Lockdown recipe diary #6: Clover Club & Knickerbocker

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As we go into week *checks watch* a million of the lockdown, there are many articles on the web offering handy tips for the home bartender to raise their at-home cocktail game, and frankly, that’s too good of a bandwagon for me to let it roll down the hill without flailing after it.

Handily, I have one thing that’s going to change your life and all you need going to need are raspberries*.

* uh, and sugar and water. To be fair, a jar and a set of scales will def help.

Raspberry syrup is a pretty staple ingredient in many classic recipes but I think it’s often overlooked. It’s a shame because it’s a) delicious and b) so easy to make.

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Raspberry syrup

150 g raspberries
150 g water
300 g granulated cane sugar

Put the raspberries, water and sugar in a large, airtight container.
Leave in a cool, dry place for at least six hours.
Shake vigorously until sugar is fully dissolved.
Strain out any solids, and transfer to a clean bottle.
Keep refrigerated between uses. Yields ~375 ml.

Homemade ingredients can be a little intimidating for the home bartender and it’s definitely true that getting a thing to taste right so it works as you need it to can sometimes be tricky but this recipe is pretty bombproof and it’s a handy thing to have around if you, for example, wanted to make two of my actual all-time favourite cocktails - the Clover Club and the Knickerbocker.

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There are a great many Clover Club recipes out there that are just gin, lemon, raspberry syrup and egg white, and there are a few older recipes that include some vermouth - usually dry or a mix of dry and sweet vermouth.

I’m here to tell you not to skip the vermouth.

Clover Club

45 ml / 1.5 oz gin
15 ml / 0.5 oz dry vermouth
15 ml / 0.5 oz raspberry syrup
20 ml / 0.66 oz lemon juice
Half an egg white

Pour all the ingredients into a cocktail shaker.
Shake briefly without ice, then fill the shaker with ice and shake for 10-15 seconds.
Fine-strain into a chilled cocktail glass (or the cheap-ass wine glass that was in your flat when you moved in seven years ago I guess).

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As with many vintage recipes, there are heaps of versions of the Knickerbocker in books going back to Jerry Thomas in 1862.

Simon Difford has a nice overview of the variations - apparently, if we’re being technical, you’d need to serve it on ice to call it a Knickerbocker; the straight-up serve would be a Knickerbocker Special if anyone needs a specific hill to die on.

Knickerbocker

45 ml / 1.5 oz rum
15 ml / 0.5 oz curaçao
15 ml / 0.5 oz raspberry syrup
20 ml / 0.66 oz lemon juice

Pour all ingredients into a cocktail shaker.
Fill the shaker with cubed ice and shake for 10-15 seconds.
Fine strain into that one nice glass you have, and garnish with a twist of lemon zest.

A quick note on rum - something aged but nothing too old is where you want to go. Anything between four and eight years old will be grand. It does feel like a recipe that tends towards more pungent, English style rums than the lighter, drier Spanish styles but the only aged rum I had on hand was small amount from a Bacardí blending workshop and y’know what? It worked fine.

Lockdown recipe diary #5: Alloway, Lochfield & Middlecroft

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While looking through some of the recipes I’d previously posted here, I noticed that a lot of them from before this recent hiatus were entries for cocktail competitions and most of what I’ve been posting in the past few weeks haven’t been. There’s a simple reason for this - I don’t do that many cocktail competitions any more - but the thinking behind that is a little less clear.

At a certain point in my career, I would enter just about every competition I heard about. Sometimes I did pretty well and mostly I didn’t but I got to travel a lot (to….uh, London, mostly), meet lots of fun people, all while picking up useful stuff.

I often tell bartenders I work with that the only thing that really gets you good at creating recipes is creating recipes and competitions are useful because they force you to do something new, and even if you don’t do well, you’ll probably learn something that will help you in some way. It might be a mistake you’ve made that you learn from, a new technique you pick up, some feedback from a judge, or someone else does something cool and you flat out rob the idea.

(A solid 70% of me watching a cocktail comp is that GIF.)

It’s also true that competing carries cost - not just in terms of money and nuts-and-bolts stuff like ingredients and kit and glassware - but also in time. Creating original recipes to a specific brief isn’t usually instantaneous and once that’s done, over time, the idea of taking five or six hours out of a day to actually compete became a less and less attractive way of spending my free time. By the time I moved to Australia in 2013, I’d reached the point where I’d generally only enter a competition if I found the brief more interesting than simply creating a recipe or if I could find a way to make my presentations more interesting than just creating a recipe.

