The only rule is you have to listen to Arthur Lyman while you make this

Aloha, you boozehounds, you. Apologies for the delay in posting again...I just can't keep up with the pace I established last year.

Anyway, today I've got an excellent drink for you, and one that I can finally make properly thanks to a little bit of luck. A while back, I entered a giveaway that Blair "Trader Tiki" Reynolds was running on Facebook...one lucky winner would get a care package with all of his currently available syrups. Lady Luck was on my side, as I'd picked up her bar tab the night before (man, that girl can drink!) and I soon had seven bottles winging their way to me; Don's Spices #2, Don's Mix, Vanilla Syrup, Cinnamon Syrup, Orgeat Syrup, Passion Fruit Syrup, and Hibiscus Grenadine. So yes, for those keeping track at home, these were a freebie, but not because I'm awesome, or because the Trader was trying to butter me up, but simply because I'm lucky. Trust me, I'm nowhere near a big enough fish in the booze-blogging pond to merit freebies from anyone. All that being said, let's get on to the drink, shall we?

I went with one that would let me use a couple of the Trader's syrups, the Passion Fruit and the Hibiscus Grenadine. This is a cocktail that dates from about 1961 or so, at the Kahiki in Columbus, OH, and it's a blender drink (gasp!) called:

The Port Light

1 oz fresh lemon juice
1/2 oz passion fruit syrup
1/4 oz grenadine
1 1/2 oz bourbon (I actually used rye, but who's counting?)
8 oz (1 cup) crushed ice

Put all ingredients in a blender and process on high for 5 seconds. Pour it, without straining, into a tall glass, adding more crushed ice if necessary to fill.

(recipe adapted from Jeff Berry and Annene Kaye, Beachbum Berry's Grog Log, p.66)

Oh man, this is a beautiful drink. Tart, sweet, ice cold, what more could you ask for? The passion fruit syrup just punches you in the nose with a ripe fruit flavor when you open the bottle, and the grenadine is sweet and bright, with an additional floral tartness from the hibiscus. I used rye in this drink, because it's what I had on hand, but even so, the syrups and lemon juice more than hold their own against it. It's kind of a Polynesian Ward Eight, and sipping one of these on a summer night with fireflies twinkling and Martin Denny or Arthur Lyman on the HiFi is going to be a little slice of heaven by way of some exotic port of call.

I'm very much looking forward to trying the other Trader Tiki syrups when I can get enough varieties of rum to do them justice in all sorts of Tiki drinks!

(FCC disclaimer: the branded products named in this post were received at no cost to me, not for review or promotional consideration purposes, but as a prize in a random giveaway.)

"If I...were king...of the foreeeeeeeeest!"

Yes friends, I'm actually posting within a few days of the last one. I feel bad about leaving you in the lurch for so long, and I picked up a couple nice deals at the liquor store today, so I'm mixing up a new one for all of you.

Tonight's drink is one that features a spirit I haven't used in far too long; rum. Rum was one of the first liquors I actually picked out as being something I liked. Before I really started to branch out into the world of spirits, rum was my old standby. I think it was, in no small part, an extension of my interest in Tiki drinks that made me gravitate towards rum, but I can now tell you, that rum is by no means the exclusive spirit of faux Polynesia.

That being said, rum's really an interesting spirit, one that's far too often taken for granted. Tonight, though, I've got a great showpiece for it.

The White Lion Cocktail

1 1/2 oz white/silver rum (I used Mount Gay Eclipse Silver)
1 oz lemon juice
1 tsp sugar (I used raw sugar, but that's just me. Bar sugar would dissolve a lot more readily)
1/4 oz grenadine or falernum (I had falernum in the fridge, so I used that)
2 dashes bitters

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

Spicy, sweet, fruity, sour...this drink really hits all the notes you want a drink to hit. There's the acidity of the lemon, and the spice and lime notes of the falernum, the subtle tropical fruit notes from the rum (banana seems to be a popular note detected in the Mount Gay Eclipse Silver), all of these combine to make for a really interesting drink. I have no idea of the provenance of this drink, especially since one old drink book, 1888's "New & Improved Illustrated Bartender's Manual" by Harry Johnson (no laughing, please), has the White Lion as four ounces of rum mixed with raspberry syrup, curaçao, lime juice and seltzer, and served in a pint glass...quite a different beast altogether. All that being said, this would be a different drink entirely just by swapping the falernum with grenadine. Not a bad one, but very very different. If you feel up to making some falernum (and I highly recommend you do), try using it in this drink. I don't think you'll be disappointed.

