A swing and a miss

I recently got back into bartending - which, yes, is a weird thing to say on a blog all about bartending and making cocktails, but it's been a couple of years since I spent more than one or two days at the most actually behind a bar making actual drinks for actual customers. Of course, among the various duties of a working bartender is to represent his employers in cocktail competitions and seeing as I'm not currently drawing a paycheck from a spirits producer, I thought I'd try my hand at the Australian qualifers for Diageo Reserve Brands' World Class comp.

World Class is pretty emblematic of how cocktail competitions have evolved over the past few years. This year's UK final took place on a plane while the prize for the winner of the Australian final is $100,000 towards opening their own bar (SPOILERS: it's not going to be me, it's going to be one of these guys) and as the potential benefits have grown, so has the competitive level.

Y'know when you've got an idea but it looks like it's gonna take about $500 of prep and equipment to even try it? — Jon Hughes (@dirtyoldtown) February 12, 2013

Now, most of the time, workshopping a drink isn't that expensive of an exercise, assuming you have access to the equipment and ingredients you need and that access usually comes through the bar you work at. This time, to satisfy my own curiosity as much as anything, I ended following the entire process from scratch on my own dime. I did manage to avoid some cost: despite moving to Australia in January, I did have my own shakers, strainers and measures with me. Anything I needed and didn't have, I bought.

The competition was structured around two 'bursts', each containing four drink categories associated with one or two of Diageo's Reserve Brands. I opted to tackle Tropical Drinks with Don Julio Tequila and ended up drawing once more from the well of Dave Arnold's fast'n'cheap infusion. I wanted to take a Tiki-ish approach to flavour - fun fruit flavours set against citrus and spice - and present it in a more refined, elegant fashion. The shopping list ended up looking like this:

1 x iSi 0.5 ltr Cream Whipper $100

1 x 10 pack Cream chargers $5

1 x pineapple $4

500g root ginger $15

1 x 700ml vodka $45

1 x 750ml Don Julio Reposado $85

1 x 2 ltr pressed apple juice $4

1 x 5 pack lemons $3

All in, that's $261 (all prices are in Australian dollars); maybe $500 was a touch of an overestimate and no doubt I could have got things cheaper if I tried. If you have all that stuff lying around, of course, the R&D cost of the drink drops somewhat. And from that, to this?

 Señora Primavera

45ml pineapple infused Don Julio Reposado
30ml pressed apple juice
15ml lemon juice
10ml ginger syrup

Shake all ingredients with ice and fine-strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a twist of lemon zest. 

*** 

Pineapple infused Tequila 

300ml Tequila
150g fresh pineapple, diced

  Combine Tequila and diced pineapple in a cream whipper; seal and charge with N2O and shake vigorously for thirty seconds. Wait a further seconds before quickly venting the N2O from the whipper; strain out any remaining solids and reserve liquid.

*** 

 Ginger syrup

500g root ginger, diced
300ml 40% ABV vodka
water
1kg caster sugar

In a food processor, blend ginger and vodka into a rough purée. Press the purée through a strainer or chinois and reserve the liquid. Add water to bring the volume of the reserved liquid to 500ml and add the sugar. Stir until the sugar is fully dissolved. 

*** 

Ultimately, I didn't end up getting anywhere in the competition. As with any risk/reward calculation, there's a chance of getting nothing and - NEWSFLASH - with $100k up for grabs, it was always going to be tough. Besides, for once, the story of this drink doesn't end with the comp: the finished product is going on the new cocktail menu at Grandma's Bar in Sydney. Which ought to help towards making that $261 back. 

Circles and straight lines

With any kind of creative endeavour, there's always a temptation to say you've created something for the simple pleasure of having created it - art for art's sake, if you will - but while that's true to some extent, it would be ever so slightly misleading of me to suggest that all the drinks I come up with are in celebration of some Dionysian muse. Most of the time, they're in celebration of the possible acquisition of stuff.

Cocktail competitions have been something of a compelling force in the industry over the past few years - the emergence of huge, global contests with prizes of the genuinely life-changing variety (recent highlights include brand ambassador roles, start-up capital for opening your own bar, getting to design and sell your spirit) to accompany the more traditional bonuses of travel, equipment and free booze has led to a near-constant cycle of fierce competition. With so many people producing so many new recipes, standards have inevitably improved - gone are the days when the winner was the person with the most exotic fruit.

