Starry Night

There are lot of cocktail competitions throughout the year and sometimes when you submit an entry, you don't really think about it too much after you hit the "submit" button. For me, that was the case with the Bols Genever Classic Competition - I sent in a drink called the Stuyvesant and didn't hear anything back for a while and so it slipped off my list of immediate concerns.

That changed a couple of months ago, when representatives from Bols Genever and Maxxium UK got in touch with the general manager at Sygn looking for a venue for a Scottish final for the competition. After a couple of meetings, they agreed a date in early November and selected six finalists - Grant Neave from Monteiths, Tom Walker from Bramble, Ryan McDonald from the Voodoo Rooms, Jo Karp and Byron Abbot from Bond No. 9, and me. The final was covered by two intrepid correspondents from Imbibe magazine and is due to be featured in the Jan/Feb 2012 issue.

After we'd all presented our original online entries, word came down that the judges had picked two competitors to face-off for the prize - a trip to Amsterdam with the winner of the English final and Bols brand ambassador John Clay. The two finalists were Tom and myself and we were given fifteen minutes to come up with a contemporary style cocktail using Bols Genever.

I was keen to keep the genever at the forefront but I also wanted to complement it with ingredients that don't require too much buy-in from a customer. One of the things I'd talked about with John Clay earlier in the day was the difficulty in getting the idea of genever across to a customer in, say, two sentences. It's a really interesting category, but it takes some explaining and that can be tough to do in a busy bar environment.

I opted to make a long drink and I opted to make a sour-type drink; for all their qualities, aromatic-type drinks lack the same degree of accessibility, particularly for people are massively into cocktail culture. As I put the ingredients together, I realised that I was making a pale drink with a ginger top so I named it after a painting by another famous son of the Netherlands, Vincent Van Gogh.

Starry Night

35ml Bols Genever
15ml apricot brandy (I used the Bitter Truth)
25ml lemon juice
25ml apple juice
2 bsp acacia honey
Top with ginger ale

Shake the first five ingredients with ice and strain into an ice-filled highball glass. Top with ginger ale and garnish with an apple fan.

Tom went down a different route, taking his inspiration from the New York scene and the work of Sam Ross in particular. It was an impressive drink and hopefully he'll get something up on his blog about it. Ultimately, I think that my focus on making something consciously accessible to people unfamiliar with the category helped; I won, by something like one point between three judges.

It's alway nice to do well in comps, and it's extra special to be able to do it on home turf. Thanks to John and everyone at Bols Genever and Maxxium UK, and to the guys from Imbibe for taking the time to check out the Edinburgh scene.

Road Trip: London Cocktail Week

It's been a while since I took some time off work, so being nominated for CLASS Magazine's Bartender of the Year award seemed like the perfect opportunity to sack it off for a week and check out the bright lights of London town. Happily, the competition coincided with the second edition of London Cocktail Week, which meant there was a long list of events and seminars that would keep me off the streets. Sorting out the award was the first order of business, and the other nine finalists and myself - Justyn Bell (Hausbar, Bristol), Ryan Chetiyawardana (Worship Street Whistling Shop, London), George Collyer (Hotel du Vin, Bristol), Maxime Creusot (The Player, London), Jamie Jones (Cocktail & Spirits Initiative, Chester/NE England), Tristan Stephenson (Purl, London), David White (Tigerlily, Edinburgh), Susie Wong (Australasia, Manchester), and James Wynn-Williams (All Star Lanes, London) - met at the Cabinet Room in Bermondsey to do battle over three drinks and a written test set by the Soulshakers' Kevin Armstrong.

The Cabinet Room, incidentally, is the bar that takes up the ground floor of Simon Difford's apartment. It's among the more impressive living rooms I've seen, with cabinets of vintage glassware adorning one wall, super comfy leather sofas, and a fully featured bar right in the middle. The back bar contains no less than three different brands of blue curaçao - that stat just became my benchmark of how well stocked a bar is.

The three drinks required were a classic Daiquiri, "any cocktail of your own creation" (with a Bacardi Brown-Forman Brands product as the base spirit), and a classic cocktail drawn at random from a list of fifteen. My Daiquiri didn't come out as well as I'd hoped - I made some good decisions (using the Bacardi 1909 Heritada limited edition bottling at 44.5% ABV as opposed to the standard Superior) and some bad ones (there's a reason no-one uses icing sugar as a sweetening agent, I guess); I drew the Whisky Sour for my classic and that went pretty well, although some of the judges felt it may have been a touch too sour for their tastes. I was happy enough with my original drink but the point I kept hearing back from the judges - CLASS magazine editor Simon Difford, BBFB's head of training Alex Turner, 2010 winner Joey Medrington, and Kevin Armstrong - was that they felt bourbon and Campari wasn't a natural pairing; by extension, perhaps the recipe's missing just one more ingredient to bridge to the two.

