imbibliotech

[imbibliotech]

Bitter ashes of defeat

Cocktail experiment. Given the ingredients, I couldn't not call it this.

25 ml Antica Formula

25 ml Cynar

10ml Laphroaig

salt (dissolved in warm water before adding) "to taste"

Serve on the rocks.

This is really tasty. It's a bit much before salting, but the salt nicely balances it out by suppressing a bit of the bitterness and accenting the tastes-like-a-bonfire smokiness of the Laphroaig. I think I over-salted it a bit, but definitely a fan even with the excess salt.

[imbibliotech]

I don't have a name for this but it's tasty:

50ml Cocchi Vermouth di Torino

25ml FEW Rye Whiskey

1 barspoon campari

1/2 barspoon bitter truth pimento dram

The campari nicely offsets the spiciness of the rye and the dram, and seems to be a nice bridge between the two. This was weirdly off balance until the addition of the campari but afterwards is a very nice drink.

[imbibliotech]

The optimal Martini

I'm quite a fan of the Martini. No surprise really. I like gin, I like vermouth. I pretty much like any combination thereof.

There's a huge variety of different Martinis. They vary by type of vermouth, type of gin, quantities, type of bitters. Different ones are to different tastes, and different people prefer different styles. It's all subjective whether one is better than another.

Except this one. This one is the best Martini recipe. You should make this one.

4 parts No. 3 gin

1 part cocchi americano

2 dashes bitter truth celery bitters

Garnish with a twist of grapefruit (a twist of lemon + some grapefruit bitters is also very acceptable)

Stirred, not shaken, obviously. What are we, monsters?

[imbibliotech]

Winning at the game of gin

In my other life I do complicated things with computers. As such, I'm currently attending the Software Practice Advancement conference.

Tonight, as you do at tech conferences, we engaged in a blind gin taste testing. The game was as follows: There were 5 gins, poured into plastic shot glasses. You had to guess which was which and fill in a form. The correct answers would win, of course, gin.

The gins were as follows:

Whitley Neill

Caurunn

Gordon's

Zuidam Oude Genever

Portobello Road no 171

Needless to say, I was amongst the winners.

How, you may ask, did I so keenly deduce the answer amongst the nearly indistinguishably subtle difference of flavours?

Well. A magician never reveals his secrets.

But I'm not a magician. I'm just a software developer who masquerades as a gin fiend. So I'm totally OK with revealing my secrets.

So here's how I figured it out.

The Genever was yellow. Really, honestly, that was all there was to it. There were four clear drinks and one yellow one. It couldn't be anything other than the genever.

Gordons and Caurunn? You can cover a distinctively shaped bottle with brown paper, but the bottle is still distinctively shaped. The Gordon's came out of a Gordon's shaped bottle. The Caurunn came out of a Caurunn shaped bottle.

The Whitley Neill? It tasted like the bottle of Whitley Neill I bought on Saturday.

The Portobello Road? It tasted like being smacked in the face with a juniper bush.

Truly, the secret mysteries of the magincian are mysterious and secret.

The prize was a bottle of portobello road. Except I'm already owed one of those when I finally get around to using my ticket to the Ginstitute, so I ceded that to Seb, the only other person to get it all right, and instead claimed a nearly full bottle of Caurunn instead.

By the way, the genever in question is really good. If there were any left and I'd been able to weedle my way into it I would have totally claimed that instead. I have a bottle of Bols' aged genever, which is nice, but this was exceptional. I drank a lot of it. I'm currently hoping not to miss tomorrow's sesions as a result, because they look rather interesting.

[imbibliotech]

This Cocktail Scares Me

Yes, that's the name of the cocktail.

First, let me state up front: This cocktail is not the result of me just throwing things together at random. It's not the result of me desperately trying to rescue something that wasn't quite working. This is something I put together with malice aforethought because I thought it might actually be good. This is how you can tell that I am wrong in the head.

Without further ado, let me tell you what goes in a This Cocktail Scares Me.

25ml Cocchi Americano

20ml Campari

5ml Bitter Truth Pimento Dram

About 2ml death water

A couple dashes bitter truth spiced chocolate bitters

Let me tell you about the death water.

At one point my brother, Jamie, and I were living together. We got into a thing of experimenting with making spice infused vodkas. They were about halfway between bitters and a spirit. Some of them were good (the cinnamon one went very quickly), some of them were interesting (the cardamom one got used in a lot of drinks, but I was never really convinced it worked), some of them were just a bit weird (one friend loved the black pepper vodka to a slightly scary degree. The rest of us weren't sure what to think).