There's now further pressure when it comes to formulating a recipe: not only must it taste good and look good, now every drink needs that thing that makes it stand out from the crowd. It might be a home-made ingredient or a new technique or a crazy new garnish. For me, it's usually trying to draw dodgy thematic connections between things.

Here's an example: for the Ron Diplomático World Tournament, I wanted to pair up a rich, aged rum from Venezuela with the floral notes of Chartreuse. The rum in question - Diplomático Reserva - is aged for up to eight years and brings a chunk of rich fruit (I get a lot of plum and banana) along with some darker spice notes (espresso, vanilla and dark chocolate in particular) and it doesn't naturally match the complex herbal qualities of Chartreuse. If you were to make a Venn diagram of the two, it might look like two separate circles on a page.

The trick was to use something as a bridging flavour and I opted for Grand Marnier; the cognac base would play well with the rum and the sweet citrus fills in the gap to lighter aspects of the Chartreuse. The other reason Grand Marnier works well is as a thematic link between the other two ingredients.

On one hand, you have Diplomático Reserva. Produced at Distilerias Unidas (DUSA), it's a blend of column- and pot-still rum and makes use of a couple of specific quirks of Venezuelan rum production: due to the low, government-set price of sugar, the molasses they use for the column-still rums are relatively high in sugar content, and the local climate tends to mean that evaporation during barrel ageing doesn't significantly impact the ABV of the spirit. While DUSA has been in operation since 1959, many of the techniques used were brought to the Haçienda Botucal by Don Juancho Nieto Melendez in the late 19th century. It's a great representation of rum as the spirit of the new world - initially produced as a solution to the surplus of molasses from sugar production and refined over time into something remarkable and elegant.

On the other hand, Chartreuse has been made Carthusian monks since the 1740s from more than 132 herbal extracts and can be seen as an archetype of the European tradition of liqueur-making that began with its roots in alchemy and medicine and would ultimately lead to things like genever and, later, gin.

And then in the middle comes Grand Marnier; conceived in the 1880s by Alexander Marnier-Lapostolle and combining the new world (in the form of the bitter peels from the Caribbean that provide the orange flavour) and the old (in its base spirit of aged Cognac). It provides a link in more than just flavour - it's on the line from the old world to the new world in both geography and time.

All things considered, it's a neat little conceit. The drink itself - the King of the Hill - is available over the bar at work and has been well received by people who really don't have much of an interest in the historical and thematic relationships between the ingredients in it so I guess I'll see if it'll make the difference if I make the Australian final in Melbourne in April.

King of the Hill

35ml Diplomático Reserva
10ml Green Chartreuse
10ml Grand Marnier
10ml lemon juice

Shake all ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a twist of orange zest.

"When this baby hits 88 miles per hour..."

In honour of the forthcoming tenth edition of Tales of the Cocktail - which, coincidentally marks my first attendence - I've been spending a fair bit of time thinking about the Sazerac. It's often cited as the world's oldest cocktail (though the burden of proof suggests otherwise) but I think it represents something far more interesting. The Sazerac, you see, is a time machine.

It's a relic of an age of drinking very different to the one we have now. Its creation is tied to two specific occurrences - the entry of one Antoine Amedie Peychaud into the manufacture of medicinal bitters (sometime around 1830; the Sazerac Company, who do have a horse in the race, specifically date the drink's creation to 1838) and the establishment of the Merchant's Exchange Coffee House (later the Sazerac House) in New Orleans - and both happen before molecular mixology was a thing, before super-premium vodka was thing, before the light, sour style of cocktail found in places like Cuba and Mexico gain prominence during US prohibition became a thing, even before vermouth was a thing.

If anything, the Sazerac is a product of constraint. It's arguably as good of a drink as can be made from its four ingredients and even those have been informed by constraint. The original formulation called for a Cognac base which changed to rye whiskey after the phylloxera blight ended the former's run as the world's pre-eminent spirit; the absinthe rinse was modified to a less intense, more legal substitute following the US ban on La Fée Verte in 1912; whenever an ingredient became unavailble, the recipe was amended to suit what was available. Its survival and enduring popularity really is a testament to not being dogmatic about a recipe.

