bostonapothecary

i've been drinking more cynar lately... next to my favorite cynar cocktail of last summer with kola nut tonic and lemonheart 151... so far this summer i've been drinking it with chamberyzette 2 oz. real serious apple brandy (guy davis apple-ation) 1 oz. chamberyzette (replica) 1 oz. cynar 2 dashes peychaud's bitter don't obscure the aromatics with a garnish... i liked the strawberry / cynar combo so much that i started fermenting a small gallon of wine with artichokes, strawberries, and a 2 liter of coca cola... hopefully it will be intense enough to fortify and make a rustic aromatized wine... drinkable by january... my "must" tastes rather phenomenal but there is definitely no strong bitter. the way cynar is made is pretty mysterious... distilled artichokes and very low alcohol... no perishable wine base... what else is going on in there? a whole lot of quinine and some some kola nut? citrus peels? any ideas? any other new cynar cocktail recipes for the summer? if anyone else has surplus artichokes and wants to gamble on a gallon of wine with me, the wine recipe will appear shortly on my blog...

so i think this is new news... imbibe won a james beard award... congratulations mr. wondrich!

that is a high maintenance drink to construct but it looks like my style... it could kick off some introspective contemplation... a companion for heavy reading, or is it simpler than it seems?

I will admit, when tried straight, I found the Sweet really weird. It has a kind of vegetable taste. And when I say vegetable, I mean like in a V8 sort of way. However, when I tried it in a couple cocktails, it was fine. I tried a Martinez and a something (can't recall the name) that was a variation on a perfect Rob Roy. I haven't opened the Extra Dry yet. I don't want to have too many vermouths open until I get a Vacu-Vin or something. I plan do more experimenting with several kinds of vermouths this weekend. I've seen a few comments by posters who seem to like Bossiere Dry, but what about their Sweet? Anyone? If one were forced to choose between, say, M&R Sweet and Bossiere Sweet, which would it be? ← i haven't seen the bossiere in boston but i've started to prefer stock and cinzano over M&R... i try to keep half bottles of all of them in the house only because they are so cheap... why not? i keep two brands open at a time so that i can make comparisons... i've started to prefer the vermouth to the gin in my martini's...

I'd recommend against pre-brewing tealeaves before infusing them in alcohol. Once I spoiled a whole bottle of vodka when in a moment of genius I decided to pre-brew some green tea before pouring the vodka over top, to speed up the process. Big mistake. It made an incredibly tannic, bitter, and scuzzy-coloured infusion. I think tea infused alcohol works best when infused either at room temperature or even in the fridge. I guess it's the same principle as cold-brewed iced tea - it's much less bitter than hot brewed tea, the hot water pulls out the tannins quicker than cold water. The colder the alcohol, the longer it takes to infuse, but I find it tastes much better. I used to work at a tea shop and it was a lot of fun messing around with tea & alcohol! (and tasting them!) I recall one of our staff experimenting with smoked lapsang tea & vodka...something about coming up with a drink reminiscent of scotch. Don't remember tasting it though. ← on our bar we usually always have a tea infused spirit going... i like to pair the tea with a fruit for some good flavor contrast... champagne oolong and dried cranberries over peruvian pisco was my favorite so far... i also put tea in my rum punches and my blackberry shrub... audrey sanders told me (about the early grey gin) that you have to be careful of your flavors oxidizing to where they quickly becomes unintended (within a day or so even)... she is probably right but, i think some things can oxidize to elegance and certain fruits may even provide an antioxidant effect... therefore experiment and make sure you take notes!

i don't infuse my pineapples. i juice and clarify them... i also like them in a mature preserve... fresh pineapple is a beautiful thing but mature oxidized pineapple can have an old wine sort of character... if you have any wray and nephews laying around there is a good rum punch recipe on my site...

