"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.

Forty Nine: L'Étranger Cocktail

Let's talk a little about context. After all, it's often said that nothing happens in a vacuum - though that's patently untrue given our little marble of evolved consciousness does circuits in one - and so much of the difficulty of creating recipes is creating those contexts in which your chosen ingredients can shine. I've been exploring the idea of seasonally appropriate flavours over recent weeks which, naturally, got me onto thinking about seasonally inappropriate flavours. Things that work in the context of sunny summer afternoons often don't on rainy winter evenings. Beyond that, certain types of ingredient have fallen into specific contexts over time. If I'd thought about it at the start of this project, the notion of using a vermouth in a refreshing citrusy cocktail would have seemed counterintuitive, given my own attitudes towards fortified wines back in the day. Context - or more accurately, the previous contexts in which an ingredient or technique are found - is a useful guide, but it shouldn't be taken as a stonecrafted edict.

And so we come to orgeat. No, this is not supposed to be a non sequitur.

Orgeat is beloved by many, but is rarely used outside of tiki drinks and more rarely still with spirits other than rum. If it appears in a recipe, you'd get incredibly long odds on the drink not falling into Embury's Sour Type classification. This may be as much because including an opaque sweetener in an Aromatic Type drink runs against the standardized aesthetic of a brilliantly clear beverage as it is because orgeat combines so very well with citrus and rum. However, once I'd realized that orgeat is hardly used outside of the tiki/rum/sour context, the obvious thing was to try it in an entirely different one.

This is how we end up talking about hot drinks.

Tea Cup Pot by Eduardo Mueses on Flickr.

There are exceptions - the Irish Coffee being the most notable - but hot alcoholic drinks are rare. It's worth remembering that they existed before iced cocktails, given the difficulty of obtaining a consistent supply ice in the era before refrigeration. One of the most popular concoctions of the North American colonists was flip, which was "mixed with a device called a loggerhead..."

"- a narrow piece of iron about three feet long with a slightly bulbous head the size of a small onion. It was originally created for heating tar or pitch, with the bulb buried in the glowing coals until it blazed red-hot, then quickly withdrawn and plunged into the pitch to make it pliable. The instrument served a similar heating function when plunged red-hot into a beer-rum-and-molasses concoctions. The whole mess would foam and hiss and send up a mighty head." Wayne Curtis, And a Bottle of Rum, p. 83

As I'm lacking in both an open fire and a loggerhead, I'd have to go for less dramatic means of heating my drink. In time, I'd also opt to steer clear of coffee and dairy. Fernet Branca and cloves were chosen as complementary flavours on top of a whisky base, the Glenrothes Select Reserve in this case. As for the orgeat, it really does work in this drink. Sometimes, taking things out of context is the only way to go.

L'Étranger Cocktail

50ml The Glenrothes Select Reserve
15ml orgeat
15ml Fernet Branca
5 cracked cloves
50ml hot water

Combine all ingredients in a mixing glass or suitable heat-proof  container. Fine-strain into a small tea-cup or rocks glass (if you're going for a glass, make sure to heat it first so it doesn't crack). Garnish with a twist of lemon zest and a cinnamon stick.

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.