Cardiff Cocktails

Heres my entry for the Crystal Head Rolling Stones inspired cocktail compeition. didnt win this one but got into the final and met Dan Akroyd, which was pretty cool…

- 37.5 ml Crystal Head Vodka
- 20ml Carpano Antica Formula sweet vermouth
- 20ml Noilly Pratt
- 20ml fresh blood orange juice
-12.5ml Jegermeister
-10ml sugar syrup
-Teaspoon Regan’s Orange Bitters
Shake and strain into a chilled goblet. Finish with expressing orange zest oils over the top of the drink, garnished with dehydrated orange and a bag of cocaine(sherbet - sugar, tartaric acid, bicarbonate of soda)

The inspiration behind the drink was the song ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ which is sung by Jagger as a first person narrative from the view point of Lucifer. The name ‘professor Woland’ is Lucifers guise in the book ‘The Master and Margarita’, a Russian novel which Jagger said his influence for the song came from. The cocktail is a twist between a forgotten cocktail Satan’s Whiskers and a blood and sand, with a bit more bitterness in the form of jäger (it seemed more rock and roll than say Chartreuse!). Each part represented the lyrics within the song, the vodka represented the time ‘I stuck around st. petersburg’, the pefect vermouth combination ‘Just as every cop is a criminal, and all the sinners saints, as heads is tails’. The Jäger represented ‘when the blitzkrieg raged’ with the sherbet (cocaine lookalike) to symbolise the ‘traps left down for the troubadours’

1. Create or find a drink which utilises the use of fresh herbs (or barks, roots, beans etc). There’s plenty to play with here, be it mint, basil, rosemary or thyme, or something further a field such as balm, verbena, angelica, or eucalyptus, so get mixing!!
2. Make your drink and post it on your Blog, or on egullet’s spirit and cocktail’s forum if you don’t have one, with a picture, the recipe list, and any thoughts on the drink or theme.
3. Add the MxMo logo to your post with a link to the Mixology Monday website, and one to Cardiff Cocktails
4. Lastly comment on this post by clicking here, with a link to your entry, or you can email me at holmeandpub(at)hotmail.co.uk or tweet me on twitter @markholmes16. Do all this by midnight on the 20th may.

So open up your newly bought Drunken Botanist book, get creative and have fun! Cheers, Mark.

This months Mixology Monday we go over to San Francsico and to Rowen, from the blog Fogged In Lounge. The theme for the month is titled ‘Drink Your Vegetables’. Here’s what Rowen had to say

What to get more vegetables but you’re always easting on the run? Maybe you hate vegetables but feel you should get more of them? Well then, how about a vegetable cocktail? No, not that nice little glass of red stuff Grandma put at each place setting-we’re talking something with a kick in it.

For this task I decided to use a romano peppers juice. After seeing Danil Nevsky use a fantastic bell pepper juice in last years Flor De Cana competition, this was a juice I’ve been wanting to recreate it for a while (he also mentioned in a conversation over twitter that he recently had a Harvest Negroni in Amsterdam, which was made using gin infused with frozen peas. I hope someone uses peas this month, and is something which I’ll definitely be playing with soon!). My first initial instinct was it should be tequila based, but after going through a recent patch of loving a nice smokey tequila/mezcal Blood and Sand, I decided a good peaty scotch could work well here.

Moscrop

• 1 1/2 oz peaty scotch whisky (I used Talisker here)
• 1 oz romano pepper juice (fresh raw peppers de-seeded and ran through a juice extractor)
• 3/4 chilli infused Carpano Artica Formula vermouth (2 de-seeded birds eye chillies left in a bottle of vermouth for 2 hours)
• 3/4 fresh lemon juice
• 1/4 sugar syrup

Shake and stain into a chilled coupe, no garnish.

The smoke from the peat worked really well with the sweetness of the peppers here, and the chilli vermouth worked wonders for giving it an unusual but welcome spice. Thanks to Rowen for hosting this month and look forwards to seeing other peoples vegetable cocktails

This drink I made to utilise a cardamom tincture I made last week (a tincture being an alcoholic extraction of plant material, in this case cardamom which I cracked and left in high proof vodka for 1 week). Tinctures are great to have handy, and REAL easy to make, and the best thing is you can make them with just about anything. Cardamom has been one of my favourites so far. To compliment the cardamom I’ve used rosewater in a stock syrup, and by using this flavour combination in the structure of a classic John Collins, made a real refreshing drink ideal for the spring (if it ever comes over here!).