i just bought a bottle of hitachino's "kiuchi no shizuku"... from the label: "grain alcohol distilled with hops, orange peel and coriander" 43% alc sold in a 200ml for $21 this product is supposedly made from distilling their white ale, infusing it with the botanicals while mellowing it in oak, then redistilling with more beer and, mellowing it some more... its beautiful stuff. all three botanicals are easily evident on the nose with a great sense of balance... on the palate there is a nice hop greenness with out being too bitter... and the alcohol is rather smooth...

so i snagged a bottle of the rogue spirits dark rum... its ok but nothing special for 30 dollars a 750ml... very toffee, caramelly... not that complex. it has a uniquely rich mouthfeel and is very smooth... but kind of lacks some character... i think i'll just have to make sure its mixed with the most adult ingredients i have...

so i'm trying my picon replica in a "brooklyn cocktail"... 1.5 oz. rye (sazerac 18) its all i had... .5 oz. dry vermouth (M&R) .25 oz. maraschino (luxardo) .25 amer picon (replica) stirred... the rye dominates the nose... the first thing i tasted was the maraschino contrasted against the spice of the rye... i haven't really drank anything with maraschino in a while so it leapt out at me... the orangyness becomes more evident as i sip... the small percentage of bitter may be there but is lost in the rye heat... i think the picon may create a faint bitter roasted coffee note i get on the finish but i can't really see amer picon really making too much difference in how special this drink is... (thats assuming my replica is passable...) i love this style of drink where the acidity of dry vermouth balances something sweet on a brown liquor background... drinks like this usually seem challenging on paper but are quite crowd pleasing...

what does it come from? what else do they put in the stuff that could give off that character...? torani amer is too high alcohol to have wine in it... is it from the sugar they used to sweeten it? a vegetal cane juice or something? or a grapejuice concentrate to sweeten it?

so how do you compare the torani amer to an orange liqueur like cointreau or creole shrub? is it just orangey with a small additional bitter element or am i under estimating it? ← Yeah it's not as clean as Cointreau and def. has the caramel aspect to it. The bitterness hits the palate in a different way than most other things I've had, more on the back of the palate almost. There's also a strange and oft-noted celery note that I find not entirely pleasant. Apparently Torani Amer + dash or 2 of orange bitters = something close® to Amer Picon. ← so the esthetic goal of amer picon would be an orange product with lengthened, more complex, bitter yet managable finish... i wonder if the celery note you describe comes from the gentian... it has a funky hard to describe but sort of nutlike character...

so how do you compare the torani amer to an orange liqueur like cointreau or creole shrub? is it just orangey with a small additional bitter element or am i under estimating it?

so i have a bottle of the beer picon and thougt it was pretty cool. low alcohol orangy bitter and thats about all... i can taste all the ingredients that are on the label and nothing more... (gentian, quinine, orange peel) well i have all those ingredients so i thought i could make a replica of the higher proof version... picon feels like it would the same as any other orange liqueur but just with gentian and quinine... if the same alcohol content then probably the same sugar content... and probably even the same orange peel intensity... well i made some beautiful tinctures of gentian and quinine and added them to a bottle of creole shrub... and about .75 of a gram of each botanicals by weight dissolved a the tincture... i'll put the details of my proprietary tinctures on my site soon but anyhow its pretty tastey stuff... picon really isn't that bitter. its not exactly campari... but the botanicals really lengthen the finish to something very elegant... and make the sugar content seem more pleasant... i based my botanical intensities roughly on guidelines from books of the subject and those guidelines seem to meet the average of most people's tastes. the test will really be to drink as many picon cocktails as i can and see if the elements are all parsible and in acceptible sugar balance... and i feel like quinine is a nicer bitter than gentian and maybe i should make it more dominant... the first cocktail i tried was the "brut cocktail variation" from the cocktaildb 1.5 oz. dry vermouth (M&R) .75 oz. amer picon (replica) dash peychauds bitters stir! this is beautiful and everything contributes... i even like how my replica picon's lack of caramel doesn't muddy the cocktail color... its this pretty pink hued color... the acid of the vermout is in good ratio with sugar of the picon... (justifies my sugar content?) and the bitter quotient is sublime...