Sophomore

45ml Woodford Reserve Bourbon
15ml Campari
15ml clarified lemon juice
10ml grenadine

Stir all ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled 8oz stemmed glass. Express and then discard a twist of orange zest. Garnish with a cocktail cherry.

The written test was appropriately brutal, fully a reminder that, for all that I claim some kind of knowledge about spirits, cocktails, and alcoholic beverages in general, there is so much I don't know. Helpfully, that no longer includes the Latin name for Hops, the recipe for a Scarlett O'Hara, or the knowledge of what a "spile" is.

I didn't win; Purl's Tristan Stephenson took the honours, and I've no complaints about that. I felt that there were at least three guys who absolutely nailed their presentations and Tris was definitely in that group. It was a fun day, and I didn't leave completely empty-handed - I'm pretty certain I beat Dub-Dub in a blue drink shake-off.

With the comp out of the way, I spent the early part of the week checking out some of the trade events at the Drinkology Studios in Shoreditch. There was a decent chunk of the Edinburgh scene on show at the BBFB Training Team's Magic of Maturation talk, presented by Ian McLaren and Craig Harper and featuring an interesting discussion on aging cocktails with Bramble's Jason Scott and Mike Aikman (and I totally managed to score a barrel-aged, hand-bottled Affinity cocktail, which are generally in short supply up here).

I did a couple of other things in LCW - a visit to the Sipsmith Distillery in Hammersmith, which is probably deserving of its own post, for one - before I hit the CLASS Awards at the Old Street Classic Car Club and met up with probably everybody I know in the industry. With four different bars - Belvedere (Red), Tiger, Sailor Jerry, and Bacardi - we were well served for drinks (apparently, yes, you can have too many Last Words) and the cabaret theme was suitably epic. Although the Scots missed out on a couple of awards - Tonic were nominated for Best Classic Bar which went to Be At One, and Edinburgh alumni Meimi Sanchez (Havana Club) and Shervene Shahbazkani (Bacardi) were up for Best Brand Ambassador against the eventual winner, Grand Marnier's Julien LaFond - we didn't go home empty-handed with the Best Bar Menu award going to the Blythswood Square Hotel in Glasgow.

For a sophomore effort, London Cocktail Week was really impressive. Over 250 bars signed up to offer £4 cocktails to attendees over the week and there were trade and consumer events all over the city every day. I don't have a frame of reference to compare it against but what I did see seemed to run smoothly and was well-received, and that's to the credit of the organisers - particularly Hannah Sharman-Cox at Odd Firm of Sin, and to Simon Difford and Emma Ramos who had to put up with my chat on more than one occasion.

Road Trip: Balmenach Distillery and Caorunn

Scotland - and it's likely that I'm not the first person to notice - has a long history of distilling. The obvious product of that history is whisky - single malt or blended - but like any country with that kind of tradition, it's not uncommon for producers to branch out into other spirits. Up and down the length of the country, you'll find vodkas, gins, liqueurs, and much more besides, all produced on scales from a single shop to multi-national distribution runs.

All of this became particularly relevant as I accompanied Andrew Kearns from Monteiths, the winner of the Edinburgh heat of Caorunn Gin's cocktail competition, to the Balmenach distillery in Speyside. We travelled up with the Glasgow party, including regional winner David Smillie from the Blythswood Square Hotel and Caorunn's brand ambassador Ervin Trykowski, and met up with 99 Bar & Kitchen's Mike McGinty and the Aberdeen contingent at the distillery.

The word Speyside should be familiar to anyone with an appreciation of single malt Scotch. Of Scotland's whisky producing regions (the others being Highland, Lowland, Islay, Islands, and Campbeltown), it's home to the greatest number of working distilleries - including those of the world's top selling single malts, the Glenlivet and Glenfiddich.

The Balmenach distillery isn't a new addition to the scene; it was established by James McGregor at some point in the early 19th Century (it's often dated to 1824, when it was officially licensed but it's a fair guess that they'd been producing before then). It remained in family ownership through 1922 before changing hands a number of times through the 20th Century, until it's then-owner, Diageo, opted to mothball the site in 1993. Balmenach was taken over by Inver House in 1997 and production started anew in 1998.