Then there was the death water.

The death water was supposed to just be a chilli vodka. A bit brutal, but nothing too painful. Put some dried chillis in the vodka (I think we used absolut), take them out after a few days, voila chilli vodka. There were just two problems. The first was the very simple one that we used quite a lot of chilli. I think it was somewhere in the region of 50-100g of fairly spicy dried red chillis for a 500ml bottle of vodka. The second was that about a month later we said "Huh. Are there supposed to still be chillis in there?" It's definitely not the spiciest chilli vodka in the world. I've had a drop of a Naga chilli vodka which set my mouth on fire. This is not that. But it's definitely heading quite far in that direction, and 2ml of it is more than enough to give this drink some serious fire. What's the drink like? You know... it's actually kinda good. As I discovered with the FEW rye whiskey, the Cocchi and Campari mix appears to work rather well with spiciness - it provides a nice strong base layer on which you can build spices. Sweet, but very able to stand up to other flavours. The spiciness of the pimento dram adds an interesting level of cinammon and clove (yes I know it's allspice, but allspice tastes like cinammon and clove) to it without quite dominating and the chocolate bitters provide a nice bridge between the two to balance it out. The chilli vodka then adds heat at the end which really nicely finishes the whole thing off. It's definitely a curious drink, and it's not going to be to everyone's taste, but I think it might be a bit of a winner.

[imbibliotech]

I had a really nice Boulevardier (part of the Negroni metacocktail family) made with the Buffalo Trace white dog at the Climpsons's Arch recently. Although I'm normally of the opinion that Cynar makes a vastly superior Negroni than Campari, the bitterness of the Campari really nicely balanced the spiciness of the white dog and produced a truly excellent drink.

It occurred to me I own something which was similar to the white dog: the FEW Spirits rye. It's lovely, but overpoweringly spicy in most cocktails. I've tried it in a Little Italy (aka  "Cynar-Rye Negroni") before, but even then it managed to intimidate the Cynar into submission. Given the experience of the white dog, I was hopeful that the Campari might be able to stand up to it.

Turns out, yes!

Recipe:

25ml FEW Rye whiskey

20ml Campari

25ml Cocchi Americano (I was low on sweet vermouth, and the Cocchi is pretty sweet)

I normally find Campari Negronis a little on the bitter side, but the spiciness of the rye managed to offset that really nicely. Given the normally overwhelming nature of the two ingredients the result was remarkably mild.  Mild but extremely pleasant.

[imbibliotech]

Coffee, tequila and cynar: A combination that works surprisingly well

This is roughly based on the cocktail South of No North, which I've never had, but I was looking for something which combined both coffee and alcohol and it sounded interesting.

50ml freshly brewed darkish roast nicaraguan coffee (it's Monmouth's Tres Pueblos), brewed short in an aeropress

25ml Centinello Anejo Tequila

15ml Cynar

4 dashes bitter truth spiced chocolate bitters

1/2 tsp dark molasses sugar

I built this in glass: Pour the coffee into the glass, stir in the sugar until it's dissolved, add the other ingredients.

I was originally going to ice it, but I liked it lukewarm so much I decided not to.

What does it taste like? It tastes like beautifully spiced coffee. The primary flavours are coffee and the woodiness of the aged tequila, but the chocolate and the herbal flavours from the cynar accent it well.

Seriously, try this one. It's really good.

[imbibliotech]

Supercherry tasting with the LCS

Supercherry are a company who import Italian food and spirits to the UK. Last night I got to try some of their products with the London Cocktail Society.

We tried three products: Their Visciolata cherry wine, their Aquavite del Cardinale, and their pistachio cream liqueur.

The cherry wine was rich and fruity, with quite a lovely almond finish. While it was clearly a dessert wine, and was correspondingly quite sweet, it stopped well short of being excessively so to me. It had a richness that was possibly heading slightly in the direction of a port. We only tried it in small quantities, and I feel like a full wine glass of it would be overwhelming, but as a small drink it was delicious. There was also a cocktail on the menu using it (which I didn't try), and I think it would work well with mixing - you could almost use it as a sweet vermouth substitute. I'm definitely going to be buying a bottle of this to experiment with (or just drink straight!).

