bostonapothecary

just beware that passion fruit is an acid... a 1:1 will balance some of its own sugar content... or nearly all of it... in my experince in a 1:1 ratio, passion fruit balances haus alpenz liqueurs perfectly and st. germain... when i use something like cointreau:creole shrub which has more sugar, i have to add a spoonful of lime juice to keep within the average of peoples tastes...

I assume you mean passion fruit syrups? I have a bottle of the Fee Brothers one, and it's alright. I don't really have anything to compare it to and don't use it that often. In Sippin' Safari, Berry recommends Finest Call, and explicitly advises against Fee Brothers, Monin and Torani. He also suggests getting frozen passion fruit pulp (from "Latino [or] gourmet markets") and mixing it in equal parts with simple syrup. ← i use the very tart "pulp" which has become a staple of the bar... i'd never pre add sugar. i think you'd blow the max sugar content thats palatable too quickly and then you wouldn't have as many options in your mixing... i bet it just too often ends up in the form of a syrup as a canning method. the pulp can change to vineger in a matter of weeks... my favorite way to mix the stuff was with the elusive clayton's kola nut tonic and lemonheart 151...

i'd use 86 proof ron barrilito three star... looks like a good brunch drink to me...

readily available ingredients are boring... give me an excuse to drive to rhode island and i will... i just read about sage prolifically growing across the steppe as modern man developed and mauraded following climate change... sage was always present and its scent must be ingrained in our minds effecting our insticts... averna and sage might induce a relapse of primal behavior... as long as i have the next day off to recover, sign me up... *also the best of sage isn't completely water soluble from what i've read. dissolve it in alcohol and then make your syrup if thats the route you want to take...

sevilles are in season... i got a case a month ago and made quite alot of creole shrub from the peel... but i squandered the juice... i drank most of it myself nonalcoholically with demerara sugar... and now i've been asked to present a cocktail for a large charity event... i was going to use the shrub i made in a drink... its delishous, intense, and the drink is fun... but i can't get over the juice... everybody has had cointreau or creole shrub but few had tasted the seville juice... i think i should scratch my idea and go for a drink to showcase the juice... (giving myself an excuse to get more peel) do drinks calling for OJ actually call for seville OJ? i was thinking of presenting the "bronx (zoo) cocktail"... but what is the earliest recipe... i see sweet vermouth only and then sweet and dry... maybe they added dry vermouth because they stopped using tart oranges... i kinda wanted to make a saint james cocktail but i don't think i can find enough of the rum around here... tart oranges are a wild concept amongst our domesticated landscape... they remind me of wild lands where you have to be on your toes... the zoo is where those exotic unrestrained oranges and our modern life would overlap... i need a drink to earn the respect of errant mauling tigers and to drink side by side with silver backs... enough color to apease a tiger and enough booze to inebriate a babboon? 1.5 oz. gin (exotic high proof formula) .75 oz. sweet vermouth (a style that isn't bland wine syrup) .75 oz. tart seville orange juice

maybe another way to look at drinks is civil war reenactments... (experience something exactly as it was a century or so ago) be like charlie trotter... be like feran adria... i think i want to hold down the charlie trotter style...

i think i tried it exactly the same way. (beafeater,noily,reagans) the fruit from the cherry heering was quite potent... but everything else provided incredibly adult flavor contrasts... this drink is well within the average of so many people's tastes... i might have to drink these three to my usual one over proof rum cocktails but i think it would be worth the extra effort...

i think i need to drink this... i don't have cherry heering... i might have to use elisir gambrinus instead... or maybe its worth my while to buy the heering... hmm.

i've made those decanter bitters before and they are wonderful. i drank mine by the glassful... thats looks like a great drink.

wonderich cites a 1915 oakland tribute article crediting the drink to san fransisco. wonderich claims the drink could be named after multiple people: Charles Dana Gibson the artist or Bohemian Club member Walter D. K. Gibson. 60-40 dry gin to vermouth... no garnish...

i'm ignoring the 1/2 oz. spiritless max because i drink this mainly for the lemon juice... "caco cocktail" 1.5 oz. wray & nephews 126 1 oz. brizard apry 1 oz. lemon juice 2 dashes angostura shake with extra ice... float .5 oz. lemonheart 151 i drink this quite regularly...

Well, I'd say that is both pretty interesting and amazing! I guess that's the nail in the coffin of the Absinthe substitute idea. Also, "pink" makes it sound like it might have been on a white wine rather than red wine base. ← wow, thats interesting. i think we need to come up with a list of questions for that guy to answer... if it was pink it could have easily gotten colored with a dye... i don't know anything other than barolo chinato that actually uses red wine... most everything is white and caramel...

