Can't get theah from heah...

This was another libation I served at Thanksgiving, and again, it will require a little prep for one of the ingredients. However, it's non-alcoholic, so little Johnny and Susie can have one, as well as Mabel, your tee-totaling great aunt, thrice removed on your mother's side. I got this recipe from the November/December 2009 issue of Imbibe Magazine, and they built it thus:

New England Buck (mocktail)

4 oz apple cider
1 oz lemon juice
1 oz sage and juniper syrup (recipe follows)
2 dashes orange bitters
ginger beer (I used mostly ginger ale and a splash of ginger beer base I had sitting around)

Combine all but ginger beer with ice in a cocktail shaker and shake to mix. Strain into an ice-filled double old-fashioned glass and top with ginger beer. Gently stir and serve.

Sage and Juniper Syrup

1 cup water
1 cup sugar
5 fresh sage leaves
10 juniper berries, cracked in mortar and pestle

Heat ingredients in saucepan until sugar dissolves. Remove from heat, let stand 10 minutes, then strain into a clean squeeze bottle or glass container. Keeps for up to a month in the fridge.

The cider's natural tartness plays with the really fresh flavors of the sage and juniper and makes something that's really unique and crisp-tasting. The ginger gives it a little warmth, too. It's really an appealing drink, and a good one to serve at any fall or winter family gatherings. It would also work well for, say, a brunch with certain family members who don't believe in mimosas before noon.

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.

"Keep your eyes on the road, your hands upon the wheel..."

This drink, which I'm posting quickly upon realizing it's been more than 5 days since my last post, is called the Blinker Cocktail. "Blinker" was another word for "blinders" as a mule or horse might wear to keep them looking forwards. I'm not sure what connection that has to the drink, but hey, if Ted Haigh researched it, it's good enough for me.

The Blinker Cocktail

2 oz rye whiskey or, failing that, a bourbon with a lot of rye, like Bulleit
1 oz grapefruit juice
2 barspoons (about 1 teaspoon) raspberry syrup (it's available commercially, or you can mash 1/2 pint of raspberries and put it in to boil with your next simple syrup batch)

shake all with ice, and strain into a cocktail glass.

It's a nice balancing act this walks; tart from the grapefruit, sweet and tangy from the raspberry syrup, and spicy from the rye (or bourbon). But it works. And it's such a lovely color.

"Drinks Named for Gemstones" for $200, Alex...

I picked up some fresh squeezed grapefruit juice today at the grocery store, and I was flicking through my drink guides to see what I could make with it that wasn't a Greyhound or a Salty Dog. I stumbled on this beauty by Dale DeGroff:

Garnet Cocktail

1 1/2 oz London dry gin (I used Boodles, Mr. DeGroff suggests Tanqueray No. 10)
3/4 oz Cointreau or other good triple-sec
1 oz pomegranate juice
1 oz fresh grapefruit juice
2 dashes Peychaud's bitters (my addition, to play with the fruit juices in the drink)

Shake all with ice and serve in a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish, if desired, with a flamed orange peel.

This may look like a Cosmopolitan, because it's pinkish, but it's definitely more interesting. The grapefruit juice gives it a gloriously tart character, but not overly so...there's still plenty of sweetness in it. It's really well balanced. Definitely worth adding to your repertoire.

Just a quick one.

It's less common now, but for years, there were cocktails galore named after celebrities...some because the stars in question actually ordered them, some just to cash in on the identity. I've had a few of these (the Bogie was one I've already featured, the Mary Pickford may come later) and some are actually quite tasty. That's not to say that you should just run out and drink celebrity-christened cocktails willy-nilly...can you imagine what a Paris Hilton would be like without shuddering and scheduling an STD test? I certainly can't.

But tonight's libation is one that comes by its name honestly. It was actually ordered by the star in question, though you probably haven't heard of her. Her name was Vera Rush, and though she doesn't appear on IMDb, she was a silent film actress, who featured in such works as The Graven Image and Intemperance. It's quite a simple thing, as drinks go, but eminently quaffable.

