bostonapothecary

its good to finish things in life so i'm still working on some rum bottles... 50/50 1992 plantation venezuela stock sweet vermouth 2 dashes hermes orange bitters i didn't like this when it was too cold... but then it woke up. it also might be better with less vermouth in a 2:1... this rum gives really unique kola nut like flavors but with a certain elegance. other southern carribean rums can be over the top in their dark flavor but this one is worthy of contrasting vermouth... in drinks like this i'm scared of using angostura bitters which i save to revive the lesser spirits. two more oz. of this rum to go then i'll never find it again... i need some fresh egg whites...

the disclosed vya sweet vermouth botonicla formula isn't very interesting... kinda tame... being a moscat expert quady is probably the best potential producer of vermouth... has anybody ever talked to that winery? the have a new aromatized wine out called "deviation"... so far i haven't seen it around anywhere...

i'm trying to finish some bottles of rum that i let get down to about 2 oz. or so... 2 oz. ron barrelito three star 2 oz. stock sweet vermouth 2 dashes hermes orange bitters this to me was perfection (for my current mood anyhow...) not too sweet even though it is a not a 2:1 drink... barrelito three star is in my top five rums. i think its most comparable to things commonly found like mount gay but then far complexer... the drink develops these coffee notes that you could also get from mount gay but here they take on more sophisticated and beatufiul shades...

With the way Quinquinas behave with gin, I can only assume the 'Great Secret' is that there's actually liquor in this? ← its like a gin and tonic for more ambitious people... take that how you will...

cool. but does anyone have the drink recipes? i still have half a bottle of averna...

Limoncello and vanilla make a great flavor base, or even alone. I've started seeing this combination semi-frequently when dining out in the past 6 months. ← when making it i was remembering a girl i went out with a couple times years ago... she drank a vanilla vodka lemondrop... most bartenders thought it was weird... but she was a smart girl. i was always hoping she would accidently walk into my bar and i'd get to make one for her... "Of all the flavored vodka joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine..."

last night i asked for a tart arrack cocktail and received... 1.5 oz. batavia arrack 1.5 oz. anchor genavieve 1 oz. lemon juice .5 oz. simple syrup (1:1) this was really delicious... before i had the first sip i was kind of intimidated by the proportions that the bartender gave me... it definitely was not too tart... the gin gives some kind of extra real or perceived sweetness... and the two spirits butt heads really well... mellow botanicals contrasted with a certain maltiness and uplifted with a fusel alcohol quality from the arrack... reading more about fortified wines i've read that a big decision is made on whether to go with a clean tasting fortifier or something with a "fusel" character from traces of higher alcohols... certain rums and grappas have this character. i personally love it... italian wines are noted for developing traces of these higher alcohols during fermentation. apparently the literature claims it isn't very marketable to americans and noone outside of red port uses it. what a shame because whispers of it can really make a drink... i wonder if there was a big difference between fortified wine products of today and yesteryear based on changes not in botanical formulas but seemingly simpler decisions like cleaner fortifying spirits... i need to make some "higher alcohol bitters" to add an old school edge to a drink... i need to get some rocket fuel...

today i tried to improve my mixo monday drink... by adding lemoncello... 1.5 oz. vanilla vodka (888 nantucket) .5 oz. lemoncello (homemade) .5 oz. myrtle berry liqueur (homemade 10 years ago...) 1 oz. fresh espresso (lavazza) barspoon of simple syrup; either over your shoulder into the eye of the devil or in the drink... lots of ice and shake shake shake... this is an interesting drink... it can be quite light and go from aperativy to desserty... the brands you use will really dictate the style... i inherited the liqueurs so i don't really know how much sugar is in them and how they compare to a classic espresso martini with coffee liqueur... at first sip with my arbitrary ingredients, the drink was really dry and elegantly piney from the mirto... you'd think the drink was made with tangueray... the lemonyness felt sort of artificial like lemon verbena and the espresso created sophisticated bitter... i then added the simple syrup and got the desserty effect... it made it by no means cloying but different flavors came into focus... the pinyness died down, the vanilla became more pronounced, and the lemon became more real... i usually hate sugar and love high acid drinks but i think the dessert style was much more fun... when i see recipes that seem sweet on paper but add a spoonful of simple syrup the author might definitely know something i don't...

