Book No. 2, the Bee’s Knees, and the Jasmine Cocktail

(This is a fairly long post! The first big chunk is about a new book I’m writing called Classic Cocktails and the accompanying post series I’m launching today, but if you want to get straight to the drinks, skip down to the bold heading that says, “Enough Context, Time for Cocktails.” Today we’re doing the the Bee’s Knees and the Jasmine, because apparently I have a thing for rose-colored cocktails on Laetare Sunday.)

This post begins a new series, which I’ve been planning for several weeks, in celebration of the fact that I’m writing a second book, and this one is actually about cocktails.

In one sense, the timing of this really couldn’t be worse (my plans for it have changed multiple times over the course of the last few weeks, obviously). People aren’t feeling celebratory right now. No one’s top priority is a new cocktail book, nor should it be.

But on the other hand, a lot of people are going to be spending a lot more time at home than usual. If I do my job with this series, I may help some folks who are cooped up to experience some of the artistry of cocktails they might otherwise be missing out on, using ingredients they have on hand. I may also be able to crowdsource help with my writing process, which would otherwise be kind of hitting a wall.

Let me back up a bit and explain. Abbeville Press, the publisher of Distilled Knowledge, also published a book in the late nineties called 100 Classic Cocktails. Earlier this year, they reached out to me and asked if I’d be interested in writing a new edition of the book for them. I’ve wanted the chance to write a cocktail book for a long time now, and I feel like I’m finally capable of doing so after all these years. I agreed, enthusiastically.

For 1998, the original book was excellent. Half a dozen egg drinks, at least four with Campari, and even one with Kümmel - there were of course bartenders working with these things in the nineties, but 100 Classic Cocktails was a mainstream guide, 4”x4” and sold in gift shops. The work of revival and innovation in cocktails hadn’t filtered through to popular consciousness in the way it has today, and even so, Barry Shelby was able to reflect that ongoing progress in what he wrote.

That said, things have evolved a lot in the last twenty-two years. The original edition lacks some old drinks that have been reestablished as classics under the reign of the Cocktail Renaissance, the Aviation, the Boulevardier, and the Corpse Reviver #2 among them. It also predates the establishment of various contemporary drinks as classics - and even their invention in many cases, being some seven years older than the Penicillin, which has since circumnavigated the globe. Likewise, there are drinks in there that may have been hot in the nineties but never got established as enduring classics (Midori and Galliano being common indicators thereof).

All told, there’s plenty of revising to do. The title of the book is being changed to Classic Cocktails for the new edition, so we’re not married to having exactly one hundred recipes, and I have the publisher’s authorization to make reasonable additions and deletions. I share all of this in part because I find it exciting and invigorating personally, and in part to provide context for what follows.

I have also made a commitment to test every single recipe that will go into the book. Nothing will be printed that I cannot seriously recommend. That includes recipes for drinks I would be unlikely to order myself, like the Black Russian (conveniently, Mr. Shelby hit that one square on the head).

But testing variations on dozens and dozens of cocktails, many of which I may have had but not made myself before, is a dauntingly large task. I’m also wary of my own tastes biasing the results too much - this is meant to be a mainstream guide, after all, and fond as I am of my own palate, I don’t trust it to be representative. I had initially addressed this by beta-testing recipes with groups of friends and neighbors, in person. Real-time feedback and adjustments, and a broad, randomized range of taste preferences. It seemed foolproof.

In fact, it was nearly foolproof, and I got a lot of work done that way, but it wasn’t pandemic-proof. Gathering a dozen people in a small room and having them share multiple cocktails is not what you’d call responsible social distancing.

Which, at long last, brings me to this blog series. I am still testing recipes, because the book is still meant to be finished this spring and published this fall. And I’m hoping you’ll test them along with me.

For as long as I’m *ahem* working from home, I’ll post recipes every couple of days. Some of them will be recipes I want help with - maybe there’s something about the balance that doesn’t seem right to me, maybe I’m worried I’ve made them too much to my tastes and not enough to the world’s tastes, maybe I’m limited in the ingredients I have on hand and want to be sure the recipe works with an arbitrary gin, triple sec, etc. Send any feedback you have on those cocktails to me at brian@herzogcocktailschool.com, and you’ll get an acknowledgement by name in the book when it’s published.

I’ll also periodically post recipes I don’t need help with, which I just happen to think are good quarantine cocktails: easy to make with things you may have on hand already, and more than the sum of their parts. And because you’ve just read through a truly massive block of text, today I’m giving you one of each.

Enough Context, Time for Cocktails

Today’s quarantine cocktail is the Bee’s Knees, and today’s question cocktail is the Jasmine. Let’s begin with the former.

The Bee’s Knees occupies an odd position in the canon. Basically everybody who is serious about cocktails has heard of it. It’s been around for a century. Two of the iconic drinks invented at Milk and Honey are riffs on it,* and the that bar’s most famous export (the above-mentioned Penicillin) is a riff on one of those. There can really be no doubt about its influence or venerability.

But when is the last time you actually had one? How often do you see it on cocktail menus? It seems to be a classic that everyone knows and nobody drinks.

I think part of the issue is the honey. Post-renaissance cocktailiery† has established as gospel that you don’t use honey in drinks, you use a honey syrup instead, because it flows better and is easier to work with. The Milk and Honey recipe is pretty commonly used: 1 cup of honey, plus 1/3 cup of water, warmed and stirred until fully mixed, then bottled and refrigerated until you’re ready to use it. It’s perfectly easy to make, but it’s an extra step to make it, and that tends not to make sense for either a home or a retail bar unless you’re making a lot of honey cocktails.

