Lebkuchen? Gesundheit!

I was casting my mind around to see what I could do with some of this ginger liqueur I made, and I though perhaps something with a lot of spice notes could be interesting. I remembered a great cookie my mother and I made years ago called "Lebkuchen," a traditional German cookie that's related to gingerbread. It seemed like we threw the whole spice rack in there, so I set out to invent the alcoholic equivalent of it, and came up with this:

Lebkuchen Cocktail

1 1/2 oz ginger liqueur
1 oz aged rum
1/2 oz bourbon
dash Angostura bitters
dash pimento dram
dash homemade spice extract

Build all over ice, stir to combine.

This is really kind of uncanny. It tastes almost exactly like a spice cookie...the allspice of the pimento dram, the myriad spices in my spice extract, the ginger, the silkiness of the rum, the sweet spiciness of the bourbon; they all combine into a drink that greatly resembles the cookie of my memory. It does not, however, pair as well with milk.

I have been informed that today is International Rum Day!

That means, of course, a rum cocktail. And I'm going to take a page out of Matt "RumDood" Robold's book and modify an existing drink. Earlier this year, he took an El Presidente and turned it into a Machado Cocktail. Well, I'm taking his Machado and turning it into what I'm going to call:

RumDood's Revenge

1 1/2 oz aged rum
1/2 oz dry vermouth
1/4 oz orange liqueur
1/8 oz pimento dram
2 dashes Angostura bitters
splash of grenadine

build over ice in a Double Old-Fashioned glass, stir, and garnish with lemon twist.

This drink turned out to be so ridiculously smooth it ought to be illegal. The aged rum is so incredibly mellow, the dry vermouth keeps it from veering too far to the sweet, the orange liqueur and lemon zest brighten it, and the bitters and pimento dram add a smoky, spicy complexity. Oh, Sweet Saint Seryn the Merciful*, this is a good drink.

*Saint Seryn the Merciful is patron saint of brewers, bakers and distillers...my kind of people.

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).

I love happy accidents in the lab.

Last night I was playing around with Tiki drinks, because I just got this nifty little iPod Touch app called Tiki+ (link opens in iTunes), which features more than 150 tiki drinks that Jeff "Beachbum" Berry has dug up over the years. So I was looking through them for inspiration, and, well, I wound up going a little "mad scientist," what with a dash of this and a little of that, and just generally experimenting. And I'll be frank, sometimes when I just mix stuff together, it really really sucks. But sometimes you can surprise yourself, and I'm delighted to report that this was one of those times.

And, since I made it up, I got to name it, which is one of my favorite parts of the process. So, since it's just some random thing, I went with the Hawaiian pidgin equivalent of "whatchamacallit," which is "da kine" (it's been described as "the word you use when you don't use the word")

Da Kine Cocktail

1/2 oz pimento dram
1/4 oz falernum
1/4 oz orgeat syrup
dash of vanilla extract
juice of 1/2 lime
slice of lemon
1 oz white Puerto Rican rum (I used Bacardi)
1 oz dark Barbados rum (I used Gosling's Black Seal)
dash of orange bitters

Combine all ingredients in shaker with lots of crushed ice, squeeze in the lemon juice and drop in the slice, and shake well. Pour, unstrained, over the juiced lime half, into a favorite Tiki mug, or boring old glass.

Brok'da mout*, da buggah is ono**! This turned out to be a great drink in the spirit of all the Tiki drinks it drew inspiration from...sweet, sour, full of spice, complex in character. Oooh, man. You gotta make this. Drink more than a couple of 'em, though, and you'll be pau***!

*"Brok'da mout" = "It's so good, it broke my mouth"
**"Da buggah is ono" = "This wicked little thing is delicious"
*** "pau" = "done" or "finished"

This drink travels directly to...The Twilight Zone.

I was reading an old Thursday Drink Night post earlier this evening from late February, dealing with adding rinses to the inside of your glass before adding the cocktail itself...and I got to pondering...last night we played around with Pernod and noted that between that and the gin, there were a ton of extracts and herbal ingredients in it. So how many varieties of multiple extracts could I have in one drink and still have it taste good? I decided that I was just crazy enough to find out, and so I created another drink tonight! There's no photo, because it's really nothing special to look at, but it's worth trying if only to see if it cures your bursitis or something.