vermouth does age in the bottle... maynard amerine notes that people have been interested in studying the aging of aromatized fortified wines but noone has really gotten around to it... there are tons of fortified dessert wines with similar structure to vermouth besides the botanicals and their aging is known to be very slow... dessert wines (high sugar) supposedly age very fast to start and then slow down drastically and move slower than regular dry wines... i've tasted bottles of stock with weird labels that were probably on a shelf for a decade and they were still fun to drink. the cinzano reserva dry that i've written about is probably very old and therefore affected by aging... i'm lucky to have alot of old white wine experience. the old cinzano tastes alot like old dry white wines i've had... a little worn down... probably better younger... but still interesting. if you save something unopened and drink it within the decade i say go for it... and when you buy it write the date on the bottle so you can blog about it down the road... and the way alot of the M&R sweet and dry's taste, i'd say they have some really efficient supply chain management... i wish they put born on dates on them... though i still don't like M&R and find their stuff unelegant... maybe its the lack of age? i think campari ages (slowly) and i think cynar probably does too... its so low in alcohol and seldom used you would have cause to worry about an opened bottle... amerine referenced vermouth aging in "dessert, appetizer, and related flavored wines, technology of their production" maybe i can track it down...

on the orange liqueur front we started using hiram walker's 60 proof triple sec on people that are indifferent... its nice because it has more alcohol than the other super low proof generic versions... i'm starting to develop solid recipes to make orange liqueurs from scratch when seville sour oranges are in season... if you master your orange intensity and master your sugar you are free to experiment with different base spirits... for vermouth you can't get doc's dry or steven's sweet up here. you can't even get antica. i hold stock, niolly, cinzano, and m&r all in high regard... i favor stock and hold m&r in the lowest regard of the four... its sweet doesn't seem as complex to me as the others. its all cinnamony and simplistic. and the wine base of their dry has some serious identity and creeps me out... its very muscaty but reminds me of concord grapes from some reason in its frutiness... if you get any of the big four vermouths you should be all set... getting it as fresh as you like is another story...

Almost 3 years later, I finally noticed this behind the counter at a local Italian Deli... Not only that, but scored a lovely large bottle of Amarena Fabbri Wild Cherries in Syrup. Persistence pays! ← I've been trying to track down "Bitter Martini", a spirit by Martini & Rossi that I've seen mentioned in a few recipes recently. While searching for it, I came across China Martini which looks like Martini's attempt at quinine bitters. I much prefer that bottle though Erik! Does anyone know if China Martini and Bitter Martini are related at all? I'm struggling to find information on Bitter Martini, much less a source of it... ← i thought china martini was kind of boring... its very high alcohol. 30% or so. i was hopeful that it would be elegant like a barolo chinato but it wasn't that memonable... its like a combination of fernet and sweet vermouth...

ramazotti, and aperol use rhubarb root which might be like comparing celery to celery root... books on making aromatized wines consider it mildly bitter and aromatic comparable to angostura, bitter orange, hops, and yarrow... but i've never had it on its own...

i think you'd just want to bring it up to temperature to kill whatever mold things live in the rhubarb... then big batch or not store it in many smaller containers... so just opening one doesn't contaminate them all... they don't sell those very small jelly canning jars for no reason... cheers! my pastry chef has been serving lots of strawberry and rhubarb lately... delicious.

