This drink is not kosher, halal or safe for vegetarians.

As I said, as long as I had leftover base ingredients from my Thanksgiving mixology experiments, I would share the fruits of my research and testing. And tonight, I have something that may shock, terrify and amaze you. Those of you with sensitive dispositions, please leave the room now. If you have small children...why the hell are they reading this blog with you?

Tonight's drink requires you to devote several hours over the better part of a week making one of the ingredients, and the guide for that will follow the main recipe. Believe me, though, it's well worth the effort. Behold! I give you...

The Bacon Old-Fashioned

2 ounces bacon-infused bourbon (recipe follows)
1/4-1/2 oz maple syrup (less if you use Grade B, which is stronger in flavor)
2 dashes Angostura bitters
orange zest
Urban Moonshine Maple bitters (optional, but if you have them, great)

Place orange zest in the bottom of an Old-Fashioned glass with Angostura bitters and maple syrup. Gently muddle to express oils. Add ice and bacon-infused bourbon, stirring gently to combine. Add two dashes Maple bitters to top.

Bacon-Infused bourbon (makes about 750 ml)

750 ml bourbon (nothing too pricy...I used Evan Williams)
4 strips of bacon
a 1-liter Mason jar with lid

Slowly cook bacon over low heat, in a cast iron skillet if you have a well-seasoned one, reserving drippings (which should total about 1 ounce). Eat the bacon or set aside to eat later. Allow drippings to cool slightly. Meanwhile pour the bourbon into your scrupulously clean Mason jar (rinse well with boiling water, and swish a little high-proof neutral grain spirits around inside if you have them) and add the bacon drippings. Store at room temperature overnight (or about eight hours) then move to the fridge for three days. Move to the freezer for one day, and then strain out solidified drippings. Run bourbon through a paper coffee filter, rebottle and refrigerate. Bourbon should keep for several weeks in the fridge.

Yes. Bacon-infused bourbon. No, I have not lost my mind. It really is fantastically good...the sweetness of the bourbon is the predominant flavor to begin, but then the smokiness of the bacon makes itself known. It's also wonderful for horrifying your friends when you tell them what you've made. Well, horrify or delight...the reactions usually go to one of those two extremes.

It's not a drink, per se, but it's got booze in it!

I decided earlier this week to try to make my own ginger extract/liqueur. I haven't tried it yet, but I wanted to document it before I forgot. So here's what I did...

On Monday, I took pretty much the remainder of my bottle of J. Wray and Nephew White Overproof rum, about 300 ml or so, added 2 oz of shaved ginger (unpeeled) and let it sit, covered, but shaking it periodically, until Thursday night, when I added another ounce of crystallized (candied) ginger chunks. I let those sit in there until tonight (Saturday), when I strained it into a clean bottle, mixed up some simple syrup in a 3:4 water:sugar ratio, and poured that in, shaking to combine.

By my back of the envelope calculations, it should still be about 40% alcohol by volume, plenty strong to be shelf stable, There's about 16 or 17 ounces of liqueur in there, so I may try a rye and ginger tonight, and we'll see how it turns out. If it's good, there's be some posts in the future featuring it. If it sucks, well, at least you'll have had some entertainment making this for no good reason whatsoever. Maybe you could use it as a marinade, or something...

EDITED TO ADD: Oh, yeah, that's nice and spicy. That'll be a featured drink soon!

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.

Okay, now I'm really confused.

I put a poll out in the field earlier this afternoon, and since two people answered it, I can call it unanimous. Tonight's drink is the Singapore Sling. Easy enough.

Which one, though?

There's more recipes out there for the Singapore Sling than you can shake a swizzle stick at. Some with club soda, some without. Some with citrus juice, some saying if you add citrus it's no longer classified as a sling. Some with gin, some with brandy, some with both. It's very perplexing. So I'm going to mix up one version of it tonight and perhaps revisit its variants in the future. Tonight's version is the one David Wondrich takes on in "Esquire Drinks":

Singapore Sling (Wondrich version)

2 oz London dry gin
1/2 oz Cherry Heering cherry brandy
1/2 oz Bénédictine

Stir all well with 2-3 ice cubes, pour unstrained into highball glass, and fill to taste with club soda (or ginger beer, if you're of a mind to).

