Starry Night

There are lot of cocktail competitions throughout the year and sometimes when you submit an entry, you don't really think about it too much after you hit the "submit" button. For me, that was the case with the Bols Genever Classic Competition - I sent in a drink called the Stuyvesant and didn't hear anything back for a while and so it slipped off my list of immediate concerns.

That changed a couple of months ago, when representatives from Bols Genever and Maxxium UK got in touch with the general manager at Sygn looking for a venue for a Scottish final for the competition. After a couple of meetings, they agreed a date in early November and selected six finalists - Grant Neave from Monteiths, Tom Walker from Bramble, Ryan McDonald from the Voodoo Rooms, Jo Karp and Byron Abbot from Bond No. 9, and me. The final was covered by two intrepid correspondents from Imbibe magazine and is due to be featured in the Jan/Feb 2012 issue.

After we'd all presented our original online entries, word came down that the judges had picked two competitors to face-off for the prize - a trip to Amsterdam with the winner of the English final and Bols brand ambassador John Clay. The two finalists were Tom and myself and we were given fifteen minutes to come up with a contemporary style cocktail using Bols Genever.

I was keen to keep the genever at the forefront but I also wanted to complement it with ingredients that don't require too much buy-in from a customer. One of the things I'd talked about with John Clay earlier in the day was the difficulty in getting the idea of genever across to a customer in, say, two sentences. It's a really interesting category, but it takes some explaining and that can be tough to do in a busy bar environment.

I opted to make a long drink and I opted to make a sour-type drink; for all their qualities, aromatic-type drinks lack the same degree of accessibility, particularly for people are massively into cocktail culture. As I put the ingredients together, I realised that I was making a pale drink with a ginger top so I named it after a painting by another famous son of the Netherlands, Vincent Van Gogh.

Starry Night

35ml Bols Genever
15ml apricot brandy (I used the Bitter Truth)
25ml lemon juice
25ml apple juice
2 bsp acacia honey
Top with ginger ale

Shake the first five ingredients with ice and strain into an ice-filled highball glass. Top with ginger ale and garnish with an apple fan.

Tom went down a different route, taking his inspiration from the New York scene and the work of Sam Ross in particular. It was an impressive drink and hopefully he'll get something up on his blog about it. Ultimately, I think that my focus on making something consciously accessible to people unfamiliar with the category helped; I won, by something like one point between three judges.

It's alway nice to do well in comps, and it's extra special to be able to do it on home turf. Thanks to John and everyone at Bols Genever and Maxxium UK, and to the guys from Imbibe for taking the time to check out the Edinburgh scene.

Secret histories of cities and spirits

Nothing focuses the mind quite like a deadline and deadlines don't care about royal weddings or bank holidays. On top of that, they can be sneaky little buggers and so it turns out that the entry deadline for Bols Genever's Classic Cocktail competition passes on 1st May (UK only, I think) and while I've dabbled with the spirit in the past, I wanted to put new together.

In this case, "new" is a relative term. After all, they called it the Bols Genever Classic Cocktail Competition, so classic gin and genever based drinks were on my mind. I've just invested in a bottle of Campari so Negronis were never far from my thoughts and the New York thing led me to look at the Bronx.

I should probably explain the New York thing.

Famously, New York hasn't always been New York. The town that would become the city that never sleeps was first established by Dutch settlers under the name New Amsterdam at a time when a large number of the ships exploring the possibilities of the New World were flying the flag of the Netherlands. The name changed when the colony of New Netherland - of which New Amsterdam was the capital - was provisionally ceded to the British in 1664, and finally stuck ten years later.

Oh, this is fun. This is the good old days of throwing together random thoughts and providing a tenuous link back to booze.

There's a thematic link here to genever because genever is the New Amsterdam to gin's New York; everyone knows the latter, everyone loves the latter but you don't get to the latter unless you go through the former. No New Amsterdam, no New York. No genever, no gin.

And that's why I was thinking about the Bronx cocktail. But I couldn't let go of that Campari element - after all, if we're thinking about what happens if you give up what turns out to be one of the greatest cities on Earth, there's likely to be some bitterness.

The Stuyvesant

35ml Bols Genever
20ml Campari
25ml freshly squeezed orange juice
25ml freshly squeezed lemon juice
2 barspoons acacia honey (might need less/more depending on the acidity of your lemons and oranges)
10ml egg white

Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker and shake without ice to emulsify. Add ice and shake; fine-strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

Garnish with a twist of orange zest.

(Named for Petrus Stuyvesant, the last Director-General of the colony of New Netherland.)

Twelve: Kitchen Special No. 1

Being honest, I'm pretty cocktailed out at the moment. We're just put the finishing touches to a new drinks menu at work - featuring some of the drinks I've posted here - and I've been making the most of not thinking about combinations of spirits and liqueurs. That said, there are still times when I do want something a little more exciting than a beer or spirit/mixer. The problem here is that I'm genuinely awful at keeping my kitchen stocked. I'd save a pile of money if I actually planned meals rather than getting takeaways or eating at work. So, using whatever I had lying around the kitchen...

Kitchen Special No. 1

45ml Amsterdamsche Oude Genever
15ml Punt E Mes
15ml Elderflower Cordial
1 dash egg white

Shake all ingredients with ice and fine-strain into chilled martini glass. Garnish with a lemon zest if you've remembered to go shopping this week.

Ten: Winter's End

11:44am on March 20 2009 marks the Vernal Equinox, one of the two points of the year at which the Sun is directly over the Earth's equator. Or the Earth's equator is directly over the Sun, if you want to be picky about it. See, astronomy lessons and everything. The Vernal Equinox marks the end of winter and the start of spring, unless you happen to be in the Southern Hemisphere, in which case it's the end of summer and the start of winter. If you are south of the Equator, I'm so sorry. You've got...ooh, 186 days until this post becomes topical.

And so spring is coming like a badly-driven haulage truck on an icy road, which is cause for much celebration in Northern Europe. Perhaps this will be the year when spring is accompanied with temperatures north of 20°C and bikinis for everyone, but I think that's unlikely. It doesn't mean the occasion shouldn't be marked with some kind of mixed drink.

Winter's End

40ml Amsterdamsche Oude Genever
10ml St. Germain
15ml Noilly Prat Dry Stir all ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled martini glass. Garnish with a single mint leaf.