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.

Hey gang! Long time no see!

I know, I stink...it's been a week since my last post. Though it has not been devoid of interest...I've started my new job, my iPod died and I tried to play Dr. Frankenstein and resurrect it (sadly, it went to that big iPod kingdom in the sky, but the Apple Store replaced it free because they're awesome and I didn't do anything wrong to it and it was not even two weeks out of warranty) and tonight, thanks to my job, I managed to procure a bit of dry ice. And if you've ever played with dry ice, you know how awesome it can be. However, I wound up getting quite a bit of it. And because I have pets that are rather low to the ground, and because CO₂ sinks, I really was kind of anxious to get it all sublimated and out of my hair. So I figured, "What the hell? Might as well toss it into a drink!" And it is through that circuitous and rather tortured train of thought that I arrived at tonight's drink, in full Mad Scientist mode:

Hell Broth

2 1/2 oz gold rum (I used Mount Gay Eclipse)
1/4 oz triple sec
1/4 oz real pomegranate grenadine
4 dashes Bittermens Xocolatl Mole bitters
dry ice

Combine all but dry ice in mixing glass, stirring well to combine. Pour into small goblet and (using gloves!) add dry ice (I used the equivalent of a ping-pong ball's volume of dry ice). The intelligent person would use a straw to drink it, if only to avoid small bits of frostbite on their lips.

I was going for a vaguely spicy, vaguely sweet thing here, and I think I achieved it. The Bittermens, with it's spice and chocolate notes, really lends itself to more amber liquors, and the pomegranate and orange notes of the grenadine and triple sec pair well with those flavors. The dry ice also adds a little bit, as that bite from the carbon dioxide sublimating in your glass sort of tempers the heat. For a completely improvised drink, I think this shows potential. Plus, you could serve it for your Halloween guests, and be all spooky and stuff. Blah blah!

"Hey, that almost sounded dirty, fella!"

Tonight marks my 100th post, though not my 100th drink. So I'll do some counting a little later, and I'll make sure my 100th drink is something awesome. Or at least tasty.

Tonight's drink is another one I modified, because honestly, what good are classic cocktails if you can't take them apart and put different after-market components in them? It's based on a venerable old drink called the Whiskey Squirt (you there in Pennsylvania; stop snickering!)

Whiskey Squirt (modified)

1 1/2 oz rye whiskey or bourbon
1/2 oz pomegranate grenadine (the fresher, the better)
1 bar spoon 2:1 simple syrup
1/8 teaspoon lemon extract (I use Penzeys, because they're local and awesome)
seltzer to top

build all except seltzer over ice in a Double Old-Fashioned glass, stirring to combine. Top with seltzer, swizzling gently to mix.

The traditional version is made as a highball, in a tall glass, rather than the DOF, and doesn't have the lemon extract. It can be garnished with fruit, though, as desired. Me? I like things to be simple to assemble, and while there's definitely a place for garnish, sometimes I just can't be bothered. I like using the lemon extract because it's a very strong, clean taste, and it's already dissolved in alcohol, so I don't have to worry about it mixing poorly. It's just a nice, simple drink, and one that you can throw together in no time flat. Just stop giggling about the name, will you?

