white lily

[by john]

this drink, the white lily, has two amazing virtues.

first, its ingredients are readily found at any fratty house party (hosted, presumably, by some dude who smuggled absinthe back from europe after spring break '07), and their combination in a single drink just amplifies the frattiness ('look bro, a shot each of rum, gin, triple sex [sic], and some of the green fairy. race you to the bottom!), but that blend yields a refined, fruity, crisp, and flipping tasty result.

second, like the pegu club, the eensy bit of modifier (absinthe for the lily, bitters for the pegu) transforms the drink like a necklace of pearls around an otherwise fine neckline of a black dress.

i won't forgive myself for keeping this one on my to-make list for so long.

the white lily

equal parts of:

gin

white rum

triple sec

&

a dash of absinthe

stir with ice and strain

september budget

[by john]

it's getting to be the same old story, but i managed another month under budget. to get more fine-grained about it, though, i spent roughly $90 on schmancy cocktails, $45 on wine and beer to bring to friends' parties, $30 on a new bottle, and $15 at the beer-after-work sort of places.

huh, that's a 6:3:2:1 ratio; is that a common one for drinks? some people swear by a 2:1:1 spirit:citrus:syrup portioning for sours, or a 4:3:2:1 weak:strong:sweet:sour for punches, so perhaps. well, not really. after looking through my recipes, the 6:3:2:1 really isn't in vogue. i did find one drink, however, from a weekly blogger think (drink?) tank:

1 1/2 gin

3/4 green chartreuse

1/2 orgeat

1/4 carpano antica

1 dash angostura

(call the tiny portion of bitters extra tips or something, if you want to be strict about it.) what kismet, though - it uses carpano antica vermouth, the bottle i just got. unfortunately, this one goes down in the average column, despite looking so tasty on paper. too sharp and too sweet, i'm afraid.

at least my spending was in tasty proportion...

three gimlets

[by john]

the gimlet is one of those perfect summer drinks - crisp, simple, and cold. it was the first thing resembling a cocktail that i ever mixed, in fact, three summers ago:

the adolescent gimlet

build in a rocks glass over ice:

1 large eyeball pour of vodka

1 smaller eyeball pour of rose's sweetened lime juice

rattle the glass around to mix.

ah, how far i've come. i've eschewed vodka (though a vodka gimlet is a bona-fide variant...for when too much taste gets in the way), i've started measuring ingredients for replicability, i've gotten a proper shaker, and, goodness, i've abandoned high fructose corn syrup products like rose's. now, to be a little fair, there are cocktail snobs who insist that rose's is required to make a 'real' gimlet. i'm not one of them.

a real gimlet should be something close to this:

the gimlet

1 1/2 oz gin

1 oz lime juice

1/4 oz simple syrup (can go more, to taste)

shake with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

now that is a proper drink. enjoy on the porch just before sunset, when the humidity is still hanging in the air. or just about any other time, really.

there is always room for improvement, though (nevermind a statewide dehumidifier):

the adult gimlet

1 1/2 oz gin (this version used berkshire's ethereal gin)

1 oz lime juice

2 barspoons thai basil simple syrup

1 barspoon absinthe

1 barspoon green chartreuse

shake with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

mmm, all my favorite (liquid) green things together in one glass. the different herbal flavors dance in the background while the gin, lime, and sugar play their familiar tune.

to progress, kanpai!

how to throw a cocktail bash in four easy steps

[by john]

this past weekend, i threw a two night cocktail fête. it was perhaps the closest i will come to opening a bar, with different guests every night, waves of drink orders, and gourmet bar food. (mad props to mike and andy for the crispy shredded pork awesomeness, gravlax, and bone marrow.) i had tremendous amounts of fun without drinking anything, save for a few dozen milliliters from test-straws. homing in on each guest's taste proved to be a delightful challenge. i will certainly do this again.

now, easily:

create a menu

i put up my menu last time, but gave no indication of how hard it was to make. i tested tens of drinks over the course of a week to see which would appeal to a wide sample of palates. and, in addition to the pet pet, i created two originals - a st. germain/applejack marriage (la pomme rouge), and a constantly varying - popular, too, it turned out - tequila cocktail (the ho[a]rfrost).

everything on the menu got great attention and compliments, except for the poor martinez. being the oldest drink on there, maybe it couldn't hang with this hip crowd. noted. but otherwise, i am elated for converting many guests to the wonders of sloe gin, regular gin, spicy finishes, and flamed chartreuse.

go into debt

having settled on a menu, i then biked around boston/cambridge for another week trying to gather the necessary ingredients. the word is out on rittenhouse, quality bourbon, and old monk rum, apparently, because i had to discover several new liquor stores to hunt them all down.

after all my shopping, i went (a predicted) $200 over my normal budget for the month. i calculated the cost of each drink: usually around $3, and $4 for the tipperary. i figured each guest would go through ~3 rounds, so asked for $10 donations. in the end, i recouped exactly $200, perfect!

for the nth time, i'd like to reiterate how cheap home bartending is, compared to going out.

focus on the freezer

at some point, maybe 10 days before the party, i realized with growing dread that i would need a lot of ice. like, 200 cubes per night. only the brute force solution was viable: i bought two more tovolo trays and pushed out batches each day and night into ziploc bags. by friday morning, i was satisfied with five gallon bags, four trays in reserve, and five non-cubical trays in super-reserve.