Vera Rush

2 oz dark Jamaican rum (Myers's is traditional, but Gosling's, Coruba or even Cruzan Blackstrap can be used with no ill effect)
1/2 oz unsweetened pineapple juice

Pour rum over ice in an Old-Fashioned glass, and float the pineapple juice on top.

A simple drink from a simpler age. Still tasty, still classy, and still simple to order, even if your bartender gives you a blank stare when you mention it by name. Just order it as David Wondrich, of Esquire Magazine et al, informs us Vera herself did; "Myers's on the rocks with a splash of pineapple juice." Tip tip hurrah.

"Pineapple Princess, he called me Pineapple Princess all day..."

When warmer weather finally settles in to the Midwest, and the three months of bad skiing commence (as opposed to our nine months of winter), I start up my Exotica/Hawaiiana playlist and think about drinks with pineapple. Yes, it's cliche, but it's also damned tasty, and a fun plant in general. It's a bromeliad, meaning its relatives are as varied as ornamental houseplants and Spanish moss. It's also a distant cousin to the Torch Ginger plant. However, the pineapple is the most heavily cultivated one, and the tastiest (though I can't speak personally on the flavor of Spanish moss, or lack thereof).

So, our lovely pineapple, which lends itself so well to tropical drinks, is getting featured tonight, in a simple but elegant libation called:

Pineapple Fizz

1 oz pineapple juice
1/4 oz simple syrup (or superfine bar sugar)
1 3/4 oz Bacardi Silver rum

Shake all with ice, strain into a 6-8 oz tumbler, and top with seltzer.

That's all there is to it. It's a simple drink that really features the flavor of the pineapple. In fact, if you wanted to go for the ne plus ultra of freshness, you could muddle about 4 oz of pineapple chunks with your bar sugar/syrup, add the rum, shake, and double strain. You'd really be tasting the pineapple then.

Oh, and fun fact: my family has always, when noshing on fresh pineapple, sprinkled just a tiny bit of salt over it before diving in. It helps draw out and emphasize the sweetness, although now that I understand flavors a bit more, I'm more likely to use kosher or sea salt (maybe even black Hawaiian salt if I could afford it), just so I don't get that iodized flavor that table salt brings to the party. I'm happy it helps keep me from getting a goiter, but still, I don't wanna taste it on my fruit.

Gotta take the bitter with the sweet...

Those of you who have read this blog for a while know that I like to make variations on drinks, swapping out one ingredient for another, seeing what results. Often, the experimentations are the result of stark realities...I don't have any oranges, I'm out of Jamaican rum, I've got three nearly empty bottles that I need to use up, I took a strip of zest from a lemon for my Sazerac, and now I need to use it before it dries up...that last one was what prompted this drink. The original is called the Income Tax Cocktail, which is basically a Bronx cocktail with bitters added. However, I don't have any oranges in the house, and I had a lemon that needed to be used, so I pondered...what's even more apt to put a sour expression on your face than an income tax...why, payroll taxes, of course! How else can you lose a third of your earned income with a few microseconds of calculation time?

Now, let me be clear, I'm not one of those rabid anti-tax goofballs who thinks that nothing good comes of paying state and federal taxes...I willingly concede that there are vital things that my money goes towards; roads, vital infrastructure, that whole "providing for the common defense" thing. But nonetheless, it is a bit disheartening to see that disparity between "Gross Income" and "Net Income" on the check stub. With that in mind, I give you my take on the Income Tax Cocktail:

The Payroll Tax Cocktail

1 3/4 oz London Dry Gin
3/4 oz sweet vermouth
3/4 oz dry vermouth
juice of 1 small lemon, squeezed directly into the shaker
2 bar spoons of 2:1 simple syrup
2 dashes Angostura bitters

Shake all with ice, strain into a cocktail glass, and garnish with a lemon twist.

