Drinks! (2004–2007)

[slkinsey]

According to Field, the Millionaire dates to no later than 1922 from the Hotel Ritz London. 

The recipe is as follows:

white of a fresh egg

2 dashes of Curacoa

1/6 gill of grenadine

2/6 gill of Rye

First off, I have no idea what a gill is and no clue how to measure it...

An American gill is equal to four US ounces, an Imperial gill is equal to 5 Imperial ounces (4.8 US ounces). An American gill is equal to 5/6 of an Imperial gill and an Imperial gill is equal to 1.2 American gills.

What does this mean? If it's an English recipe, 1/6 of a gill would be equal to 23.68 millileters, or 0.8 ounces -- for practical purposes and ease of measurement, I'd say go for 3/4 of an ounce or 25 milliliters. If it's an American recipe, 1/6 of a gill would be equal to 19.72 milliliters (20 ml for practical purposes and ease of measurement), or 2/3 of an ounce.

So, your drink would come out something like:

white of a fresh egg (of a medium egg)

2 dashes of Curacoa (1/4 ounce?)

1/6 gill of grenadine (3/4 ounce)

2/6 gill of Rye (1 1/2 ounces)

Figure the egg white is around a half ounce, and you've got three ounces before shaking and maybe 4 ounces after shaking. Actually, not that small. I personally find three ounces to be just about right for cocktails.

But, in general, yes, the drinks were very small.

I don't think it's possible to overestimate how small some of these drinks were. Take a look at the original Thin Man movie, for example, in particular the Martini Nick makes in his opening scene. It's so small he's able to shoot it all in one go. Couldn't have been more than 2 ounces in the glass.

Edited September 13, 2007 by slkinsey (log)

[bostonapothecary]

last night i drank a massenez poire william with dry vermouth. she did stir the drink but it was absolutely massive. i was scared at first but the drink was delicious and i was able to put it down... it did kind of end my evening because i was quickly on my way to drunk.

i noticed well heeled ladies at the bar were drinking "very light" belvedere and sodas... so they could "drink all night". their highballs were not even large enough to put 2 oz. of booze whether it was requested or not... yet anything in a martini glass was massive...

[misscasserly]

@ LODGE restaurant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, just had a little drink of apple cider and 'bison grass' vodka. Crisp and refreshing, just like the seasonable weather.

but WHERE to buy bison grass vodka?

[Alchemist]

last night i drank a massenez poire william with dry vermouth.  she did stir the drink but it was absolutely massive.  i was scared at first but the drink was delicious and i was able to put it down... it did kind of end my evening because i was quickly on my way to drunk.

i noticed well heeled ladies at the bar were drinking "very light" belvedere and sodas... so they could "drink all night".  their highballs were not even large enough to put 2 oz. of booze whether it was requested or not... yet anything in a martini glass was massive...

←

I get the request for light drinks all the time. There is a segment of society that isn't trying to get hammered. I pour light and buy them every third. The house isn't losing a sheckle and the customers are better behaved. A win-win-win situation.

[KatieLoeb]

@ LODGE restaurant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, just had a little drink of apple cider and 'bison grass' vodka. Crisp and refreshing, just like the seasonable weather.

but WHERE to buy bison grass vodka?

←

Look for Zubrowka. It's readily available in most non-fascist states.

[TBoner]

I made a Liberal today with Rittenhouse and (unfortunately) some of the current Amer Picon. It was good, but...I wish I could taste it with the older recipe.

My Amer Picon replica has a ways to go, as I've got another full month of steeping the dried orange peel in vodka. I think I should've gone with an adaptation similar to the one eje posted in another thread.

At any rate, I've been drinking Scotch and Manhattans almost exclusively, so I was due for something different. Up next, it's on to a Bairn variation:

2 oz. homemade Scotch blend (includes varying amounts of Highland Park 12, Macallan 12, Dalmore 12, Bowmore 12, and Famous Grouse)

1/2 oz. Ramazzotti

1/4 oz. Cointreau

dash orange bitters

[thirtyoneknots]

I've been in a bit of a rut lately regarding what I have been drinking at home, cocktail-wise. I recently realised that the last time I bought a bottle of something I hadn't had before was probably in May. Tonight I think (hope) I may have snapped out of it with maybe the tastiest Martini I have ever had:

1.5 oz Junipero (first time to try it, picked up last week)

.5 oz Noilly Prat dry

2 drops Hermes OB

Stirred very well with cracked ice, strained into very well chilled glass, garnished with very fresh lemon twist.