The aquavite was... interesting. Rob described as "Like a grappa but more heteronormative" (excuse me, "feminine"), which is about right. It was clearly a strong spirit, but it was much softer and more drinkable than you'd expect, with a sensation like the very gentlest of whiskies. The flavour was mostly the almonds of the cherry stones with just a hint of the fruity sweetness. It was a little reminiscent of the core flavour of sloe gin, but with none of the tartness or sugar.

My reservation about the aquavite is simply that I don't know what to do with it. There were no cocktails on the menu using it, though apparently they do exist, and I can't imagine myself being in a situation where I wanted to drink neat spirits and this was what I reached for. Given some recipes to use it in I'd buy it in a heartbeat, but I think first I need to find a bar with some cocktails that use it.

The pistachio cream liqueur... my feelings about are much more mixed. I had a cocktail with it in - basically a flip with this, lime and vanilla vodka - which was very pleasant indeed. More of a dessert than what I normally look for in a cocktail (and it vanished correspondingly quickly), but still very good - like pistachio ice cream in cocktail form. On it's own however the liqueur was far too cloying. This isn't a problem per se - many ingredients don't work on their own - but it's compounded by the fact that it's a milk based liqueur with a low ABV so isn't going to last. So for my part I think if I really wanted pistachio cream based cocktails I would just... make pistachio cream. There's no complicated hard to replicate distillation process going on here - it's basically just pistachios, sugar, milk and vodka. On the other hand, if you're less inclined to make pistachio cream from scratch and think you'll get through a bottle of this at an acceptable rate, it is a very nice ingredient and I recommend it too. It's apparently also very good as a sauce on ice cream, so there's that.

All in all, a good evening. An interesting company with some very good products, and at least one "excuse me I'm going to go buy this now" product.

[imbibliotech]

Tonight's Negroni variation

25ml Plantation 8 year old Jamaican rum

25ml Cynar

25ml Cocchi Americano

This was tasty and interesting. It was very recognisably a Negroni despite having no ingredients in common with one (though it still fit into the general theme of a spirit, a bitter and a fortified wine). The flavour of the rum came through very strongly, especially as the drink cooled, which made for a pleasant variation on the normal experience.

[imbibliotech]

You know who else put too much vermouth in their Martini

Supposedly Winston Churchill's instructions for making a Martini were "you should observe the vermouth from across the room while making it". I suspect this is apocryphal, but nevertheless the term "Churchill Martini" seems to get colloquially used for what is basically a cocktail glass full of cold gin.

That's not what I'm drinking tonight.

Having previously observed that Cocchi Americano is delicious, it seemed a shame to give it such a minor role in the cocktail, so I thought I'd try a Martini which was much heavier on it that was traditional. So basically we have the opposite of a Churchill Martini. Let's call it a, well, Godwin's Martini.

50ml Gin Mare

25ml Cocchi Americano

2 dashes of Bitter Truth celery bitters

Just to complete the sacrilege (by which I mean "Because I'm lazy, drinking on my own and they're easier to wash up") I served it in a tumbler rather than in a cocktail glass (not on the rocks though. That would be a step too far).

This is actually pretty good.

Between the Gin Mare and the celery bitters this drink is almost savoury on the initial sip. You get the celery and rosemary flavours quite strongly up front, then as you swallow you get more of the sweetness from the Cocchi, then the bitterness you'd expect from the Cocchi on the swallow with the celery flavours joining back in on the party. 

I don't think this is how I'll be drinking my Martinis in general, but it does nicely demonstrate that you can go heavier on the vermouth (ok, Cocchi isn't a vermouth, but same idea)  and still get a very pleasant drink. In future I'd probably dial down the cocchi to 1 part in 4 rather than 1 in 3, but I'll definitely happily keep it more pronounced than the more standard 1 in 5 or 1 in 6. 

[imbibliotech]

On The Negroni

Last year, Felix of the Manhattans Project wrote an article also entitled On The Negroni. It's a very good article. You should read it. Also you should respect Felix's opinion more than mine because he's way better at this stuff than I am.

But I'm still about to disagree with him completely on one point.

In particular, I think the following section of his article is wrong:

No. Not yet. GO AND MAKE ANOTHER TEN (HUNDRED) NEGRONIS. (seriously, get to know what’s going on with that, it’ll put you in good stead). 

Don't get me wrong. The classic Negroni is a great drink. It could be a slightly better drink (for example I entirely agree with Felix's decision to use slightly less Campari).

But one of the great virtues with the Negroni is that it's almost impossible to screw up - you can use pretty much any variation on the standard ingredients, and you'll get something pretty good.

