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

totally. i'm ok w/having a few bourbon & a few scotches & a few ryes on hand. drink them on their own fairly often, so can pinpoint subtle differences, but not sure putting this rum or that rum w/a few juices is really gonna make that much diff. i dunno. not enough experience w/them yet.

i was pretty hesitant to even get into rum or tiki drinks until recently. i thought they were totally corny, sweet drinks until i went to Smuggler's Cove. amazing amazing place. they have a club where you try each of their >200 rums and you get into some club and get a fez or something. i talked to a guy at the bar who was halfway through last time i was there. definitely some aspie qualities :-/

good tiki drinks shouldn't have any juices imo

The Tonga Hut in North Hollywood (oldest extant tiki bar in LA iirc) has a similar deal - I think if you drink all 100 or whatever of their cocktails you get discounts for the rest of your life + your name on a plaque in the bar

and the range of rums is pretty vast. any random scotch, bourbon and rye seem a lot closer together to me than a flavorless light rum, a really spicy dark rum, and something like a cachaca. although maybe the latter shouldn't be considered a rum.

my attempts at tiki drinks have been a mixed bag, at best. part of the problem is sort of a selection bias thing--like, i'm not going to intentionally fuck up the selection of rums in one of berry's recipes so that i can "appreciate" the correct recipe later. that makes it hard to figure out why so many different rums are called for, beyond an abstract understanding that they do in fact taste different.

that said, it's frustrating that the drinks that are really fiddly (calling for a dash of ango and a tsp of grenadine and 6 drops of pernod and exactly 6 oz. of crushed ice) don't taste more complex. maybe i'm just doing things wrong, idk. maybe i just don't like tiki drinks all that much! or maybe the original mai tai recipe is just impossible to top.

good tiki drinks shouldn't have any juices imo

― the wheelie king (wk), Thursday, August 18, 2011 12:01 AM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

huh?

wow, I'm drunk. that didnt' make sense did it?

lol not really!

is there a tiki drink without any fruit juices? haha

Tiki drinks should just be five kinds of rum in a glass served at room temp imo

I just hate places that think a mai tai has pineapple or orange juice in it

xp as someone who has been creating a spreadsheet of the perishable ingredients in berry's recipes, the answer is not really except for like 3 coffee/dairy drinks.

I got into drinking pernod because of that book. I picked one of the recipes out and bought a bottle of pernod, not realizing it only called for a dash. So then I just ended up drinking the pernod.

So I just attempted a drink that Stevie D likes called the Elder Sage, which is made by a vegan restaurant in Philly. I tried:

1.5 oz Hendricks gin
.75 oz St Germain
Dash grapefruit bitters
1 sage leaf, muddled

Stir with ice

Not bad, but would use less St G next time methinks

that said, it's frustrating that the drinks that are really fiddly (calling for a dash of ango and a tsp of grenadine and 6 drops of pernod and exactly 6 oz. of crushed ice) don't taste more complex. maybe i'm just doing things wrong, idk. maybe i just don't like tiki drinks all that much! or maybe the original mai tai recipe is just impossible to top.

― call all destroyer, Thursday, 18 August 2011 05:07 (3 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^^ have been wondering this too

and the range of rums is pretty vast. any random scotch, bourbon and rye seem a lot closer together to me than a flavorless light rum, a really spicy dark rum, and something like a cachaca. although maybe the latter shouldn't be considered a rum.

I really think this is an individual palate thing - like, if you drink rums more often than I do, you pick up the differences I don't, and vice versa with whiskey. It's hard for me not to go further and say that whiskey is just "objectively" more diverse - I mean, single-malt Scotch and bourbon don't even have any ingredients in common, vs all rum being derived from sugarcane.

(Including cachaca as a rum definitely expands the distance, though.)

(What we need are some rum-like liquors made from other sugars - coconut syrup, maple syrup, pomegranate molasses, honey, date sugar - but distilled and diluted to the same level of cleanness as rum, not 170 proof firewaters.)

This weekend's cocktails are mostly going to be geared towards using up the last few fingerlimes in my fridge and the last cubes of frozen strawberry juice in my freezer - probably something Pimm's cup-ish and probably something with my barrel-aged gimlet - but I also have a four pack of Fentiman's tonic water to check out, found at a local farmstand of all places. (The supermarket carries the Fentiman's sodas, but not the tonic.)