Very delicious, it's gonna be hard to go back to Tanqueray and Plymouth, my former Martini standbys.

Edit to correct 98.6 proof spelling errors

Edited October 1, 2007 by thirtyoneknots (log)

[Nathan]

I've been in a bit of a rut lately regarding what I have been drinking at home, cocktail-wise. I recently realised that the last time I bought a bottle of something I hadn't had before was probably in May. Tonight I think (hope) I may have snapped out of it with maybe the tastiest Martini I have ever had:

1.5 oz Junipero (first time to try it, picked up last week)

.5 oz Noilly Prat dry

2 drops Hermes OB

Stirred very well with cracked ice, strained into very well chilled glass, garnished with very fresh lemon twist.

Very delicious, it's gonna be hard to go back to Tanqueray and Plymouth, my former Martini standbys.

Edit to correct 98.6 proof spelling errors

←

yup. Junipero and Old Raj are my favorite martini gins...

[Alchemist]

This was a few days ago but...

I was in Mexico, and on the fourth day, and was not being all that nice to my liver (but my tastebuds were dancing in the streets) so add to that the wicked hot that my ears were aflame and my Irish constitution was agast at the heat and overabundance of.. well un Catholic food (food with flavor). I worked through the fever and the groans.

So after 12 hours of sleep. I woke up went to lunch. After lunch, feeling a wee bit on the delicate side I arrived back at the hotel at hour of afternoon delight. I know that it is unadvised to start drinking rum at noon, so I had two shots of Peychaud's with a HC7 and a Bohimia as a chaser. The Bitters so did me right. I will NEVER travel without bitters, ever, ever, ever. More important than Kao or bug spray is bitters. No qustion.

[catscandal]

Right now I'm sipping a delicious concoction called the Tia Juano. It's basically a poor man's Rosita (or, conversely, La Rosita is a perfect Tia Juano), which I've discovered on my quest to try out every reasonable tequila-based cocktail on cocktaildb (by reasonable I mean no creme de banane, kahlua, or weird unbalanced beasts with three liqueurs and no bitters/citrus). Once I narrowed down the duplicates and eliminated the nasties, I ended up with 43 cocktails, this one among them, and I'm working through them as I get the ingredients, as well as many of the cocktails from the tequila MxMo and the thread here on tequila cocktails.

This is all part of a grand project to create more quality, respectable cocktails with my favorite spirit. I'm hoping the testing will reveal flavours that pair well with tequila and lead to new and delicious creations until we have as many well-loved tequila drinks as gin drinks (so we on the west coast can have something more suited to our culture and tastes). So far, I know that tequila has great synergy with campari, creme de cassis, citrus, and Cointreau, and I suspect it may also work well with certain rums and with Galliano, maraschino, and vanilla flavored liqueurs, given the frequency of those in recipes.

Anyway, the recipe for the Tia Juano is thus:

1.25oz silver tequila

1 oz dry vermouth

.25oz Campari

garnish with flamed orange peel

I was making this with 1800 (very agave-forward rather than subtle and complex, and a bit hot, but good flavor for the price, and it's 100% agave) and Noilly Prat dry vermouth. With a more subtle tequila like Cazadores or Herradura, I might bump the tequila up to 1.5oz, as I was tempted to do anyway, but regardless, a very tasty drink that integrates the Campari very well without letting it take over, and is nicely smoothed out by the high quantity of vermouth (though I don't find that tequila and dry vermouth are really made for one another. case in point, the "tequini", which fails utterly to be as satisfying as a real dry martini, though possibly due to lack of bitters).

[Vin Ordinaire]

I've been enjoying a drink I adapted (read: stole) from a local restaurant. It's a combination of my two favorite Campari preparations: the Negroni and grapefruit supremes in Campari syrup.

The drink

1 oz Campari

1 oz Gin (I use Plymouth)

1 oz Sweet Vermouth (Noily Prat Rouge)

2 oz grapefruit juice (ruby red is best)

1/2 oz brown sugar syrup (simple syrup made with dark brown sugar

[thirtyoneknots]

On my night off I decide to revisit a few drinks I hadn't made in a while. The first and most notable was the Improved Gin Cocktail:

2 oz Junipero

generous 1/2 tsp Luxardo Maraschino

~3 dashes rich Demerara syrup

~3 dashes Peychaud's

1 generous dash Jade Edouard

Add 2 large lumps of ice and a twist of lemon peel. Oh my!