Without the simple syrup, this would be unpalatable, as sour as grandpa's face at Thanksgiving when he learns you're out of Scotch. With it, it really is a nice cocktail...sweet, sour, a zing of lemon, a bracing bit of gin, a hint of spice from the bitters. Yes, I would drink this experiment again, with no hesitation.

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.

What can I say, I felt like experimenting.

So. Short and sweet because I've got to return some videos got eleventy-billion library books to read before they're due, and I want to make some headway on my days off from the the show. I made up a drink tonight. It's quite tasty and subtle and I think you should try it. I have not named it. If you try it and like it and want to serve it to other people, you can say it's just something you threw together. I give you full permission to claim it as your own.

1 3/4 oz orange flavored vodka
3/4 oz London dry gin
1 1/2 oz pineapple juice
1 oz Tahitian limeade
dash of Peychaud's bitters

Build over ice in an Old Fashioned glass, stirring well to combine.

The citrus all plays very well together, the coconut water and the botanicals from the gin live together in perfect harmony (oh lord, why don't we?) and the Peychaud's extremely subtle notes waft through the whole thing, tying it all together. I like it. Hopefully you will do.

Now to read!

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...

In which I enjoy being contrary...

I figured that, since today people are grilling out and mowing lawns and most likely drinking beer and wine, I'd go outside of the booze bubble entirely and make a non-alcoholic drink. That doesn't mean that it's gonna be boring, though.

I was at the store the other day, and I found a variety of four-packs of "Dry Soda", a company that makes not-too-sweet soft drinks in unusual flavors. I saw lemongrass, rhubarb, juniper berry, vanilla bean and lavender, and I picked up those last two. So I'll use them periodically either in cocktails or with non-boozy ingredients.

Today, I'm using the lavender soda and making an unusual lemon-based drink. I started by looking around the web at what ingredients people usually pair with lavender, and got some ideas...so I came up with this:

Lavender-Herb Raspberry Lemonade

3/4 oz lemon juice
3-4 raspberries
3/4 good sized leaves fresh rosemary, bruised
pinch dried thyme
4 oz Lavender DRY Soda

Bruise rosemary with the bowl of a spoon against a hard surface, add to lemon juice. Add thyme and raspberries and muddle briefly. Let stand for several minutes. Strain through a fine-mesh strainer, gently pressing with a spoon to get all the juice out, and add 4 oz chilled Lavender Dry Soda.

I gotta admit, for wing-and-a-prayer-ing this drink, it turned out pretty well. If I could do it over with some extended prep time, I would have put the thyme and bruised rosemary in some boiling water, then strained and frozen it until it was time to use. The herbal flavor is a little weak. But given enough lead time, you could make a rosemary extract, let it steep and use that for a concentrated rosemary flavor. Or, if you like the idea, but want booze, you could use a good, herbaceous gin, or a tiny bit of Yellow Chartreuse. But even as a liquor-free drink, it's still something unusual and tasty.

EDITED TO ADD: Yep, I tried it with steeping the herbs in boiling water, and it gets a LOT more flavor out of them. So take your bruised rosemary and your pinch of thyme, stick them in a tea ball or self-fill tea bag, and steep in about 1/2 ounce of boiling water, scaling up the water and herb quantities for multiple drinks. Let it sit for about 10 minutes, pull it out, and chill the herb tisane until well cooled. Then add it to the lemon/raspberry mixture, muddle, strain and mix with the Lavender DRY as before. Since every dried and fresh herb is different, though, I'd try the tisane before you plan to serve it out...that way you can test and adjust the strength of the herbal flavors.

Elect-ile Dysfunction

West Palm Beach. Election. Troubles deciphering ballots. Trying to sex chads. Swinging? Hanging? Pregnant? Tri-chad? Oh, those crazy November days of...1960?!

Yep.

Seems that 40 years before the big dust-up in Florida electoral history, there was another sorry-ass chapter. In the aftermath of all that deciphering, a precinct captain in Palm Beach Lakes decided to create a drink to help unwind at the end of the day, and lo, the Swinging Chad was born.