Don't have a good vermouth? No worries. Pretty much any vermouth will do! Only have Gordons gin? No problem! Have Aperol instead of Campari? Oh well!

You just take three parts of roughly the right spirits, mix them together and serve over ice with a garnish if you're feeling fancy and you're going to get a good drink. Some variations will be much better than others, but it's truly very difficult to make a bad Negroni if you have the recipe right. 

This may not seem that great a virtue if your goal is to drink excellent drinks, but it's really very helpful if you don't drink beer and often end up in bars where their strength is more their beer than their cocktails. There will often be a decent selection of spirits behind the bar but not much knowledge of how to use them, and the negroni is your friend in this case - you ask for one, if they look confused you put on a helpful smile, point at bottles and deliver the really very simple instructions.

(Timing is of course important here. If you need to give instructions and the bar is really busy, don't do that. It's a bit of an asshole move)

But another great advantage of the Negroni that comes from its difficulty to screw up is that it is a great test bed for experimentation with new things. It's a template drink.

The template is basically as follows:

1 part spirit

1 part bitter herbal liqueur

1 part vermouth, probably red and sweet

The nice thing is, that if you find a combination that works well you can pretty much sub out any one of these three ingredients for another in that category and you'll continue to have something that works well. It might not work as well of course (not all Negroni variations are created equal), but then you'll have learned something, and have had a relatively pleasant experience doing so. It's like science but tasty.

Why might you want to do this when the classic Negroni is such a good drink? Well, partly because some of the drinks you discover by doing this are really fucking good. Felix has a list of his favourite Negroni variations, and frankly some of them just blow the Negroni out of the water in my book. Your mileage may of course vary, and you might find that actually the classic Negroni is exactly what you want, but it seems foolish not to try to find out.

Another reason is that it's great for test bedding new spirits. My friend Ryan makes an old fashioned with just about every spirit he tries, because it's a great showcase for how it mixes with bitters, which is basically the ur-cocktail. The Negroni works very well as a more complex version of this because it showcases how well it mixes with other spirits and what notes it adds to a drink when it's not at the forefront.

But neither of those are the real reason I'm in favour of doing this, which gets us down to the point on which I most strongly disagree with Felix's instructions.

Surprisingly it's not really about alcohol. Or maybe not surprisingly, because if were really about alcohol I would probably be deferring to Felix's expertise.

What it's actually about is a different philosophy of learning.

If you make a thousand Negronis then you will be very drunk.

Err. Wait. Let's start that again.

If you make a thousand Negronis then you will have learned a lot about Negronis. You'll have tried it with different vermouths, different gins, maybe different Amaros. You'll know a lot about how those three classes of flavours interact. 

This is depth-first learning. You've picked a subject to specialize in, and you've learned everything you can about it, and you can now do that area incredibly well.

If you make a thousand Negroni variations, you'll have explored a lot more of the space of available spirits. You won't know any of the combinations nearly as in depth as you did by focusing more narrowly, but you'll have got a very broad ranging view of what works and what doesn't, and how different flavours of spirits combine with eachother, which is probably closer to what you actually need.

This is breadth first learning. You've acquired a wide general knowledge which you can now build upon in most situations you come across.

It's also possible to combine the two. Once you've made your thousand variations, you can pick your favourite and make a thousand of those. You'll learn just as much as you did with the original Negroni plan, but you'll do it in the corner of the space that you actually prefer.

There's a Bruce Lee quote about this which often gets bandied around in discussions about different learning styles:

“I fear not the man who has practised 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who had practised one kick 10,000 times.” 

But I can't help but feel that both of those guys would get their ass kicked by the person who practised 5000 kicks once, picked the one that worked best for their build and capabilities, then practised that one 5000 times. Them? They're fucking scary.

On that thought I'll leave you. Enjoy your Negronis, whatever they may be.

[imbibliotech]

The Kina Cocktail

This is a classic cocktail I'd only encountered recently, when I was trying to figure out what to do with a newly acquired bottle of Cocchi Americano. This has rapidly become a new favourite.

Here's how I make it:

25ml Cocchi Americano

25ml Spiced English Vermouth

25ml FEW Navy Strength Gin

I've also tried it with 50ml (the more traditional ratio) of Adnams First Rate gin, but I think using a smaller amount of navy strength gin instead works better. Both combinations are really tasty.

