Make way for the seaway...

I was bumbling around CocktailDB the other night, trying to find uses for dry vermouth. I picked up a second bottle for Thanksgiving, thinking that what I had on hand wouldn't be enough. Ha. Silly me. I had MORE than enough for my friends at Thanksgiving, and so I've been trying to use up some of this stuff...

Well, I fumbled my way through the database, and I landed on this one...at first glance it seemed like another Manhattan variant, but this one has 3 parts vermouth to 2 parts whiskey. Canadian, of course, given the name. I tried it and liked it, and am now featuring it here.

The St. Lawrence Cocktail

2 1/4 oz dry vermouth
1 1/2 oz Canadian Club whiskey
3/4 oz Grand Marnier
dash of Angostura bitters

shake well with ice, strain into cocktail glass.

What's interesting in this drink is how the whiskey plays backup to the vermouth...it's still well balanced, it's just not what you expect. The orange flavors of the Grand Marnier keep it from veering too far to the dry side of things, though, and make for a nicely tuned flavor. Give it a go...no passport required.

If this drink is Irish, then Sean Connery's a Spaniard...

As promised, I'm bringing you a drink this time that's about as un-Irish as you can get, despite it's name. You see, this one is named, I suspect, for it's color, not it's cultural awareness. You'll see why when you run down the list of ingredients...gin, Cointreau, and green curaçao. Yes, green curaçao. Remember, it comes in many colors, but only one flavor. If you don't have green curaçao and don't feel like tracking down a bottle of it, just use triple-sec (which, if you'll recall, is "white curaçao") and add a couple drops of green food dye to it. That way, you can mix up your own:

Hibernian Special

1 1/2 oz London Dry Gin
1 1/2 oz Cointreau
1 1/2 oz green curaçao (or your homemade equivalent)
splash of lemon juice

shake all with ice, strain into cocktail glass. toast in the direction of the Auld Sod, or possibly the Caribbean.

Yes, as Data said about Aldebaran Whiskey in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, "It is...it is green." I suspect that's what made this drink's creator think of Ireland. Perhaps he was homesick, perhaps he was just really quite drunk, who knows. That being said, it's not bad tasting...it's very orangey, but you get the botanicals from the gin and the sourness from the lemon keeping it out of cough-syrup territory. Worth a shot. But then please wash it down with something authentically Irish...Jamesons or Guinness or something. Even a wee dram of poitín, if you've a mind...

Oh, ye think ye're a true Scotsman, do ye?

Yes, it's been a bit since our last drink. Sorry, all.

I'll make up for it by writing this one in a Scottish dialect. Set your brains to Sean Connery mode.

Thish drink ish shimple enough to make, but it'sh shtill quite tashteh...it'sh got four very shimple ingredientsh, and while none of them are Shcottish, I enjoy it jusht the shame.

The Old Chomlean Cocktail

1 1/2 oz Canadian Club whishkeh
3/4 oz Cointreau
3/4 oz Grand Marnier
3/4 oz lemon juicshe

Shake all with ische and shtrain into your chilled cocktail glassh.

OK, enough with the Connery, before he starts telling off-color jokes about Alex Trebek's mother. I have no idea why I opted for that, apart from perhaps the word "Chomleans" having a Connery-esque chewy feel in the mouth when you say it. Anyway, this is a simple drink, but a good one. You don't need or want an expensive whiskey in it, just one strong enough to hold up to the various orange-y liqueurs and the lemon juice. In some ways, it's similar to a whiskey sour, but it's got enough different from it that it's worth a taste.

Next time, a drink with a true Irish name that contains absolutely nothing Irish.

Yes, I know, it's been a week. I am ashamed.

Sorry, everyone...this past week has just been not at all conducive to photographing and waxing rhapsodic about drinks...I had my first real challenge of the new job come up (I didn't suck at it, so that's encouraging!) and rehearsals for my current show have gotten a little more frequent, since we're opening in two weeks.

That said, I made it inside the "one week" threshold I set a couple weeks back...that's gotta count for something, right?

Tonight's libation is another one with a silly name...however, it's venerable, dating back at least to the 1930 publication of the Savoy Cocktail Book. While it sounds like something a little old lady would sip in a swanky hotel lobby, unless granny's packing a couple pounds of pig iron in her purse, it's definitely not. In fact, it's far better than the name promises.