Swinging Chad

2 oz golden Puerto Rican rum (or Cuban, if you know a guy who knows a guy)
2 oz unsweetened pineapple juice
2 dashes Angostura bitters
1 dash Pernod

Stir well with cracked ice and pour, unstrained, into a Collins glass. Top up with ginger ale, add a straw, and garnish it with a paper umbrella with little rectangles cut out of it.

It's a silly looking thing, but it's not too bad. As long as you don't go too heavy with the Pernod, this is a pretty well balanced, interestingly spicy concoction, one that's got enough magic going on that it's hard to pick out individual flavors. I'd say it's more of an occasional drink, though, rather than a twice or thrice a week tipple...as the Emperor said to Mozart..."too many notes."

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.

an ode to unusual beverages...

I'm participating in a round table discussion at my local library about the future of food in the United States, looking at how farming and raising livestock has shifted from family run endeavors to huge, vertically integrated agribusinesses. One of the discussion points is the notion of eating locally-produced foods, and one of the things I plan to bring up at our next meeting tomorrow, replete with samples (non-alcoholic, sadly. I can't imagine the library would want booze on the premises) is the notion of preserving food. Now most people think of preserving food as either salting, smoking, canning or making jellies. There is another route, however, and it's one that was tremendously popular in the American Colonies...you can preserve the bounty of summer's fruit harvest by making a fruit shrub. No, not "shrub" in the sense of a small plant...the name actually comes from Arabic, and the word "sharab," which simply means "to drink". A fruit shrub is just a liquid that's produced by boiling together water, sugar, the fruit who's essence you want to keep on hand, and vinegar. In my recipe, I use white wine vinegar, just to keep it palatable, although I'd imagine apple cider vinegar could work as well. In either case, the acidity of the vinegar plus the simple syrup base combined to keep the liquid from spoiling in the fall and winter months in the Colonies, and could then be used to add a touch of summer's color and flavor to the bone-chilling bleakness of, say, January in New Hampshire. In my experience, this works best with berries, small stone fruits like cherries, and cranberries. Tonight's drink, which will also be tomorrow's drink at my "Menu for the Future" session only without the liquor, was made with four berries; raspberries, blueberries, marionberries and strawberries. Here's how to make the shrub.

In a medium-sized pot, whisk together 1 cup of sugar and one cup of water. Once combined, add 2 pints of the fruit of your choice and reduce the heat, simmering for 10 minutes. Then add two cups of white wine vinegar and return to a boil for two minutes. Strain through a cheesecloth-lined mesh strainer, pressing on the solids to get out as much of the liquid as possible; this should result in about a liter of syrupy liquid. Bottle and chill before using.

Then for your drink, all you've got to do is add 2 to 2 1/2 ounces of rum to 1 ounce of your shrub mixture, building over ice, and top up with ginger ale.

A lot of people, on learning what's in this drink, invariably pull a face at the mention of vinegar. In truth, it adds a tang to the beverage, but it's flavor is so muted by the sweetness of the fruit (not to mention the sugar) that it's really more like the flavor a bit of lemon juice might add than anything else. It's really a fun drink to spring on people...and you can make it with a ton of different fruits. I've even heard of a ginger shrub, which must look a lot like a chutney before straining. And, of course, like so many specialty foods and beverages, if you don't feel like making your own shrub base (which means you'll lose out on half the fun and all of the feeling of accomplishment) you can buy it online, most notably, from Tait Farm Foods in Pennsylvania. One of my favorite aspects of this is the feeling that I've refined something, that I've taken these simple ingredients and rendered them down and made this beautiful, fragrant, jewel-colored liquid from them. It's a simple process, but it produces a great, and long-lasting result; that batch of shrub will make more than 30 drinks. It may be a good idea to share...

Learning the provenances of rum is like strolling through a Beach Boys song.

