that kind of danger. this quote was kind of out of context but i'd say cynar has another kind of flirting with poisonous aroma kind of Funkiness due to the quinine. i made a large intensely potent quinine tincture and the resultant aromas are wild. just smelling it makes you feel weird. i think the common thread of all this Funkiness is a level of aromatic danger which is loved or feared... excessive congeners in distilates, arsenic, the aroma of frightening bitter botanicals... i've always been attract to wines with extra unique characters. dirt and earth, barnyard, petrol, smoke and coal furnace, blood and iron... anything but too much fruit... you find these aromas all over the rhone and all over southern italy. i've never really figured out how grappa develops all its flavors but have expirimented with distilling some wines. i started drinking an 04 white rioja which is the single malt scotch of white wines. smokiness, oak, whiskpers of butter, strange sherry style appley fruit and a really strange kind of extra alcohol. some people i work with said they liked it alot and admired its complexity but couldn't drink an entire glass. i distilled a bottle of it, not throwing out anything and it smelled exactly the same... definitely Funky

my understanding is that the origional formula is intended to be slightly more bitter and aged differently. probably longer before its release but then it gets trapped in the system so who knows... i'd say the product probably changes with age. and who knows if we are used to a fresher or older product. due to how they make it, the wines probably show some terroir and then there is the post fermentation terroir from the season it ages "rain water" style. i think the product is only meant to be consistent by a certain margin. if they put a vintage date and a production time line on the bottle, i bet people would respect the differences. i'd say the fruit character of dolin puts it in a different league. i hate when vintages change on wines i deal with that are supposed to be super consistent year to year. that short term period of extra aging often makes a huge difference. this is the last month i can get some 05 barrique nero d'avola. the 06 is available but i'm not gonna pick it up until probably august because its just not ready. now i need to find something else in the mean time... in the world of nuance i doubt even vermouth escapes this phenomenon.

i had a genavieve juelp last night at Drink... it was a nice drink but i asked for about one sugar cube worth of sweetness. i think i intended that to be relative to 2 oz. of gin but got 3 oz. so i probably just should have trusted him.... (but every julep i order anywhere is too sweet for me) well. i think next time i will try it with some liqueur instead of sugar as well for deluxe flavor contrast. very promising stuff.

if you don't have the economies for historical accuracy, i'd recommend the zabaglione method... what ever the whites do for the batter is synthesized by creating a foam with the heated yolks, some "water"(booze has water in it), and sugar... you achieve more or less the same aesthetic goal after it starts to dissolve in your hot liquid but with more stability...

sour 2 oz. distilled hops, coriander, orange peel 1 oz. lemon juice spoonful of sugar shaken! this might be the most amusing drink i've ever had or its just relative to my mood... now that i have distilled hops, my desire to drink other things is gone... of course i can improve upon this with bitters and an egg white.

attempt at a 50/50 style drink... 1.5 oz. distilled hops, coriander, orange peel 1.5 oz. chamberyzette (replica) 2 dashes peychaud's bitters stirred this tasted immensely like watermelon which may be due to the vermouth quotient being too oxidized (but still a pleasure!)... and the contrast of the botanicals was really cool. hoppy and refreshing... i started using block ice at home. breaking the ice up to form your drink is almost as stress relieving as contemplating some flavors...

i wanted to get a kold draft for the restaurant. it seems like we can afford it and our current budget machine breaks down constantly. but the kitchen who probably uses the majority of the ice doesn't want large cubes. is kold draft only for cocktails or can it also make my kitchen happy? anyone have experience using it in the BOH?

i thought nardini made something but i can't find the reference. the italians gave the advocaat treatment to high proof amaros like fernet but who knows how old the tradition is. some of the things you think are ancient are mid century modern...

I later offered this quote from a NYT article: So, to sum up: distillation (separation of substances based on differences in boiling points) is preferable to fractional freezing, and was practiced in the rural US extensively by the late 1600s. ← i'm not exactly convinced that fractional freeze separation is the most probable explanation for "peach brandy" etc. but as operating stills came under closer scrutiny and possibly did not scale down to really small levels, the freeze method looks more practical than it did before. upon searching a little more on the web, the distilling laws currently are so stifling that many people are playing with freeze separation in their kitchens to concentrate home brewed cider. it may have been fairly practical at some small point in time a century ago. and products baring the same name eventually approximated freeze separated fermented peaches by merely infusing them in distilled spirits and adding sugar to mimic what would have been concentrated by the obsolete method... (which i'm sure someone's grandmother still practiced when she processed the single tree she owned after baking too many pies) i also have a feeling that what some people would call "gut-wrenchingly awful" i'd be happy to drink and enjoy. i've distilled lots of fermentations i've made and been able to enjoy the uncut results (except the methanol). i can only imagine something being "rot-gut" and unenjoyable if the resulting distillate was tampered with like during prohibition or if it was an uncut bland sugar distillate. supposedly so much can be lost during distillation especially if you have to distill something a couple times in a pot still to bring the alcohol to the proof you want. its a school of thought of some fruit distillers who add sugar or honey to increase the alcohol of there fermentation so they have to put it through the pot still less times and lose less delicate fruit character. every now and then distillation can over engineer things. certain things are delicate and therefore you don't want to apply heat to them... i think i may try it next peach season. its kind of impressive that buried in egullet years ago is a conversation about this obscure subject.

so i've been reading about some very rural and very ethnic distilling traditions and i keep coming across freeze distillation which i didn't think anyone really practiced. apparently applejack was originally a freeze distilled spirit but when did it stop? and after the transition to conventionally distilled, would they have cut it down to proof with water or any of the fermented cider like they do in some eastern european traditions which would give it color and make it slightly sweet... was all this peach brandy just freeze distilled fruit wine? which might create something with 35% alcohol and some residual sugar.

i thought i'd hijack and revive this thread on punch. i've made long term macerated punches like the one described in the first post but i've also started making more "fresher" styles because lately i've been entertaining lots of people at the same time and have been looking for an easy to put together low maintenance collective experience... the holidays are upon us... what are people making? my latest was the "french top punch" for a bunch of back of the house industry people... 375 ml fernet branca 375 ml chambord 375 ml lemon juice 750 - 1500 ml brut sparkling wine i chilled all the booze and juice in the fridge to start and then use chunks of ice to maintain the chill... this went over really well with its fernet fanatical audience.

i've used potassium sorbate in wine making. you have to be careful because it can give off aromas... i don't think its a highly regarded trick by wine makers. i think its only used in cheap sweet wines. i wonder if people's stability rates vary because of the differing amounts of mold spores in their houses?

2 oz. clear creek eau de vie de pomme spoonful sugar 4 dashes angostura bitters stir i wanted to drink something seasonally appropriate. i didn't add a twist because it was already so aromatic... i think i like these plum/pear/apple brandy old fashioneds more than i like whiskey... rye and bourbon seem too comparative to angostura bitters while these brandies offer more flavor contrast. whiskey is great and all but i think it needs a different bitter... with rye as good and spicy as they make them these days i'd say the same about a manhattan. luckily there are lots of bitters to play with lately...

genever and mint strikes again... and i have yet to try it... back in the day what kind of bottle did they keep their OJ in to get four dashes out of it...? wouldn't you just squeeze a small fresh cut wedge? citrus and all i'd give that drink the patient stirred julep treatment.

i want a genever julep...! must have that by the end of the week.

why don't you make a liqueur instead of a syrup... 20%+ alcohol will protect anything from bacterial spoilage... oxidation will be your only worry and you will have a good solvent...