Mah-Jongg Cocktail

2 oz London dry gin
1/2 oz Cointreau or triple sec or white curaçao
1/2 oz rum (classically, it uses Bacardi, but I like a nice amber Bermuda rum in it for a hint of color)
dash of Bittermens Grapefruit bitters

combine all over ice and stir until well-mixed. Strain into cocktail glass.

In some ways, with the three very different liquors mixed, this could be viewed as a progenitor to the Long Island Iced Tea...however, this is a hell of a lot better than that hoary old chestnut. The citrus and the gin blend just as well as citrus and rum do...making the combination of the three an unusual but complimentary thing. I like throwing a little grapefruit bitters in there just to pull the sweetness back a little bit, but that's just my take. It's quite a nice drink, and one that I plan to have again sometime soon.

As an aside, this is drink number 99 to appear on my blog. I had been hoping and seeking out a very special ingredient for drink number 100, and by gum, I've succeeded. So next time, on a Very Special™ "Urbane, Not Cosmopolitan," you'll see a fun new ingredient that I've never featured before! Woo hoo! Exciting stuff!

Science Fiction Double Feature

"Wait! I can explain!"

I picked up a small bottle of a new ingredient today, and decided to play around with it a little bit tonight. I'm frankly kind of disappointed in it, but since it was a little bottle (not a 50ml sample, but nowhere near full size) I'm not out too much money, only about $4.50 or so. I will survive.

The ingredient is kirsch, also known as kirschwasser. It's a cherry brandy of sorts...it's not sweet, as other fruit brandies frequently are. Truth be told, it tastes remarkably similar to it's cousin, maraschino liqueur...it's got a sort of funk that stems, in part from being fermented (or macerated, in the case of maraschino) with the skins and stones. Kirsch is typically made from Morello cherries, rather than the eponymous Maraska cherries of maraschino, but they're remarkably similar in taste...the big difference is that the kirsch is a lot drier, not being a liqueur.

Anyway, I mixed it with two drinks tonight both of which sound like they could be from 1950s B-grade sci-fi movies; one drink fared far better than the other...let's get to them, shall we?

Blackthorn Cocktail

1 1/2 oz gin
1/2 oz Dubonnet rouge
1/2 oz kirsch

stir all in a mixing glass with ice and strain into chilled cocktail glass.

Eh. It's not a fantastic drink...it's still orders of magnitude better than what you'd find at your local fraternity dive bar, but it really strikes me as one dimensional. The kirsch and the Dubonnet run together (which surprises me), and it's left as being ginny with some unnameable-but-rather-sweet fruit flavor floating in the background.

Our second drink proved to be rather better than this one.

Cat's Eye Cocktail

1 1/2 oz gin
1/2 oz dry vermouth
1/4 oz Cointreau
1/4 oz kirsch
dash lemon juice

stir all with ice in a mixing glass, strain into chilled cocktail glass.

This one is not nearly as sweet or boring...the lemon juice and dry vermouth keeps it more balanced, and the tiny bit of orange you get from the Cointreau works very well with the cherry and almond notes the kirsch brings to the drink.

Appropriately, it's a short drink...

Tonight I feature a new ingredient for the blog, one that'd read about for months on end, but until lately, have not tried. It's called Dubonnet, and like vermouth, it's a fortified wine. Unlike vermouth, however, it contains quinine, which makes it a quinquina. Among the fortifying spices and flavorings in Dubonnet Rouge, the red variety that's by far the most common, are chamomile, cinnamon, orange zest, and unroasted coffee beans. (I must tip my hat to Tim, of the previously-mentioned Ginger Bitters blog for turning me on to the existence of this drink in the first place, as well as his helpful information on Dubonnet. If all bars were like the New Zealand bar he manages, the drinking scene would be vastly improved. As ever, Cheers, Tim!)

So, this drink is sort of a kissing cousin to the Fifth Avenue Variation I mixed up last month; gin based, has a little Fernet Branca backing up the fortified wine, but instead of dry vermouth, we've got a sweeter Dubonnet taking up that role, and some citrus is added with the inclusion of orange curaçao (I used a good triple-sec, a.k.a. white curaçao, but Cointreau or Grand Marnier could work, as well.) Furthermore, this drink is first and foremost a gin drink...there's four times as much gin as the other ingredients combined. Despite that, there's still a remarkable complexity to it... Here's how it's made:

The Napoleon Cocktail

60 ml (about 2 ounces) London dry gin
5 ml (about 1 teaspoon) Dubonnet rouge
5 ml (about 1 teaspoon) Fernet Branca
5 ml (about 1 teaspoon) orange curaçao/triple-sec/Cointreau/Grand Marnier

Combine all ingredients with ice, stir well to combine, and strain into a chilled cocktail glass or coupe.