i make alot of carribbean drinks and i seem to need very few rums to do it... cruzan/flor de cana wray nephews 126 mt gay bacardi 8 st. james amber goslings old lemonheart 151 i seem to get everything i want out of all of them. i kinda gave up on everything else. i'd like to replace mt gay with something more affordable. and i used to be a pompero freak but lately i get everything i need out of goslings old and lemonheart 151... i have a small group of girls that work for the cheese cake factory asking for a blend of rums... they call it that "tropical drink" on their break. 1.5 oz. wray newphews 126 .5 oz. goslings old 1 oz. tart granadilla juice 1 oz. grenadine grate nutmeg from grenada... humorously my other staff memebers who hate to measure drinks have never dared free pour it... i think they are scared of having a bunch of chease cake factory girls mad at them... it probably has the same alcohol content of a classic margarita... but i can get the intensity i want from the non alcoholic parts without sacrificing the adultness.... when i'm not slammed and i make this style of two rum drink for myself i float the dark rum on top... and probably use lemonheart 151...

interesting... in enfleurage you can't even extract all of the aromatic compounds out of your neutral fat... they usually make soap out of whats left... i bet its a two way street and you'd take some of the character out of the bitters. a good experiment would be to try it with some neutral fat and see how each tastes afterwards... then you could make some angostura confit...?

upthread i discovered that averna and chocolate can be great... i also learned that there is more than a couple of "passito de pantelerria's" and they are among the most expensive dessert wines out there... i used the common, delicious, and incredibly affordable pellegrino...

joining the party... 3/4 oz. saz 18 (all i had) 3/4 oz. clear creak 8 yr applejack (all i had 1/2 oz. averna dash peychaud's dash angostura (all i had) no cinnamon yikes! wow, this is a very adult drink... something in the drink gives it an intensely thick mouthfeel without being overly sweet in anyway... if someone surprised me with this drink, i would be very happy... i can taste where the rye and apple brandy intersect... i like these split spirit "animators"... this is not for everyone but it definitely thrills me... i wish i had an orange twist...

perfumer's have used the technique for ever and call it enfleurage. i've heard of cultures putting chicken feet in their booze... i have a lot of rendered capon fat in the walk in... add some black truffle... some aged spirit... chill and seperate... maybe i could add rendered fat and spiced rooster claws to fighting cock bourbon and make it live up to the name...

Discussion of the recipe ensued. You can find it here. ← being a modern creation i wonder what their analytical approach was to making the formula. i've never had it but on paper it seems like homer simpson's car of the future... i've found that more or less no matter what you create there is always some ingenuity (a cocktail) that can make it drinkable or even look good... wine is the same way... i came across a difficult wine tonight that most of the staff didn't like. it wasn't a "sipping wine" and couldn't stand alone. if you gave it the right food it would become high performance... anyone would like it. i can only break out that bottle when i'm gonna show it off with the right pairing (venison!)...

botanicals on their own might have a certain type of bitter among the many but i dont' see it as a negative. a master of wine i served recently told me my carbonated new zealand sauv blanc was bitter and thats probably why wine makers don't produce them. the wine on its own is immensley popular and never called bitter... all i did was add gas. the bubbles brought out the herbal nature of the wine... i find it delicous and it was either loved or feared... bitter and acrid can stick out when something is really dry... bubbles in a wine can make it seem drier. balance it and you can create heaven on the tongue. if you know what botanicals are in something you can create a flavor map. you may not know the intensities which is key to a full understanding but you can get a rough idea of the over all goal of a botanical formula... the botanicals in bombay and bombay saphire are printed on the side so you can use Harold McGee's tables from "on food and cooking" to create an aid in describing the formulas. they are delicately full flavored with little redundency. bombay saphire might not be intense but on paper it looks like a very elegant full flavor spectrum botanical formula only really redundent in the fresh, piney, and citrus sectors... i wish saphire had more intensity because it looks like a really advanced formula. its interesting to look at a popular blend like herbs de provance and see how redundent its woody botanicals are... i used the formula and made a pretty unique but fun dry vermouth from it... the woody vermouth contrasted nicely in drinks that were gonna get a spoonful of something sweet like marashino, or a fruit liqueur...

so you fiends drank a rare beatle to the point of extinction and the good campari people, with their spirit of conservation, finally cut you off... now you've drank your aged supplies down to nothing and you don't like the taste of it right out the tap... i hope a lesson was learned... if any of you people wrecklessly exhaust the world supply of mature green chartreuse there will be hell to pay...

this is non alcoholic so i hope i don't offend anyone... but it is very adult... today i attempted to make "sweet potato fly"... unfortunately somebody sold me fake sweet potatos. i think they were yams but it didn't matter the results were still extremely cool... recipe: take your favorite lemonade recipe... instead of diluting the lemon juice and sugar with water dilute with water percolated through roasted sweet potato pulp... (i think i used 3 pounds of roasted yams to get maybe 2 liters of juice... these were some really sad yams and they still tasted good. tomarrow the first thing i do is make it with some beautiful sweet potatoes from whole foods... i ran my water trough the yams three times then through an empty coffee filter once... keeping it hot so it went through easy... the character the water picks up is beautiful and it fits in with lemon so well... this recipe is a specialty of rural guyana which they just call "fly". another version is "mango fly"... so if i find good sweet potatoes i'm going to use mango powder as my acid and add it to my percolator so i can capture more of that guyana character... all the beautiful sugars dissolve and all the starchiness stays in the filter... i made this in a couple minutes while doing other things... i can't wait to test this in 90 degree heat...

something similar i made was with dry vermouth instead of sweet vermouth (alto cucina). it can be strange how interesting these recipes can be... they don't always read well... i need to try it with the M&R sweet now... i think i have just 2 oz. left in my bottle of flor de Cana 4 year gold... perfect.