Here’s the thing, though: making a honey syrup is also entirely unnecessary.

The goal of making the honey into a syrup is to make it easier to mix into cocktails. Honey is thick, and it doesn’t flow or dissolve so well, even when shaken - so goes the logic. Never mind for the moment that different kinds of honey have different viscosities,‡ let’s just focus on the expected properties of ordinary store-bought honey, which tends to be thicker than, say, simple syrup.

Even then, the viscosity is temperature-dependent: warm or room-temperature honey will flow and dissolve better than cold honey will. When you put honey into a cocktail shaker, you’re cooling it down at the same time that you’re trying to get it to dissolve. Of course that goes badly.

You may already see where I’m going with this. See, it occurred to me yesterday that honey gets noticeably foamy when shaken, much like egg whites do (although not to the same degree), and that it’s actually kind of odd that we only use the dry shake technique for eggs and not for other ingredients that respond texturally to temperature (particularly foamy ones). What, I wondered, would happen if we dry-shook the Bee’s Knees?

Behold:

Bee’s Knees
2 oz. Gin
1 oz. Fresh Lemon Juice
1/2 oz. Honey
Combine all ingredients in a shaker without ice and shake until honey is dissolved. Add ice and shake again. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass and serve.

Not only is it possible with very little additional effort, but this was easily the most delicious Bee’s Knees I’d ever had. I used Back River Gin from Maine, which is reminiscent of Plymouth Gin in its sort of mineral sweetness but with some savory notes that pop in cocktail use. I used it because I had it on hand, but any medium-bodied gin with a reasonably traditional profile will work for this drink. The honey was regular store-brand clover honey from the local supermarket. The lemon juice was from a lemon. Simple pieces, spectacular result.

I suspect that the dry shaking process also affected the flavor, perhaps releasing more of the honey’s aromatics (also a temperature-dependent process) and trapping some of them in the air bubbles in the foam. But honestly, I’m not sure! And in the course of an admittedly cursory look through Google and the usual cocktail suspects, I was unable to find any other reference to dry-shaking honey drinks. This one might be a true original, kids.

All that being said, if you’d rather make the honey syrup than shake the drink twice - perfectly sensible if you’re going to be making a lot of these - you’ll want to substitute 3/4 oz. of syrup for 1/2 oz. of honey.

For best results with the dry shake technique, you’ll want to start with honey at room temperature. If you want to add a splash of warm water to the jigger to get the last bit of honey out of it, go for it (I did!). Just keep it under a teaspoon so you don’t over-dilute the cocktail by accident.

~~~~~

And now, on to today’s question cocktail. Let’s talk a bit about the Jasmine and why it is that we’re talking about the Jasmine.

A veritable contemporary classic, the Jasmine was invented in the early nineties by a Very Big Deal cocktail renaissance figure named Paul Harrington. It was created on the fly for a friend and patron whose surname was Jasmin, but Harrington didn’t discover that error until some time after the drink had achieved popularity (possibly after it was included in his own book, which was coincidentally also published in 1998). It turns on Campari, which was gaining steam in the nineties bar community but hadn’t been used in an influential and novel way during that period before Harrington came along. It also tastes strongly of grapefruit despite containing none. It’s famous, it’s simple, and it proves that it’s still possible to invent successful drinks in the classical style. It is absolutely going in the book.

The only problem is, it didn’t taste quite right when I tested it. To my own surprise, I felt that it needed something: a dash of Regan’s orange bitters, which vastly improved the result.

Here’s the thing: This isn’t really a drink that’s up for debate. Far from there being disagreement about what goes into it, nearly every published recipe for the Jasmine gives the same proportions for the same list of four ingredients, orange bitters not among them. And unlike many older classics I might want to tweak, the creator of this drink is still alive (and almost certainly still way better than this than I am),

All of which inclines me to look first for what I might have done wrong, rather than for issues with the recipe. My hunch is that the trouble is my triple sec. It’s very tasty, and locally made at Short Path Distillery, but I think it has less of a pronounced bitter-orange note than others I’ve had, and some of its non-citrus botanical flavors fill that gap. If I’m right about this, adding that dash of Regan’s may have had a similar effect to swapping my triple sec out for a different one with a more conventional profile. And if that’s the case, the recipe is right as it is.

My request for today: Try this drink with these proportions and whichever ingredients you have on hand. Let me know how you like the balance. Tell me about any flavors that you felt were strongly represented (for better or for worse), or else that were weak or missing in your view. Let me know which brands you used. And if you feel moved to do so, add a dash of orange bitters and tell me how it changed the drink - and whether you liked it more or less.

Jasmine
1 1/2 oz. Gin
3/4 oz. Lemon Juice
1/4 oz. Campari
1/4 oz. Triple Sec
Shake. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. If desired, garnish with a lemon twist.

Happy drinking!

Notes:

(*) Those would be The Business, which is a Bee’s Knees with lime juice instead of lemon (say the names out loud and you’ll get the joke), and the Gold Rush, which is a Bee’s Knees with bourbon instead of gin.

(†) I coined the term “Cocktail Baroque Period” back in 2016 or so, and it seems to have since begun to seep into the vernacular. Though I do worry that the coronavirus-induced shutdowns may bring a premature end to the contemporary baroque artistry in cocktails.

(‡) Honey comes in a variety of textures depending on its origins. There is a honeymonger here in Cambridge called Follow the Honey, which often sells Atchafalaya honey from Louisiana. That particular honey is about the consistency of simple syrup or Grade A maple syrup right out of the jar, and makes lovely cocktails. If you want to get into honey, there’s a lot more out there than you might expect!