Or milk sugar. I have a vodka made from milk sugar, but what if you treated it like a rum instead of a vodka, and left as much flavor in as possible?

So I just attempted a drink that Stevie D likes called the Elder Sage, which is made by a vegan restaurant in Philly. I tried:

1.5 oz Hendricks gin
.75 oz St Germain
Dash grapefruit bitters
1 sage leaf, muddled

Stir with ice

Not bad, but would use less St G next time methinks

― clams cassingle (donna rouge), Thursday, August 18, 2011 12:28 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah i would approach this sort of like the alaska cocktail which is a good starting point for gin/liqueuer/bitters. more like 2 oz/half an ounce/2 dashes of bitters. i like st. g but it will just obliterate other flavors sometimes.

i totally agree w/ all of your claims about tiki drinks not being complex enough no matter how many things you add. i have found that i like tiki drinks w/bitters or absinthe or allspice dram added to them. more than just sweet/sour. i've been on the hunt for rum drinks that are pretty low in juice. here's one i saw that looked interesting, but i need to get punt e mes (is that swapable for sweet vermouth in other drinks? just ran out) and smith & cross.

Ashtray Heart
1 oz Smith & Cross Jamaican rum
1 oz dry vermouth
1 oz Punt e Mes vermouth

stir with ice and pour into mezcal coated glass

that's from beta cocktails! i think i posted about it upthread.

you can swap punt e mes for sweet vermouth most of the time but it's got a more pronounced flavor than most s.v.'s so you may want to adjust your base spirit up and your punt e mes down a bit in stuff like manhattans.

Crazy, I just read a bit more about that cocktail and the guy that created it tends bar 2 blocks from my house. I should go try one.

just found this website. super stoked to start exploring it. can search by name or ingredient. background on tons of liquors. can make lists of your faves. can add your own drinks. before this, i just added bookmarks to delicious. and searching on google, oftentimes w/o the greatest luck.

http://www.kindredcocktails.com/

i remade the elder sage tonight with the proportions you suggested, CAD - much better

made this last night. it's supposed to smell/taste like celery. i didn't totally get it, but the wife thought it might. either which way, it was pretty good.

Celery Sour

1 1⁄4 oz Gin
1 oz St. Germain
3⁄4 oz Lemon juice
1⁄4 oz Fernet Branca
1⁄4 oz Pastis, Herbsaint
2 ds Aromatic Bitters
1 Lemon peel (Garnish)

well i was in search of a drink before going out to dinner and lo and behold this popped up. maybe a little celery in the aroma but this is just too much pastis for me--would make again and reduce that shit to like a teaspoon.

this drink cheats in that it actually uses celery bitters (though i think it uncheats by using pineapple juice in this context) and is really good:

celeriac:

2 ounces London dry gin
¾ ounce pineapple juice
¾ ounce freshly squeezed lemon juice
½ ounce simple syrup
4 dashes Bitter Truth celery bitters
1 egg white

Ya, I went a lil easy on the herbsaint. Kinda reminded me of a more complex corpse reviver #2. I liked the floral notes of the st germain and the weirdness of the fernet.

I also tried someone's riff on a sazerac with equal parts herbsaint, peychaud's, rye & simple and it was pretty pointless. All I tasted was the herbsaint. Glad I made it only using 1/4oz of each.

tonight i made

Root of All Evil
2 oz Bourbon
3⁄4 oz Orange liqueur, Grand Marnier
1⁄2 oz Fernet Branca (i'd cut this to 1/4 tbh)
1⁄2 oz Maraschino Liqueur
2 ds Orange bitters, Regans' orange bitters
1 twst Orange peel (as garnish)

this is really good. herbal, aperitif style cocktail, even though it's pretty spirit heavy. this was the "his" cocktail to the next cocktail's "hers". fernet sorta took over and made everything pretty minty, but i def could see drinking this again w/less fernet.

