Twenty Three: Reina Amargo

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We are on the edge of a great moment in British history. We are in sight of the point at which the great British public see tequila as something other than a shot or a frozen margarita. My friends, the road to that point will be long and hard, but with courage, strength and resolve, we can make this dream our new reality.

Reina Amargo

50ml José Cuervo Tradicional
25ml lime juice
1 barspoon Campari
2 barspoons honey

Shake all ingredients with ice and fine-strain into chilled martini glass. 

Adventures in space, time and vodka

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Here's a thought.

Cocktails destroy good spirits.

It's not my thought. It belongs to a man named Börje Karlsson, one of the master blenders involved with a new Swedish vodka called Karlsson's Gold (rated B+ by Drinkhacker!), in an article in the Washington Post. It's an interesting thought, not least because it comes from a vodka producer and vodka, well vodka is a bit troublesome.

NO COCKTAILS?... by Metro Centric, licenced under Creative Commons.

Imagine we've got a time machine, and rather than using it to buy last week's winning lottery ticket, we travel back to somewhere near the sixteenth century, somewhere in Eastern Europe, where the bouncing baby vodka tradition has just started walking and saying its first unintelligble words. Assuming that no-one burns us as witches on account of our strange fashions and bizarre future talk, we'll find a spirit that has mostly slipped past its origin as a medicinal elixir and is gaining popularity among the masses, flavored with herbs, honey and berries, and among the aristocracy who compete to create the purest liquid from their state-of-the-art pot stills. Skip forward a few hundred years and we'll find this spirit embedded in the culture, adding punctuation to any event, from weddings to birthdays to funerals and everything in between. Vodka becomes the lifeblood of the community, used and abused by the powers that be as something approaching a rum ration for an entire empire through the middle part of the twentieth century.

We should take in a little context. Travelling back to 15-whatever, when Western Europe raises a glass, it's likely to be brandy. The Scots and the Irish have started doing remarkable things with malted barley, but they're probably a good fifty/hundred years off hiding their distilleries at the end of obscure valleys in the most innovative and insane tax dodge ever. The Dutch have, by now, discovered a wonderful little berry that can transform a distilled spirit, but they'll have to wait until the eighteenth century for it to blaze through English society and emerge, smouldering, on the other side as something we'd recognise as gin. Over the next five hundred years, the various spirits of Western Europe will have their successes and failures. Cognac will emerge as the upper classes' drink of choice, only to be decimated by a hungry bug in the second half of the nineteenth century. Taxation, rebellion, famine, war and slavery will a play their part in the respective fortunes of gin, whisky, rum and whiskey, and things will continue in much the same vein until just after the world explodes in rage, hatred and a splatter of atoms.

The second half of the twentieth century sees vodka slowly seeping out from behind the Iron Curtain. It is not an entirely unknown quantity, largely thanks to a man named Smirnov. The right to produce his vodka eventually land with Heublein Inc. in the USA and the rest is, as they say, history.

In 2004, vodka sales surpass those of gin in the UK. In 2007, vodka outsells Scotch whisky. In Scotland.

And so, the trouble with vodka. It's simple, really. Western Europe and America do not have a vodka-drinking tradition. The way in which these cultures drink evolved alongside the spirits that they created and traded and vodka has been slapped onto it like go-faster stripes on the space shuttle. That's not to say that vodka doesn't have a part to play in the community of spirits, it's rather that the integration has been a little forced. The definitive original vodka cocktail remains the Moscow Mule (anyone who's just said "Martini"? Taxis are out front) because, on the whole, it doesn't sit well with structure of mixing drinks that evolved from the era of Jerry Thomas.

Börje Karlsson makes a good point from outside my - our - experience of spirits and cocktails, even if I think he's being a touch hyperbolic. Realising that there's a separation between the various spirit-drinking traditions can only be a good thing, because the really interesting stuff happens in the space between.

Twenty Two: Twice-Shy Negroni

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I've been using a bottle of Punt E Mes as my go-to sweet vermouth for a good while now. I'm a big fan of the bitter note it brings to drinks, but I've been predominantly using it as a generic sweet vermouth which has slightly warped my expectations of certain drinks at the bitter end of the scale. Case in point: the Negroni. When I have one in a bar, I can notice the absence of the extra bitterness provided by the Punt E Mes and it takes me an instant to remember that it's my Negronis that are slightly out of whack, not the one I've just bought.

But then it also occurs to me that bitter is a very divisive flavor, and that if I can up the bitter content of a Negroni, surely it's possible to mellow it out a little.

Twice-Shy Negroni

45ml Plymouth Gin
30ml Martini Rosato
4 mint leaves
50ml Campari (in an atomizer)

Give the mint leaves a quick smack to wake them up and place them in the base of a mixing glass. Add the gin and vermouth and stir with ice. Strain into an ice-filled old-fashioned glass. Spray some Campari over the top and garnish with an orange zest and a mint sprig.

In which we aim for a BSc in vodkaology

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It's been a busy little while at ednbrg Towers, what with trying to locate those missing vowels and all. Monday, for example, saw the 42 Below Vodka University roll up to the Voodoo Rooms to launch the 2010 Cocktail World Cup. Thanks to loveable kiwis Jacob and Marty, I now know that New Zealand is home to over 40 million sheep and has been - since 1996 - one of the few countries where home distillation is legal. I also learned that some people, no matter how hard you try, are never going to like a Feijoa-flavored vodka.

I really wish I'd taken some photos of the presentation. First of all, there was vodka tasting which is rarely on my list of top five enjoyable activities. We covered Russian style vodkas (Russian Standard, in this case), Polish style vodka (Belvedere) and what they called a new world style vodka (Ketel One) - meaning Western Europe/America, I'd guess - before moving onto flavored vodka (Zubrowka) and the 42 Below range of Passionfruit, Feijoa, Manuka Honey and Kiwi. While this was going on, there was an animated backdrop projected onto a screen behind Jacob that, at points, showed a giant, laughing Boris Yeltsin head.

After the tasting, we were shown a couple of videos from previous Cocktail World Cups. 42 Below have been hosting the events in New Zealand since 2004, doing things like throwing competitors off a bridge with a bungee cord and a cocktail shaker. The World Cup was described as "the hardest, and most fun" comp ever.

The brand guys then proceeded to the bar to make a mixture of signature cocktails and drinks that had performed well at previous World Cups - including one that had been engineered to taste like a traditional warm, English ale.

All in all, it was a cracking afternoon. There are always downsides, though, and in this case, it was the fact that I had to go to work pretty sharpish after the session.

So. That was Monday.