The Potential Monteleone Cocktail

For the rinse:
6 drops pimento dram
6 drops spice extract or falernum
6 drops Pernod
2 drops Peychaud's bitters

For the drink:
1 3/4 oz jenever-style gin
1/4 oz bourbon
1/4 oz dry vermouth
dash orange bitters
dash Angostura bitters

Swirl the rinse around in your prettiest cordial glass as far up the sides as possible, then pour out the rest. Shake the remaining ingredients with ice and strain into your glass.

This is really a weird, but good concoction. The nose is so at odds with the flavor that it's got this weird little cognitive dissonance thing going on, which I really like. The scent is very spicy, sweet, all nutmeg and allspice and cinnamon and star anise...and then the flavor is very dry and ascerbic, with a little bit of sweetness from the bourbon and a little fruit from the orange bitters. I'd almost use this as a digestif in its current size, or double it and have it with a splash of club soda as a larger size cocktail.

If you're in an experimental, mind-warp kind of mood, you could do worse than this drink. Not bad for a made up on the spot drink.

UPDATE! Dateline: El Cinco De Mayo 2009 [insert newsroom sound effects here] I'm entering this drink in a contest, and it has thus been renamed. It was "The Voodoo PuPu Platter" but it is now the "Potential Monteleone Cocktail" to reflect the contest in question.

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!

♫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.

There's a funny little, sunny little melody...

So as luck would have it, I was beaten to the punch on tonight's drink. I was going to do "Jasper's Jamaican" but Trader Tiki over there in my blogroll beat me to it this afternoon. So I went with Plan B and put my own little twist on it. Tonight's drink is the first Tiki drink on the blog here, and it's a simple one (at least compared to some...there's Tiki drinks that you can get at Tiki-Ti in LA that have 8+ ingredients, some that need to be specially made). Trader Tiki commented in his post on Jasper's Jamaican that most Tiki drinks are variants on the Daiquiri, much like Harpo's Special from the other day. I'll give you the straight up recipe first, and then tell you about my addition (as that's an ingredient that you'll likely need to make yourself).

Outrigger
3/4 oz fresh lemon juice
3/4 oz triple sec
1 1/2 oz Barbados Rum (I went with Mount Gay and was not disappointed)
sugar

Rub the rim of a cocktail glass with the spent lemon shell and coat with sugar (I used demerara sugar). Shake the juice, triple sec and rum with ice cubes and strain into your sugar-rimmed glass.

Now my variant on it added a scant 1/8 oz of Pimento Dram. You can find it commercially as St. Elizabeth's Allspice Dram, or you can make your own, which takes a while, but is incredibly good. Here's what you'll need

2 1/4 cups overproof rum (go with 151-proof Lemon Hart or 126 proof Wray and Nephew...leave the Bacardi alone)
1/2 cup whole dried allspice berries
3 cups water
1 1/2 lbs brown sugar

Crush the allspice berries coarsely with a mortar and pestle, combine in a large jar with the rum and seal it up. Let it steep for 10-14 days, shaking it every day. Once it's done steeping, pour through a strainer lined with cheesecloth, then pour that liquid through a coffee filter. You'll be happier without little bits of allspice in it.

Combine the sugar and water over heat to make a 1:1 simple syrup, cool, and add that syrup to your rum infusion in a clean, sterilized bottle and let it sit in the back of your fridge for a month or more. As it matures, it'll become very smooth, but very spicy. A little will go a loooooong way.

As for the modified Outrigger, I'm almost thinking the 1/8 oz of pimento dram I used tonight was a little too much, but it plays with this rum VERY well. The lemon juice and triple sec's citrus makes this almost Christmas-like when combined with the allspice liqueur, but not quite...the rum keeps it summery. I think if I upped the lemon juice a little more and added a dash of lime juice, it'd be even better. It wouldn't be an Outrigger anymore, but it'd be good!