But the key is to ensure you at least have your facts straight or have an unverifiable story. I remember going to a restaurant at the top end of the list of best kitchens. We did a wine tasting and the Sommelier was always very descriptive and it sounded like he had trudged around the mud in his rubber boots. I knew a particular wine area very well however, which was a reason I was looking forward to a specific wine in the tasting menu. And on he starts describing how this one variety comes from the North slope which has more clay content than the Southern slope. However looking at the vines they had very similar qualities blah blah blah. So I then said that from the Northern slope one had a very good view of a valley and did he see this particular landmark? The Sommelier stuttered a bit then went tut-tut and explained that he had only ever seen pictures and had never even been to Europe. Did I feel taken for a ride! /Tim ← you are right you need to be careful. there is an art to a good story and a good sense of humor... "this is a specialty of rural borneo or least it SHOULD be... they have all the ingredients..." i think wine should be taken a little more seriously. its ok to mix and manipulate it but alot more time, blood, sweat and tears go into it than any silly liqueur i make... with wine also i've gotten to a point where i dont' like to endorse a pairing unless i've actually tried it... luckily i get to try alot... its a big practice to bluff on pairings but i've found when you actually start obsessively trying things its so counter intuitive... bluffing and experimenting with cocktails is great fun... you can construct and present a new drink with out ever having previously tasted it in confidence mainly because you know the contents of sugar, alcohol, bitter and acids you are working with...

Where did you get this idea about surface tension? As far as I know, solubility of a gas in a liquid depends on the gas, liquid, temperature and pressure. But since we're talking about dissolving carbon dioxide into water, for our purposes we can consider this a constant. Solubility, then, depends upon temperature and pressure. Lower temperatures and higher pressures correspond to greater solubility. Time can also be a variable, depending on the carbonation technique used, simply to allow the gas sufficient opportunity to dissolve into the liquid. We create fizzy liquids by dissolving carbon dioxide into water under increased pressure (chilling the liquid also helps, of course). The liquid fizzes because, when the liquid returns to regular atmospheric pressure, the gas comes out of solution, forms bubbles and we get effervescence. Actually, most of the carbon dioxide simply escapes from the surface of the liquid into the atmosphere without forming bubbles. In order to form bubbles within the liquid, nucleation sites are needed -- usually provided by microscopic pieces of cellulose or tiny points on the surface of the glass (little known fact: the best champagne classes are etched by the manufacturers to provide nucleation sites throughout the glass). Carbonated water in a perfectly clean, flawless glass would not form bubbles. The size and extent of the bubbles is largely determined by the amount of carbon dioxide dissolved into the liquid, with larger bubbles corresponding to greater amounts of dissolved gas. One reason why we consider small bubbles desirable in champagne is that a certain amount of carbon dioxide is lost through the cork as the wine ages and therefore an aged champagne containes less carbon dioxide compared to a young champagne. The chemical composition of the liquid can also have a minor effect on the characteristics of the bubbles, and of course on the formation and character of a "head" on the liquid as the bubbles rise to the surface. This, and a whole lot more, is explained well in the book Uncorked: The Science of Champagne by Gérard Liger-Belair. In the formation of persistent bubbles at the surface of the liquid, which is not the same thing as "keeping the gas from escaping the liquid," surface tension and other variables can be important. If you want a persistent foam like that, I would suggest including some egg white in the charger with your liquid. As for your grapefruit juice. . . so long as it is as cold as possible when carbonated and spends sufficient time under pressure, you shouldn't have any problems. An hour is a fairly short time period, however, if you're using a seltzer bottle. You should also consider that citrus juice is full of suspended particles. These make great nucleation sites and are likely to make the carbonated juice lose its fizz rather quickly. You might consider running the juice through a fine filter (perhaps experiment with a Büchner funnel filter) to remove these particles to the greatest extent possible. Adding some gum arabic could be interesting as well, as it should result in good head retension. ← that is a good summation. i wonder if it was the abundence of suspended particles that caused the failure with the grapefruit juice. gonna have to try it again...

tonight i drank sparkling sauvignon blanc... they don't exist in the wild but with a little molecular mixology anything is possible... it has a particularly fun aromatic intensity... i can't wait to top a french 75 with it... a winemaker told me that carbonation increases aromatic intensity... certain wine varietals could become obnoxious if they were anymore intense which is why they don't exist in sparkling versions under any tradition... cocktails love near obnoxious intensity at times... so a market just emerged! does anyone know anything about surface tensions and dissolving CO2 in liquids? what is the optimal for keeping a gas from escaping a liquid and how do you create the optimal if it doesn't already exist? i want freshly squeezed (no more than an hour old) sparkling grapefruit juice... the surface tension of the natural juice doesn't like being injected with bubbles that much... can it be done?