Cardamom and Rosewater Collins

• 50 ml Gin
• 25 ml Fresh Squeezed Lemon Juice
• 12.5 ml Rosewater Syrup (25ml rosewater per cup of sugar syrup)
• dash of Cardamom Tincture
• dash Peychaud’s Bitters

Shake and strain into a chilled Collins glass and top with soda, garnish with a lemon twist and a few cardamom pods.

This Cocktail was the first cocktail I’ve made using a foam, the idea being that the foam on top compliments the drink underneath - I wanted to create something that would actually aid the experience of the drink, and not just be there for novelty reason. For me foams are definitely one of the more useful (and more approachable to work with) trends to arise from the boom of Molecular Mixology of recent years.

The flavour profile of the drink was based on the Brown Derby from Hollywood Cocktails by Buzza & Cardozo, 1930. For a full history on the drink check out Michael Rooney’s article at his great blog The Liquid Culture Project. The simplicity of the Brown Derby is beautiful, much like that of the Daiquiri, a simple 3 ingredients which just work and work so well.

Brown Derby

• 50 ml Bourbon
• 25 ml Grapefruit Juice
• 15 ml Honey Syrup (1:1 honey & hot water)

 Shake and strain into a chilled coupe. 

building on this flavour profile to create the 30-3 I decided to use the honey in the foam to compliment the grapefruit and whisky below, sweetening it with simple syrup. The foam is then balanced with lemon juice.

The name was to commemorate Wales’ huge Victory over an unbeaten England to win this years 6 Nations (I’ve sold out here as I’m English, but if there’s one thing the Welsh love more than winning the Rugby it’s beating the English, and it sells!)

30-3

• 50 ml Penderyn sherrywood single malt Welsh whisky
• 25 ml grapefruit juice
• 15 ml simple syrup

shake and strain into a chilled cocktail glass, top with a honey and lemon foam.

Honey and lemon foam

• 200 ml egg white
• 100 ml fresh lemon juice
• 50 ml simple syrup
• 50 ml honey syrup

Add all the ingredients into a cream whipper and charge with 2 NO2 cartridges. Refrigerate for an hour before use.

I thought this months Mixology Monday was a great theme and one in which I totally believe in. Hosted by Scott Diaz at Shake, Strain & Sip the theme he chose was titled ‘From Crass to Craft’, and focuses on the use of ingredients so many of us (bartenders) now consider, as the title suggests, crass. Here’s a snippet from Scott’s announcement post…

‘The evolution of the cocktail has been a wondrous, and sometimes, frightful journey.  From its humble beginning, to the ”Dark Ages” of most of the later 20th century, to the now herald “Platinum

Age” of the cocktail,  master mixologists and enthusiasts alike have elevated its grandeur using the best skills, freshest ingredients and craft spirits & liqueurs available.  But with all this focus on “craft” ingredients and classic tools & form, it seems we have become somewhat pretentious.  The focus on bitter Italian amari, revived and lost ingredients such as Batavia Arrack or Creme de Violette, the snickering at a guest ordering a Cosmopolitan or a Midori Sour; has propelled us into the dark realm of snobbery. Many scratch bars and Speakeasies have gone as far as to remove all vodka and most flavored liqueurs from their shelves.  Some even go as far as to post “rules” that may alienate most potential imbibers.  Remember, the bar was created with pleasing one particular group in mind: the guest.

The first few things that came to mind when thinking about ‘crass’, was mainly different cocktails I regularly get asked for that wouldn’t be considered as ‘the right thing to drink’, rather than specific ingredients, and one cocktail I get asked a lot for is an Amaretto Sour. Amaretto I thought was a pretty reasonable place to start. I started by mixing a few drinks with some apricot infused bourbon I made last week, with some pretty pleasing results. But in the end I really wanted to make a cocktail that would please a guest who likes an Amaretto Sour, after all it’s for the guest.

With this in mind, I decided to use vodka to give the amaretto the kick it lacks, but with out changing too much of the almond like taste. Just to point out here, I don’t really consider vodka crass, marshmallow vodka yes, but straight unflavoured vodka rightfully deserves its place behind the bar. the main focus here is on amaretto.

Another ingredient I’ve used, but again like the vodka wouldn’t consider crass, is a preserve, more specifically apricot preserve. Using preserves in cocktails is nothing new, Harry Craddock’s Marmalade Cocktail (1930) and Salvatore Calabrese’s Breakfast Martini (2000) both come to mind.

So here it is, my drink for this months Mixology Monday using amaretto as a crass ingredient to craft a more palatable cocktail.