In this one, I taste the gin more than anything. The Heering and the Bénédictine round it out a little bit, and give it some depth, but it's really relegated to the background. Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad drink, but it kind of lacks something. I'll be very interested to try some of the other versions and see what they bring. But first, I'll need to get a new bottle of Bénédictine, as this drink took the last few drops from my miniature "fun size" bottle (and since when is getting less of something "fun?"). Fortunately, my friendly neighborhood liquor emporium has a half size bottle that won't break the bank. Tune in next time, true believers!

"Shaken not stirred?" UR DOIN IT WRONG!

Thanks to stupid James Bond (well, maybe not ONLY him, but he's a big part of the problem), everybody and their brother thinks two things about a Martini; it should be made with vodka, and it should be shaken. Here's why that's wrong. First off, classic martini? Gin. Second off, shaking? Doesn't "bruise" the flavors like people seem to suppose, but it does introduce microscopic air bubbles, which lend a cloudy appearance, which isn't exactly conducive to that gorgeous, crystal clear look that the Martini pulls off so well. For more info on shaking vs stirring, take a look at Imbibe Magazine's video on the subject, hosted by Jeffrey Morgenthaler (you may remember him from my Old Fashioned post). A further pet peeve of mine is that people seem to think that anything served up in a cocktail glass should carry the Martini moniker, but that's a quarrel for another time.

Long story short, a Martini, in the classic, timeless, perfect, sublime sense of the drink, has a scant three ingredients, plus optional garnish; gin, dry vermouth, a couple dashes of orange bitters, lemon twist garnish (actually, just twist the lemon over the drink and then ditch the peel...you really only want the oils). The main variances in the experience of the martini come into play with the alteration of the gin-to-vermouth ratio and the variety of each you use.

It's very possible to take the ratio to extremes...at times, the preferred ratio was 8 parts of gin and a menacing glare at the vermouth bottle...in other words, cold gin. On the other end of the spectrum, there's equal measures of gin and vermouth, which takes it back too far away from dryness...in the end, you want the best of both worlds; you want that crisp dryness from the gin tempered ever so slightly with the more mellow aspect of the vermouth (which is still dry, but not nearly so much as the gin). To this end, I agree with David Wondrich in that an idea proportion, though a tricky one to attain without using a scale (like I do, because Alton Brown taught me well) is 7 parts gin to one part vermouth. You can get pretty much there with 2 oz gin and barely two teaspoons of vermouth, or you can just plunk your mixing glass or shaker full of cracked ice on your digital scale, pour in 63 mL of gin and 9 of vermouth, dash in your orange bitters, and stir until everything is well chilled.

I commented to my two followers on Twitter (ok, one follower, the other is my main account) that I'd procured a couple new spirits today, including Rehorst, a locally produced gin. So I figured I'd test it out in a Martini. The gin's distilled by Great Lakes Distillery, and it features, among its botanicals, two unusual elements; sweet basil (sometimes called "sacred basil") and Wisconsin ginseng. Neither of those have ever been used in a commercial gin before, and they make for a really unique aroma and taste.

This is my first time sampling Rehorst's gin, so my impressions are about as fresh as possible. It's a really really clean gin, and oddly enough, the first flavors I get from this drink are a clean hard mineral flavor and, perplexingly, coconut, and then the citrus notes come into play! It's great, though, I'm sold already. I think, on reflection, that the mineral flavor I'm getting is the sweet basil and coriander, maybe some of the ginseng. Whatever it is, mark me down as a fan. I look forward to trying this one in a Gin Rickey and a G&T, as well. If you don't live in the Midwest, see if you can order it from their website. It's a damned good gin.