some further creative maneuvering allowed me to fit cocktail glasses in there, too, so they could chill before service. good thing we weren't serving gelato or something.

stand around

the hard parts are done. now you only need to stand in one place for three hours and shake or stir the shit out of lots of drinks. stand, and also listen, steer, cajole, charm, engage, introduce, rinse, muddle, crack, and pour.

i had not expected the rush i got from bartending. it's like being on a kitchen line, but colder and solo. some hardcore multitasking - remembering orders, mixing, chatting people up, and monitoring the glassware situation all at once, with outward aplomb. and the repeated delight on guests' faces with the first sip made it even better.

my drink is average

[by john]

if i were to judge, based purely on the reviews and musings i read in the cocktail nook of the internets, i would think that just about every drink ever drank tasted good. nobody ever says, 'meh, this drink was...okay.' it's like grade inflation for the tippling set. well, it's bothersome, so i hereby start my battle with the fine and dandy:

fine and dandy

1 1/2 oz gin

3/4 oz lemon juice

3/4 oz triple sec (cointreau)

1 dash angostura bitters

well, as advertised, it's average. the lemon juice and triple sec keep each other from making the drink too sweet or too tart, and the bitters add depth, but...it's nothing miraculous. perhaps a good drink for beginners, but nothing i'd come back to much.

tonight, i had an ordinary drink. mlia.

The cocktail: a flow-chart

[by Naveen]

"Distilled alcohols are some of the most intensely flavored foods we have." - Harold McGee



I know far less about cocktails than my fellow bloggers, but I do enjoy making flow charts. I decided it was finally time to try to make sense of the language of mixology. The whole field is due to the inability of yeast to survive in alcohol concentrations higher than about 20%. To get around this biological limitation, people figured out how to heat up a fermented liquid to extract the components with a lower boiling point (especially ethanol). There's some danger involved, since methanol, a poison, has an even lower boiling point. Longer-chain molecules can give the final product an oily consistency. However, there are numerous substances with similar boiling points that give each distilled spirit its characteristic flavor.

What about flavor components with very different boiling points than the ethanol? It turns out that ethanol is a great solvent, so adding herbs, sugars, or other flavorings gives rise to the diversity of flavored alcohols, liqueurs, and bitters that go into making a cocktail.

I realize that this diagram is far from complete, since there is much more to add about the sources for the various base alcohols (e.g. corn, wheat, potato) and the psychology of balancing flavors. Any suggestions for future visualizations are welcome.

local is the new pink

[by john]

i brought home two new bottles as part of my qualifying exam recovery program: four roses bourbon ($20 bottle!) and greylock gin, produced by a local distiller (on twitter, nice). drinking (cocktails) locally is a crazy idea unless you live in, say, kentucky or italy, but now i'm afforded that, er, additional warm and fuzzy feeling.

i decided to make a martinez with it. the martinez is a very old cocktail, with a long history better detailed in other more assiduous cocktail blogs. a precursor to the martini, but with italian vermouth. there are variations out there with french vermouth, which is what i was feeling like, so i went with cocktaildb's:

martinez (variation)

1 1/4 oz gin [greylock]
1 oz french vermouth [noilly prat]
1/4 oz maraschino liqueur
1 dash orange bitters [angostura]

stir with ice and strain into a cocktail glass. [no cherry for me, thanks.]

pretty delightful. surprisingly, the noilly prat managed to tame the greylock's botanicals on the nose. the taste: fruity, botanical, dry, and a little sweet, all with the distinctive gin backbone.

at the moment, i've run out of plymouth, so greylock will be the workhorse for a while. looking forward to it.


p.s. - it's the season for phd defenses, and some celebratory champagne got me thinking about what i'll be pouring for my own après-defense. i'd love to mix batches of an original cocktail, but that'd present a few logistical challenges. maybe champagne cocktails, then? i have some time to think about it, anyway.

taking the edge off tax day

[by john]

i just submitted my federal and massachusetts taxes. fairly painless, actually, except for the fact that i couldn't file online. (why schedule d screws everything up is beyond me. but it was worth it; i sold some old stocks and put the proceeds straight into my roth ira.)

to celebrate, i made an income tax cocktail. this is a true cocktail in the classic style: a variation on gin plus vermouth plus bitters. all very cheap ingredients (sub-$20 bottles), and versatile ones to boot. the cocktail itself is decent; a little flat of a taste profile, but balanced enough. (clearly, the only reason i'm writing about it is because of its name.) the linked recipe calls for a bit more orange juice, but since i'm not a huge fan of that citrus, i only use 1/4 oz of it. to compensate, i garnish with orange oil to bring out the hint in the drink.

income tax cocktail

1 1/2 oz gin {i use plymouth}
3/4 oz dry/french vermouth {i heart noilly prat}
3/4 oz sweet vermouth {martini and rossi for now}
1/4 oz freshly squeezed orange juice
1 dash angostura bitters

stir with ice and strain into a cocktail glass. squeeze an orange peel over top and discard. optional garnish: flamed dollar bill.

(i should give a shout out to these adorable oxo measuring cups, which get down to the 1/4 oz. now indispensable in my bar.)

cheers to that.