in the 2k10 i am learning to make cocktails. this is my mixology thread

i agree about the simple. i don't think i used that much, mostly because the wife can't deal w/citrus juices for fear of acid reflux. but she didn't even have any of the drink, so it prob made the drink better anyways.

i used my good sipping rum. ron zacapa 23. i've got a few other bottles around that aren't that good prob but i've used in drinks and they've been ok. whaler's original dark and sailor jerry spiced.

i really want to buy that rum! need to clear some shelf space first tho

i know this is a really old post, but i felt like commenting

ok so i made the negroni this past weekend as CAD notated it at the top of the thread and thought it tasted horrid when using equal parts of the three liquors but a lot better with less campari/more vermouth. campari is maybe too bitter for my taste but now i have most of a bottle of it left over i'd like to try it in other things
― im armond white btw (donna rouge), Wednesday, March 10, 2010 10:09 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i've made this w/equal parts gin, vermouth and campari and wasn't the biggest fan, but with a ratio of 4 gin, 2 vermouth, 1 campari, it's pretty excellent.

probably said this elsewhere, but i didn't like rum until i tried that ron zacapa

yah i think rum is much harder to "use well" than gin or rye but when you do it's magnificent

I think the as-seen-on-television rums are also much worse, for anything other than a rum and Coke or Dark and Stormy (don't sue me, Gosling), than the gins of similar or lesser price points, too. You can make a perfectly good cocktail with Beefeater, Boodles, even Seagrams, but I can't imagine ever buying Bacardi or Captain Morgan again.

yup--and it's funny because on the balance good rum can prob be had more cheaply than many other "good spirits" (esp. when we get into aged stuff) but a few mediocre or worse brands dominate the market.

re: Ramazzotti discussion upthread, it definitely has cola flavors and it's my go-to amaro. A few years ago I started drinking Ramazzotti and sodas over ice as a summer drink and it's so great and simple, just a super delicious adult cola.

xpost yeah its crazy what a lock bacardi has on the market, i mean over here you can get havana club everywhere + yet still most ppl reach for bacardi.

and jaxon you should try steadily bumping up the campari level in that negroni, i bet you'll be on board w/ equal parts soon.

Ultimately the liquor industry is always going to be heavily driven by what 20 year olds use to get their dates drunk, and kids like to draw the Bacardi logo on their notebooks in math class. They also like pirates.

You also see a lot of general meatheadedness - there's a lot of real scorn out there for the idea that a drink is worth enjoying. "It's just supposed to get you drunk," after all. Bacardi's like Bud - safe to drink when giving a shit would mean you're a pussy.

then compare that to ppl spending a lot of money on premium vodka

Continuing on the Do Not Drink This theme, Do Not Drink ri(1) or (ri)1 or whatever that shit is called, because the committee of mooks who came up with that one do not deserve your dollar. It's made more annoying by the fact that it's a Beam product and the long-rumored Old Overholt Bonded is still nowhere to be seen.

Rye is a troubled category.

xp; the quadruple-distilled premium vodka nonsense is so frustrating! I have a Facebook friend who is as fanatical about trying different premium vodkas as I am about citrus fruit, and I want to grab him and shake him and tell him the emperor has no clothes.

I'm going to make a million dollars selling cornstarch-and-water as quadruple-distilled pure premium ketchup.

rye is getting better! rittenhouse distribution is slowly creeping up--apparently heaven hill is mashing rye once a month instead of four times a year to keep up with demand. hopefully buffalo trace is doing the same for sazerac.

hopefully that'll make it cheaper over here! it seems like such a reasonably priced spirit over in the US, but here it costs abt as much as a good single malt

oh and i just got some battavia arrack in the mail from a friend for my birthday - any ideas of what to make? it seems to be another thing thats made by those alpenz ppl

We need more ryes like Rittenhouse. I like a lot of the newer ones - I really like Redemption - and I like that there are more >90% ryes now. But the price point for some of them is nuts. It's one thing to introduce new expensive bourbons, because we have plenty of bourbons to choose from - or gins or rums or etc. But there are only ... what, four? mid-price ryes anywhere, right? Old Overholt, Jim Beam Rye, Wild Turkey rye, and Rittenhouse. Five if the baby Sazerac counts, and maybe it should.

We need more choices in good mixing stuff, not $40-60 bottles I'll feel guilty diluting.