so apparently there was a drinkboy discussion on the vermouth matter... MSN Drinkboy discussion well i have found those ollivero recipes but they really aren't complete... the recipe without the calamus and without the gentian also had arbitrary amounts of vanilla extract and pomegranite extract... the two recipes probably from the same developer have a certain style... he uses massive amounts of orris root relative to any of my other scattered recipes... today anyhow, orris root is more or less banned because it is allergenic... i bet by looking at the recipe it would be very expressive and flowery rather than integrated... very different than any of the other big names and probably worth putting together... i was using lots of orris in my botanical formula... it is nothing but violety goodness... besides the orris and wormwood its probably the safest recipe i've seen... i'd drink it. i wouldn't stress the white wine type too much. these recipes don't scale down too well. whipping up a fractional batch would probably cost a couple hundred dollars... its kind of hard to analyze a formula without completely producing it.

It doesn't seem any worse than Benedictine, Drambuie, or whatever, espcially if chilled. I could see 2 parts Martinique rhum and 1 part Punsch as sort of a weird Rusty Nail translation that would work after dinner. ← martinique rhum and punsch sounds pretty good... measuring sugar contents has become a problem... but there is a solution! but i don't have time... right now any how... as i read much more about refractometers i found they are very sensitive to temperature... but you can buy models that correct for it... but they cost $300... and the technology is highly if not debilitatingly sensitive to non water solutions... all of the scales that refractometers use are calibrated for water solutions... analyzing liqueurs is supposedly a very tricky and expensive business.... how do you take an unknown substance and determine its alcohol, sugar, and total dissolved solids?? well for us alcohol is given and we can create tables to measure sugar in mixed alcohol water solutions by comparing water solutions to alcohol solutions that we create by weighing the sugar and observing the volumes to find the new alcohol content... a magnetic stirrer and a big spread sheet and some extrapolation and its a non issue... but it takes some time a couple hundred dollars... i'll get to it eventually... so i don't know what to tell you... about M&R versus Cinzano on the sugar matter... but i do have studies from the 50's on vermouth that decsribe the variances in sugar, alcohol, and acidity, extract, and tannins among countries... they don't really name, names with brands... i think bitterness is the most important determinite of perceived sweetness across the major brands... acidities are pretty similar but extract levels and botanical choices are pretty distinct... and i do have 30+ classic recipes for sweet and dry vermouths... (its crazy how much orange peel goes into every dry vermouth formula... its very muted without sugar... they all use lots of wormwood too but i think they remove the thujone from their extracts...) the recipes are sprawling and expensive to reproduce... and so many use banned substances that are very important to the sucess of the formula... but from developing profiles of every common herb and using other people's helpful profiles i've developed an analytical guide to describing a formula without producing it and predicting substitutions where necessary... the botanical formulas are really the key to stepping into the 21rst century... when you create a stunning botanical blend with a certain robustness it becomes the forground which you can contrast with different backgrounds... you can fortify your wines with eau de vie's or work with fruit wines... (mango vermouth is all the rage half way across the world...) a new style of chamberyzette anyone? vermouth is pretty wild stuff... there is more to the differences between M&R, cinzano, stock, Noilly, and Dolin than most people think... Carpano has been desribed as being in a class of its own by so many sources...

It's probably not the alcohol content, but the sugar that is the problem with the texture. I think 1 parts sugar to 2 parts water, in a really basic sorbet, is about where you want to be. But you'd need to whip out that raw egg, or a fancy refractometer, to know exactly. ← i need still need lots of acid to like anything... soup or sorbet... i drink dakyree's for the lime...

no acidity in the picture? 1 cup water 1 cup sugar 1 cup fresh lemon juice 1 tablespoon lemon zest this is a classic lemon sorbet recipe... i'd try to fit the bianco vermouth into that...

i would drink that in inverse proportions... 1 oz. of each vermouth and 1/2 of the swedish punch... if you predict your drink might be too sweet so far in my commerical vermouth journey's i've found cinzano to be the least sweet...

