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

Yeah, I have a bottle of peaty scotch just for this drink (I'm not a scotch guy).

xpost fwiw I think it's just 1:1 honey and water, steeped with fresh ginger.

Yeah, I've made other syrups like honey and cinnamon, but I knew I could use those in more than one drink. But maybe I'll give it a go.

Honey-ginger you could always add to tea and stuff. My daughter uses regular simple syrup in her coffee.

I just make a honey syrup (takes 5 minutes) and muddle the ginger, but maybe I'll try making it a honey-ginger syrup next time.

What I've learned in the past few years of making bar syrups is that the old way of cooking sugar, water and your target flavor together then straining produces a relatively faint ghost of a flavor; plus sometimes a cooked [whatever] doesn't taste as good as fresh/raw. You get a more intense syrup if you combine the target flavor (ginger, rhubarb, whatever) in a blender with the amount of water you would have used otherwise, strain through cheesecloth, then sweeten the uncooked juice+water, warming it up just enough to dissolve the sugar. Doing ginger this way is especially good; you get a very intensely gingery syrup.

Might have to try that! I love penicillins so much, I try not to drink them too often so I don’t get burnt out on them, but at this point it’s been several months and I was just thinking it’s time to make some honey-ginger syrup again.

Now I wonder what effect kinetic energy (extreme blender violence) might have in creating an oleosaccharum. Usually the process is just chemical breakdown of cell walls.

I've grated raw ginger with a microplane to a similar effect. You just end up with pulp that packs a good punch.

That sounds like a good syrup approach WmC. We do something like that with mint — mint is tricky, because you have to blanch it to preserve the color or it turns brown. So we blanch it, then blend it with the simple and then strain. Gives a lovely emerald shade and obviously lots of minty flavor. With honey-ginger tho we just make honey syrup and then let a bunch of sliced ginger steep in it while it's warm.

Yeah, I have the same system with mint syrup. Frankly I want to drop the Mojito from our menu, it's a money-loser considering how much we spend on mint and how rarely it's ordered.

Yeah I feel like mojitos' moment in the spotlight has ended. I think partly for just what you're saying, lots of bars don't even make it because of having to keep mint around.

I had some blood oranges that were starting to shrivel a bit, so I juiced them and pondered what to do with the juice. The Blood and Sand is criticized a lot because OJ is a poor cocktail ingredient so I acid-adjusted the juice (mostly citric, a little malic) and give it a go. Equal parts Scotch, acid-adjusted blood OJ, Sangue Morlacco cherry liqueur (better than Heering, plus it's got blood in the name) and sweet vermouth. Tastes good, man. For now I'm calling it Sandy, Bloody Sandy.

https://scontent-ord5-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/329337067_1594041551038258_3286885234608281867_n.jpg?stp=cp6_dst-jpg&_nc_cat=104&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=730e14&_nc_ohc=PRVYkXm4AP0AX9pQwSD&_nc_ht=scontent-ord5-2.xx&oh=00_AfCtMl4wbJYNIWIGenupxfePbsJF7G3I_les-UiS7AOCCw&oe=63E7043E

Nice. I've made and liked this cocktail with mezcal, blood orange juice, cinnamon syrup, and fernet:
https://www.diffordsguide.com/cocktails/recipe/3339/sangre-dulce-cocktail

i want to try that william! i love the idea of acid-adjusted orange juice but have only done it a couple of times.

I made some acid-adjusted pineapple juice (same recipe as for OJ iirc) and the resulting paste daiquiri was amazing.

But pineapple is pretty sweet so drop back the simple a good bit.

can u explain to a noob what the deal is with the acid adjustment? is straight orange too sweet?

The sweetness isn't the problem, it's just not tart/sour enough. Add citric acid if you want the sourness profile of lemon juice with the flavor of orange, or a combination of citric and malic acid if you want a lime sourness.

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500 grams OJ or pineapple juice, 26 grams acid (16 citric and 10 malic, or just 26 citric), awww yeah

that is much more added acid, proportionally, than I would have guessed!

here's my invention:

Nobel Prize

3/4 Aqvavit
1/4 Swedish Punsch
some blood orange bitters (depending on volume)

carefully peel a lemon so that the entire peel is an unbroken, narrow strip - combine in a jar or bottle with other ingredients and let sit in fridge for at least one week, if not two.. make a whole batch. (The peel should resemble a sunny tapeworm floating in formaldehyde)
Serve chilled in small drams after dinner, or can be mixed with ginger beer into a cocktail

(I tried adding a single clove but it was too overpowering.. maybe if you left it in for only a day)

I've never tried Swedish Punsch, that sounds good.

it has kind of a toffee/butterscotch flavor, and is very sweet on its own.. that's why you dilute it. 75/25 might actually be a little too sweet, but it's nice when kept in the freezer

I have a lifetime supply because a bar manager buddy bought a case years ago and has never figured out what to do with it.. so he'll sell me a bottle from time to time
It's not super easy to find

I have a bottle of Swedish Punsch, iirc it tasted kind of ... rummy?

one of those things I've always wanted to try but never have found

I've been wary of using OJ as a mixer. Thanks.

xps yeah it is a rum liqueur, tho made with Batavia Arrack which is kind of its own thing. I feel like I've seen some around but I've never actually shopped for it.

We made some "mimosa" beer cocktails — with Miller High Life, of course — for some events a few years ago and orange juice is so weak on its own that we had to make orange syrup to boost it or you wouldn't get the flavor at all. There's a reason you only mix orange juice with vodka, anything else will override it.

kronan swedish punsch is i think the main one you can get in the usa, its base includes both batavia arrack and rum.....it's fine? idk it might be a more interesting historical artifact than actual cocktail ingredient.