But yeah, it's still a better situation than 5 years ago, or even 2 years ago. I just felt like ri was a step in the wrong direction - higher price, less rye character.

xp - I've never had Batavia Arrack myself! It's been on my wishlist for a while.

also pikesville

I've never seen that! Huh, from Maryland. Maybe they'll send me some.

oh and i just got some battavia arrack in the mail from a friend for my birthday - any ideas of what to make? it seems to be another thing thats made by those alpenz ppl

― just sayin, Monday, April 11, 2011 10:41 AM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark

i have a very cool arrack sour recipe--i will try to remember to post it when i'm home tonight.

fyi pikesville is also produced by heaven hill (in kentucky) with the same mashbill as rittenhouse. i believe it's one year younger.

xpost thx dude

That's probably why I haven't seen it - not much of the Heaven Hill stuff is carried here. I'm surprised I didn't see it when I lived in Indiana, though, but that was right on the cusp of this whole cocktail revival, and maybe it just wasn't carried at my local store.

yeah i've never seen pikesville in a store up here--some bars seem to get it but that's it.

Batavia arrack is pretty terrible unless mixed but there are some good classic punch recipes with it

what's considered mid range rye? less than $40?

a step above that, i got High West Rendezvous and it's pretty great. i do hide it from the guests tho, ha

most ryes seem to be either 15-30 or 50+. i guess i don't know how much redemption is. the high west stuff is all pretty pricey iirc. baby saz can be over 30 at times and it's not really worth that.

Less than $25, I'd say, but I guess it depends in part on where you live. Old Overholt, Wild Turkey, Jim Beam, and Rittenhouse are all under $25 - and are all in about the same price range as other-spirit brands like Maker's Mark, Knob Creek, Bulleit, Plymouth, Bombay/Sapphire, Pampero, Barbancourt ... over $40 and you're in the same price range as the Thomas Handy releases and the Papa Saz.

But there is a weird middle ground too - I think Redemption is $30, Templeton and baby Saz and one or two Michters releases are all more expensive than those but cheaper than the Handys. Maybe that should be the "mid-price" range, but it would feel weird referring to the Rittenhouse group as "cheap ryes" - basically it's a small enough spirit category that there aren't any cheap ones unless you count Old Overholt.

I just realized I forgot to include Bulleit Rye, which might be mid-range too, but Bulleit is already such a high-rye bourbon that, I don't know, I haven't gotten very excited at the prospect of this one.

You basically can't buy a bad rye unless you get confused and buy Canadian. It's the opposite of rum.

oh yeah, forgot michter's. i wonder where that stuff is coming from these days.

the following are all made by lawrenceburg distillers int'l in indiana, for those who like to be up on such things (age difference noted, too lazy to find proof difference):

bulleit rye (4 years)
templeton (5 years)
redemption (2 years)
the young rye in the high west bottlings (2 years)

funny that, in such a small spirit category, going to the source (the distillery) makes it seem that much smaller!

Yeah, I wonder how much of that is because there seems to be even less of a market for white ryes than for white corn whiskeys - a new bourbon distillery can sell its white dog for a while to have a little revenue while waiting for its release to be ready, but it seems much more rare for a distiller to do this with rye. I was thinking Deaths Door did it, but just doublechecked, and no, the bottle I have is malted wheat.

o ya, i'd mentioned in the brown vs white liquor thread that i'd recently tried a white rye and thought it was nasty. i'm having trouble finding out what kind it is though

I love white whiskey in general, but don't think I've had a rye one (and realize that despite the media hoopla, I'm in the minority in liking any of them). It's got to be less sweet than the corn, I'd guess?

Oh, here's a bottle of Buffalo Trace white dog that's corn/rye/malted barley, but the 125 proof ends up being its most notable feature, so I have no idea what white-rye-specific characteristics I might pick up on it.

i knew i read recently about rye white dog, and it's coming from our friends at heaven hill:

http://www.drinkhacker.com/2011/04/04/review-heaven-hill-trybox-series-new-make-white-whiskeys/

basically it's white evan williams and white rittenhouse. interesting--you should see if they'll send you a sample!

Shit, I'll have to email them. I've been sitting on a multibrand white whiskey review for a year because all those articles on white whiskey came out, and I just sort of felt like ... I'd be contributing to the hype, without adding anything to the discussion. I mean, even though *I* like it, it's not the next big thing - a lot of the people ordering white Manhattans and whatnot are clearly just trying it out once, it's not becoming a regular order for them.

(I infused some of the BT with huckleberries. Blue Dog!)