Thanks to the properties of the Fernet and the Dubonnet, this is really an ideal after-dinner drink, for calming down the stomach and kicking the digestion of the meal into gear, a traditional digestif/digestivo. As I said it's a remarkably complex drink, but a very enjoyable one. Dubonnet is remarkably inexpensive, so go get a bottle and start playing around with it.

I love drinks with goofy names.

Sometimes, when paging through your drink guides and cocktail recipes, you stumble across a drink with a name so incongruous that you just have to make it. This is one of those drinks.

Sloppy Joe's Special

1 oz good gold rum (I used Bacardi 8, but if you have some Cuban rum secreted away that fell off a truck, use that)
1 oz dry vermouth (Noilly Prat & Cie is my brand)
juice of 1 lime
2 bar spoons grenadine
2 bar spoons curaçao (I swapped in triple sec)

Stir all with cracked ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

I have no idea where the name of the drink originated. My source is a handy little cocktail app for my iPod touch that has collected dozens of drinks from various sources. This one was published in "The Gentleman's Companion: Being an Exotic Drinking Book, or Around the World with Jigger, Beaker and Flask" published in 1946. I won't link to it on Amazon because pretty much the only copies available are used and approaching $200.

In terms of flavor, the lime juice really tends to overwhelm this, and I didn't use much, only about 3/4 oz. I'd scale it down to 1/2 oz lime juice, just so you can taste the rum a bit more. Other than that, it's sort of a modified Sidecar with rum and vermouth. There's some subtleties there, but until you get rid of some of the lime, you'll never taste them.

EDITED on 8/1/09 to add: I've got a lead on where the name comes from...apparently in Prohibition-era Cuba, there was a bar called Sloppy Joe's. More info can be found here.

Come let's mix where Rockefellers walk with sticks or um-ber-ellers in their mitts...

And I'm back! The show wrapped on Sunday, we struck the set immediately afterwards, and the head of the theatre group and the director said they got nothing but raves from the audience. My bruises are healing (it was a rather physical show for me, I was stuffed under couches and fell off balconies) and now, I'm ready to get back to the blog! I do feel, however, that it benefitted from not trying to get something posted every night (or at least that *I* benefitted from not having to get something posted every night) so I'm going to be trying the "posting several times a week" thing for a while longer. Don't worry, I haven't lost interest in this thing, I'm just trying to pace myself, like any good drunk.

I obtained, late last week, a copy of the new, Revised & Expanded Deluxe (Soopa-Genius!) Edition of Ted Haigh's invaluable Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails: From the Alamagoozlum to the Zombie and Beyond - 100 Rediscovered Recipes and the Stories Behind Them and I nearly wept unashamedly when I opened it and began to read. This book is pretty much my entire cocktail philosophy encapsulated between two covers: good spirits aren't cheap, but good drinks don't need a lot of them. The trend is towards goldfish-bowl sized vessels of cheap booze in garish colors, but classically, the drinks were small (usually no more than 4 oz) and well crafted. If you drink to savor rather than to get verschnickered, I truly believe you'll get a lot more out of your liquor-buying dollar.

And on the subject of dollars, that provides me with a nice segue to tonight's drink, the Park Avenue cocktail. The very name conjures up notions of gold-plated sidewalks, gem-encrusted parking meters, and small yappy-type dogs being walked by portly matrons. Happily, the ingredients for this cocktail are pretty easily come by.

Park Avenue Cocktail

2 oz gin
3/4 oz pineapple juice
3/4 oz sweet vermouth
2 teaspoons orange curaçao

Shake all with ice, strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

It's a strangely tropical drink, for being named after a NYC locale...Ted Haigh suggests it was switched at birth with the Palm Beach cocktail (gin, sweet vermouth and grapefruit juice, rather more bracing than balmy in character). That said, it's still a damn fine drink, and one that I'd like to see more of, rather than the "Blue BahamaMama MojitoTiniRita™", or whatever they're calling the latest liquor-laden travesty they're trying to foist upon an unsuspecting public.