And there’s a hand my trusty friend! And give us a hand o’ thine!

And we’ll take a right good-will draught,
for auld lang syne.

For our New Year's Eve post, I'm of course using champagne, but I'm doing a little something different with it. Not a lot of non-lushes realize that champagne makes a great mixer. You get the effervescence of club soda with the flavor of wine, plus hell, anytime the champagne gets broken out, it's a party in and of itself.

This drink has many many stories as to it's origin, but it seems most likely that it originated just after World War I. Some say it was first made with cognac, which I can see, because cognac and champagne would have a lot of similar flavors going on, both being grape-based spirits, but my version, which could perhaps be considered the British version (as I am an unrepentant Anglophile), is made with gin. Named after the rapid-firing artillery piece that proved so useful to the French in WW I (contrary to popular belief in the US, the French are not the cheese-eating surrender monkeys they're so frequently portrayed as), I present to you, the last drink on this blog for 2009...

The French 75 Cocktail

1 oz gin
3/4 oz lemon juice
2 bar spoons simple syrup
champagne to top

Shake the first three ingredients with ice and strain into a small champagne flute. Add champagne to top. Garnish, if desired, with a lemon peel spiral and/or maraschino cherry.

Rather than the single-minded sweetness that so often plagues champagne, this really is a complex drink. The gin adds a little crispness that's most welcome here, and the lemon juice and small amount of sugar syrup also tweak the flavor profile of your champagne, making for a really interesting drink. The only problem is that it's waaaaay too easy to down two or three of these in rapid succession. And then, well, the eponymous machine gun may feel like it's opening fire on your sobriety...but hell, it's New Year's Eve!

Thanks for sticking with me so far, dear readers. I hope to keep things lively and interesting for you well into 2010 and beyond.

Lone Pine Mall serves this drink in their food court.

I was nosing around some of my cocktail guides, looking at the pages that I'd dogeared for future mixing and consumption, and stumbled across this old beauty. It's another one from the great old Savoy Cocktail Book, and it's called:

The Lone Tree Cooler

juice of 1/4 lemon
juice of an orange
1/2 oz dry vermouth
1 oz London dry gin
1 oz grenadine
club soda to top

shake all but club soda with ice, strain into tumbler, top up with soda.

This is really a nifty drink...the flavor is so much more than the sum of it's parts. I find it really hard to describe, but it's so simple to make, perhaps you should try it for yourself and see what you think? Yes? Hmm?

Yes.

It's Halloween! This calls for a spooky-looking drink!

Ah yes, Halloween. A time when bartenders bust out their Bailey's, their corn syrup laden grenadine, and some sort of schnapps or another and make a shot that looks like brains. Lovely. Doesn't taste like anything you'd care to drink any other time, but it's got the panache you need for a good Halloween drink.

How about I give you something that looks appropriate and tastes good too? Here's an oldie-but-goodie from the 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book:

Albemarle Fizz

juice of 1/2 lemon (about 3/4 oz or so)
1/4 oz simple syrup
1 1/2 oz gin
seltzer
2 bar spoons raspberry syrup

Shake lemon juice, syrup and gin with ice, strain into glass. Top with seltzer and add two bar spoons raspberry syrup.

There you go. It's a modified gin sour, but with the added benefit of a little fizz, and the lovely, somewhat bloody look of the more dense raspberry syrup settling in the bottom of the glass. Tip tip hurrah, boils and ghouls!

I wouldn't have guessed this would be as tasty as it is...

You're all familiar with gin and tonics and vodk tonics, I'm sure. Ever heard of a rum tonic? You wouldn't expect it to work, but it does, and it's as spectacular as it is simple. You just need to make sure you've got a good rum, as you're gonna taste a lot of it.

Rum Tonic

2 oz good amber rum (I used Mount Gay Eclipse)
tonic water to top
slice of lemon
grapefruit or orange bitters

build over ice in a tumbler.

