The new gin

The sun is out, the flowers are blooming and Easter has come and gone. Spring has sprung like a beartrap and that means that it's time to add some new things to the backbar. No, really. It's like a spring tradition.

Photo from NOTCOT.com

Among our new treats is Greenall's Bloom, the latest addition to the world of super-premium gin with a less traditional mix of botanicals. In its award-winning, jewel-cut bottle, Bloom combines juniper with pomelo, chamomile and honeysuckle for a rounded, floral flavour. It's another gin that might make a good gin-and-tonic, but really sings in a cocktail.

The emergence of gins like Bloom, Caorunn, Hendrick's, Martin Miller's, Tanqueray No. Ten - I could go on for days, by the way - presents an opportunity to look at classics afresh. They'll make a Martini that's very different to those enjoyed even ten years ago, but there's no particular reason to confine them to white-spirit classics. The new, non-traditional gins arguably are robust enough to use in an Old-Fashioned, or even a Sazerac.

There's a sense in which a twisted classic is the perfect cocktail for Spring. It's the combination of taking something from the past and something from the future and reconfiguring and transforming both.

Elderblossom Sazerac

50ml Bloom
15ml St. Germain Elderflower Liqueur
2 dashes Peychaud's Bitters
1 dash Absinthe

Rinse a chilled martini glass or brandy balloon with Absinthe. Stir the other ingredients with ice and strain into the chilled, absinthe-rinsed glass. Garnish with a lemon zest twist.

Fifty One: Relativity

I've posted a lot of recipes based around typical winter flavours over the past few weeks. There is, of course, a downside and it's that seasonal flavours will call that specific season to mind and not everyone wants to think about how cold it is outside all of the time. But then again, one of the beautiful aspects of a mixed drink is that through a trick of the senses, it can transport the drinker from a cold Edinburgh night to, well, anywhere.

Relativity

15ml Belvedere Cytrus (any citrus flavoured vodka will do)
10ml St. Germain Elderflower Liqueur
2 dashes Fee Bros. Peach Bitters
Top with champagne (the drier, the better)

Build in a chilled champagne flute. Garnish with a lemon zest twist and a cocktail cherry.

MxMo: Vermouth

Every month, the online drinkblogging community gets together for a couple of drinks and a bit of a chat, maybe some of those little nibbles if we're really lucky. The resulting flurry of posts goes by the name of Mixology Monday and the theme for this month's party - hosted by Cocktailians - is vermouth. Vermouth represents one of the key innovations in the development of the cocktail. The process of fortifying and aromatizing wine may prefigure the invention of the cocktail, but its incorporation into the new tradition of mixed drinks emerging in the saloons of 1800s America gave rise to classics that are still popular today - a practiced bon viveur needs no introduction to the Manhattan or the Martini. But as the decades have flowed slowly past, vermouth has fallen from grace under the disdainful gaze of such iconic drinkers as Winston Churchill and for one simple fact.

Old people drink vermouth.

In the UK, 90% of vermouth* - particularly dry vermouth (a certain Italian brand of extra dry vermouth if you want to be absolutely specific) - is served long with lemonade over ice to middle-aged women who only go out three times a year: Christmas, New Year and their birthday. This serve has the unfortunate effect of making vermouth seem old and fussy and not fun, which is something of a tragedy because there's so much complexity and variety within the category.

* This statistic is based purely on anecdotal evidence and is probably entirely untrue.

Of course, if you're reading this then there's a good chance that you're already a fan of the virtues of vermouth - at least in its dry and sweet forms. There is also, however, the forgotten child of the family: white, or bianco. It tends to sit somewhere between the two, exhibiting many of the lighter flavours of extra dry variants combined with the sweetness of a rosso.

For all its qualities, vermouth still lacks the cachet that other liquors carry. It's rarely seen as the main ingredient in a cocktail or as a respectable drink in its own right. Spirits and liqueurs often go through peaks and troughs of popularity, but vermouth seems to have been in a hole for an awful long time. Opportunities - like this month's MxMo - to start the long climb up are always welcome.

White Ladder

50ml Cinzano Bianco
15ml St. Germain
10ml La Fée Parisienne Absinthe
15ml lemon juice
1 dash Fee Brothers Aztec Chocolate Bitters
1 whole egg

Combine all ingredients in a shaker and dry-shake briefly. Add ice and shake. Fine-strain into a chilled martini glass. Express a lemon zest over the top and discard.

MxMo: Vodka is your friend

Mixology Monday is billed as the monthly online cocktail party, where our host chooses a theme and we rock up a couple of hours late, stinking of cheap wine and muttering something about "consumption". This month, Felicia's Speakeasy is graciously listening to our ramblings about our favourite Doctor Who and the fact that vodka is your friend. In Scotland, of course, vodka is everyone's friend. It's been the biggest selling spirit in both on- and off-licence sales (that's bars and liquor stores) since 2008, while Diageo's Cameronbridge distillery produces several quadrillion litres of Smirnoff every year. As far as Scottish bartenders go, vodka should be our friend, because selling it pays our wages but it's not.

Vodka has a bad reputation because it's in an awful lot of terrible drinks, all the classics of the vodka-liqueur-fruit juice school. It's telling that the drink that broke vodka in the US - the Moscow Mule - doesn't foreground its base spirit. There is, however, one vodka cocktail that does. The vodka martini is the elephant in the room. It's probably the most famous vodka cocktail, but the prevailing attitude among those in the know is that it's a corrupted gin drink. However, it remains one of the most popular and enduring drinks of all time. The key thing to take from the martini is that vodka's prefered partners are subtler and less confrontational. Pairing it with bolder flavours, like those in heavily sweetened liqueurs, pushes it to the background.

The other lesson to take from the vodka martini is that vodka can work in repurposed recipes. The trick is not to overcompensate for the lack of immediate, accessible flavour in the spirit. The basic plan, therefore, is to steal a formula and there's few better than the original - spirit, sugar, bitters and water. This refitted Old-Fashioned uses 42 Below as the spirit because, being honest, they gave us a bottle to play about with at work. St. Germain operates as our sweetening agent, with a touch of Fee Brothers Grapefruit Bitters with a slow stir and a cranberry juice float for dilution.

Aura

60ml 42 Below Vodka
1 barspoon St. Germain Elderflower Liqueur
2 dashes Fee Brothers Grapefruit Bitters
1 barspoon cranberry juice

Stir the first three ingredients with ice for at least 45 seconds. Strain into an ice-filled rocks glass. Float the cranberry juice and garnish with a twist of grapefruit zest.

Thirty Two: Drake's Fortune

I've been thinking a bit about gin cocktails of late, which is useful given that all the recipes I'm currently owe various people and competitions are supposed to be rum based. I set myself to making a summery drink that wouldn't be torture to make - essentially the polar opposite of A Walk In The Clouds.

Drake's Fortune

50ml Tanqueray Gin
25ml pink grapefruit juice
10ml St. Germain Elderflower Liqueur
1 dash Angostura Bitters
6 mint leaves

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

*** 

The recipe is inspired by the Victorian Mojito - basically a standard Mojito, but with gin and apple juice instead of rum and soda - but I wanted to get away from the shorthand of using crushed ice to signify summer drinks. From there, it seemed obvious to use elderflower to complement the gin and a touch of Angostura to bring everything together.

And yes, more drinks should be named after videogames.