Bourbon Crusta
2 oz Bourbon
1⁄2 oz Triple sec, Cointreau
1⁄2 oz Maraschino Liqueur
1⁄2 oz Lemon juice
2 ds Orange bitters

nice, sweet, agreeable, "girly" cocktail. in a good way. (i tend not to choose these, but i know what mrs jaxon is into)

Punky Monkey
3 pieces Cardamom (pods, muddled)
1 oz Añejo rum
1 oz Bourbon
1⁄2 oz simple syrup
1⁄2 oz Pineapple juice
1⁄2 oz Lemon juice
1 ds Angostura bitters
1 ds Peychaud's Bitters

and after i said that about the last drink, this one is weird and savory and really great and she's loving it.

anyone got recipes/pointers re sangria? late summer and i should really be making this.

i haven't made this but i would trust this guy to have a good basic recipe: http://www.jeffreymorgenthaler.com/2010/sangria/

I found this white sangria to be very good:

1 750 ml bottle of white wine
1 medium orange sliced into wedges
1 lemon sliced into wedges
1 fresh pineapple sliced and diced to your preference (may use canned pineapple, substitute two 15.5 oz cans of crushed or sliced pineapple)
1/4 cup of sugar
4 cups of ginger ale
3 shots of coconut rum
sprig of mint (optional)

Preparation:
Pour wine into a large pitcher and squeeze the juice wedges from the lemon and orange into the white wine. Toss in the fruit wedges (leaving out seeds if possible) and pineapple then add sugar. Chill overnight. Add ginger ale, rum and ice just before serving. If you'd like to serve right away, use chilled white wine and serve over lots of ice. However, remember that the best Sangrias are chilled around 24 hours in the frig. - allowing the flavors to really marinate into each other.

And I use a Spanish white from Rene Barbier called Mediteranean White, which I find for $4 - $5 dollars (Cost Plus/World Market).

Had a great time at jamie boudreau's new bar, canon last night.

First: roulette!
Pick your spirit, he does the rest.

I ended up with an old pal (rye, dry vermouth, campari) - perfectlt suited to my taste.

Second round: went for 'the vermouth experiment': a flight of rye manhattans made with dolin, punt e mes, and one other I for got that starts with a c.

I think I am now ready to buy my own bottle of dolin.

Camparo Antica

sorry, Carpano Antica

Punt e Mes is one of my favorite things, period. I kind of marvel at the fact that I drink it so less than I used to - that's just a testament to the fortified wine revival of the last ~2 years, so that I'm not picking between PeM and any-other-vermouth anymore, I've got Cocchi Americano and Bonal hanging around too. It's like the way I no longer drink Campari a few times a week, because I have other options that hit the same bullseye now.

Nope. I wanna say cinca or something with a 'ch' sound...

Not quite a vermouth, but maybe Barolo Chinato? Only other one I can think of is Perucchi but I've never seen that in the US.

cinzano??

Made a moderately interesting cocktail of two parts Punt e Mes and two parts Jaegermeister to one part creme de menthe yesterday. Herbal but not overpoweringly so and nicely cooling.

Maybe chinato - will investigate further when I'm back home.

just finished packing to head out to sf for a week which called for a stiff manhattan--2.25 rye/.75 punt e mes + ango.

it's cocktail week here next week. http://sfcocktailweek.com/

but generally that just means really expensive covers, long lines and annoyingness. like i said to a friend recently: i feel the same way about cocktail week as i do about black history month: why not just celebrate year round?

oh weird--we're going to bourbon and branch on monday but that's at this point the only cocktailian component of our trip.

and i agree w/you--it's hard enough to get into the handful of good cocktail bars around here on normal days.

a little googling of bottle labels (we actually had him show us the bottle) and i'm 90% sure it was barolo chinato.
xpost

yessss

tehresa, Adam B3rnbach (bar manager at Pr00f) came up with this drink when he was at Pilar and it's an instant classic:

Darkside

Ingredients:

Ice
2 1/2 ounces gin, preferably Plymouth brand
1 ounce Barolo Chinato, preferably Marcarini brand
3 dashes Peychaud bitters
Twist of lime peel
1 whole star anise (optional)
Directions:

Fill a mixing glass two-thirds full with ice, then add the gin, Barolo Chinato and bitters. Stir vigorously for 30 seconds, then strain into a cocktail (martini) glass. Twist the lime peel over the drink, then drop it in, along with the star anise, if desired.

Sounds awesome

do they still have it at pilar? Or proof? haven't been to either in ages!

I think it might be on the menu at proof - even if not there's a ton of great stuff on their list right now.