Thirty Four: Pacific Dawn
In which representatives of the Company are unsuccessful in progressing in the Cocktail World Cup, but still come away with a great recipe.
Read MoreThirty Three: The Unnamed One
In which the Company makes an elementary mistake.
Read MoreMxMo: Vodka is your friend
Mixology Monday is billed as the monthly online cocktail party, where our host chooses a theme and we rock up a couple of hours late, stinking of cheap wine and muttering something about "consumption". This month, Felicia's Speakeasy is graciously listening to our ramblings about our favourite Doctor Who and the fact that vodka is your friend. In Scotland, of course, vodka is everyone's friend. It's been the biggest selling spirit in both on- and off-licence sales (that's bars and liquor stores) since 2008, while Diageo's Cameronbridge distillery produces several quadrillion litres of Smirnoff every year. As far as Scottish bartenders go, vodka should be our friend, because selling it pays our wages but it's not.
Vodka has a bad reputation because it's in an awful lot of terrible drinks, all the classics of the vodka-liqueur-fruit juice school. It's telling that the drink that broke vodka in the US - the Moscow Mule - doesn't foreground its base spirit. There is, however, one vodka cocktail that does. The vodka martini is the elephant in the room. It's probably the most famous vodka cocktail, but the prevailing attitude among those in the know is that it's a corrupted gin drink. However, it remains one of the most popular and enduring drinks of all time. The key thing to take from the martini is that vodka's prefered partners are subtler and less confrontational. Pairing it with bolder flavours, like those in heavily sweetened liqueurs, pushes it to the background.
The other lesson to take from the vodka martini is that vodka can work in repurposed recipes. The trick is not to overcompensate for the lack of immediate, accessible flavour in the spirit. The basic plan, therefore, is to steal a formula and there's few better than the original - spirit, sugar, bitters and water. This refitted Old-Fashioned uses 42 Below as the spirit because, being honest, they gave us a bottle to play about with at work. St. Germain operates as our sweetening agent, with a touch of Fee Brothers Grapefruit Bitters with a slow stir and a cranberry juice float for dilution.
Aura
60ml 42 Below Vodka
1 barspoon St. Germain Elderflower Liqueur
2 dashes Fee Brothers Grapefruit Bitters
1 barspoon cranberry juice
Stir the first three ingredients with ice for at least 45 seconds. Strain into an ice-filled rocks glass. Float the cranberry juice and garnish with a twist of grapefruit zest.
Thirty Two: Drake's Fortune
I've been thinking a bit about gin cocktails of late, which is useful given that all the recipes I'm currently owe various people and competitions are supposed to be rum based. I set myself to making a summery drink that wouldn't be torture to make - essentially the polar opposite of A Walk In The Clouds.
Drake's Fortune
50ml Tanqueray Gin
25ml pink grapefruit juice
10ml St. Germain Elderflower Liqueur
1 dash Angostura Bitters
6 mint leaves
Shake all ingredients with ice and fine-strain into a chilled martini glass.
***
The recipe is inspired by the Victorian Mojito - basically a standard Mojito, but with gin and apple juice instead of rum and soda - but I wanted to get away from the shorthand of using crushed ice to signify summer drinks. From there, it seemed obvious to use elderflower to complement the gin and a touch of Angostura to bring everything together.
And yes, more drinks should be named after videogames.
Thirty One: Jade Sky
It seems like just two weeks ago that Diageo's Reserve Brands division named Aristotelis Papadopoulos as the World Class Bartender of 2009. But two weeks is a long time in the cut-throat world of cocktail competitions and the search for Aristotelis' sucessor starts on Monday at a training day for Edinburgh's bartenders on the Reserve Brands rum portfolio. It's so unfair, having to go to a secluded bar and spend the afternoon tasting Pampero and Ron Zacapa.
As part of the competition, bartenders from all over town are invited to submit recipes with the top five facing off in a regional heat with a trip to Venezuala up for grabs, not to mention a spot in the UK final sometime in 2010.
Jade Sky
3 slices of cucumber
50ml Pampero Especial
25ml lime juice
10ml sugar cane syrup
3 dashes Fee Brothers Peach Bitters
1 dash egg white
Muddle the cucumber in the base of a shaker. Add other ingredients and shake with ice. Fine-strain into a chilled martini glass. Garnish with a cucumber slice on the rim.