See? Super simple, but it's incredibly good. I was doubtful at first...I couldn't imagine the slightly bitter tonic water finding a match with the rum, but it all ends up being smoothly tempered, and quite tasty. I like using Bittermens Grapefruit bitters here, just to add some extra tartness to the lemon, but orange bitters would work too, I think. Give it a try...I believe you'll be pleasantly surprised.

In which I attempt to not get sued...

Tonight's drink is one where I get to use a name that I've been itching to use for quite some time...and one that I've been afraid of. You see, I'm naming it after a much beloved fictional character in a tremendously popular series of books. Now, the author and publishers have shown wonderful restraint in not going after, say, writers of fan-fiction who use their characters names, perhaps because there's no profit to be made there. I should point out that I really don't make any profit on this blog, either (current Google AdSense total for the first 5 months of operation: $1.35, plus one generous donation from a reader). So in that spirit, and recognizing that there's alcohol in the books as well, I hope that they'll be lenient about my introduction of a ginger-laced rum punch named after the most amusing ginger-headed clan I know of. I give you:

Weasley Rum Punch

3/4 oz berry shrub base
1 1/2 oz ginger liqueur (or ginger syrup if you want it to be a little less boozy)
3/4 oz black strap or other molasses-y rum
1 1/2 oz aged rum
2 oz seltzer
scant 1/8 oz homemade spice extract
2 dashes Bittermens Grapefruit bitters

Combine first three ingredients plus spice extract in a shaker full of ice, shaking well to combine. In an tall-ish glass, add two cubes of ice, dashing grapefruit bitters over the ice before pouring in rum mixture and topping with club soda.

It works as a Weasley because of both the "ginger" connotation and the color...it's pretty much a fiery red. I really like this drink's flavor, as it's an unusual take on the classic Planters Punch formula of 1 of sour, 2 of sweet, 3 of strong and 4 of weak, plus spice. The vinegar base of the shrub really works in a very subtle way, and the heat of the ginger plays with everything as well, as shrubs were traditionally topped with ginger beer. I like how the spices play with the smoky molasses nature of the rum, and the brightness of the grapefruit bitters really makes it all sing.

Now, as long as I don't get sued out of existence, I'll be happy! Ms Rowling, if you read this, please enjoy the drink as much as I enjoyed your books. (And please don't sue me!)

In which I create a drink and name it for a celebrity.

So, on the heels of the "RumDood's Revenge" of the other night, I decided to create another cocktail, but name it after a real celebrity this time. (Sorry, Matt...you're only famous in our mixology circles.) And I figured, who better to name it after than a person who's interest in classic drinks is quite well known. We've already seen David Wondrich name a drink for a broadcaster famous for "truthiness," so let's name one after another newscaster. Ladles and Gentlemints, I give you...

The Maddow Sling

1 oz Plymouth Gin
1/2 oz ginger liqueur (mine's homemade, but Domaine de Canton will work, too)
1/2 oz double-strength Earl Grey Tea
1/4 oz Cherry Heering
1/4 oz 2:1 simple syrup
1/8 teaspoon Fernet Branca
dash orange bitters
2 oz seltzer, to top

Build all except soda over ice in an Old-Fashioned glass. Stir to combine, then top with seltzer.

It's really a nice, subtle drink. Not one-dimensional, lots of flavors in there, but all working together. Ginger naturally pairs with bergamot and tea quite well, so that's the Earl Grey right there, the Cherry Heering brightens the whole thing, and that tiny bit of Fernet Branca adds a little more complexity. I quite like it, and if she's reading this, I hope Rachel Maddow likes it, too.

Admit it, after last night's "Colbert Report," you knew this was coming...

I saw it, it was made by one of my cocktail heroes, so I've gotta make it and try it out. I made one substitution out of necessity, but it's still awesome. I give you the drunk custom-made for Stephen Colbert...

The Colbert Bash

1 1/2 oz Plymouth gin
1 oz Cherry Heering
1/4 oz lemon juice (I used lime because I had it on hand, still works)
generous splash of soda water/seltzer

Build first three ingredients over ice in a tall glass, top with seltzer, and gently swizzle to combine.