Mixology Monday XLI: Vodka is Your Friend

August's Mixology Monday challenge is one that I had some trepidation over...vodka. I'm not much of a vodka fan...I think the asking price for what's essentially neutral grain or potato spirits on a lot of big name brands is ludicrous, and being relatively flavorless, vodka just never appealed to me. That being said, it is the first alcoholic beverage I ever had, so I suppose, deep down, there's a small part of me that still likes it (and hates it, for the same reason, presumably). But, as it turns out, there's a local distillery that produces a vodka that caught my attention despite all this, so I figured I'd see what I could make with it.

The distillery, as I've mentioned in my post on gin martinis, is Great Lakes Distillery, the founder and distiller is Guy Rehorst, and it's his name that's on the gin and vodkas. The vodka that caught my eye is Rehorst Premium Milwaukee Citrus and Honey Vodka. It's made with Wisconsin honey and real lemons, so my usual grumping about test tube flavors doesn't apply. And it's local, which is a big deal for me, because I like keeping as much of my money in the local economy as I can.

So, what did I make of it? Well, I came up with two drinks. One's pretty easy and straight forward, the other is a little more complicated, but has a lot more depth of flavor. We'll go with the simpler one first.

Milwaukee Lemonade

1/2 oz fresh lemon juice
1/4 oz simple syrup
2 1/2 oz Rehorst Citrus and Honey Vodka
seltzer to top
splash of pomegranate grenadine

shake all but seltzer and grenadine with ice, pour into ice filled DOF glass, top with seltzer, drizzle in grenadine.

This one really lets the vodka come to the forefront. It's a really great spirit in that, while it's got the fruit and honey in it, it's not overwhelmingly sweet. In fact, sipping the vodka straight, it's really smooth and mellow in the mouth, with no burn, and no cloying sweetness. I tasted the lemon first, and then the honey, faintly but there, in the back of my mouth. I really, really like this vodka. I mean really. Anyway, I mixed it with a little lemon juice and even less simple syrup, shook it up, added some seltzer for fizz, and drizzled in the pomegranate grenadine. It's pretty, and it's tasty, really letting the vodka shine.

The other drink I made is one that's got a lot of layers going on, but reflects my initial approach to mixing with this spirit; I was brainstorming what flavors complemented both lemon and honey and the first one I could think of was ginger. And so I ran with that.

Fiery Citrus Cocktail

a scant 1/2 oz thinly sliced ginger (unpeeled)
1 oz simple syrup
3/4 oz fresh lemon juice
1/4 oz limoncello
2 oz Rehorst Citrus and Honey Vodka
dash of orange bitters

Muddle the ginger with the simple syrup, then add remaining ingredients. Shake all with ice, and double strain into glass

This one really has the ginger sitting in the forefront, but once that blast of heat dies down, then the lemon and the sweetness from the simple syrup and the round mouth-feel of the honey pipe up. This would be a good cocktail for soothing your throat, too, come winter, although my old college voice and diction teacher would kill me for suggesting that alcohol can soothe the throat. However, after a couple of these, you likely won't care if you actually feel better as long as you're not feeling anything! I like how this one turned out, but I think that the Milwaukee Lemonade showcases the spirit better.

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.

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...

He has fallen into shadow!

Every now and then I like to take a drink that exists and put my own little spin on it. And when you do that to drinks that were, themselves, just modifications of already extant cocktails, well, you can end up going a little crazy.

Take, for example, the Eastern Sour. It's a variant on the Ward Eight, which is, itself, a variant on the venerable Whiskey Sour. The Eastern Sour diverges from the Ward Eight by using bourbon instead of rye, lime juice in lieu of lemon, swapping in simple syrup for the grenadine, and adding a tiny bit of orgeat syrup. I'm not sure exactly which of those changes make it "eastern," but perhaps the orgeat added enough mystery to it that it seemed exotic by comparison.

Well, I like that well enough, but while I was pondering what made it eastern, I started thinking about the connotations of things in the east, in literature and culture. I can't help it; I'm a dork. And one of the things I came up with was that Mordor, in "The Lord of the Rings" is in the east. So I did some further swapping and modifying, and I made it a Mordor Sour! It's a tiny bit more involved, but it really makes for a neat looking and tasting drink.

