Lockdown recipe diary #6: Clover Club & Knickerbocker

As we go into week *checks watch* a million of the lockdown, there are many articles on the web offering handy tips for the home bartender to raise their at-home cocktail game, and frankly, that’s too good of a bandwagon for me to let it roll down the hill without flailing after it.

Handily, I have one thing that’s going to change your life and all you need going to need are raspberries*.

* uh, and sugar and water. To be fair, a jar and a set of scales will def help.

Raspberry syrup is a pretty staple ingredient in many classic recipes but I think it’s often overlooked. It’s a shame because it’s a) delicious and b) so easy to make.

Raspberry syrup

150 g raspberries
150 g water
300 g granulated cane sugar

Put the raspberries, water and sugar in a large, airtight container.
Leave in a cool, dry place for at least six hours.
Shake vigorously until sugar is fully dissolved.
Strain out any solids, and transfer to a clean bottle.
Keep refrigerated between uses. Yields ~375 ml.

Homemade ingredients can be a little intimidating for the home bartender and it’s definitely true that getting a thing to taste right so it works as you need it to can sometimes be tricky but this recipe is pretty bombproof and it’s a handy thing to have around if you, for example, wanted to make two of my actual all-time favourite cocktails - the Clover Club and the Knickerbocker.

There are a great many Clover Club recipes out there that are just gin, lemon, raspberry syrup and egg white, and there are a few older recipes that include some vermouth - usually dry or a mix of dry and sweet vermouth.

I’m here to tell you not to skip the vermouth.

Clover Club

45 ml / 1.5 oz gin
15 ml / 0.5 oz dry vermouth
15 ml / 0.5 oz raspberry syrup
20 ml / 0.66 oz lemon juice
Half an egg white

Pour all the ingredients into a cocktail shaker.
Shake briefly without ice, then fill the shaker with ice and shake for 10-15 seconds.
Fine-strain into a chilled cocktail glass (or the cheap-ass wine glass that was in your flat when you moved in seven years ago I guess).

As with many vintage recipes, there are heaps of versions of the Knickerbocker in books going back to Jerry Thomas in 1862.

Simon Difford has a nice overview of the variations - apparently, if we’re being technical, you’d need to serve it on ice to call it a Knickerbocker; the straight-up serve would be a Knickerbocker Special if anyone needs a specific hill to die on.

Knickerbocker

45 ml / 1.5 oz rum
15 ml / 0.5 oz curaçao
15 ml / 0.5 oz raspberry syrup
20 ml / 0.66 oz lemon juice

Pour all ingredients into a cocktail shaker.
Fill the shaker with cubed ice and shake for 10-15 seconds.
Fine strain into that one nice glass you have, and garnish with a twist of lemon zest.

A quick note on rum - something aged but nothing too old is where you want to go. Anything between four and eight years old will be grand. It does feel like a recipe that tends towards more pungent, English style rums than the lighter, drier Spanish styles but the only aged rum I had on hand was small amount from a Bacardí blending workshop and y’know what? It worked fine.

Circles and straight lines

With any kind of creative endeavour, there's always a temptation to say you've created something for the simple pleasure of having created it - art for art's sake, if you will - but while that's true to some extent, it would be ever so slightly misleading of me to suggest that all the drinks I come up with are in celebration of some Dionysian muse. Most of the time, they're in celebration of the possible acquisition of stuff.

Cocktail competitions have been something of a compelling force in the industry over the past few years - the emergence of huge, global contests with prizes of the genuinely life-changing variety (recent highlights include brand ambassador roles, start-up capital for opening your own bar, getting to design and sell your spirit) to accompany the more traditional bonuses of travel, equipment and free booze has led to a near-constant cycle of fierce competition. With so many people producing so many new recipes, standards have inevitably improved - gone are the days when the winner was the person with the most exotic fruit.

There's now further pressure when it comes to formulating a recipe: not only must it taste good and look good, now every drink needs that thing that makes it stand out from the crowd. It might be a home-made ingredient or a new technique or a crazy new garnish. For me, it's usually trying to draw dodgy thematic connections between things.

Here's an example: for the Ron Diplomático World Tournament, I wanted to pair up a rich, aged rum from Venezuela with the floral notes of Chartreuse. The rum in question - Diplomático Reserva - is aged for up to eight years and brings a chunk of rich fruit (I get a lot of plum and banana) along with some darker spice notes (espresso, vanilla and dark chocolate in particular) and it doesn't naturally match the complex herbal qualities of Chartreuse. If you were to make a Venn diagram of the two, it might look like two separate circles on a page.

The trick was to use something as a bridging flavour and I opted for Grand Marnier; the cognac base would play well with the rum and the sweet citrus fills in the gap to lighter aspects of the Chartreuse. The other reason Grand Marnier works well is as a thematic link between the other two ingredients.