The Journeymen

• 15 ml Disarrano Amaretto
• 50 ml Vodka
• 20 ml Fresh Lemon Juice
• 1 Bar spoon apricot preserve
• 5-6 Cloves
• 2 dashes Regan’s Orange Bitters
• white of 1 egg

Muddle the cloves with the apricot preserve and vodka. add the rest of the ingredients and dry shake to start emulsifying the egg white. Shake with ice and double strain into a chilled glass. Garnish with a lemon twist

Check out the round up post here and a big thanks to Scott for hosting

After a brief spell of not writing anything up due to working on a new menu (and missing last months Mixology Monday), I’m finally getting around to posting the recipe for some Lemongrass bitters I made back in January.  These are my first set of bitters and I have to say they came out pretty good. The basic method I used to make them (thanks to Brad Thomas Parson) was to make the bitters in one small batch, rather than making tens of tinctures and blending them (I have plenty of bottles of booze already and to be honest, having an excess amount of mason jars just wouldn’t fit in my flat). For more detail on making bitters check out, If you don’t own it already, Brad  Thomas Parsons excellent Book called Bitters.

Lemongrass Bitters

• 5 Lemongrass stalks, chopped
• 2 tablespoons chopped dried citrus peels *
• 1/4 teaspoon fennel seeds
• 1/4 teaspoon prickly ash
• 1/4 teaspoon cloves
• small piece of chenpi
• 1/2 teaspoon cassia chips
• 1/4 teaspoon quassia Chips
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 star anise
• 1/4 teaspoon licorice
• 1/4 teaspoon Zedoray
• 1 craked tsao-ko
• 1 Vanilla pod halved and seeds scraped out (use both pod and seeds)
• 500ml High proof spirit (I used Spiritus - a 95% polish spirit)
• 250ml water
• 2 tablespoons sugar syrup (2:1)

This looks like a lot of ingredients but if you can find Mujur spice from your local Chinese supermarket you’ll save yourself a whole bunch of money and time (Mujur consists of fennel, prickly ash, cloves, chenpi, cassia, bay leaves, anise, licorice, and tsao-ko). The only other unusual items to pick up is your Spiritus, which can be found in most local Polish food shops, and quassia chips, which is an internet job.

*Dried Citrus Peels - Zest and finely chop the peels 3 grapefruit, 8 lemons, 8 limes, and 6 oranges. Preheat the oven and bake for 30 mins at 90 degrees Celsius. Store in an air tight container. This makes about half a pints worth of peel so you wont need to do this again for a long time.

To make the bitters add all the ingredients except the water and sugar in a large mason jar, seal and store at room temperature out of direct sunlight for 2 weeks, shaking daily.

after the 2 weeks strain all the solid through cheesecloth until all the sediment has been separated out, squeezing the solid to expel any excess liquid. seal the liquid in a clean jar and add the solids to a saucepan. To the saucepan add the water and bring to the boil, lower the heat, cover and simmer for 10 minutes

After the 10 minutes remove from the heat and leave to cool completely. Empty the saucepan into a clean mason jar (i.e. not the one with the infusion from earlier), seal and store at room temperature, out of direct sunlight for a further week, shaking once a day.

After the week is up, filter the jar with the solids in as before, and add to the jar with the original solution. This time discard the solids. Add the sugar and shake. Leave this final solution at room temperature  out of direct sunlight for 3 days, but do not shake.

After the 3 days are up and the sediment has settled, filter one last time through cheesecloth. now your bitters are ready for bottling.

Japanese Cocktail

This cocktail comes from Jerry Thomas’ 1862 cocktail guide ‘How to Mix Drinks or the Bon Vivants Companion’.

• 50ml Brandy
• 10ml Orgeat
• 3 dashes of Lemongrass bitters

Shake and strain into a chilled cocktail glass, garnish with a couple pieces of lemon peel, discarding one.

It’s mixology monday again and this month it’s being hosted by Jordan Devereaux over at the excellent Chemistry of the Cocktail. He has set the task of using fortified wines such as sherry, port, maderia etc (but not infusions such as vermouths and quinquinas). As Jordan explains over on his announcement post fortified wines have been around for hundreds of years, so I felt it was suitable to choose a drink which predates the cocktail, a drink that was the pinnacle of drinking fashion and one which Harry Johnson called ‘without doubt the most popular drink in the country’ in his 1888 classic Bartender’s Manual…The Sherry Cobbler.

This drink I find fasinating due to that fact it was one of the first drinks to utalise ice, and the small cobbles of ice are most likly the reasoning behind the name. The Cobbler also brought around the necessity of two more new inventions, the straw, and the cobbler shaker (similar to todays more fashionable boston shaker). 