Mordor Sour
2 oz bourbon or rye (I think rye would be a little more interesting)
1 1/2 oz orange juice
1 oz lime juice
1/4 oz orgeat syrup
1/8 oz simple syrup
1/8 oz clementine or mandarin infused vodka (optional)
dash of orange bitters
1/4 oz grenadine

Combine all ingredients save for the grenadine with ice in your shaker and shake well to combine. Strain into an Old-Fashioned glass full of ice. Slowly add the 1/4 oz of grenadine, letting it seep to the bottom. Garnish with cherry and serve with a short stirring rod.

I think the only way this cocktail could be more exotic is if I added some crazy extract like, say, black pepper and orange (which I'm making, by the way). It naturally tends towards the sweet, even with all the citrus juice, so I'd go with the rye here, just to let that natural spiciness counteract it. I think the vodka also helps dry it out a little bit. I scaled back the simple syrup, since I was adding the grenadine, but if you're partial to more sour and less sweet, you can do away with it entirely. This has some great potential for tinkering with, and I think you could take it to really unusual places if you were so inclined. When my orange and black pepper extract is complete, I'll totally retry this with a few drops.

Oh, and because I don't want to get my broke ass sued, this drink is neither authorized nor endorsed by the Tolkien estate, New Line Cinemas, or any of the nifty people involved with The Lord of the Rings. Though if they like it and want to fly me out to make it for them at premieres or something, I would totally be up for it.

If someone wants a drink that tastes like candy, serve them this!

Growing up, I remember my grandparents had some unusual varieties of candy. Mercifully, I never had circus peanuts inflicted upon me, but I did have spice drops. Remember those? Little dome shaped, sugar encrusted pieces of gummy candy? And no matter what the color, they all tasted the same? It wasn't a bad flavor, but it was distinctive. I'd forgotten all about those until I sampled tonight's drink...a drink that contains a spirit I've never had before; Pernod.

I'll confess, I looked for a miniature bottle of Pernod because I knew that it was an anisette, a sort of licorice-on-crack flavored liquid, and to be honest, black licorice is not one of my favorite foods. Sadly, there were no mini bottles to be found (frankly, I'm not sure if they even exist), so I figured I'd just bite the bullet, stop worrying and learn to love Pernod. Well my worrying proved unfounded, because while the nose of Pernod is full of licorice, the flavor is not nearly as monotone as that. And tonight's drink, cheerfully called "William Seabrook's Asylum," makes for quite the unusual, but intriguing, cocktail.

Pernod, like it's big brother absinthe, and cousin ouzo, is a liquor that louches, or clouds up when it's introduced to water. It makes for some pretty effects, especially in the Asylum. You'll notice on looking at the ingredients, that, despite containing grenadine, the beverage is very very yellow. That's solely due to my grenadine being homemade and pretty pale in color. If you use commercial (and if you do, PLEASE go with a brand like Stirrings over Rose's), or if you make your own using pomegranate juice, your drink will end up more orange than yellow. My grenadine was made by boiling down pomegranate pips, and is therefore not quite as colorful.

William Seabrook's Asylum

Pour slowly, and in this order, into an Old-Fashioned glass:

1/2 teaspoon grenadine
1 1/2 ounces Pernod
1 1/2 ounces London dry gin (though a Jenever-style would be interesting, too)

Add 2 to 3 ice cubes, letting them melt a tiny bit, and then swizzle to watch the clouds form.

I'd be lying if I said this tastes like anything besides a spice drop, but that's not a bad thing at all...it's not cloyingly sweet, and as David Wondrich points out in "Esquire Drinks," "[b]etween the Pernod and the gin, you've got the extracts of a few dozen assorted roots and herbs, not a few of which must have some serious juju going for them...[it] seems to impart a trancelike, unblinking calm tat is difficult to otherwise achieve." I don't know about "trancelike" but after a pair of these, I was feeling pretty damn mellow. For an introduction to Pernod, this drink made it pretty painless. Next stop, absinthe, maybe?

