A weblog detailing cocktails, spirits, liqueurs, barware, bars, and bitters. Maintained by Michael Dietsch, a hobbyist mixer in Providence, R.I.

From the category archives:

Gin

Chairman’s Reserve Spiced Rum

by Michael Dietsch on August 26, 2010 · 0 comments

in Gin,Rum

My god, Tales didn’t kill me after all.

This rainy weekend saw Jen and me attending a couple of wine and spirit events down in Newport. On Sunday, we attended the Newport Wine Festival–three full tents of wine and spirits to sample. We weren’t too crazy about certain aspects of it, especially the way food was handled, but overall we enjoyed it. We went in part to see our old friend Jim Ryan, late of Dressler restaurant in Brooklyn, and now a brand ambassador for Hendrick’s Gin. I’ve seen Jim a couple of times at Tales of the Cocktail since we left New York, but Jen hadn’t seen him since the last time he sat a cocktail in front of her at the Dressler bar. (Disclaimer: Jim was able to procure tickets for us, so our entry was free. We paid for food and parking.)

(photo by Jennifer Hess)

Jim gave a condensed version of his talk at Tales, when he and Charlotte Voisey gave a presentation on the botanicals in Hendricks gin. Jim discussed the use of spicy elements in the Hendricks botanical base, and spicy ingredients in cocktails. One highlight was the La Luna cocktail, a blend of gin, lime juice, cucumber juice, jalapeno syrup, soda–a delicious drink that I tried in the Botanical session and was happy to see at Newport, because I knew Jen would love it. Jim also had an assistant pass around a tray of botanicals, tins of juniper berries and other spices, alongside vials of the same botanicals in distillate form.

Monday, I flew solo and attended the M.S. Walker Wine Experience, a wine-and-spirits tasting put on by M.S. Walker, a distributor in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. I focused mostly on tasting spirits since I knew there were a few new things I wanted to try. Chief among them was the new spiced offering from Chairman’s Reserve Rum, made by St. Lucia Distillers and imported into the United States by Team Spirits Imports Company. That latter group was repped at the show by its founders David Jones and Clyde Davis, and I had a chance to speak to David at some length about how the spiced is made.

First, I have to say this: I normally hate spiced rum, and David put a finger on why–it’s often overloaded with vanilla. And yes, I’ve found that to be true, but there’s more. I just don’t think the spices make any sense. I can rarely distinguish anything other than clove and maybe nutmeg. And the damn things are always so overly sweetened. Gross.

Chairman’s is taking a different approach. First, the base spirit is the original Chairman’s Reserve, not a “second” gussied up with caramel and vanilla flavoring. Second, they’re using spices and fruits that make sense for St. Lucia–products that are traditionally grown or consumed there. Bitter orange peel. Clove. Ginger. Coconut. Nutmeg. (What you won’t find is the Bois Bande that’s used in bottlings sold in St. Lucia. Its supposed aphrodisiac properties would have made it too hard–fnar, fnar–to pitch to the TTB.)

Man, I really loved this stuff. I told David it was like sipping a well-made rum old-fashioned. Or, even truer, sipping a pseudo-OF. One thing I sometimes enjoy is using a small bit of liqueur or other sweetening agent in place of sugar (or simple syrup) in an OF. So I’ll sometimes take 3 oz. of a good sipping rum, splash in about a teaspoon of Allspice (Pimento) Dram, and dash on some bitters. The Chairman’s reminded me a lot of that.

Now, the Team Spirits guys had the Chairman’s Spiced at Tales, from what I’ve heard, but the one time I saw it was in a Tasting Room, and their table was always so mobbed I couldn’t get close to it. Everyone there seemed to love it, too.

Look for Chairman’s Reserve Spiced Rum to come to market in September.

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Botanical Garden

by Michael Dietsch on July 23, 2010 · 0 comments

in Gin,Tales of the Cocktail

Thursday morning, I had the pleasure of sitting in on the Botanical Garden seminar, presented by Charlotte Voisey and Jim Ryan of William Grant & Sons. Voisey and Ryan discussed the roles that various botanicals play in gins.

The seminar was lighthearted but info-packed. Four actors played the role of different botanicals and were decked in colorful outfits. At the right moment, the actor would come out into the room, dance or strut or even swagger around to music, and then exit. It sounds cheesy but it was actually quite fun.

Charlotte started, describing the history of the science of botany, and how our understanding has evolved over time.

They then split the world of gin botanicals into four groups: spice, floral, citrus, and other. They said there was honestly no better term they could derive than “other.” In spice, they covered first the biggie: juniper. They worked through coriander, caraway, and cubeb.

The cocktail served during this portion was the Snapper. Their version included Hendricks gin, rice wine vinegar, spices and a float of port.

They moved on to citrus: orange peel, lemon peel. They use a bitter orange, like that found in marmalade, for Hendrick’s. As for the lemon, it’s there to help correct and soften other flavors. Cocktail was the Citrus Fizz, in which they tried to layer the citrus flavors in the drink. It was gin, Solerna Blood Orange Liqueur, creme de violette, rhubarb bitters, and the juices of orange, lemon, and lime.

Among the floral botanicals used in making Hendricks are chamomile, elderflower; meadowsweet, and rose petal. The cocktail served here was the Pall Mall Punch: Hendricks, chamomile tea, lemon, honey syrup, and Peychaud’s. Lovely drink.

