MxMo XL: Ginger

Like other stuff, Mixology Monday happens every month, but is at least 7,000% more fun than paying your rent. This month, RumDood challenges us to find a use for ginger, in any of its various forms. Ginger is a wonderful thing. Its mere presence elevates a run-of-the-mill stir fry towards the awesome and beyond that, it's versatile and easily fermentable. It's worth noting that having ginger hair is often treated as a kind of social disability in Scotland, but combining the physical trait with the root can be a powerful thing.

Fresh root ginger is, as we've already decided, great. The problem is that fresh root ginger is slightly troublesome when it comes to drinks. Muddling it takes a lot of effort and adds time and icky bits of ginger into a drink - we have a cocktail at work that involves muddling fresh ginger and it sells by the hundred. Every time someone orders one, another bartender starts crying, because basically it's a lot of faf for not a lot of benefit. There are other options - ginger beer or ale are the most obvious, but you could use a liqueur like Domaine de Canton (if you could buy it in the UK) or a syrup or jam.

Yes, jam. We will make jam out of anything.

Jams offer a slightly different sweetening agent for cocktails, adding sweetness, texture and specific flavour notes without adding too much volume into the mix. They're a great alternative to liqueurs, particularly in non-alcoholic drinks.

So, yeah. Ginger jam. It's the future.

La Roux

40ml Courvoisier Exclusif
10ml Campari
2 barspoons Ginger Jam
25ml lemon juice
Dash egg white

In a mixing glass, stir the jam with the lemon juice until it dissolves. Add the other ingredients and shake with ice. Fine-strain into a chilled coupette and garnish with a thin slice of root ginger on the rim.

Twenty One: Blackberry

If David Embury is to be believed, mixed drinks fall roughly into two categories - cocktails of the sour type, and those of the aromatic type. The former covers drinks that include - surprise! - a sour element like lemon or lime juice while the latter comprises recipes with some kind of aromatized or fortified wine component, such as vermouth. But I don't think that these two categories have to be mutually exclusive. I don't mean drinks that contain both aromatic elements and sour elements - there are some, most notably the Corpse Reviver - more I think that it is often possible to present both a sour version and an aromatic version of the same drink. There will be differences in the two versions of the drink, but the overall flavor profile will pretty much the same.

I'm going to use a Bramble to illustrate the point. It's a gin-based drink invented by Dick Bradsell in London in the early part of the 1980s.

Bramble

45ml gin
25ml lemon juice
10ml gomme syrup
15ml Creme de Mure

Stir the first three ingredients with crushed ice in an old-fashioned glass. Float the Creme de Mure and garnish with a lemon wedge and a couple of blackberries.

*** 

The thing with sour drinks is that they're not actually sour. It's all about that balance between sweet and sour, finding that spot between zingy and refreshing, and avoiding gum-sucking acidity. The immediate hit is something that is going to be lost in the aromatic version, but that doesn't mean that we're going to lose the citrus notes entirely.

Blackberry

50ml gin
15ml dry vermouth
10ml Limoncello
4 kaffir lime leaves
15ml Creme de Mure

Stir the first three ingredients with cubed ice in an old-fashioned glass. Float the Creme de Mure and garnish with a blackberry and a lime leaf.

*** 

And there we go - complementary sour and aromatic cocktails based on a single flavour profile.

Twenty: Last Night's Party

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.

Nineteen: Brandyberry Julep

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.

One more thing: spot that lovely picture? It was taken by the wonderful Hugh Beauchamp - check him out on Flickr and Twitter.

Eighteen: West India Company

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.