Addendum: You've probably noticed that in a lot of my photos, I've got the drinks posing with books. That's not by accident. I'm a voracious reader, and I will happily and most emphatically recommend any of the books you see in the photos. I try to match them based on a sort of emotional connection I feel each drink could make with them, but sometimes I just feel like singling out a book, you know?

"It's an investment in Havana - this is a little gift for the President"

One of my favorite sections of "The Godfather, Part II" is the part of the story set in pre-embargo Cuba (though obviously the scenes were shot elsewhere, the Dominican Republic in this case). While that section of the film took place in the 50s, Cuba has a long history with cocktails and booze. Bacardi's first distillery was there (Castro's government has since taken it over...it produces Havana Club, now), and Americans flocked to the friendly bars of Cuba during Prohibition, as it was a easy journey of just 90 miles from the US mainland. It was during that time that tonight's drink was invented, a rum concoction called El Presidente.

Now, you may have seen a drink with this name that purports to contain pineapple and lime juices. While that may be a lovely cocktail, it's not the real McCoy. In fact, that drink is closer to a Hotel Nacional Special or a Sunshine than El Presidente. No, the real El Presidente, named after Gerardo Machado, the former cattle thief turned leader who ruled Cuba until he was deposed by Batista in 1933.

The true version of El Presidente is made as follows:

1 1/2 oz white or golden rum
1/2 oz orange curaçao
3/4 oz French vermouth
dash of grenadine

Stir well with cracked ice and strain into a cocktail glass, garnish with a twist of orange peel.

Your end result should be a beautiful, clear orange hue, rather like this:

(Look at that, I even used props in this photo!)

I really like this drink. The French (dry) vermouth keeps it from getting too sweet and cloying, and lends it some depth. I think the next time I make it, I'd round it out with a dash or two of orange bitters as well to add a little more spice, but as it stands now, it's a damned fine drink. Definitely one to add to your repertoire.

40 minutes later: I made a second one and bunged in a dash of orange bitters...I was right, it's even better!

"We shouldn’t have muddled! We shouldn't have muddled!"

One little secret that I can share with you from my time working as a bar-back: if you want your bartender to really hate you, you should order a mojito during the evening rush in the middle of the summer. At this point, I expect some of you are looking agog at your monitor and going "But why?! Why would that make them hate me?" Let me answer that with a little walk-through...You're the bartender, and you've been pouring beer and slinging G&Ts, serving up whiskey and Cokes, and even the occasional *shudder* Cosmo. Suddenly someone orders a mojito. The bar goes silent. A tumbleweed blows through the room. Somewhere, a lone crow caws. You turn around, open the bar fridge, pull out a bag of mint leaves, pluck off six or eight good ones, discarding half as many lousy-looking ones, drop them into a Collins glass, pour in some bar sugar and squeeze in a few lime wedges, and proceed to muddle them for the next two minutes, while the other drink orders pile up. Then you add the rum or cachaça and club soda, the spent lime bits, and hand it off to the person who ordered it. Then you turn back to see the scrum of other patrons who had to wait to put in their orders, and you spend the next ten minutes playing catch-up.

Okay, I may have ventured into hyperbole a little bit there, but my point stands...

The muddler, looking like nothing so much as a small baseball bat, is perhaps one of the most maligned pieces of equipment in the bar, thanks in no small part to the mojito. Even the Midwestern propensity to make Old Fashioneds with muddled up orange slices and cherries (and occasionally, blasphemy of blasphemies, brandy) does not provoke the ire of the bartender as much as a request for a mojito can, though perhaps that's because the Collins glass gives you less room to maneuver the muddler in, compared to the DOF glass. Now, not all bartenders will start twitching when you ask for one of these, though pretty much all those that I've worked with hated the process. Perhaps some like venting their aggression on the mint and sugar and lime. So it was with some trepidation that I approached tonight's cocktail, a drink calling itself "The Country Bumpkin" (hey, I don't name 'em folks, I just drink 'em), a drink which, like the mojito, requires the use of a muddler. However, this one, like the Old Fashioned, is made in the smaller, wider Double Old Fashioned glass, so it wasn't too terrible. Also helpful is the fact that you're not trying to grind up mint leaves with the action of bar sugar, but rather just crushing a soft fruit into a messy pulp. All in all, I doubt many bartenders would froth at the mouth were one of these ordered, though they may snicker at the name.