I've got some Goya Passion fruit juice in a bottle, lists water, sugar, passion fruit pulp, citric acid, ascorbic acid, and acacia gum. I think that's about as pure as you're going to find the stuff. It works really nicely in drinks, and the bottle helps it keep better than the canned by virtue of being recloseable. I think it costs about $1 for a 16 oz bottle. ← but how tart is it? its probably balanced as a drink not as a modifiable kitchen product... your getting "passion fruit cocktail" like "cranberry cocktail" not nearly unadulterated passion fruit juice... ← I've never had straight passion fruit, but yeah, it's roughly analagous to cranberry juice. However I think in both cases those juices are made into sweetened cocktails due to excessive acid levels in the fruit. With the possible exception of the various purees (particularly the Perfect Puree one) I doubt that any of the products mentioned here are pure, unadulterated passion fruit, which I think would probably be prohibitively expensive. ← the puree i get for the bar is excessively tart and quite a lot of fun to mix... its only on the verge of being prohibitively expensive but so worth it... i can't quite recall the brand, its some kind of french puree company, but i highly endorse it... turning it into a syrup would only limit your options... i like it best contrasted with kola nut tonic...

I've got some Goya Passion fruit juice in a bottle, lists water, sugar, passion fruit pulp, citric acid, ascorbic acid, and acacia gum. I think that's about as pure as you're going to find the stuff. It works really nicely in drinks, and the bottle helps it keep better than the canned by virtue of being recloseable. I think it costs about $1 for a 16 oz bottle. ← but how tart is it? its probably balanced as a drink not as a modifiable kitchen product... your getting "passion fruit cocktail" like "cranberry cocktail" not nearly unadulterated passion fruit juice...

i have heard of this technique a few times but have never seen it in a book... it has been attributed to italy every time and was told it was done with grappa... i wonder if any one restaurant in particulur was famous for it... much cooler than a "stoli doli"... i was almost going to set one up a couple months ago but i still am looking for an elegant jar with a spout at the bottom... tonight i drank... 1.5 oz. vanilla vodka (sample bottle of triple eight vanilla) 1 oz. mirto de sardegna (mirtle berry fruit liqueur) 1 oz. fresh espresso shake, strain... mirto is a fruit liqueur but isn't exactly framboise... mirtle's have a piney, digestiefy kind of character... they are bitter or tannic? in the way pine needles and juniper berries are... i probably don't have the right descriptors... but they are definitely somtetimes fun and always very adult... the drink might have been a little over the top... i'm not sure if the vanilla vodka had less sugar than the conventional but the drink could have been slightly sweeter... i liked its coffee type of bitter quality and found the mirto more exciting than kahlua but i think swapping out half its quantity for amalfi lemoncello would have been more sucessful... "fruit's a gamble..." -jerry seinfeld

Depends who's drinking, I guess. Oh, you mean how long does it keep. If you take it off the pineapple after a couple days, don't add the citrus until you mix, and keep it in the fridge (or in the freezer for "shots" as mr. miller advises) fairly indefinitely, I would imagine. ← when i make similar things i age it for quite a while before i even drink it... it definitely keeps a while... but doesn't last long... i've got some bentonite clarifying a batch right now... its creepy how much it looks like normal booze but is over the top aromatic and flavorful... it isn't gonna be touched again until june... i'm trying to develop the concept of a booze cellar to go along with our wine cellar... my pastry chef is using some raspberry liquor i made 8 months ago to flavor a zabaglione... the flavor is stunning... summer is coming so you gotta start now... this is also the peak of pineapple season if i'm not mistaken...?

early yesterday i put the finishing touches on another five gallons of hibiscus soda... my new disgorgment technique is unstoppable... i found that my dosaging technique was over engineered and as long as things were cold enough i could simply pour the dosage right into the bottle and cap... it was quite the mess before i figured that out... i'm also testing potassium sorbate which is used in dessert wines to prevent renewed fermentation... anyhow... in the glass real serious... fruit and adult acid and complex yeasty aromas (epernay champagne yeasts)... and then to make it more of an adult drink i added 3/4 oz. of a really wild wine that aged past its prime... a 2000 corvina from the veneto that i fortified with grappa to vermouth range... the wine was on its death bed and exploding like a super nova of flavors... (but not complete flavors to make it a good wine... fruit was dead and no tannins)... so this stuff is nothing but dirt, earth, barnyard, coal furnace, and burnt wood... with no fruit to balance it can be a scarey flavor experience... but its marriage to the hibiscus soda was very cool... what would you call a preserve of unaromatized wine? this stuff doesn't really need herbs to enoble it but it needs grappa to last... a coworker was worried that he liked the drink more than laurent perrier rose... i think i'm gonna hide the last two bottles of that wine before someone cooks with it...