Drinks writer/drinks historian David Wondrich explains in Imbibe! that the first documenation of the Sherry Cobbler he has come across dates from 1838, and in 1840 a New York weeky calls it “the greatest ‘liquorary’ invention of the day”.

So here it is, a drink with so much influence on the current cocktail world and one which we so rarely hear about (this recipe is adapted from Jerry Thomas’ 1862 How to Mix drinks, or the Bon Vivants Companion)

Sherry Cobbler

• 4oz Amontillado sherry
• 1.5 Teaspoon of fine sugar
• 2 slices or orange
• 2 raspberries

muddle the flesh of the oranges with the raspberries and sugar, adding a litle water to dissolve. Add the sherry and crushed ice, shake and pour unstrained into a large bar glass. Garnish with a couple fresh orange slices and straws.

This cocktail is a result of playing around with new bottle of Edmond Briottet Rhubarbe Liqueur I bought the other day, and also double as my entry into the Pink Pigeon (a vanilla infused rum from Mauritius) competition. This also comes with help from bartender Chris Lewis over at Browns Cardiff, who bounced off ideas and mixed up the different drinks. After a few failed attempts at grasshopper twists, and borderline rhubarb daiquiris (both which just plain didn’t work) we ended up with this flip, which I must say I rather enjoyed.

The name came after I posted my dismay of trying to name cocktails on twitter. with broad suggestions of names such as Irie Rhubarb Flip through to John, I ended with Jens Kerger’s, of Pinta Cocktail bar, random suggestion of Caribbean Nut Shot. Odd I know, but after hitting a wall, it humoured me.

Nut Shot

• 25 ml Vanilla spiced Rum
• 25 ml Rhubarb Liqueur
• 5 ml Rich Demerara sugar syrup
• 1 whole fresh egg

Dry shake the egg to start emulsification and to break up the yolk. Add the rest of the ingredients, shake hard with ice and double strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Un-garnished and un-tarnished. 

Having received a beautiful punch bowl from Amy for Christmas I thought it would almost be rude not to post a recipe capable of filling it. For this punch I turned to David Wondrich’s (the absolute king of Punch and other historical drinks) book on Punch. The recipe I adapted was James Ashley’s Punch, a recipe Wondrich sourced from Grub Street Journal, January 1736.

This is a simple Punch to prepare, with pretty much all the work being done while preparing and bottling the shrub. Once this is bottled it’s as simple as it gets. For this Punch I give the recipe using 1 whole bottle of spirit.

Cosy Orange Punch

• 700 ml Bottle of Brandy
• 700 ml Bottle of Orange, Clementine, and Lemon Shrub
• 700 ml Bottle of Mineral Water 

Pour ingredients into the punch bowl, add a large block of ice and grate nutmeg over the top. Be warned, this punch goes down very easy.

Orange, Clementine, and Lemon Shrub

For every bottle of shrub you plan to make, take the peel, avoiding as much pith as possible, of 2 Seville oranges (sometimes called bitter oranges, the kind you use for making marmalade), 1 Clementine, and 1 lemon. Save the fruits for latter. To the peel add half a pint (1 cup) of light raw sugar and muddle until the sugar starts to absorb the oil from the peel. let stand for 1 hour. This is your oleo-saccharum.

To this oleo-saccharum add 500 ml of hot water and stir to dissolve the sugar. Squeeze and strain 200 ml of the juice from the fruit reserved earlier, squeeze more if necessary. Chill, bottle, and refrigerate ready for use.

I have to give credit to everyone at Measure and Stir for this one. Having played with beer in cocktails before, it never really inspired me (the best results I got where from a syrup I made using oak aged Innis and Gunn). However after reading the cocktails they made during their beer week, I thought I’d give it another go. Glad to say the result was rather pleasing. The beer I chose to use was a stout (more accurately a porter), and more precisely Bath Ales Darkside. If unavailable substitute Guinness here.

Piña Porter

• 1 1/2 oz Tequila
• 3/4 oz lime
• 1/2 oz kahlua
• 1/2 oz Dark Caramel syrup
• 3 oz Porter
• Dash Angostura bitters

For a bit of theatre I like to ‘throw’ this drink by passing it back and forward from a ice filled tankard and another empty tankard, keeping the ice in place with a julep strainer. Here’s Charlotte Voisey  showing us how it’s done on the excelent Small Screen Network. Serve in a half pint tankard with ice and a lime twist.