The Country Bumpkin is made as follows: Muddle four fresh blackberries and half a lime in the bottom of a Double Old Fashioned glass until unrecognizable. Add ice, a half-shot (3/4 oz) of sugar syrup (I actually went with homemade grenadine, figuring it'd complement the blackberries), a dash of Peychaud's bitters, and two shots (3 oz) of gin. Churn with a bar spoon and garnish, if desired, with a few skewered blackberries and raspberries. I also topped mine with just a little bit of club soda, just enough to bring the liquid close to the top of the glass, so maybe 3/4 oz or so.

This is an awesome drink. It's sweet (but not too sweet), it's woodsy, it's bright, it's nuanced, and it's pleasantly dark. The lush flavor of the blackberries contrast with the not-quite-bitter notes from the gin, with the sour of the lime juice balancing everything out. The Peychaud's bitters, which play so nicely with fruit-based drinks, take a backseat but still make themselves known, and the use of grenadine rather than just simple syrup adds another dark-fruit note that gets along very nicely with the blackberries. This is a complex but very nice drink.

If you wanted to add a little variety, you could use vodka in lieu of gin, maybe some 44 North, as it's infused with huckleberries. Or I could see using 2 oz vodka and an ounce of Chambord, though that would probably veer enough toward the sweet side that you'd want to add a little more lime. I could also see a version made with bourbon and some Cherry Heering (cherry brandy) as sort of a variant on the aforementioned Old Fashioned. And finally, you could just make a booze-free version of this by muddling the lime and berries together, omitting the grenadine/simple syrup, and just topping it up with 7up or Sprite or some similar lemon-lime soda. At any rate, this is definitely one to add to your summer drink repertoire. Now, if we could just do something about that name...

As Columbo and Steve Jobs so often said, "Oh, one more thing..."

It just occurred to me, as such things tend do at 1:30 AM, that while I've repeatedly mentioned that you should use homemade grenadine whenever possible, I've neglected to give you any idea how to make it. Oops!

There's two routes that I've taken to get to homemade grenadine. One is super-easy and the other is slightly less easy but more complex in terms of flavor. Both are very good.

Option 1:

Get a 16 ounce bottle of pure pomegranate juice. Pour it into a non-reactive pot on the stove. Bring to a boil. Add 8 ounces of cane sugar. Cook until volume is reduced by about 1/2 and the liquid coats the back of a spoon (it'll look uncannily like cough syrup...just go with it) Let the mixture cool and add an ounce of vodka before bottling as a preservative. Keep it in the fridge.

Option 2:

Get two fresh pomegranates, quarter them, and remove their seeds (this is best done in a bowl of water, as the seeds will float out and the peel will sink). While you're separating the pips from the peel, bring 16 ounces of water to a boil and add 8 ounces of cane sugar. Heat until it thickens a bit, then add the pomegranate pips. Simmer for 10 minutes, pressing on the seeds with a wooden spoon to try to get them to release their juice, then remove from heat and let sit for two hours. Strain through a fine metal sieve, again pressing on the seeds with a wooden spoon. Strain that liquid through cheesecloth (just to be certain you've got all solids out) then add an ounce of vodka as a preservative and bottle.

The two versions turn out to be different, but both very good. Option one gives you a thick, deep purple liquid that's very heavily flavored. Option two returns a pale pink liquid that's rather more subtly flavored, but still packs a punch. I like the second one in particular because you get some flavors from the seeds that you don't get from straight-up pomegranate juice. Both are very good additions to the home bar, though. Vastly better than Rose's Grenadine, which is naught more than sugar (usually in the form of high-fructose corn syrup), water, thickening agents, and red dye. Not exactly what Jerry Thomas or the bartenders at the Waldorf envisioned when mixing up drinks with grenadine.