I looked at my state's ABC website and Kronan is available, but as a special order. There's a new-to-me liquor store in Tupelo that I haven't been able to explore fully, but on quick glance they had a ton of stuff from the special order list, maybe they have punsch.

jaymc, didn't want to ignore your post, I'm tempted to make a bit of cinnamon syrup to try that.

Had a big party, made a bunch of negroni variants with Aperol, lillet and gin (plus grapefruit wedge). People loved it.

Further play with acid-adjusted pineapple -- I made some with a lemon profile instead of lime and tried a whiskey sour, a drink I've always been 'meh' about after my early enthusiasm wore off. Best whiskey sour ever, one I could definitely see prying myself away from rum drinks to order. (2 oz. Rittenhouse Rye, 1 oz. acid-adjusted pineapple, .75 oz. 1:1 simple syrup, 1 egg white; dry shake, shake with ice, double strain, garnish with a few drops of Ango)

so for the lemon profile it's just citric right? and citric/malic is lime?

I would like to try this w/ a pisco sour

xp yep

Do it! It's so easy, and the results are a lot of fun.

love that pineapple whiskey sour idea!!

confession time folks. when I make old fashioneds I use good bourbon. the $50 a bottle stuff people say you should never mix. like whatever, it tastes great with Squirt too. I don't even make them right lol

I used to mix drinks with Weller 12, back when it was $25 a bottle and everywhere. How things have changed.

I think old fashioneds are a fine use of good booze — they have a minimal amount of sugar and bitters, mostly what you're tasting is the base spirit. A different thing than dumping it into a whiskey sour e.g. (I love whiskey sours, but Four Roses is perfectly fine for that.)

Tho yeah, if you're putting Squirt in, that's not an old fashioned. I don't know what it is. But enjoy!

Wisconsin is famous for fussing with the Old Fashioned, hence the Brandy Old Fashioned, with this apt detail:

In Wisconsin, the default way to make a Brandy Old Fashioned is with a splash of Sprite or 7-up, making it “sweet.”

But, don’t think you have to stop there.

You can also make it with sour mix or a sour soda (often Squirt), making it “sour.” You can get fancy, and make it “press,” with a combination of 7-up and seltzer. Or, you can skip all the fanciness and simply add seltzer.

Oh lord, no. That way lies TGIF and the whole fruit-cup-in-a-glass approach.

Fun bit about the "old fashioned," it is as far as anyone knows the single oldest cocktail in the U.S. Also the original "cocktail," when that word first shows up around the beginning of the 1800s, it refers specifically to a mixture of whiskey, sugar and some small amount of bitters. Exactly why it was called a cocktail is disputed, there are (as common with drink history) various theories and claims. But the reason the "old fashioned" is called the old fashioned is that as the word cocktail came to mean mixed drinks in general, people who wanted the O.G. would ask for an "old fashioned cocktail" to specify which one they wanted. Or so the story goes!

Anyway, I think old fashioneds are unfairly maligned but it's mostly because of the ghastly overstuffed concoctions they became during the '70s/'80s Dark Ages. A classic old fashioned — whiskey, a touch of sweet (we use 1/4 oz 2:1 simple, which gives it a little viscosity), and dashes of orange and angostura bitters, stirred with ice — is really good. As are the rum and mezcal variants (with good rum you can dial back the sweet to very little, and with mezcal I like chocolate bitters in place of the ango).

But a properly made old fashioned is a fine showcase for a good liquor.

Per @DavidWondrich, this 1880 Chi Trib article is the earliest-known reference to the Old-Fashioned https://t.co/28d9zidxAX #cocktailsummit pic.twitter.com/eClsPwu3wA

— John M. Cunningham (@jmcunning) April 2, 2017

Also per David Wondrich:

“If you had an old horse you were trying to sell, you would put some ginger up its butt, and it would cock its tail up and be frisky. That was known as 'cock-tail.' It comes from that. It became this morning thing. Something to cock your tail up, like an eye-opener. I'm almost positive that's where it's from."

Louisville claims it too, they both have published recipes from the early 1880s. But the drink was long in circulation by then, it just took a while to move from "an old-fashioned cocktail" as a bar order to "an Old Fashioned."

And yeah that's one of the cocktail theories. There are others: https://tastecocktails.com/word-cocktail-come/

Yeah, I trust Wondrich, though! If he thinks that's the true origin, I believe him. He's well aware of the other claims.

The Old Fashioned is really taking off where I work. We are going through Ango at probably 3x or 4x the rate from when we first opened.

Lately I am trying not to lose my cool at customers who want straws in drinks served up, and even more WTF, a straw in their whiskey sour. Not even getting into the amount of single-use plastic I stick in a landfill every shift, it's just "oh ok, so you don't actually want to taste your drink, you leather-tongued eejit..."

I made some celery syrup a couple of weeks ago because I thought it would play interestingly with gin and lemon. It's pretty weird but not bad, just a matter of getting the specs right.

I was going to say, is the old-fashioned really unfairly maligned? Feel like it's been the default cocktail-bar order for a certain type of guy for at least a decade.

xpost Yeah you can kind of pick the version you want, it's just that in drinks history there's rarely really a single point of origin — it's usually something that has developed over time and then either somebody slaps a name on it or is the first one to put it on a bar menu or in a cocktail book. e.g. Jerry Thomas certainly didn't invent all the drinks in his 1862 book, but it's the first printed reference point for a lot of them.

In the 20th century there are more instances where you can specifically identify an origin, because of better documentation. And sometimes, like with the Moscow Mule, the story is well established and was known even at the time of its introduction.

And WmC, interesting to hear that about the OF. I order them out some myself, tho usually only at places that have good mezcal for a Oaxacan variation.