Dark Caramel Syrup

Here’s a great guide to making caramel syrup by Darcy O’Neil from Art of Drink

In all honestly I love christmas. It does have its minor annoyances, but the positives far out weigh the negatives, and one positive for me is all the wonderful flavours we get to enjoy to get us through the cold days. After mixing up Jeffrey Morgenthaler’s Clyde Common Egg Nog for a few friends the other night (who after initially turning their noses up to the idea, smashed through the whole batch in no time at all)  I wanted to make my own Egg Nog or Flip, and here’s the end result…

Nadolegg Nog

• 25 ml Jamaican Rum
• 15 ml Oloroso Sherry
• 15 ml Walnut orgeat*
• 20 ml Date juice**
• 20 ml Whole milk
• 1 Whole fresh egg

Dry shake the egg to emulsify, shake the rest with ice and strain into a chilled glass, garnish with a grating of at least 70% cocoa chocolate

*Walnut Orgeat

Not technically orgeat (orgeat is, in the easiest term, an almond sugar syrup) due to the fact it’s not made from almonds but walnuts, but the word describes the process of making the walnut syrup well. The method I used was the same as Darcy O’Neils orgeat, but substituting walnuts for almonds and can be found by clicking here.

This cocktail I’ve made based on a request from my brother-in-law to use Dr Pepper in a drink. Instead of using Dr Pepper as it is, it’s been reduced by 3/4 to give it a thicker consistency and more intense flavour (Don’t worry Matt it’s easy - heat in a pan until reduced to 1/4 of it’s original volume), a similar idea to a cocktail by Brad Thomas Parsons in which he reduces coca cola to use in his Fernet & coke.

 I’ve also noticed a run of rum cocktails, but I know he likes rum, so one more and I’ll promise to change the base spirit next time. 

What’s The Worst That Could Happen?

• 50 ml Dark Rum (I used Gosling’s Black Seal here)
• 25 ml Dr Pepper Reduction
• 20 ml Fresh squeezed lemon juice
• 2 dashes of Peychaud’s Bitters

Shake and strain into a chilled glass, garnish with a lemon twist.

It’s less than 3 weeks till Christmas and for those of us who work in hospitality, that means unimaginably long weeks, slaving over God knows how many pots of mulled wine, Wham!’s last Christmas 8 times a day, and everybody’s favourite inexperienced drinker who for some reason thinks their Christmas party means drink as much as they can on the bosses tab and act like a dick. Rant over. That however fittingly brings me on to this months Mixology Monday.

The (anti)seasonal theme this month is ‘Humbug!’ and has been chosen by JFL over at Rated R Cocktails. Designed to bring out our inner Grinch, we’re mixing drinks in the spirit of anti-Christmas.

For me, here in Wales, Christmas is cold. It’s all about mulled wine/cider, Sherry, Eggnogs, and toddies. So going against all of that I set out to make the most tropical drink I could; I thought Seychelles, the Maldives, and Mauritius and went from there. So next time the Christmas shopping or bad weather gets you down, mix up one of these and think white beaches, rather than white Christmas.

Last Christmas in Club Tropicana

• 40 ml spiced rum
• 10 ml lychee liqueur
• 15 ml grapefruit and star anise sherbet (see below)
• 20 ml Green tea
• 20 ml fresh squeezed lime juice
• 2 dashes Peychaud’s bitters

Shake and strain into a chilled glass, garnish with cinnamon, star anise, and a lime twist.

Grapefruit & Star anise Sherbet

First remove the peel of a grapefruit (I used a red grapefruit) taking away as little of the pith as possible. muddle the peel with 1/2 cup of sugar and a couple of star anise and let sit for an hour (this is called an oleo saccharum). To make a sherbet combine the oleo saccharum with the juice of the grapefruit (should be about 1/2 a cup).

I’m not even going to bother going into the history of Punch. David Wondrich has an entire book on it, and is far more literate than myself. I will however show you a neat little technique I saw a bartender from The Voodoo Rooms (sorry, I forget her name) use to infuse smoke into a drink, without the need to purchase a smoke gun. With only 2 days until December, it seems appropriate to share this nice little festive twist on the Milk Punch. The basic formula of such can be found in Jerry Thomas’ 1988 How to Mix Drinks or The Bon Vivant’s Companion.

Cinnamon Smoked Milk Punch

• 1 1/2 oz Brandy
• 3/4 oz Rum
• 1/2 oz Vanilla Syrup
• 3 oz Milk

To infuse the smoke, burn a cinnamon stick until it lights then place it on a plate underneath a Boston tin. Add all the ingredients above into a Boston glass, add ice, and then quickly using the smoked filled tin, cap, shake and strain. Finish with a grating of nutmeg.