Unless otherwise noted, text and photos copyright © 2011 Michael Dietsch. All rights reserved. No reproduction permitted without prior consent.

Drink of the Week: Oude Plein

One evening, a few weeks ago, I was contemplating a new bottle of Bols Genever, trying to find a new use for it in a cocktail. I started thinking of a New Orleans favorite, the Vieux Carré, a blend of rye whiskey, cognac, sweet vermouth, Benedictine, and two types of bitters.

Now, depending on the brand of vermouth used, I sometimes find that the Vieux Carré’s request for equal parts whiskey, cognac, and vermouth is a little on the sweet side, so I often reduce the vermouth by a tad–down to 3/4 ounces instead of 1. Or if I want a boozier drink, I up the spirits.

Which is what I did here:

• 1.5 oz Bols Genever
• 1.5 oz Pierre Ferrand cognac
• .5 oz Dolin sweet
• 1 tsp. Benedictine
• 2 dashes each of Ango. & Peych.

Mix all ingredients in a double Old Fashioned glass over ice; stir.

My mention of this drink on Twitter sparked a brief conversation, and someone (Matthew Robold, I think) suggested naming it the Oude Plein, which Google Translate offered up as a Dutch translation of “old square.” Works for me.

The Carousel Bar at the Hotel Monteleone in New Orleans remains one of the most reliable places in my experience to find a Vieux Carre, and they’re served in these lovely flared OF glasses. For my variation, I used the closest thing in my cabinet.

Unless otherwise noted, text and photos copyright © 2011 Michael Dietsch. All rights reserved. No reproduction permitted without prior consent.

Bandwagoneering: White Manhattan

Talking to bartenders, reading blogs, I’ve noticed a trend rising over the last several months: you take a classic whiskey cocktail, such as the Manhattan or the Sazerac, and you swap in an unaged (“white”) whiskey for the brown stuff. If you’re not familiar with white whiskies, they’re nothing more than unaged whiskies that have never seen a barrel. Spirits straight from the still, and cut with water (in most cases). You can say they’re like moonshine, but the key point here is that moonshine by definition is illegal. As my friend Matthew Rowley wrote, “If you can you buy it in liquor stores, it’s not moonshine.” (For more information: Simonson, Clarke, Cecchini, Rowley)

Legal white-dog whiskies, as the unaged stuff is called, aren’t exactly new to the market. I tasted some at Tales of the Cocktail in 2008. But they’ve been slowly gaining ground among bars and consumers since then and started making their way onto cocktail menus. As I mentioned above, one popular way is to replace the brown spirit in a classic whiskey drink with a white. I wanted to riff on this, but instead of using a white dog, I chose Bols Genever. It’s a favorite in our household, a malty botanical spirit that’s the precursor to modern gin. Bols tastes uncannily like whiskey, so I thought it would play well in this type of preparation. I tried a couple of different ideas–one using Carpano Antica vermouth–to re-create the Manhattan cocktail, but this is the one we liked best.

Nieuw Amsterdam

• 2 oz. Bols Genever
• 1 oz. Cocchi Aperitivo Americano
• Fee’s barrel aged bitters
• Lemon peel, for garnish

Stir, squeeze on lemon peel, discard peel.

photograph © Jennifer Hess

Unless otherwise noted, text and photos copyright © 2011 Michael Dietsch. All rights reserved. No reproduction permitted without prior consent.

Winter 2009/2010 column is online

[Click to read onscreen. Many thanks, as always, to Chip Riegel for making the drinks look so damn good.]