One of the competitions where I found the opportunity to do that was the Chivas Masters in 2017. The brief called for three drinks:

  1. the classic way - “inspired by a classic cocktail from New York, with a nod to Scotland,” made with Chivas Regal 12yo, 18yo or Chivas Extra

  2. the local way - “inspired by your local cocktail scene,” made with Chivas 12yo

  3. the Japanese way - “inspired by the land of the rising sun,” made with Chivas Regal 12yo, 18yo or Chivas Extra

Rather than just presenting three separate drinks, I found it helpful to have a common thread running through all three (besides the whisky, obvs) and that common thread ended up being a shared ingredient - ginger.

I think it was ‘the Japanese way’ that got me there (I mean, I guess? This all happened three years ago). As a noted consumer of bad supermarket sushi, I’m pretty sure I wanted to find a way to use gari - pickled ginger - somewhere in that drink, and I ended up making my own to use as a garnish while using the pickle brine as an ingredient in the drink.

From there, my ‘classic way’ drink was a simple twist on a Bobbie Burns, using ginger wine instead of vermouth. Ginger wine is widely available in the UK, it’s usually really cheap and, as far as we’re concerned, it’s pretty much only a thing for a Whisky Mac (Scotch and ginger wine) which is very much a drink that no-one ever orders. I think it’s an underused cocktail ingredient - it’s a fortified wine but it brings a very different vibe than a vermouth or an Italian-style aperitif would.

For the ‘local way’ serve, I didn’t want to do too much to the ginger but I’ve generally found blending root ginger into water gives a more vibrant flavour than muddling it directly into the drink.

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Alloway - ‘the classic way’

50 ml Chivas Regal 18yo
15 ml Stone’s ginger wine
5 ml Benedictine
1 dash Angostura bitters
1 spray Absinthe (from an atomiser)

Pour the first four ingredients into a mixing glass. Fill with cubed ice and stir for 15-20 seconds.
Using an atomiser, spray the inside of chilled cocktail glass with Absinthe.
Strain the cocktail into the Absinthe-rinsed glass, and garnish with a twist of orange zest.


Lochfield - ‘the local way’

50 ml Chivas Regal 12yo
10 ml ginger juice
15 ml lemon juice
15 ml rosemary syrup
10 ml egg white

Pour all ingredients into a cocktail shaker. Shake briefly without ice.
Fill the shaker with cubed ice and shake for 10-15 seconds.
Fine-strain into a chilled coupe glass and garnish with a rosemary sprig.

Middlecroft - ‘the Japanese way’

50 ml Chivas Extra
10 ml pickled ginger brine
10 ml sencha tea syrup
1 spray peated single malt whisky (from an atomiser)

Pour the first three ingredients into a mixing glass. Fill with cubed ice and stir for 15-20 seconds.
Using an atomiser, spray the inside of chilled cocktail glass with a peated single malt whisky.
Strain the cocktail into the whisky-rinsed glass, and garnish with a twist of orange zest.

Ginger juice
100 g root ginger
100 g water

Wash, peel and dice the ginger. Put the ginger and water in a blender and blend until ginger is fully broken up. Strain out the solids and transfer to a clean bottle.

Rosemary syrup
2 sprigs rosemary
350 g granulated cane sugar
350 g water

Blanch the rosemary sprigs for 3 seconds in boiling water then transfer them to an ice bath. Remove from the ice and reserve. Combine the water and sugar in a pan and bring to the boil on a medium heat. Add the rosemary sprigs and simmer on medium heat for 5 minutes. Leave to cool. Once cool, remove the rosemary sprigs and transfer to a clean bottle. Yields ~500 ml.

Sencha tea syrup
5 g loose leaf sencha tea
350 g water
350 g granulated cane sugar

Heat water to 80 degrees Celsius and add the tea. Leave to infuse for 3 minutes. Once infused, strain out solids and transfer to a pan. Add the sugar and bring to the boil. Simmer on low heat for 2 minutes, then remove from heat and leave to cool. Once cool, transfer to a clean bottle. Yields ~ 500 ml.

Pickled ginger brine
You can buy gari in jars in an Asian supermarket; if you do, just use the brine from the jar. If you want to make your own, this recipe is the one I used.

Lockdown recipe diary #4: Picolino

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This story starts, as so many do, with three people at an airport.

In truth, the story starts a few months before that morning in June 2018. We’d agreed some budget with Hendrick’s gin to do at least one event outside of the UK and that ended up being a quick stop at Bar Convent Brooklyn followed by a head-to-head bar takeover against a team of German bartenders at Williams & Graham and Occidental in Denver to mark World Cucumber Day.

Obviously, if you’re putting together a menu with a bunch of gin drinks on it, you’ll want to do a martini of some description and, if that menu is for World Cucumber Day, it makes sense that you do some kind of a cucumber martini.

Reader, I shall not disappoint you.

(In this regard, anyway.)