The idea here was to do something gimlet-like with kabosu juice -

1.5 oz gin
1 oz kabosu juice
.75 oz simple
.5 oz douglas fir eau de vie

Definitely good, especially given how warm the afternoon is turning.

holy crap @ douglas fir eau de vie

http://www.clearcreekdistillery.com/other.html

It's so good but I'm really torn at whether I'll buy more when I run out. It's not that flexible a cocktail ingredient (the best is I think called a Shiver, with Campari and grapefruit juice), but if you drink it alone, it goes that much quicker, and it's $50/375ml. At that price I could get Chartreuse VEP.

Haus Alpenz imports a pine liqueur that must be somewhat similar. They are truly doing the lord's work.

The stone pine stuff - Zirbenz or something like that. It's a different kind of pine flavor, and sweeter, but yeah, each is definitely the thing most like the other.

clear creek is so cool--i love their pear eau de vie

yo just sayin:

1.5 oz. batavia arrack
.75 oz. lemon juice
.5 oz. Maraschino
.5 oz. simple syrup
.5 oz. egg white
2 dashes Peychaud's bitters
lemon peel for garnish

follow all standard egg drink protocol

Ha, right after getting on Bacardi's case, I heard about this: http://talesblog.com/2011/04/12/tales-of-the-cocktail%C2%AE-announces-official-united-states-bartenders-guild-bacardi%C2%AE-pina-colada-competition/

I know Tales has to pay the bills, but a Bacardi-sponsored Pina Colada contest, at the same event that's previously seen the return of Creme de Violette and Creme Yvette, the release of Legendre Herbsaint, etc? It's a couple weeks late for April Fools.

i think plain white bacardi still had its defenders among cocktailians. maybe they're few and far between, but they're out there.

i wonder what these pina coladas are going to look like--wouldn't be surprised if a lot of them included some aged rum along with bacardi.

btw bill do you have thoughts on:

creme yvette vs.
haus alpenz creme de violette vs.
parfait amour

esp. for use in aviations? i need to suck it up and get one of these because they're vital to that drink, but i've heard conflicting things about all of them.

There will probably be some caramelized pineapple infusions + coconut water and so on.

I haven't picked up Parfait Amour yet because I feel like I don't need it AND creme de violette, and haven't finished the creme de violette. I started drinking Aviations when they were still made just with maraschino, because violette wasn't available yet - the first time I had a Blue Moon, it was with violette from an ancient bottle I bought on eBay.

Parfait Amour also sounds like it has more going on than just the violet, the way Creme Yvette does. And Creme Yvette vs Creme de Violette is weird, because on the one hand I think I like the first more, but on the other, if I could only have one, I think I'd get the Violette. The Yvette is more *interesting*, I guess is what it comes down to - but as limited as they both are, the Yvette is probably even more limited because of those extra flavors. It's delicious, it's just not nearly as flexible as the other Cooper product, St Germain, and it costs an arm and a leg.

I would probably go through both of them faster if I drank less whiskey and less genever - they don't seem to work with either of those spirits, or if they do, they require some other ingredient bridging the gap, which I don't know about. I tried a touch of violette in a whiskey sour and it just didn't work - the combination of flowers and malt isn't a successful one, I think.

The sensible answer here is probably "buy whichever one you can get the cheapest." They're all well-made products - I'm sure that's true for the P.A. - so if they sell minis of any of them, you can probably get by with that. Barring a mini, I think the violette is more than $10 cheaper than the Yvette, and it's not worth paying $10 for some added orange peel and berries. Okay Jesus, I just checked DrinkupNY and they sell Yvette for more than twice what they sell violette for - that is nuts.

Whoa - an equal parts Smith & Cross / Angostura drink: http://cocktailvirgin.blogspot.com/2011/04/mentirita.html

Smith & Cross works really well with Bonal in equal parts, so it makes sense. I'm out of Ango or I'd be on this.

topped with coke! that sounds fun. i'll make if i remember to buy coke.

this was my favorite drink to make for a while

Gin Basil Smash
One bunch of fresh basil, save one leaf for garnish
1/2 of a lemon
2/3 ounce of simple syrup (sweeten to taste)
3 ounces of gin

Stuff a bunch of basil & half of a lemon cut into four pieces into a shaker. Add simple syrup and muddle the lemon and the basil, smashing the ingredients and squeezing all of the juice from the the lemon. Shake vigorously. Strain into a rocks glass filled with ice. Garnish with a basil leaf.