Scotch whisky is, as many spirits are these days, subject to a whole raft of legislation governing what may and may not be used in its production, the method of production, length of maturation, and so on. As far as ageing goes, in order to qualify as a Scotch whisky, it must be barrel aged in Scotland for a minimum of three years and one day. If you wanted to bring a single malt to market, you'd be up against a lot of 10 and 12 year old expressions, so you're looking at a decade before you can bottle something and that's before you consider that the age statement on a bottle of Scotch refers to the youngest whisky in the blend (even for single malt). If you want to compete, then it could be upwards of fifteen years before you have the stock on hand to blend a whisky that you could label as a 10 year old.

Ageing whisky is not a cheap process, and so it makes a lot of sense to use the equipment you've got to make something that you can bring to market a lot sooner than, say, fifteen to twenty years and that means white spirits. In the case of Caorunn, the equipment goes some distance to shaping the product; they found two berry chamber stills -they would have typically been used in the production of perfumes.

Essentially, high-strength spirit is pumped into a vaporiser and turned into vapour. That vapour is channeled into the base of the berry chamber and passes upwards through five perforated drawers which contain a loose mixture of the eleven botanicals. Simon Buley, Caorunn's creator, says that the process differs from that used by other gin producers in that all of the vapour comes into contact with all of the botanicals; there's no other way out of the chamber.

The final product sits somewhere between a traditional style gin and newer, more exotically flavoured efforts. There are six traditional botanicals - juniper, lemon peel, orange peel, coriander seed, angelica, and quassia bark - and five Celtic ones - rowan berry (Caorunn is the Gaelic word for rowan), heather, bog myrtle (also famed as a midge repellent), dandelion, and Coul Blush apple (a local variant bred to survive in the changeable climate of Northern Scotland). It's an interesting product to work with, and we headed back to Grantown-on-Spey to see that demonstrated by the three regional finalists later in the evening. The winner was Mike McGinty from 99 Bar & Kitchen in Aberdeen, with drinks called the Haughs of Cromdale and the Celtic Fizz.

The Haughs of Cromdale

37.5ml Caorunn Gin 12.5ml Costacalda Passito Bianco (sweet dessert wine) 10ml Calvados 20ml lemon juice 15ml homemade apple gomme muddled pink lady apples smoked heather bud in boston shaker

Using a lighter, set a sprig of heather on fire. Hold the tin from a Boston shaker over the sprig to capture the smoke. Muddle the apple in the other part of the shaker and add the other ingredients along with cubed ice. Cap with the smoke-filled shaker and shake. Fine-strain into a chilled red wine glass.

Garnish with a slice of apple and a sprig of heather.

Celtic Fizz

50ml Caorunn 20ml lemon juice 20ml pressed apple juice 15ml homemade spiced apple gimme 1 dash egg white topped with Brewdog Punk IPA

Shake the first five ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled highball glass (straight up). Top with IPA.

Garnish with a single star anise.

Thanks to everyone at Caorunn and 3rdparty for making the trip happen!

All these things that I have done

August is generally a quiet month in Edinburgh, except for the major international arts festival and the accompanying Festival Fringe that allegedly increases the population by roughly 100%, and that makes it the perfect time for lots of cocktail competitions. One of them was the regional qualifier for CLASS Magazine's Bartender of the Year award and I was lucky enough, along with Dave White from Tigerlily, to qualify for the final in October. More details on the finalists, along with their winning recipes, can be found in the latest online edition of CLASS.

Leaving the Twentieth Century

I've been in the process of working up a small cocktail offering for a function we're hosting at Sygn in a couple of months time. There are some obvious choices for it - the event isn't industry-focused so I won't be going too obscure or bleeding edge with anything - but flicking through various menus and recipe books led me to the Twentieth Century cocktail.

Twentieth Century Cocktail

35ml Gin
15ml Lillet Blanc
15ml Crème de Cacao (white)
25ml lemon juice

Shake all ingredients with ice; fine-strain into a chilled martini/coupe. Garnish with a twist of lemon zest.

According to Ted Haigh's Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, it was named for a train, the 20th Century Limited, that plied the route between Chicago and New York in the near aftermath of Prohibition. Haigh suggests that earliest written record comes from the Café Royal Bar Book of 1937 and that "we now have a firm idea of exactly what Art Deco tastes like."

On a personal level, I found the Twentieth Century profoundly depressing. It's not because it's a bad drink - it certainly isn't - but there's something about the way those four ingredients just sing together that make me wonder if I'm ever going to put together a recipe that comes close.

On paper, it's just four ingredients. In the real, it's exceptional, and that's something to aim for.