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Picolino

50 ml / 1.66 oz Hendrick’s gin
20 ml / 0.66 oz cucumber honey vermouth
10 ml / 0.33 oz yellow Chartreuse
1 dash Peychaud’s bitters

Pour everything into a mixing glass and fill it with cubed ice.
Stir for 15-20 seconds, and strain the contents into a chilled Nick & Nora glass.
Garnish with a cucumber ribbon on a cocktail stick.

Cucumber honey vermouth

1 litre Noilly Prat dry vermouth
1 cucumber
50 g honey
2.5 g powdered citric acid

Peel the cucumber. Cut the skin into strips and dice the flesh.
Place the cucumber skin and diced cucumber flesh in a large air tight container and add the vermouth.
Leave for infuse for two hours.
Strain out solids and add the honey and citric acid, and stir until both are fully dissolved.
Transfer into a clean bottle and keep refrigerated when not in use.

If you’ve ever spent any amount of time with bartenders, you’ll know that keeping them in line only marginally easier than herding actual cats so I’d like to record my thanks to our amazing hosts from Hendrick’s and William Grant & Sons - particularly Sasha Filimonov, Ally Martin, Sebastian Derbomez and Coco Prochorowski - and to the crew at Occidental and Williams & Graham who are total bosses.

Lockdown recipe diary #2: Teller of Tales

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One of the fun parts of my job has been working with really amazing people to do super fun things. One of those amazing people is Georgie Bell, Bacardi’s global scotch whisky ambassador (and Whisky magazine’s 2020 scotch whisky brand ambassador of the year), and one of the super fun things was working with Edinburgh Food Studio to create Craigellachie cocktails to accompany a dinner celebrating Burns’ Night back in January 2019.

Teller of Tales

45 ml / 1.5 oz Craigellachie 13yo
15 ml / 0.5 oz amontillado sherry
15 ml / 0.5 oz Martini Riserva Rubino vermouth
7.5 ml / 0.25 oz Cherry Heering
10 ml / 0.33 oz raisin shrub

Pour all ingredients into a mixing glass. Fill with cubed ice and stir for ~20 seconds.
Strain into a chilled cocktail glass and garnish with a twist of lemon zest.

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Craigellachie

There’s a great many distilleries that haven’t made a lot of their whisky available under their own name, and Craigellachie was one of them for most of its history.

The distillery was established in 1891 and the house style uses unpeated barley dried using an oil-fired heater, bringing a hint of a smoky, sulphurous note to the whisky.

Raisin shrub

150 g raisins
150 g water
300 g granulated cane sugar
150 g red wine vinegar
75 g balsamic vinegar

Combine raisins and water in a large airtight container and leave for at least 6 hours.
Add sugar and leave for at least 4 hours.
Add red wine vinegar and balsamic vinegar. Stir until sugar is fully dissolved.
Strain out solids and transfer to a clean bottle.
Keep refrigerated.

Yields ~400 ml.

One year and 10,000 miles later

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Has it really been a year since the last World Gin Day?

No, seriously, don't -

Look, it's called a rhetorical question. Of course it's been a year since the last World Gin Day. This year, however, marks the first year that it's fallen - for me, at least - in winter.

This is because I'm currently in the Southern Hemisphere and things are weird here. I'm told it's winter, but seriously? It's 18° Celsius (64° Fahrenheit) and, as a native of Scotland, I'd call that positively toasty but I'm surrounded by people wearing scarves and more layers than the middle act of Inception.

People are drinking mulled wine. In June. This I cannot deal with.

I'm used to thinking about drinks for summer right about now, so it's been a fun challenge to think about something a little more seasonally appropriate for where I am. It helps that I work at a bar that is famed for its house-made ginger beer, because what could be more warming than the rich spiciness of ginger beer?

Besides actual hot drinks, yes.

The obvious choice is Audrey Saunders' Gin-Gin Mule, although the one we make at Grandma's could be called a version of it rather than a strictly authentic recreation - the original calls for a still ginger beer and the addition of soda water whereas our ginger beer is carbonated; we also like to thrown in a dash of Angostura Bitters because reasons. It's turned out to be one of the most popular drinks on our new menu - that shouldn't be surprising, given that it has been named as one of the 25 most influential drinks of the past century by Imbibe (US). Described by its creator as an "ambassador to gin," maybe - like its base spirit - that's worth celebrating all year round?

Yes, again with the rhetorical questions.

 

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Gin-Gin Mule

45ml Tanqueray Gin
15ml lime juice
15ml sugar syrup
1 dash Angostura Bitters
8 mint leaves
Top with ginger beer

Shake the first five ingredients with ice and fine-strain* into an ice-filled sling/catalina glass. Garnish with a mint sprig and a piece of crystallised ginger.

 * Your mileage may vary when it comes to fine-straining drinks served over ice; in this particular instance I'd do it to remove any teensy, annoying bits of mint from the finished drink.