In many ways it's a bit like a negroni - it shares two ingredients in common, and the cocchi and the spiced english vermouth both have a slight bitter kick to them, but because they're much milder and more complex than campari the result is a really interesting drink where you get quite a range of herbal and spicy flavours from all three ingredients balancing each other very nicely.

[imbibliotech]

I decided to have another try at the rye manhattan I made yesterday with the proportions I thought might work better:

25ml FEW rye whiskey

25ml Sacred English spiced vermouth

5 drops Bitter Truth old time aromatic bitters

Yeah, this didn't really work at all. It was much better with the more classic proportions.

The initial sip was watery. On the swallow you got more of the rye, with the sweetness of the vermouth tempering it a bit.

It was improved by layering some extra bitters on top, but the result was merely decent.

I think this vermouth probably doesn't work with this rye. Or maybe I'm just not very good at Manhattans, I don't know.

[imbibliotech]

A rye manhattan

Experimenting with the new vermouth I decided to make another drink. This time a rye manhattan

50ml FEW rye whiskey

25ml Sacred English spiced vermouth

5 dashes Bitter Truth old time aromatic bitters

Conclusion: Very tasty, but the vermouth was lost. The FEW has a bit too much flavour for it to stand up to in the normal Manhattan proportions. I would be interested to try this half rye, half vermouth. 

[imbibliotech]

Martinez with Sacred English vermouth

Made 3 of these tonight

25ml Sacred English spiced vermouth

25ml Martin Miller's gin

15ml Luxardo Maraschino Liqueur

1 dash coffee bitters

2 dashes Bitter Truth old time aromatic bitters

This was exceptionally good. I'd go as far as to say this was the best martinez I've ever made.

The coffee bitters didn't add much (I used them as an experiment then added the old time aromatic bitters afterwards).

The Sacred vermouth is really very good. I don't think this bottle is going to last long at all. However, the real thing that made this was that the bitter truth aromatic bitters work incredibly well in the martinez and I think are going to be my default bitters for the martinez in future.

[imbibliotech]

More experimenting with calvados and sloe brandy

Calvados is a spirit I don't know very well. I've had calvados that I like quite a lot, but unfortunately I own two bottles of calvados that I don't like very much (it may be that it's a nice calvados and that my tastes here are peculiar. I don't know, but I suspect not). As I'd like to reduce the number of bottles on my shelves, this gives me an incentive to try and figure out ways to use it up.

So I was looking into calvados cocktails and came across the Corpse Reviver #1. I've had a lot of Corpse Reviver #2s, but never tried the #1 (though had been warned off). 

Unfortunately the only brandy I own other than the calvados is a very nice armagnac that I don't want to be rid of and don't especially want to mix. I do however have a bottle of sloe brandy.

I figured there was something I could do here... It wouldn't be the first time I've combined the two. Previously here and here.

30ml Pierre Magloire calvados

15ml Sloe Motion sloe brandy

15ml Punt E Mes

Stirred with ice, served in a cocktail glass. 

I reversed the order of the ingredients in this from the corpse reviver because I figured that that much sloe brandy would be overpowering. I think this might have been a mistake. In the initial version of this the calvados was really the predominant flavour and, given that I don't like the calvados in question that much, the result was not overly pleasant. However, a splash more sloe brandy greatly improved the drink and resulted in something quite pleasant. 

Fundamentally the result is still something that tastes like calvados, but the addition of the sloe brandy and punt e mes results in something a bit fruitier and with some interesting spiced notes that I think works quite well. The proportions need work (maybe half and half sloe and calvados), and even if those were fixed I'd probably not be drinking these that regularly, but it's pretty enjoyable and I'd definitely not say no to drinking it again.

[imbibliotech]

Tonight's cocktail:

20ml Longmorn 12 year old Speyside Single Malt.

10ml Punt E Mes

1tsp Bitter Truth Pimento Dram

Served in a rocks glass over ice

The Longmorn is quite a mild Speyside. It's pleasant but not all that interesting, and I have several scotches I'd much rather drink neat, so I'm looking for ways to use it in mixing and thought I'd experiment. 

This experiment actually worked pretty well. The punt e mes and scotch formed a very nice base drink, and the pimento dram then added a bit of excitement. It's a bit reminiscent of the little hook from Manhattans Project (a hybrid of the red hook and the little Italy - rye, punt e mes, maraschino and cynar), but probably only in the sense that it's whiskey, punt e mes and spices. 

If possible I'd cut back on the pimento dram a little bit - its flavour works very well with the others in this drink but even in small quantities it really does dominate. Maybe using it as a wash for the glass?