I'm having another one of those nights where I can't decide what I feel like making. I'm flipping through some of my drink guides and going "Ooh, that sounds good! Wait, I don't have any Cherry Heering." Flip, flip flip. "Oh, that's a neat one, too--wait, didn't pick up any ginger ale. Crap." Page, page, page, flip, page. "Interesting, but I don't feel like faffing around with egg white tonight." Sometimes you're just lackadaisical, you know?

So I'm going to just take a basic premise, the venerable Daiquiri, and reconfigure it to what I have on hand. I'm not using a white rum, so that pushes it towards a Jamaica Rum Cocktail, but I'm going to use that Pyrat rum I picked up yesterday, so it'd be more like an Antigua Rum Cocktail. And I'm using simple syrup instead of bar sugar, and maybe I'll add a splash of pineapple juice along with the lime juice. And I don't feel like straining it, and I'm too lazy tonight to make a second one, so I'll just make it a double. Hmmm...what to call this monstrosity? Big, rummy, influenced by Tiki drinks as much as the classic Cuban recipe? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you my newest creation:

The Brando Doble

(this makes a double; for a more manageable portion, just halve the ingredients)

4 oz Pyrat XO Reserve rum
1/2 oz 2:1 simple syrup
juice of 1 lime (about an ounce. if your lime gives you more, roll with it)
1/2 oz pineapple juice
2 dashes of orange bitters
3 drops (about 1/16 tsp) pimento dram

shake well with crushed ice and strain into a Double Old Fashioned glass filled 2/3 of the way up with ice.

This drink is proof that sometimes the things you just throw together can magically, alchemically merge into something surprising. Sorry if that sounds like I'm tooting my own horn, but I was really quite surprised that this works as well as it does. I was worried it'd be too sweet, I was worried that the Pyrat wouldn't work with the lime, I was worried that the pimento dram would be overkill. I'm delighted that my worries proved unfounded on all fronts. This is a really fun drink. My only issue with my first version of this cocktail (as pictured in the photo), which I've since corrected in the above instructions, was that I used too little ice to keep it cold. The crushed ice I shook it with melted too quickly in the drink itself. So now I have you pouring it over whole ice cubes in your DOF glass. Enjoy!

Two Tiki drinks in as many nights?! How can you LIVE at that speed?!

So I put it to a vote among my Twitter friends tonight, asking them to choose one of the following cocktails for this blog entry: the Bronx, the Sunshine, or the Royal Hawaiian. One person replied, so I went with his request. I'll get to the Bronx and the Sunshine at a later time, because John wanted the Royal Hawaiian, even though we just had a Tiki drink last night. There's no accounting for taste. (Kidding!)

This drink comes to me from one of Jeff "Beachbum" Berry's cocktail compendiums, "Beachbum Berry's Grog Log". He got it from the old Moana Hotel in Honolulu, and it dates from the late 1940s. It's made as follows:

Royal Hawaiian

1 1/2 oz pineapple juice
1/2 oz fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon orgeat syrup
1 1/2 oz gin

Shake with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

Orgeat (pronounced "or-ZHAY") is a milky looking syrup that tastes vaguely of almonds, though there's some other ingredients in there to boot. You'd probably find it either at a well-stocked liquor store or maybe in with flavored syrups for coffee at your grocery. It's perhaps most famous as an ingredient in Trader Vic's classic Mai Tai.

That being said, I was fully prepared to not like this drink. I thought it would be odd combining the citrus with the orgeat, and the orgeat with the gin...and I'm very happy to say I was wrong. This is really a nice cocktail. The lemon juice keeps the orgeat from being too sweet, and the botanicals in the gin really add a fresh layer to this. I'd almost suggest using a really good quality gin in this, just to let those herbal notes sing...Hendricks would not be out of place in this. In fact, if you were to add a tiny splash of Pernod to this, or absinthe, I think it would be even more interesting. I'll have to try that, as I'm planning on procuring some Pernod (quelle alliteration!) in the next few weeks.