On one hand, you have Diplomático Reserva. Produced at Distilerias Unidas (DUSA), it's a blend of column- and pot-still rum and makes use of a couple of specific quirks of Venezuelan rum production: due to the low, government-set price of sugar, the molasses they use for the column-still rums are relatively high in sugar content, and the local climate tends to mean that evaporation during barrel ageing doesn't significantly impact the ABV of the spirit. While DUSA has been in operation since 1959, many of the techniques used were brought to the Haçienda Botucal by Don Juancho Nieto Melendez in the late 19th century. It's a great representation of rum as the spirit of the new world - initially produced as a solution to the surplus of molasses from sugar production and refined over time into something remarkable and elegant.

On the other hand, Chartreuse has been made Carthusian monks since the 1740s from more than 132 herbal extracts and can be seen as an archetype of the European tradition of liqueur-making that began with its roots in alchemy and medicine and would ultimately lead to things like genever and, later, gin.

And then in the middle comes Grand Marnier; conceived in the 1880s by Alexander Marnier-Lapostolle and combining the new world (in the form of the bitter peels from the Caribbean that provide the orange flavour) and the old (in its base spirit of aged Cognac). It provides a link in more than just flavour - it's on the line from the old world to the new world in both geography and time.

All things considered, it's a neat little conceit. The drink itself - the King of the Hill - is available over the bar at work and has been well received by people who really don't have much of an interest in the historical and thematic relationships between the ingredients in it so I guess I'll see if it'll make the difference if I make the Australian final in Melbourne in April.

King of the Hill

35ml Diplomático Reserva
10ml Green Chartreuse
10ml Grand Marnier
10ml lemon juice

Shake all ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a twist of orange zest.

Outbound: storm in a julep cup

How big of a deal is three percent? If you're talking about whiskey, apparently a lot. Last weekend, the news that Maker's Mark was to be bottled at 42% ABVinstead of its current level of 45% ABV brought forth the full range of reaction from the Internet - y'know: disbelief, anger, torches and pitchforks. While the subsequent decision to reverse the ABV reduction has been broadly welcomed, some are starting to draw differentconclusions.

(Not that any of the above is actually relevant in certain markets.)

Topically, there's a very interesting NYT article from Harold McGee. The title? To enhance flavor, just add water.

The eternal Sydney/Melbourne rivalry takes another turn as the former is named Australia's bar capital.

A lot of good people in the Edinburgh bar/cocktail scene get some well deserved exposure, courtesy of the Scotland on Sunday, though the thing itself makes everything feel a little more like Portlandia than I remember it.

A couple of gems via the excellent if acronymically-complex TYWKIWDBI - Mixing alcohol with diet soda may make you drunker  and a pretty epic wine poster for the oenophile in your life.

MxMo: Pain in the ass

Mixology Monday is four years old, and as four year olds go, it's been well-behaved and mostly hygenic. This week, the world of drinkblogging descends on McSologogy with tales of pain in the ass drinks... 859,000. Remember that.

Eight hundred and fifty-nine thousand. Big number. Sure, there are bigger ones, but 859,000 is the sort of number that seems really, really big while still seeming within in the realms of realistic possibility.

859,000 is, coincidentally, the number of results you get if you put "how to make a mojito" into Google.

The mojito is currently the most popular cocktail in Britain. In one year, we sold over 2,600 in three bars. No other 'classic cocktail' (one that we haven't created) broke 600. It's a storied drink with a rich heritage and connections to piracy's golden age and generally convoluted and remarkable history of rum.

It's an utter pain.

First, there's crushed ice which is all well and good if you happen to have some mechanical means of crushing ice. If not, the mojito is an easy and effective way to develop RSI. Second, there's the length of time it takes to make one. It's not up to Ramos Gin Fizz timings, but if you're making batches of six, seven, eight, you want something with a 10 second prep time, not a minute-and-a-half. Third, there's the question of mint which has its own foibles when it comes to prep and storage. And if you run out, no-one's interested in a daiquiri. Fourth - and this is where that 859,000 comes in - everyone's an expert. Remember that mojito you ordered one time in that bar in Cuba? It was the best ever - the drink that your bartender's getting cramp crushing ice for probably won't come close.

Think about it - the mojito should be the bartender's ideal of a pain in the ass but it isn't. Why? Because it tastes really good.

Mojito

Take a highball glass, and add a handful of mint leaves. Add some sugar - however you like it (syrup, brown, white, whatever. It's really not that important) - and lime juice - about 15ml should do. Add some crushed ice and a large measure of your choice of rum and mix thoroughly with a barspoon. Fill with crushed ice and top with soda/sparkling water. Garnish with a mint spring.