Finally, the elusive “other.” Just three things here, one of which will certainly not surprise anyone: first, angelica root, and orris root and the non-shocker, cucumber. I was interested to learn that cucumber’s essential oils are too low to be added in distillation, so they’re infused in afterward. For this round, they served up the La Luna, which was really kind of fun, but a little strong: Hendricks, cucumber juice, jalapeno syrup, and lime. A very green drink.

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Martini Project: DeVoto Edition

by Michael Dietsch on July 7, 2010 · 5 comments

in Cocktail recipes,Gin,In the library,Personalities

The martini: easily the most-often mixed drink in our household, and the one I have the most fun playing with. As Paul “Birthday Boy” Clarke pointed out recently on Serious Eats, it’s a much more flexible drink than people give it credit for. With the explosion of the gin category in the last few years, there are now many expressions of the martini’s base to experiment with. Vermouth, however…

Until recently, most elbow-benders didn’t have much choice in the vermouth market. You could find Noilly Prat, Cinzano, and Martini & Rossi just about anywhere. If you were in a larger market, you could probably Boissiere and Stock, as well. In the last couple of years, though, that’s changed. I won’t say the category has exploded, but some excellent new vermouths are on the market now, and if you can find them, you’re in for a treat–Vya and Dolin immediately come to mind.

Further, if you expand your definition of martini to include a drink mixed with other fortified wines or aperitifs–sherry, Lillet Blanc, Cocchi Americano, or Bonal Gentiane-Quina, for example–you open up for yourself a number of new avenues for combinations. Until early this year, however, my options in Rhode Island were rather limited. Now, though, the Haus Alpenz portfolio is available to us, and I already have several nearby stores that carry the line of Dolin vermouths. (And I’m working them on the Americano and Bonal.)

With that in mind, it’s time to start playing. The game is, here, I’ll be mixing up various variations on the martini–different proportions, different ingredient combinations, etc. I want to get to a point where I can say, “Hey, I really like Bonal with Plymouth, and I also think Dolin’s the perfect partner with Tanqueray.” (These are just examples, of course; I’ve never mixed them that way yet.)

I’ll begin by tackling the De Voto recipe that Paul mentions in his SE column. In his newly reissued (and handsome) book The Hour: A Cocktail Manifesto, first published in 1948, the author and literary critic Bernard De Voto wrote of the martini that …

[t]here is a point at which the marriage of gin and vermouth is consummated. It varies a little with the constituents, but for a gin of 94.4 proof and a harmonious vermouth it may be generalized at about 3.7 to one. And that is not only the proper proportion but the critical one; if you use less gin it is a marriage in name only and the name is not martini. You get a drinkable and even pleasurable result, but not art’s sunburst of imagined delight becoming real. Happily, the upper limit is not so fixed; you may make it four to one or a little more than that, which is a comfort if you cannot do fractions in your head and an assurance when you must use an unfamiliar gin.

Now, most people would probably skip the 3.7 nonsense and go right for the 4:1 measure. After all, that’s easy. If you’re stirring for two, that’s 4 oz. gin and 1 oz. vermouth. For one person, it’s a snap to halve that. But how do you measure 3.7 or 7.4 or 1.85 ounces of anything? I always hit that roadblock and never went farther.

But I’ve been reading one of De Voto’s contemporaries lately, the gourmet, railroad aficionado, bon vivant, boulevardier, and long-time newspaper columnist Lucius Beebe. He wrote of a 1963 trip to Boston, in which he luncheoned in the private Union Club. He writes of their martinis that they’re “magnificent” and mixed “precisely according to the immutable formula laid down by the late Bernard De Voto.”

So to hell with it. I’m a geek, there’s gotta be a way to hack this. I remembered my digital kitchen scale. I placed a mixing tin on the scale and zeroed out the weight. Then I carefully poured 37 grams of water into the tin. That’s a little over 1-1/4 oz. but not quite 1-1/3. Okay, I could work with that. Take 37 grams of gin, 10 grams of vermouth; then it’s simply a matter of scaling that up to make two cocktails. I still needed the digital magic machine to get the right measure, but fine. Anything for you, dear ones.

De Voto Martini for Two

148 grams gin (I used Bombay, which isn’t quite up to De Voto’s standard of 94.4 proof, but it was good)
40 grams Dolin dry vermouth
lemon twist, for garnish (upon which De Voto simply insists)

Stir, dammit. Garnish.

Prior to dilution, that comes out to 188 grams or approximately 6.63 oz. for two cocktails. Just about perfect for my glass size, with a little left in the mixing glass. Now, an Imperial variation.

De Voto Martini for Two, Imperial

5-1/2 oz. gin
1-1/2 oz. vermouth
lemon twist

Stir, dammit. Garnish.

That’s not quite to the 3.7 standard, but it’s as close as you’ll probably come with traditional bar measures. That gives you 7 oz. of martini, prior to dilution, for a ratio of 3.66667 to 1.

And now even I’m weirded out by the geekery of this post.

DISCLAIMER: I was sent a review copy of The Hour.

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Recipe Redux: Princeton

April 14, 2010

Today, I’d like to revisit a favorite cocktail, one I’ve blogged before, the Princeton cocktail. The Princeton is a lovely mix of gin and port, with a little orange bitters in the gin. The Princeton comes to us from George Kappeler’s 1895 book, Modern American Drinks. Here’s how Kappeler describes it: A mixing-glass half-full fine ice, [...]

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Hayviation

April 10, 2010

A simple variant on the classic Aviation, using Hayman’s Old Tom gin. I chose the Hayman’s because I have a problem with the Aviation; I think it’s just a touch out of balance on my palate, with the lemon juice so heavy and the sweetening agents so light. (However, I know that if you bump [...]

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