you don't really need to do anything... if you want it clearer there are options but they are a little more work than just a coffee filter and they require time... sometimes particles that were small to start will clump and settle as months (two or three) go by and then filtering them again through cloth or a coffee filter becomes very easy... wines aren't exactly ready to drink a day after fermentation... it won't kill you... but time mellows and integrates things as well as naturally aids the filtration process... i started a batch of rum punch a couple months ago. i pureed pineapple to bring some fruit to the stuff and help dilute the strength of the rum... out of the blender i was able to strain some of the pineapple solids with a very fine kitchen sieve but it was nowhere close to as pulp free as canned pineapple juice... no problem... after a couple months things started to clump. and i strained it through cloth. it was amazing how much easier it was to seperate the solids and they problably contributed their flavor while they were infusing... i would be satisfied serving it as this point but there was still a slight haze so i added some bentonite am going to give it another month...

its ok. clowdy is just a small esthetic issue... for clarifying vermouth bentonite is recommended... if you read about beer filtration techniques you can learn alot of fining options... beer brewers have done alot to perfect small batch filtration...

how much are you diluting the honey to make the syrup? is that pisco a little more "ethnic" in flavor than the clean barsol style? it sounds delicious...

last i drank a lemon sour with eggwhite fortified with cape verdian rum... the clear rum has an intense heaviness like certain piscos (don cesar)... i really bet that anyone that tried it would think it was pisco before they thought it was rum... i have no idea what part of the sugar cane its made from or if they have an interesting water situation... pretty cool. anyone that tried it straight rejected it immediately but i found if you drink it 5:1 with cold water and therefore look at it from a distance it becomes beautiful and interesting... later i had a 50/50 anchor genavieve to cinzano rosso with some reagan's bitters and lemon peel... every other time i had the drink (eastern standard) it was with martini rossi... the differences are more subtle than napa cabs across the street from each other... if i could pinpoint the difference i think the martini rossi is richer, maybe sweeter and acts to bring more into focus the malty flavors of the gin... the cinzano is a leaner experience with a japanese design ethic... the massive integration and harmony of the gin equally matched with vermouth remind you of only minerality and not herbs... early in the night i put together some wines for a tasting... one of the dishes i had tried earlier in the week with every open bottle of wine i had... nothing went even remotely well... the dish is veal sweet breads with mascarpone stuff capellaci, mustarda fruits, and hoshimenji (spelling?) mushrooms... these seemingly delicate mushrooms bring more to the dish than anything on the plate... they aren't earthy in an animalic way but more in a minerally way... they taste like tender sweet stones... a pairing would have to please their wierd intensity and not be messed up by the sweet elements of the dish... anyhow i gave the guest some chilled stock sweet vermouth and ordered myself the dish to retry along side him... it worked... the vermouth when chilled isn't too sweet for the dish and its botanical embellishment really parallels the character of the mushrooms... more points for the importance of sweet vermouth...!

this sounds delicious...

There's a long discussion on the DrinkBoy site starting with fatdeko2's post here: Bitters Recipe A bit later in the topic, Dr. Cocktail weighs in on Asarum canadense and notes that it is in the same plant family, Aristolochiaceae, as Virginia Snakeroot and is thus actually covered by the FDA warning. ← hmm. it doesn't seem to answer any flavor questions about its ginger like character... i think i'm gonna track down both herbs and do a taste test... risking renal failure to advance mixology is no big deal... and manhattans aren't that exciting to me anymore... i'm a new flavor fiend... i'd rather drink a fun enigmatic bitter... it wasn't concentrated enough to be a cocktail bitter anyhow... i'd sub the decanter bitters for the plain whiskey before i subbed it for the angostura... i think the decanter bitters is a good concept or system for a drink... i think i'm gonna find my own favorite root, citrus, and dried fruit to keep it going on my kitchen counter...

i don't know if anyone else was into making and drinking the jerry thomas decanter bitters... supposedly the "virginia snakeroot" in the recipe is toxic but what exactly it is that he used isn't clear. many herbs have many names. the book "Imbibe!" asssumes its something also known as "serpentaria" which is not exactly on the "generally recognized as safe" (GRAS) list... other literature calls "Asarum canadense" (which can easily be found) virginia or canadian snakeroot and might be the more likely choice because it has a larege history in early american brewery and native american medicine. from what i've read there is no negative information about the herb. snakeroot is often called "wild ginger" and is compared to the cultivated ginger we commonly use today... to be on the side of safe you could easily make the recipe substituting ginger and i'm sure a bottle would disapear really quickly... i didn't waste any of mine in a manhattan but drank it by the ounce before meals...