David Wondrich made this up for Stephen last night on The Colbert Report and it's damned tasty. Here's the footage of Wondrich's appearance:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Colbert Bump Cocktail - David Wondrich
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Tasers

The drink is damned tasty...well balanced, tart but not overly so, light and slightly fizzy from the seltzer, and as red as the blood of the bears that Stephen Colbert has personally wrestled into submission and then skinned. If this catches on, and it should, I'll be a happy man.

Here's a quick one for those sultry summer evenings...

Do you have a bottle of limoncello? If yes, fantastic; stick it in your freezer. If no, go out and get one. They're cheap, and some even omit the yellow food dye (including, remarkably, Danny DeVito's Limoncello, which also has a fantastically goofy theme song...just click on the lemon on the main page under the question "How does a Sorrento lemon sound?"). Limoncello's a liqueur made from the zest of lemons, not the juice, so it's got a very strong lemon flavor and smell, but not a lot of bitterness. It also blends beautifully with gin, so here's what you do...

Gin-Lemon Cooler

2 oz limoncello
1 oz gin
2 oz seltzer

in a small glass, gently mix the gin and limoncello. Top up with the seltzer.

Simple as that. It works best if everything is well-chilled beforehand, so stash that gin and limoncello in your freezer. If you want it a little more sour, feel free to add the juice of a quarter of a lemon, or so. Either way, if your AC breaks some summer evening when it's still 79ºF and humid as a steam room outside, this can help beat the heat, even if just for a little while.

Here's another booze-free one! Y'know, for the kids!

So I'd been meaning to make this one for a while, since I didn't want my Tahitian limeade to go to waste. So I rummaged through my DRY Soda flavors and got an idea. I looked at the Lemongrass flavor, and I thought, "Hmmm...lemongrass...Thai food...coconut, lime, yes, that'd work nicely!" And went and made this:

Thai Fizz

2 1/2 oz Tahitian limeade (remember, it's 3 to 5 parts coconut water to 1 part lime juice)
7 oz Lemongrass DRY Soda
dash of Peychaud's bitters (for color, more than anything)

Combine all in glass. Serve.

And it's a really refreshing drink. It's got a nice complexity from those flavors vying for attention, and it's really quite Thai like in character. That said, next time, I'd add a little bit of ginger beer for some back of the mouth heat...and if you really wanted booze, you could sneak in an ounce of gin...that would go nicely. But for an unusual, refreshing, booze-free tipple, I like it.

The one with a bad visual pun...

Every now and then, it's nice to revisit the classics... the drinks that elevated men from saloon-minders to barkeepers, from mixers to artisans. There are several examples of this...the Old Fashioned, the Gimlet, the Daiquiri, but one of the simplest of drinks is a cobbler. A Cobbler is basically a cocktail without the bitters, and with added sugar. It's usually made with cracked or shaved ice, but sometimes lump, and it's frequently nothing more than the spirit of choice, sugar (or a sweet spirit), ice, and fruit to garnish. Tonight, since it's unseasonably cold here in the Midwest (I'm currently at 59ºF in mid-July!) I opted to go with a whiskey cobbler. Here's how I made mine:

Whiskey Cobbler

1 bar spoon simple syrup
1 scant bar spoon triple sec
lump ice (or ice cubes, in my case)
2 oz rye whiskey (or bourbon)
2 oz seltzer
cherries to garnish

In a 9-ounce glass or so, combine the syrup and triple sec (or just stir 2 tsp of superfine sugar with a splash of soda water). Add ice, add your rye, stir gently, and add the seltzer. Garnish.

And that's it. All the soda and sugar and triple sec to is make the spirit not quite so powerful...but it's still very much the dominant flavor in the drink, just tempered a bit. It's a good drink to use a liquor you're partial to in, as you can really appreciate some of the more subtle characteristics that can get lost to the burn of the spirit at full strength. Definitely one to experiment with.

Celebrate the independence of your nation by blowing up a small part of it!

