Saturday Night Open Mic: goodwill to all

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It's Christmas, or to observe the correct Noddy Holder pronunciation, it's KERIIIISTMAS, which has meant a good two weeks of pain for anyone working in hospitality. I'll preface this by saying I really don't want to post specifically about work here, and all things considered, the holiday season's been pretty smooth. After all, my bar hasn't caught fire yet. But Christmas is a tough time to work behind a bar, or waiting tables. I always think that it's the one time of the year when bars and restaurants feel useful -  necessary isn't the right word, but it's close. There seems something ritualistic about a work Christmas party, a feeling that it's a separate, though still important, affair from the family meal, and this is the time where we have to step up.

Festive customers don't make it easy. My first ever bar shift was on the Friday before Christmas - the day we call Black Friday - and my new boss took the time to tell us to watch out for the people who don't go out. Ever. Except at Christmas. It's hard not to feel a flash of anger every time someone waves a bill in your face, or clicks their fingers at you, or argues about the amount of ice in their drink and how much it costs, and it's harder not to take it personally. But somehow, every year, we get through it. We'll call it an easy day if we finish after 12 hours, a quiet dinner service at 250 covers, and running out of ice a hiccup, but we get through it. We take the crazy requests, the stupid questions and the people who just refuse to understand, but we get through it. We end up broken and abused and so hungover it hurts to blink, but we get through it.

In twelve days time, we'll sit down, together, with a beer or a glass of wine or whatever, and say, "Good work. Let's never do that again."

Until next year.

(Busy bar photo from S2 B's Flickr photostream, issued under a Creative Commons license.)

Brave new world

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There's been a discussion over on Barbore about a new range of pre-prepared foam sauces called Airspuma, and what this means for cocktails. I made the point that it's the kind of product that could lead to a national chain (let's say All Bar One, for example) including a cocktail with a foam component on its menu, which would open that particular strand of mixology up to a new audience. But, thinking about it, we're not going to see foam cocktails in the mainstream anytime soon.

The drinks that you see presented at competitions, the cutting edge, experimental concoctions you see in the very best bars, these all represent a small section of the market. They're the drinks that will be included in programs 5, 10 years down the line, but they're not necessarily right for widespread adoption yet.

For things like foams, gels and airs, semi-liquid pearls and all the tricks in the molecular mixology toolkit, you can add another decade before they even enter the conversation, let alone become a part of a standard service. At the moment, it's hard to convince regular drinkers (the ones who stick to what they know, and it ain't cocktails) that making a mixed drink requires more thought than “lob it in a glass and give it a stir.” A drink with a foam component is going to be so far outside of their frame of reference that you may as well be talking about particle physics.

There will always be bars and bartenders working at the bleeding edge of innovation, and they do important work. Give it time, let the ideas filter out from those in the know to everybody else. Then we can talk about whether a premix aerosol foam garnish will damage the authenticity of a drink.

Abelha Cachaca

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Abelha Cachaca recently stuck their head above the parapet to contribute to this month's Mixology Monday, making them (possibly) the first brand to take part. Aside from the cool bottles, Abelha seem really passionate about making sure their product is organic and sustainable, as well as making sure their workers and contractors in Brazil get paid appropriately. Abelha is an alembique cachaca which means it's majority 100% pot-distilled*, and it's seemingly only available in London which means I can't tell what it tastes like.

Y'know, if there are any samples lying around the office...

Update: Anthony from Abelha's been in touch:

For Abelha Cachaça, both the Silver (rested) and Gold (aged 3 years) are *only* distilled in these traditional copper alembiques in small batches.

I do not know of any cachaças that are a blend between an alembique and industrial cachaça, but there well may be some. The manufacturer would probably not shout about such a thing.

Newsdesk: the wrath of grapes

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Hangovers are the nemesis of the committed drinker, and just ahead of Christmas, it gets worse.

MxMo: Spice

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It's Monday, and that means it's about time for the international drinkblogging community to showcase all the cool things we've been playing with. This month's Mixology Monday is being graciously hosted by Craig at Tiki Drinks & Indigo Firmaments (thanks!) and - topically, for Christmas - the theme is spice. Spices belong to that category of things you won't miss until they're not there. It's literally inconceivable to eat without salt and pepper on the table. Vanilla has become so prevalent as a flavour that the word can be used to describe things that are boring, unremarkable, and yet the general connotation of spices is of exoticism, of a faraway culture.

The problem I've always found when using spices in cocktails is that I tend to focus on one in particular, with the result that the drink ends up pretty one-dimensional. This time, I made a conscious decision to use a range of spices but I also realised that combining a number of ground spices, roots, barks and the like in a shaker would prove troublesome. In order to get around the problem, I made a bottle of Krupnik, a traditional Eastern European vodka liqueur, using some honey, cloves, cinnamon sticks, vanilla pods and nutmeg. Being honest, if I'd used red wine as a base and replaced the honey with a couple of orange wedges, I'd have ended up with mulled wine - the stuff tastes like Christmas in a bottle.

There was another problem, and this time there wasn't a lot I could about it. Christmas is crazy time in the bar industry, meaning 300 covers over the course of the day in the brasserie and 12 hour shifts representing an easy day. Saturday, for example, started at 10am and finished at 2am, with just about enough time to grab a Chinese takeaway and a coffee around 5pm. All of this made it tough to find the time to prototype drinks.

This isn't something I'd call a hardship. After all, I've always been a fan of making drinks that are a simple twist on an established cocktail. From what I know of David Embury's Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, he concludes that all cocktails can be traced back to six 'essential' cocktails, so I can claim I'm on decent theoretical ground. I played with a couple of ideas - a Krupnikito could have legs, I reckon - before deciding on a simple twist on a Cosmopolitan. Substituting the Cointreau for my Krupnik, I also opted to use some Zubrowka Bison Grass vodka with the aim on contrasting the mellow floral notes with the stronger spice flavours in the liqueur.

Stargazer

Stargazer

25ml Zubrowka Bison Grass Vodka
25ml Homemade Krupnik honey vodka liqueur
25ml Cranberry Juice
15ml Lemon Juice
1 dash Egg white
Shake all ingredients with ice and fine-strain into chilled martini glass. Garnish with an apple fan.
This recipe will work with commercially produced Krupnik, which has less of a spice hit than my homemade variety. If you're using it, garnish with some ground cinnamon and nutmeg; flame them over the drink for effect. I'd probably recommend using less lemon juice, too. The homemade Krupnik is almost syrupy sweet.

*** 

The name comes from the Polish tradition of keeping a vigil for the first star on Christmas Eve, the moment which marks the start of the traditional Christmas feast. It seemed appropriate, given I'd chosen to use two Eastern European products in the cocktail.

Thanks to Craig for hosting this month's MxMo; the fun continues over at TDIF!