On classic cocktails

Next Friday marks the 75th anniversary of the repeal of US Prohibition, a day that will be celebrated with the downing of a significant number of old-school cocktails. It's just got to be done. After all, FDR headed straight to the liquor cabinet on signing off on the 21st Amendment. I'd guess that the cocktailblog community is going to have some cool things lined up to commemorate the anniversary. These things don't happen every day, and I'm no exception. I've been spending some time looking at some of the great cocktails created outside of the USA during the dry years, but that's a tale for another day.

Next Friday's looking good, I reckon.

Anyway, the thing is this: what are the great modern cocktails?

There's a fairly nebulous group of mixed drinks that are referred to as "classics". Some are more or less undisputed - martini, Manhattan, Old-Fashioned, Daiquiri, for example, and some are kinda borderline - the Aviation? (Yes, if you're from the States, maybe not if you're British.) Off the top of my head, I can't think of any bona fide, nailed-on classics that date from after World War 2.

Taking 1948 (the first publication of Embury's Fine Art of Mixing Drinks) as the cut-off, what are the great modern cocktails?

I see two major problems. The first is the idea that Embury came up with, that all cocktails come back to six essential drinks. Well, five, and the Jack Rose. If that's true, then barring minor variations, everything's already been done. The second is the 1980s, which was as good a decade for mixology as 1666 was for London.

OK, just to be contrary - to counter the first problem, a truly great drink should transcend its formula. There is only one point of difference between a martini and a Manhattan, yet they're both considered classics in their own right. To counter the second, I just need to find a genuinely excellent cocktail that was invented about the time disco was considered acceptable to play out loud in public.

Here's a clue: it's not Sex On The Beach.

So, the question remains. Oh God, I feel a Workshop series coming on...

On the Martini

I've spent a decent amount of time thinking about gin recently. There are worse things to think about and I've sat in on two training sessions on it over the past fortnight. One thing that always comes up in any gin training is the Martini. It's one of the most iconic cocktails - everybody knows of the Martini, even if not everybody knows what it exactly is. It strikes me that the modern Martini drinker falls into one of two schools:

a) an experienced, hardcore drinker who knows exactly how they want their drink, or b) someone who's just seen a Bond movie and really doesn't know what they're getting into. I have fond memories of the aftermath of Casino Royale's release - making Vespers and, five minutes later, being asked to top them up with lemonade.

All of it boils down to this: the Martini - or, rather, the modern dry Martini - is an incredibly inaccessible drink. If you don't like the taste of straight spirits, there's no point of entry unless you turn to neo-martinis which are an entirely different beast.

It's a shame, really. I used to make a Cosmopolitan-flavoured martini-style cocktail as a party trick. At work, we've prototyped something that looks like a proper, old-school martini, and tastes like Neopolitan ice-cream. In both cases, I've found that people are really surprised in the sheer amount of flavour that you can get from a clear, colourless drink. Taking that idea further, I tried to come up with a more accessible Martini.

The other thing that sticks out at me is how unfashionable vermouth is in the mass-market these days, despite George Clooney's best efforts. If you want to blame someone, Winston Churchill's probably your best bet. Depending on who you ask, he took his Martinis with either a glance at the bottle while stirring or a pass of the bottle over the chilled glass. The drying of the Martini probably reached its logical conclusion with Salvatore Calabrese's Naked Martini, where the vermouth is sprayed into a chilled glass before adding gins straight from the freezer, creating possibly the most hardcore cocktail the world has ever known.

So, yeah. Let's make a more accessible Martini, but without using vermouth.

I do try to make things easy for myself.

The Duke of Marlborough

50ml Tanqueray Gin
25ml Sauvignon Blanc (I used Anapai River 2007 from Marlborough, New Zealand)
1 barspoon Acacia Honey
1 dash Fee Brothers Peach Bitters

Dissolve honey into white wine in a mixing glass. Add the gin and bitters, and stir with ice. Fine-strain into a chilled martini glass. Garnish with a mint leaf wrapped in a lemon zest twist.

(Picture credits: Martini Time, from wickenden's Photostream on Flickr; news.bbc.co.uk)

On selling gin

Tomorrow, I'm lucky enough to be attending a gin training session at work hosted by an ambassador from Diageo's Reserve Brands division and I reckoned it would be worth doing a bit of homework. I'm pretty familiar with gin, but I figure it's always worth refreshing myself every once in a while. I don't know if they're going to touch on Gordon's Gin tomorrow, but I stopped by the website anyway.

Gordon's have been using Gordon Ramsay as the face of their advertising for a while now, in a campaign that plays on his uncomprimising pursuit of excellence - stop laughing at the back - and he appears in a video on the website demonstrating how to make the perfect G&T. And it's annoying the hell out of me.

Gordon's is one of the oldest spirit brands in the world, but in recent years it's fallen out of favour among bartenders, particularly in the upper end of the trade. We switched from it to Bombay Sapphire as a house pour about eighteen months/two years ago, and it's rare to see it being poured along George Street which is as zeitgeisty a market as you'll see in the bar industry. Gordon's is still (I believe, I haven't got the numbers) the biggest gin brand in the UK, but I wonder how much of that is driven by off-license (liquor store) sales, and from that point of view, it makes perfect sense to use someone like Gordon Ramsay as your corporate face.

I still feel weird about that video. I think it's territorial - Ramsay's a great chef, but my experience would suggest that chefs are much better in front of a bar than behind one. I can think of any number of bartenders, trainers or brand ambassadors that exhibit the same passion for spirits and cocktails as Ramsay does for food, yet no-one's made the leap into the mainstream in the same way as celebrity chefs have.

I guess the point I'm aiming at is, who's going to be the first mainstream celebrity bartender?

(Photo from <<graham>>'s Flickr photostream, issued under a Creative Commons licence.)

Havana laugh

I'm a bartender, therefore I like rum, which leads me to say all kinds of nice things about the roundup of the Havana Club range at A Mountain of Crushed Ice. Tiare's post touches on Bacardi's version of Havana Club, which is only available in the USA, which reminds me of two things.

The first is spending literally an entire day in Manhattan's liquor stores trying to find a bottle to (very illegally) bring back to Scotland. The second, courtesy of the guys at Bramble, is trying it.

It's absolutely horrendous. Maybe it's me. Maybe I've been spoiled by Britain's rich rum heritage. Maybe I'm comparing it with things it should never be measured against, like an aged Jamaican or Guatemalan rum, or even Bacardi's own 8 year old. Maybe I've become a rum snob.

And if it is me? It still tastes like someone made a vodka flavoured with burnt caramel. From meths.

Pretty bottle, though.

The cold war

One of the first things you learn behind a bar is alcohol tastes better when it's cold. It's what you say to people who complain that you've put too much ice in their vodka and Coke. It helps that, as a general rule, it's true. But not always. Take wine, for example. Reds usually want to be served just south of room temperature. For me, rosés can go straight from the fridge to the trashcan (it is possible that I just haven't met the right one for my tastes. Theoretically, anyway), and whites are comfortable in the ballpark of 4-7 degrees Celsius. What showed me that the majority of Edinburgh bartenders are probably more into cocktails than wine was when one of them filled an 18oz wine glass with ice and soda and then stirred it for thirty seconds before pouring the wine straight from the fridge. At least his heart's in the right place.

That was five minutes ago. My £5-plus glass of Australian Sauvignon Blanc still tastes like chilled grape juice, which is all well and good, but I'm fairly sure I ordered wine.