♫Rum lifts us up where we belong...♪

What is it about Tiki drinks that makes them so much fun to make AND drink? Is it the ridiculous names they frequently carry? Is it the unusual, exotic ingredients they contain? Is it the goofy garnishes you get to put on them? Who knows. All I know is I love makin' em. Which is why tonight's cocktail is another Tiki drink; the Rum Lift.

This fellow started out life at Don the Beachcomber's in Hollywood in the late '60s, ostensibly as a hangover remedy. I can safely tell you it's just as much fun to drink as a starter.

Rum Lift

2 oz orange juice
1/2 oz unsweetened pineapple juice
1/4 oz fresh lime juice
Dash of Angostura bitters
1 1/2 oz dark Jamaican rum (I cheated a bit and used Barbados)

Shake well with 1 cup of crushed ice, pour (ice and all) into a Collins glass. Garnish as desired, though a maraschino cherry and pineapple spear would not go amiss. Or just slap a bunch of crazy crap on the rim like I did:

There's something missing in this drink, and I'm not sure what...maybe it's the mellower Barbados rum versus the Jamaican. So I did what any sensible person would do. I finished off the first one and tried my hand at a second! I kept everything from the original recipe, but I added three more ingredients:

Dash of orange bitters
1/8 tsp homemade vanilla extract
1/8 tsp pimento dram

And then shake it like a British nanny.

This one is quite an improvement. You get that floral sweetness from the vanilla hiding in the background, and the pimento dram and orange bitters bring it a little extra spice. With the additional flavors, I'd be happy to make this one again in the future...it's got some personality that way.

Additionally, if you wanted to make a non-alcoholic version of this one, you could shake everything together without the rum, pour it into the glass and top it up with ginger ale, stirring to combine. I think it'd still be a good drink, although not nearly as fun without the rum.

some assembly required

I'll admit, I tend to use some rather unusual ingredients in my drinks, things that are hard, if not impossible to find in stores because they're so obscure. Adding more esoteric ingredients keeps things from being too flat or boring, and can, when paired with other elements, bring out flavors you may have never expected. The only drawback is you've got to prep them ahead of time, so you have those unusual additions on hand to play with.

Take, for example, rye whiskey. It tends to be spicy, almost peppery, but still with that mellow flavor. Sometimes a caramel note hangs around. It's a great spirit for a winter evening (or fall, or spring) because it's got that warmth. But if you add a couple more elements to that, you can accentuate that warmth even more.

I wound up making a couple special ingredients for Thanksgiving last year, one of which was a Maple-Demerara Sugar syrup. Demerara sugar is a coarse, brown sugar usually made from raw sugar cane and left unbleached. It's got a less refined flavor, more molasses-y, and is great in coffee and baked goods. I just made a simple syrup with two cups of that and one cup of water, cooking it until reduced and thick, and then added about two ounces of maple syrup to it (the real stuff, none of that Log Cabin crap!), bottled it, and stuck it in the fridge.

After Thanksgiving, I had more than a little left over, so I started pondering what sorts of drinks I could make with them. Here's one that I came up with:

2 oz rye whiskey
3/4 oz apple cider
1/4 oz Maple-Demerara sugar syrup
dash Angostura bitters

Shake it all with ice and pour into a Double Old Fashioned glass.

The drink wound up being wonderfully balanced, the peppery nature of the rye being muted a little by the sweetness of the syrup and the tartness of the cider. It really is best as an autumn drink, but you can certainly see it's got enough appeal to have at any time.

You could also, if you wanted, make it without any alcohol at all (apart from what's in the bitters, though you use such a tiny volume of the stuff that it's pretty much moot) and just add the syrup to the cider (though I'd go for a really tart cider, maybe even a cherry or cranberry cider) and stir in the bitters. You'll have to stir it pretty well to get the syrup to dissolve into the cold cider, but if you wanted the drink hot, that'd make it a lot easier. You could also drizzle the Maple-Demerara sugar syrup over sweet rolls if you needed to use it up, or use it in place of honey with some buttermilk biscuits, add it to tea or coffee, pour it over sliced apples...

See? I'm willing to think about other things that just liquor!