These days, if someone creates a recipe along similar lines to a Sazerac, or its close cousin, the Old-Fashioned, it's a conscious choice to reject the possibilities offered by the sheer range of ingredients available. Conversely, the Sazerac itself rejects those possibilities not because its creator wanted to but rather because he had no choice other than to do so; those things just weren't available. Trying a Sazerac today is taking a step back to a time when bartenders didn't have a lot to work with and worked wonders with what they had.

In another startling break with tradition, we're presenting this recipe in video form.

The Sazerac from Jon Hughes on Vimeo.

Sazerac

50ml rye whiskey or Cognac
3 dashes Peychaud's Bitters
1 barspoon sugar syrup
~10ml absinthe

Stir the first the ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled, absinthe-rinsed* glass. Twist and discard a lemon zest to garnish.

*To rinse the glass, either fill it with ice, add a small amount of absinthe and discard the contents of the glass before straining in the other other ingredients, or you could - as in the video - simply pop some absinthe in an atomiser.

OT OTT

I never realised cocktail competitions could go to overtime. I've been involved with a couple of tiebreakers over the years but quadruple overtime was a new one.

I was almost glad I wasn't involved. Our host, 42 Below brand ambassador Metinee Kongsrivilai, had revealed that two out of three places on the team to represent Scotland at the UK qualifier for the 2012 42 Below Cocktail World Cup had already been claimed by Jamie MacDonald, last year's UK representative in the Global World Class final, and Danil Nevsky, recently a world finalist in the Bols Around the World competition and the third spot came down to a choice between Jody Buchan from 99 Bar & Kitchen in Aberdeen  and Megs DeMeulenaere from Edinburgh's Bramble. The final member of Team Scotland would be decided by a pour test: whoever nailed free-poured measures of both 25ml and 50ml would make the cut. That turns out to be difficult to do if both bartenders never free pour ingredients and so, having matched each other for three rounds, Megs grabbed victory on a single 50ml measure.

The Cocktail World Cup has a reputation for being one of the more intense of the major global competitions so I guess it's somewhat appropriate that the first UK regional ended in sudden death.

I might not have been involved in the overtime shenanigans but I was happy with the drink I entered. Given that the winning recipes included a drink that changed colour, a slushy served beside its own beach of flavoured sand and a blue curaçao sea and a Piña Colada flavoured with the barrel essence rotovaped from an aged rum, I can see that maybe the following offer was lacking in a little of the madcap x-factor required.

Clockwork Heart

45ml 42 Below Honey
15ml Creme de Peche
10ml green tea syrup
20ml lemon juice

Shake all ingredients with ice and fine-strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a twist of orange zest.

Green tea syrup

400g caster sugar
200ml hot water
15g loose leaf green tea

Add the sugar to water in a large heatproof measuring jug. Add the tea and let it soak for 30mins. Strain the tea from the mixture and bottle; it should keep for up to 14 days.

One day in June

I've made this point before, but if January 25th can be designated No Name Calling Day and the last Wednesday in April marks Administrative Professionals' Day, then it is only right and proper that the second Saturday of June be set aside for World Gin Day. Instituted by Neil Houston (a.k.a. @yetanothergin) in 2009, today is an opportunity to celebrate a spirit that has had its ups and downs. While the popularity of gin today isn't at the level of the early-to-mid 19th Century - when its widespread availability led to what is now known as the Gin Craze and represents one of those rare occasions where the word 'craze' is a massive understatement - it has never been easier to find as wide a selection of really high quality products. Distillers across the world are finding new botanicals and techniques to bring to bear on production and bartenders and drinks enthusiasts are constantly breaking new ground in finding new ways to taste and explore those differing expressions.

My own contribution to this year's festivities works best, I think, with a juniper-forward, citrus heavy gin like Bombay Dry or Sipsmith, but your mileage, as ever, may vary. I also wanted to include a touch of Kamm & Sons Ginseng Spirit because I know the production and flavour of gin was a definite influence on how that particular spirit was conceived.

Chauffeur-driven Dream

45ml gin
15ml Kamm & Sons Ginseng Spirit
10ml orgeat
15ml lemon juice
2 dashes Regan's Orange Bitters

Shake all ingredients with ice and fine-strain into a chilled 7-8oz cocktail glass. Garnish with a twist of grapefruit zest.

*** 

Though it may represent the opportunity to do so, days like World Gin Day aren't about drinking until you fall over. It's more about finding a fresh approach something that you might find very familiar so if you do one thing today, leave off the tonic water and try something new.