You get asked to come up with a lot of drinks on the fly, working behind a bar. Most times, these drinks tend to be fairly simple - diverting, but not that remarkable. Every once in a while, though, you stumble on something golden.
Last Night's Party
30ml Bols Cherry Brandy
45ml Absolut Raspberri
30ml lemon juice
10ml Orgeat
Dash egg white
Shake all ingredients with ice and fine-strain into a chilled martini glass. Garnish with an orange zest.
There are three stories to tell, in two loose categories. Two are about products, two are about things I wouldn't think about that often. Yes, the math doesn't quite add up.
The first story, in which I'm going to have come clean. There's a reason I've been using a lot of Creme de Mure in recent recipes - Edmond Briottet. According to Oh Gosh!, Briottet liqueurs have been produced in Dijon, France since 1936 but aren't that well known outside of France. I picked up a bottle of their Creme de Mure to use for the Highland Bramble I made for February's Mixology Monday and was totally blown away. It's at least as good as any other brand I've come across in bars across Scotland, and a good deal better than most. As ever, when you fall in love with a product, it figures large in anything you come up with. It helps that blackberry goes with light spirits as well as dark spirits.
Act two - the other side of the coin. Just as there are the things you always go to, there's always a shelf full of products that you don't really use. For me, the biggest categories I tend to ignore are bourbon and Cognac. Bourbon tends to lose out to Scotch in my thinking because, being honest, I'm in Scotland; it seem foolish to ignore the massive variation within that category when it's so readily available, but there's no particular reason for me not to consider Cognac. Having cashed in a few weeks of change, I decided to invest in a decent bottle of Cognac (Courvoisier Exclusif, as it turned out) with the intention of improving my opinion of that. The recipe that follows is step on that road, I guess.
The final story is one from work. One of the bar staff asked me to speak to a customer who was complaining about their drink - he was holding an Old-fashioned. I remembered another bartender asking me how to make one a little earlier in the evening, for a drinks check. I took him through, and we made a great tasting drink - which was back at the bar in the hands of a less-than-happy customer. So, I took a breath and walked over, introduced myself and asked if there was a problem with his drink.
"I asked for a mint julep."
This might not strike anyone as surprising or unlikely, but I've been working full-time at my current bar for over three years and that was the first time that anyone has ever ordered a mint julep. I apologised and explained that as we didn't get asked for juleps that often, it was possible that the staff were unfamiliar with the drink. We got the correct drink put together and sent out, and everyone went home happy.
There are some drinks that make it and some drinks that don't. The mint julep had completely fallen off my radar, while the mojito is currently the UK's most popular cocktail.
This week's drink is pretty simple, based on those three things - one ingredient I use a lot, one I don't, all combined in a style of drink I haven't thought of in forever.
Photo ©2009, Hugh Beauchamp
Brandyberry Julep
45ml Courvoisier Exclusif
15ml Edmond Briottet Creme de Mure
10ml gomme syrup (2:1 ratio of sugar to water)
6-8 mint leaves
Build in a highball glass with crushed ice. Garnish with a mint sprig.
If I'm honest, this started out as more of a kitchen special. I recently had the privilege of having my flat inspected by my landlord and in my attempts to make the place look more safely habitable, I turned all kinds of interesting things. There were newspapers dating back to 2007, a stack of comics as big as a five-year-old child, and most intriguingly for the purposes of this post, an airtight jar full of vanilla chai teabags. Masala chai is a blend of tea and aromatic spices that originated in the Indian Subcontinent, usually served heavily sweetened with milk. The practice of adding spices, combined with the increased proportions of milk and sugar, drew disapproval from India's colonial masters but the popularity of spiced tea seems to have outlasted the Empire. These days, masala chai style drinks are available in coffee shops everywhere - Starbucks, Costa, the usual suspects - though the actually chai component tends to be a bit of a cheat. Starbucks, for example, uses a spiced and sweetened tea-based syrup for its Chai Lattes and other commercially available syrups and teabags tend to include nontraditional flavours like chocolate or vanilla.
Just like my teabags! For some reason, I immediately thought of adding rum.
West India Company
50ml 10 Cane Rum
50ml sweetened vanilla chai (black)
25ml lemon juice
Shake all ingredients with ice and strain into ice-filled glass. Garnish with a lemon zest twist.
Today - yes, today, look at that topicality - is Cinco de Mayo, a date that carries significance for many on the American continent. For Mexicans (and Californians), it is the anniversary of their victory against the odds at the Battle of Puebla in 1862. Curiously enough, the French don't seem to mark the occasion. For Americans, it is the day on which they consume the most tequila in the year. Mexico's contribution to the world of alcohol extends further than tequila and mezcal - Mexican beer accounts for at least one of the UK's biggest selling bottled brands and provides a handy byword for exotic yet accessible brews. Surely, it'd be foolish not to combine the two.
Fifth Crown
40ml José Cuervo Tradicional
20ml Creme de Mure
30ml lime juice
Top with Corona
Shake the first three ingredients with ice and strain into an ice-filled highball. Top up with the beer and garnish with a lime wheel.
The galaxy is filled with wonderful things, not least the news that its centre tastes of raspberries and smells of rum. This is great news because both raspberries and rum are themselves wonderful things and because the centre of the galaxy is not actually made of raspberries and rum - rather it contains ethyl formate, a molecule that exhibits both traits. They're good traits to incorporate into a cocktail, too.
Centre
15ml handcrushed raspberry juice
10ml sugar syrup
1 dash Angostura Bitters
60ml Havana Club Especial
Place the raspberry juice, syrup and bitters in the base of a mixing glass. Add ice and stir. Add the rum gradually while stirring. Garnish with a couple of raspberries.
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To make the handcrushed raspberry juice, simply use a barspoon or muddler to force some fresh raspberries through a fine-strainer. You'll need about 10 or so to yield 15ml. Commercially available raspberry purée works as a substitute.
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There's a point to made, I think, about stirring drinks. The handcrushed raspberry juice is opaque so you lose the clarity that you associate with stirred drinks, but the idea behind stirring this drink is to give it the smooth texture you always get.