what are some brand examples of things labeled as "american whiskey" that i might know? is this amerian whiskey hyped as good stuff and over marketed or is it produced like jug wine because there is a time and place for it... (but definitely not my bar)

i'd still say gin is pretty difficult to make... something good anyhow... you have to come up with a botanical blend worth drinking and nuancing... i'd say vermouth is the hardest to make and one of the greatest things that can be expressed with beverage... its like an automatic chronometer with a couple movements. to some an automatic chronometer represents the sumation of man's engineering knowledge... vermouth is like the sumation of our agricultural knowledge and knowledge of our own selves (taste) "vermouth" has wine, something distilled, and botanicals with some serious organoleptic properties... things i've made and called vermouth (because i used wormwood) were basically equivelant to amer picon in sophistication... so much fun to make, drink, and mix but not exactly a chronometer... i guess if it was your medium you could take gin pretty far... some gins are chronometers, and some are simple timexes... and i doubt many people notice the difference... but the point is that i bet a craft brewer would have as good a shot as anyone at taking some of these mediums as far as they could go...

so i really liked the "gilroy" cocktail from the savoy and have drunk it several different ways... swapping out the heering for elisir gambrinus or swapping out the gin for anything assertive... 1 oz. st. james amber 1 oz. cherry heering .5 oz. lemon juice .5 oz. dry vermouth (M&R) couple dashes hermes orange bitters stir this drink has got some beautiful flavor contrast going on... cherry vs. an over the top rhum agricole... and anywhere you use lemon juice i recommend experimenting with it in conjunction with dry vermouth... i need to figure out which dry vermouth is the dryest... botanicals profile aside the dryest seems the most useful in cocktails with sweet liqueurs... i even got to use my japanese spherical icecubes from the MOMA... thankyou jmfangio...

i suspect competive pricing is the biggest hurdle... distilling like so many things probably benefits from some large economies of scale. how much you enjoy something is often relative to what you pay for it. these start up distillers would probably do best producing gins because a good part of it is the ingenuity of the botanical formula... craft brewers might be the most qualified people to create a modern gin because they are used to being really analytical and can handle countless variables and their nuance. brown liquor and wine seem to be more agronomical relative to craft beer and gin...

Hi bostonapothecary, nice entry. I'm curious about the rums you suggest. For the east side of Africa Rum, are you suggesting Starr? I keep seeing bottles of it on the liquor store, I'm curious now if it's worth a try. And Santa Catalina Islands... drawing a blank there. Research suggests some Dominican Rums (Santa Catalina Island), Brugal, Bermudez, neither of which have I taken the opportunity to try. Congratulations, you've piqued my curiosity. Aguardente de Santo Antão from Cabo Verde hmm. i mixed up my islands on the brazilian rum... Armazem Viera Esmerelda from Santa Catarina Isn't La República de Cabo Verde a Macaronesian archipelago off the West side of Africa? Armazem Vieira Esmeralda comes from Florianópolis, the capital city of the State of Santa Catarina in Southern Brazil. Specifically, from the barrio of Saco dos Limões on the island of Santa Catarina -- which is about as much of an island as Long Island. ← you are right. i'm more or less dislexic... i actually had a weird conversation a few days ago trying ot figure out where it was without looking at a map... i took my friends advice that it was on the east side based on an anecdote they supplied... we liked the rum because it was under 20 dollars, had a totally unique taste and hails from lands foreign to us... it barely matters to me that santa catarina is the equivelent of long island... its tastey, exotic, and from more unknown territory relative to me... i like to tread on the frontiers of the imagination when i drink but i should probably take better notes...

The standard approach seems to be to take either Junipero or Plymouth gin (I've also seen Tanqueray recommended) and add a dash or two of rich syrup to them per drink. Alternately, you can add 1/2 oz of rich syrup per bottle, making sure to shake it well to mix it up. For my preference, if you're going to sweeten the gin, you ought to be using something with some backbone, meaning leave the Plymouth for something else. ← i think you just add sugar to gin... but is there any evidence to say what the botanical formula would taste like? if it is more of a primitive style gin would you want a more primitive formula like seagrams? so seagrams with sugar and your done... or is there more to it?

the sensory evaluation doesn't seem very scientific... i would happily drink a cocktail using either either option... hopefully we will seeing it popping up on menus and then maybe a better educated opinion can be formed...