Adam Thornton

Yeah, I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations to make sure I wasn't actually going to be poisoning myself. It is unlikely that this tobacco strain was ever 15 mg/g (it was a mostly-decorative, not a mostly-smoking, tobacco), and although the tincture was likely to give better transfer than the fat-wash, even if I drank all the proceeds at once it wouldn't actually be poisonous--note that I am using only 1 or 2 grams of tobacco in my experiments. I did not expect the striking bitterness of the tincture, which means that the amount of nicotine in the amount you'd actually consume is pretty negligible. I was actually going for "about a cigarette's worth per drink" but I'm fairly sure that I'm far short of that in the amount it's actually possible to use of what I made. That's a lot of "actuallys", isn't it? Thanks for the pointer, though. (Also, it's probably worth mentioning: I'm a home enthusiast and have no customers to serve this to and risk liability.) Adam

Bitter Brooklyn: 1.5 oz Rittenhouse, 3/4 oz. Cocchi Americano, 1/2 oz. Amer Picon (Jamie Boudreau's recipe, more or less, little heavier on the orange tincture), 1/8 oz. maraschino. Garnish with brandied/maraschinoed cherry (no fresh cherries right now, so Trader Joe's morellos in 1/2 maraschino, 1/2 cheap brandy). Not bad although the Amer is powerful funky. Adam

I've been making my own cocktail additives for a while now: the Artemisia Absinthum in the back yard is a reliable contributor, and using that as the bittering agent, I and my colleague Martin made an interesting chili-chocolate bitters and some nifty Szechuan Peppercorn bitters. I've also been making Amer Picon to Jamie Boudreau's recipe (more or less) and have achieved quite a bit of success with it. Last weekend I decided I wanted a tobacco-infused bourbon. I started with Knob Creek, as a reasonably-priced overproof bourbon base. The tobacco is some homegrown that I dried out two years ago and never used, so it's not like I'm starting from a particularly good tobacco stock. I tried two methods. One was to take about two grams of tobacco and sautee in 1 floz of neutral vegetable oil until it began to smoke, and then fat-wash 8 floz of the Knob Creek with it; I let that sit for three days and stuck it in the freezer for two. Then filter off the fat. The second was a straight-up tincture of about a gram of tobacco in 4 floz of Knob Creek. Let sit for 5 days and filter. I say "about" in both cases because I need a more precise scale. Well, the fat-wash was a disaster. I ended up with greasy-tasting bourbon. The tincture is maybe a little better, but not what I was hoping for: the bourbon gets an astonishingly bitter finish--way too bitter to use more-than-bitters quantities in a drink, and not even the spicy bitterness of wormwood. I saved it and I will use it a few drops at a time, but it doesn't taste at all tobacco-ey, just bitter. So I guess it makes an OK bourbon-flavored bittering agent, but, well, meh. Anyone else had better luck with this task? Any more promising techniques? Adam