Today's drink post is a quick one so I can go and, er... not light off illegal fireworks, yeah...that's the ticket!

I read about this one yesterday on Imbibe Magazine's blog, and thought "that sounds interesting...let's try it!" The thing that might make some of you gasp is that it combines liquor and beer. And not in a "Boilermaker" fashion, either. See, our Founding Fathers, in addition to being bewigged and remarkably prescient, were hard drinkers, of a fortitude that we can merely aspire to. Water, in the days before treatment plants, was not always the most potable thing around. Beer, wine, rum and whiskey, by virtue of their alcohol content, were safer bets. And so the builders of this nation drank. Morning, noon and night. As Imbibe puts it on their blog entry, "With breakfast, they drank beer and wine; with dinner it was claret and Cognac. And they drank rum all the time." The average was 8 ounces of alcohol a day. And from those building blocks, James MacWilliams, bartender at Canlis Restaurant in Seattle, came up with this:

The Declaration Cocktail

1 oz rum (something with good fruit notes in it, I used Bacardi 8)
3/4 oz rye whiskey (something strong and spicy, though Old Overholt worked for me)
3/4 oz brown sugar syrup (MacWilliams suggests 1:1 brown sugar to water, I actually used 2:1 demerara sugar to water)
6 oz of chilled beer (mine was local New Glarus Brewing Co.'s Fat Squirrel, which is like Newcastle in that it's a nut brown ale-type beer)

Build in a 12 oz glass with a few cubes of ice, stirring to combine. A dash of Angostura bitters will not go astray, either, and makes it a proper cocktail.

It's really remarkably good...everything works quite harmoniously, the nutty nature of the beer complimenting the spice of the rye and the sweetness of the rum, rounded out with the sugar syrup...it's well worth trying. Seriously. I cannot tell a lie.

Happy 233rd birthday, America. Celebrate responsibly. And try not to blow off any fingers.

With apologies to Schlotzky's Deli; Funny Name, serious drink.

One of my cocktail-making heroes, Paul Clarke over at "The Cocktail Chronicles," recently celebrated the anniversary of his blog by embarking on a quest to mix up 30 cocktails in 30 days (he succeeded, admirably). In his research, he came upon an old drink from New Orleans, named after the street upon which it was invented, at the Iron Horse Tavern in the 1850s or 1860s. It's called the Tchoupitoulas Street Guzzle, and in its original form, was a shot of Cuban rum with a split of ginger beer. Paul, upon tinkering with the drink, decided that it would be best to reintroduce this as a short, refreshing, quick drink, one to be guzzled and then moved on from, rather than savoring and sipping slowly. To that end, he concentrated the flavors so you get the full effect and sensation of it, but one that can still be downed in a hurry, the better to get back to work after your surreptitious tipple. Hey, things were very different in the 1860s...

Tchoupitoulas Street Guzzle

1 1/2 oz a good, strong, smooth, vanilla-y rum, say a Cruzan Single Barrel or a Bacardi 8 (I think a good mix is 1 oz of the Bacardi 8 and 1/2 oz of Coruba)
1 1/2 oz ginger beer base
1 oz seltzer
2 dashes Angostura bitters

Shake all but seltzer with ice, strain into a small chilled tumbler, add seltzer, stir briefly, and drink before it gets too warm.

The sharpness and heat of the ginger beer base is tempered slightly by the smoothness of the rum and the fizziness of the seltzer, but it's still a powerfully flavored drink...and for that reason it's wonderful. You get a fantastic blast of flavor, and then you can move on to whatever you need to do next. I'm a big fan of this cocktail, regardless of whether I can properly pronounce it or not.

In which I learn that good bitter lemon soda is apparently hard to find.

I decided to try another one of the bitter lemon drinks that I'd found in my research, so I figured I'd better try to isolate that flowery flavor I experienced in the previous Bitter Lemon Cooler. Sure enough, it's the Stirring's bitter lemon; there's not much bitter about it at all, really. I think in the future, I'll just get some pure lemon extract, add a couple drops to a good tonic water, and use that...it'd be cheaper, any way.