Try that in your next Tequila Sunrise (or Shirley Temple) and see if it's not a huge improvement over what you're used to.

*insert pithy line about rum being gone here*

As I've remarked previously (you know, at some point in the dozen or so posts prior to this one), I'm a fan of Tiki drinks, and especially of rum. It's a pretty damn simple spirit, fermented and distilled from the normally-cast-off leftovers of the sugar refining process, but for it's simplicity in make-up, it's remarkably complex and varied in flavor, as well as in it's history (for which I highly recommend reading Rum: The Epic Story of the Drink That Conquered the World by Charles Coulombe).

Most people that aren't rum-heads seem to think rum comes in two flavors; Bacardi White and Captain Morgan Spiced. Sometimes Malibu if they want coconut rum. By and large, those first two brands are good, solid workhorses of the rum world. They do the job they're meant to do in the drinks that they're served in. Not many people would think to just pour one of those over ice and sip, and they'd be right not to. They've come to be distilled and bottled as mixers, not as beverages you'd care to drink straight or on the rocks. There are, however, some great rums that let you do just that.

Now, I'm not a well-off guy, money-wise. I can't go out and taste the artisanal rums that get shipped out of Martinique and Trinidad. The biggest splurge I ever made on rum when when I got a promotion and bought a bottle of 10 Cane for about $33. And it was well worth it. It's a pale straw-colored liquid in a pretty cool bottle. It's almost more of a rhum or cachaça in that it's pressed directly from the sugarcane, rather than extracted from the molasses as most other rums are. It was a beautiful thing, and I was damned sad when it was gone.

In honor of that glorious spirit, here's a drink that I made with it; a slight variant on a classic Planters Punch (I bucked the "1 part sour, 2 parts sweet, 3 parts strong and 4 parts weak" rule a little bit, but it turned out wonderfully just the same).

3 oz 10 Cane rum
1 oz grenadine syrup (use homemade or Stirrings brand. Do not touch Rose's with a 10 foot pole)
2 oz lemon juice
2-3 dashes Angostura bitters
soda water

Shake all ingredients save for the soda water vigorously with crushed ice and pour, without straining, into a tall glass. Pack the glass to the top with more crushed ice and fill to within 1/2 from the top with soda water, then gently mix with a bar spoon until the glass frosts.

As a variant, replace the soda water with mango juice. Very different, but very tasty.

Another blast from the past.

This was originally posted on my personal blog back on March 6, 2009

I'm going to give you the recipe for the perfect Ward Eight. A Ward Eight is another variation on a Whiskey Sour, more or less. I futzed with the recipe a little bit, and this one that I made is wicked good.

2 oz. rye whiskey
1/2 oz. lemon juice
1/2 oz. orange juice
1/2 oz. blood orange juice
scant teaspoon grenadine (if you're using homemade grenadine, bump up to a 1/2 oz.)
dash of orange bitters
dash Angostura bitters

Shake all ingredients save for the Angostura bitters with crushed ice and pour, ice and all, into a double Old Fashioned glass. Add a dash of Angostura as a sort of float on top of the ice, and let it seep down.

You can also pour it as a cooler in the summertime...strain the cocktail into a Collins glass half full of crushed ice and top up with club soda or seltzer.

The drink was so named because (once again referring to Wondrich),

they say this old smoothie was inaugurated at Boston's ancient Locke-Ober restaurant, at the victory party (the night before the election, naturally) for Martin "The Mahatma" Lomasney, running for something or other from Boston's Ward Eight -- then located, as a reader informs us, "in the old West End...between Beacon Hill and the North End." We'd like to know how many Ward Eights they're pouring these days on Lomasney Way (yep -- they named a street after him).

So now you know; and knowing is half the battle. Go Joe! Er...Martin.