Junipero may be my new favorite gin.

-Andy

[bostonapothecary]

aviation

2 oz. bombay oldschool

3/4 oz. luxardo maraschino

1 oz. lemon juice

couple barspoonfuls of alpenz creme de violette

shake shake shake double strain

i would never give an aviation the time of day without throwing creme de violette in the mix... the drink left many layers to contemplate...

[thirtyoneknots]

Cooking up some fish and onion rings right now but thought I'd mess with the Vieux Carre formula a bit more. I woke up this morning with the sniffles and I constructed this by smell so I may revisit it later to see if it's as on as it seems to be now. At any rate, here's what I came up with:

1 tsp Apry

2 dashes Regans'

2 dashes Peychaud's

1 oz Lillet

1 oz Boodles

1 oz Flor de Cana Gold

Built over large ice cubes. Garnished with twist of lemon, though orange would be good, too (though sweeter).

Much more subtle than previous experiments with this formula, maybe even more so than the original. The normally-powerful presence of Apry is barely felt, somehow restrained by a list of what I would normally consider fairly subtle ingredients. I'd be very interested to try this is with the Cocchi Americano, which I still haven't had much luck locating.

-Andy

Edit to add: As this warms up and waters down it starts to taste slightly off. Don't know if it's me being stuffed up or the drink itself, but maybe it's not as great as I implied above.

Edited October 9, 2007 by thirtyoneknots (log)

[David Santucci]

This is all part of a grand project to create more quality, respectable cocktails with my favorite spirit.

←

What a fantastic project! I hope you will report your results often! (Perhaps even start a thread?)

Are you going to also try some of the recipes with reposado tequila? I find it often works better. Of course, the difference between brands could be bigger than the difference between a blanco and a reposado.

I tried some experiments with making a dry, Martini-esque tequila cocktail, and came up with the combination of tequila and Scotch, rather than vermouth or sherry or what have you. I call it the "Los Altos" (which is a Tequila-producing region, and translates to "highlands"). It is is a bit tricky to balance, but could be a lot of fun to try because of the huge range of personalitites in both tequila and Scotch. I found 4 parts El Tesoro Reposado, 1 part Glenfiddich Solera Reserve and a dash of Regan's Orange Bitters to do the job nicely.

Good luck in your explorations!

[Mayur]

Had a wonderful tequila-based "classic cocktail variant" at Death & Co last week:

Tequila negroni

[iIRC:]

1.5 reposado tequila (Siembra Azul)

1 campari

0.75 Punt e mes

dash of grapefruit bitters

Very, very tasty, and bracing!

[eje]

[...]

I tried some experiments with making a dry, Martini-esque tequila cocktail, and came up with the combination of tequila and Scotch, rather than vermouth or sherry or what have you.

[...]

←

In a similarly smoky vein, Thomas Waugh has a very nice cocktail on the Alembic menu, here in San Francisco, called the Macanudo. It is Partida Anejo, apricot eau-de-vie, qi smoked tea liqueur, dash agave nectar, lemon twist, dried apricot garnish. Don't know exact proportions; but, it is not a particularly sweet cocktail.

Edited October 10, 2007 by eje (log)

[bostonapothecary]

tonight i stopped into the green street...

asked for a cocktail.... received:

3:2:1

rye, dry vermouth, yellow chartreuse

or i might have mixed up the cencentration of the yellow and dry...

a very sexy drink...

its fun to see what people will make when you will drink anything and how they judge you. it was the perfect prescription for my evening. at the restaurant i work in huge amounts of people simply say "tell him to cook for me" and "bring me a wine, what ever you are into" (sfursato from the valtelina by the way is the answer to that)

the green street in cambridge is a great place to trust the prescription of the bartender.

[KatieLoeb]

Not tonight, but last night I had a hankering to muddle up some of the gorgeous fragrant basil I'd acquired at my local Farmer's market over the weekend. I'd been grocery shopping in the afternoon and saw some gorgeous chunks of fresh pineapple on the salad bar. A small container of those came home with me and I ended up making a couple of Pineapple-Basil Caipirinhas for my pre-prandial cocktails. A couple of chunks of pineapple, a few large basil leaves in chiffonade, a squeeze of agave nectar, a big squeeze of fresh lime and some Mae de Ouro (thanks Dave! ). Refreshing and a last heaving sigh of summer on what was still a pretty warm day.