That said, I altered the recipe here a bit to try to get it a little more lemony and a little less flowery. It was mostly successful, but I still think the better the tonic water/bitter lemon, the better. Maybe I'll even try making my own tonic water one of these days, if I can get a hold of some cinchona bark powder...

Anyway, on to the drink:

Lemon Rum Cooler

3/4 oz lemon juice
2 oz light rum
1/4 oz overproof rum (bump it up to 1/2 oz if you're daring!)
2 oz pineapple juice
1/4 oz falernum

Shake all ingredients with ice, strain into a tall glass, top up with bitter lemon soda.

This drink fares a bit better, as the flavors of the rum and falernum are quite a bit stronger than the gin and vermouth. The extra lemon juice here makes a bit of difference, as the original drink only called for 1/2 oz. It's definitely got the potential to be more refreshing than the Bitter Lemon Cooler, but still, it's not as crisp as I'd expect it to be. Maybe I've just got irrational expectations of the bitter lemon soda. I dunno...

Oh my god! Social interaction! This is something entirely new!

Every month, a bunch of lushes cocktail aficionados band together and do a little something called "Mixology Monday," centering around a theme. This month's theme is "Ginger," and we know how much I love ginger. So I'm marking my participation in my first ever Mixology Monday with this drink that I just made up in my kitchen.

Koro Koola

1 1/4 oz homemade ginger beer base (I use Paul Clarke's recipe)
1/4 oz falernum
1/4 oz pimento dram
1/4 oz fresh key lime juice
1/4 oz Grand Marnier
1 oz Coruba Jamaican rum
2 dashes Angostura orange bitters
good quality ginger ale to top

shake all but the ginger ale with ice, strain into a good sized Old Fashioned glass, top up with an equal measure (about 3 1/4 oz) of ginger ale.

Koro was a tiki god who was sometimes referred to as the Midnight Dancer...sort of the party animal of the tiki gods, so he seemed a good fit for a drink that got my taste buds dancing the tango (ok, so it's not a Polynesian dance, so sue me). The nice thing about this is that the ginger, while definitely present, is happy to share the limelight with some of the other flavors, and the (relatively) low alcohol content (the pimento dram, falernum, Grand Marnier, and orange bitters are present in such small volumes that they're really pretty negligible, and there's only an ounce of straight spirit) means that you can knock back a few of these before you hit the dance floor and start to hula out of your pants (not advised in mixed company).

A summer drink, even though it's barely 60ºF here.

With the perhaps delusional belief that summer will soon arrive here in the Midwest, despite all meteorological indications to the contrary, I'm starting to experiment with warm weather drinks. Today's is the first taste of a new one for me, the Bitter Lemon Cooler. Previously hamstrung in my attempts to even locate Bitter Lemon soda that wasn't laced with my arch-nemesis, High Fructose Corn Syrup, I finally succeeded yesterday in locating a four pack of the stuff made by Stirrings. Imagine my frustration when, after procuring my elusive ingredient, I learned that bitter lemon is nothing more that lemon juice and tonic water mixed. I'm sure there's a bit more to it than that, but that's the long and the short of it. Next time I'll just try that! But at any rate, I started browsing around for drinks that use the stuff, and here we go.

Bitter Lemon Cooler

1 1/2 oz dry vermouth
1 oz gin
1/4 oz grenadine
1/4 oz lemon juice

shake all with ice, strain into a tall, ice-filled glass, and top with bitter lemon soda, stirring gently to combine.

My first reaction when I tasted this was that it was surprisingly flowery. I'm assuming that came from the vermouth and the Bitter Lemon...but there's very little bitterness in this, nor sourness, which is surprising and a little dismaying, frankly. If I had it to do over again, I'd swap the gin to vermouth ratio, and add a little more lemon juice. This, as is, is just way too sweet to be an effective cooler on a hot day. That said, it's still drinkable, but it's more something I'd serve to a maiden aunt than drink myself.

Live and learn, I guess...