[bostonapothecary]

this afternoon we drank a widows kiss but made of green chartreuse instead of the yellow... (because we are poor and can't afford the yellow at the bar...) well it is so much better with the yellow... the green reminded me of certain white peasant wines and how they have a dirty finish that gets stuck in your throat... i think its from grapes oxidizing before they are pressed... anyhow it had its moments but just didn't compare to the yellow chartruese version...

we drank more of that "prelude to a kiss" cocktail. it was well received. 86'd all of my ratafia... i need to make a big enough supply to age it properly. i did a tasting of batavia arrack van osten before and after... (i turned it into a liqueur). quite a few people did claim to see how the character of the rum showed in the liqueur. i need to find more cocktails for it...

i tasted some of a large batch of vermouth i made a couple months ago. it is becoming quite different and is taking on some sort of raisinated character. it is still very sexy. very enigmatic. but some of its bitter components are evolving. i need to drink more of it, but it makes me wonder if standard vermouths develops in the bottle and what kind of aging they see during their trip from vineyard to glass... are vintage cocktial vermouths in the future? the 04 vya sweet vermouth is very much ready to drink... some woman preferred my vermouth to dubonnet. it might not have been fare comparison because the bottle of dubbonet has been open for 6 months or so... but so isn't every bottle of dubonnet...

[TBoner]

On the Widow's Kiss, was that with Calvados or a different apple brandy? I find the throatiness (for lack of a better term) of even mid- to bottom-shelf Calvados stands up pretty well to anything. I have enjoyed the drink with both green and yellow chartreuse. Using Laird's bonded, though, it seems to want the yellow.

Your vermouth sounds interesting. You've mentioned it before. PM me if you'd like to talk more about it, as I'd be interested in hearing about your recipe (maybe a separate thread on homemade vermouth is due?).

Today, I started by looking at the Reveillon cocktail per Chuck Taggart's recipe in Imbibe. However, lacking the pear brandy, I knew I'd have to take it in a different direction. Enter the Vieux Carre. A hybrid of sorts:

1 oz. Rittenhouse bonded

1 oz. Laird's bonded

1/4 oz. homemade pimento dram

1/4 oz. Benedictine

1/4 oz. Punt e Mes

2 generous dashes homemade bitters (cardamom and cinnamon-heavy)

Garnish with cracked black cardamom pod

This is delicious. Sweet, an after-dinner drink to be sure, but the Punt e Mes provides backbone and keeps it from being cloying. Apple pie in the flavor, but with a decided smokiness from the Benedictine (and accentuated by the black cardamom). I want to have this after roasted rack of venison or perhaps some braised rabbit.

BTW, this is the first I've used my homemade pimento dram (after a month of aging).

I also bottled an Amer Picon replica (per the recipe in the same issue of Imbibe) and a batch of homemade orange bitters. And, while I'm bragging, I'll mention that I'm about to bottle a homebrewed mead (a melomel, actually: this one has honey, blackberries, dark cherries, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, and a handful of dried Zante currants). A good day.

[bostonapothecary]

i have never had mead... that sounds real serious.

the sweet vermouth is real simple. worm wood, gentian root, orris the root of the iris, galangal, pomegranite seed, small amount of coffee bean, bitter white wine until you can't stand it... embellish with the fruits of the season (probably how my technique differs)... strain, sugar to 30 something brix (because you will dilute)... cook out the alcohol and then refortify to 20 proof with grappa.

[bostonapothecary]

"mure et musc"

1.5 oz. gin (tanqueray)
.75 oz. mure (black berry shrub)
.75 oz. musc (benedictine)
2 dashes angostura
a thorough lemon twist for fresh top notes...

i thought all the flavors got equal footing. but i need to drink another to be sure... this should have enough alcohol to not seem too sweet. the shrub is 25 brix like sweet vermouth so the cocktail should seem more or less as sweet as "a de la louisiane"...

i think "mure et musc" is a vintage perfume recipe. i've never seen it but i like the concept. it translates nicely to the palate. excellant sillage...

[Moderator note: This topic continues in Drinks! (2007–2009)]

Edited April 8, 2013 by Mjx (log)