Day 4: Noir

Now that I have some distance between myself and the event, I can see just how carefully timed Negroni Week was. At least here in Boston, it fell at the very beginning of the summer going-out season, when hitting the town felt like a fresh and novel idea, but it was still possible to get a seat at a bar. Well done there: most of these places are a lot more crowded now than they were two weeks ago

I don't think there were ever more than four occupied barstools the night I was at Noir. Because I am an Explorer, I gave their local "Noirgroni" variant a go. (I know, I know, that's a taxonomy of beer-drinkers, but most of the categories translate to the spirits crowd.)

The Noirgroni is a terrible portmanteau and an enjoyable cocktail. It was a combination of Old Overholt rye, Carpano Bianco, and a gentian liqueur called Avèze (like the spirit, the website is French). The whole is then topped with orange bitters and served how you like. If you ask either myself or the bartender, you should like it on the rocks.

I recall the some mention of artichoke, but I didn't see any Cynar go into the cocktail and the Avèze people have enough love for gentian that I doubt they'd pollute it with another plant. I might simply be mistaken - certainly, the absence of artichoke liqueur would go a long way toward explaining why I liked this drink.

Light, strangely vegetal, and so refreshing I could have kissed it. (I settled for drinking it.) Those who are intimately familiar with Noir's menu may see similarities to their Dark Horse cocktail; those who are not might call it a spin on the Boulevardier, the Negroni's whiskey-based cousin.

Saying it's a Negroni variant is a bit of a stretch. The two cocktails have no ingredients in common, unless we count two rather different kinds of vermouth as the same. The only flavor they both hit is the orange nose. Everything else is completely dissimilar.

This is the peculiar pitfall of Negroni Week. How do you strike a balance between innovation, which any bar participating in this promotion is likely to be known for, at least locally; and keeping the drink, somehow, recognizably a Negroni? Under-innovate, and you've disappointed your customers. Over-innovate, and you've accomplished the High Mixology version of an Appletini: a drink that bears no relation to its name.

Add to that the fact that there are a thousand bars doing this at once, each trying to come up with something no one else has thought of, a clever variation on a drink we've spent a hundred years deliberately not messing with. Some of these will be brilliant. Some will fail spectacularly. Some of them will be delicious in their own right, but not true members of the Negroni family. Noir's entry is the last.

The official promotion has ended, but that's no reason for me to stop promoting. Proceeds from Noirgroni sales went to the Farm School in Athol, which teaches agriculture to everyone from children in grade school to adults who want to become farmers. All of their programs are insanely cheap - kids in the federal lunch program pay as little as nothing to participate. The difference is made up in their food sales and your donations. (Fun fact: even after Negroni Week, you can still give money to charity. Who knew?)

AccesSport Young Professionals' Event (Also, Day 3)

Here are some shots from the AccesSportAmerica young professionals' networking event! We had a great showing, and raised a bunch of money for an awesome organization.

It was a two-drink menu, consisting of the Negroni and the Frisco Sour - the theme was "herbal cocktails for the summer." We had 3-oz. paper cups instead of 1-oz. ones, so our pouring was...generous. We ended up needing six shakers' worth of each drink, but nobody was complaining.

These were the recipes we used:

Negroni
1 part Beefeater gin
1 part sweet vermouth
1 part Campari
Stir with ice. Strain into cups. Garnish with a tiny orange peel.

Frisco Sour
4 parts Michter's rye
1 part Bénédictine
1/2ish part lemon juice*
Shake with ice and strain into cups. Garnish with a tiny wedge of lemon.

The asterisk in the Frisco Sour indicates a deviation from my standard recipe of 4:1:1, because that preparation assumes fresh lemon juice. We had the more concentrated, bottled variety, which called for a (roughly) 50% reduction in volume. 

The Negroni got a fair bit of it's-just-not-for-me, which makes sense, because both Campari and gin are love-it-or-hate-it spirits for a lot of people. I found myself explaining that Campari is a "potable bitters" a lot that night. I also couldn't resist the (perhaps apocryphal) story that Campari was legal during Prohibition, because the regulators couldn't believe anyone would drink it who wasn't taking it medicinally. It's easy for cocktail enthusiasts to forget, given how much we all love the Negroni, but it really isn't for everyone.

The Frisco Sour, on the other hand, was almost comically popular. The nice thing about events like this is that it's really easy to judge your success - the Frisco Sour was the only thing going around in cocktail glasses, and there were a lot of those to be seen. I owe a debt of gratitude to Frank Bruni of the New York Times, for first introducing me to the drink in this article.

Thanks also to North 26, for donating the space and the liquor, and to everyone who came out for AccesSportAmerica - this is the second year in a row they've asked HCS to play this event, and I feel good about our odds of a third performance.

For more pictures, check out our facebook page. You should also feel free to like us, along with North 26 and AccesSportAmerica!

Day 2: Russell House Tavern

I confess: I've been to Russell House before. Many times. Yes, we're two days into Negroni Week, and I've already broken my own rule.

Believe it or not, I planned for this. Russell House was my dedicated fallback bar (distinct from a fall backbar, where I assume one can get a pumpkin milk punch). If one thing led to another and I needed someplace convenient, of guaranteed quality, I had every intention of ending up at Russell House Tavern.

They're still billing themselves as a "New American Tavern" on their website, but the tavern is a fixture in Harvard Square. It was full but not packed when I was there last night, and last night was a Tuesday.

Mention Negroni Week at Russell House, and you'll get a Negroni Week Passport, with spaces to stamp for ten participating bars in each of ten cities. Suddenly, my own seven-bar project seems far less ambitious.

It was at this establishment that I first fell in love with the Jungle Bird, so I tend to trust Campari experiments conducted here. They're serving both classic Negronis and a special variant called the Palazzo this week. I opted to try the latter.

The Palazzo starts out with gin and Campari, like you'd expect. The Russell House twist is to finish it with a 50/50 mixture of Booker's bourbon and St. George raspberry liqueur, with the goal of hitting sweet vermouth's flavor notes without actually including any. It's garnished with a slice of orange peel, as usual, and served neat.

It's a pleasant drink, but it strikes me as quite different from a standard Negroni. Most of the sip is the bourbon-raspberry combination, until the Campari hits on the aftertaste. The result is that it's less complex than its parent cocktail, while at the same time being more subtle than you expect it to be. Probably not one for the Negroni purists, but I liked it well enough.

Sales of both the Palazzo and the classic Negroni benefit the Leary Firefighters' Foundation, founded in 2000 by actor and local son Denis Leary. In those fourteen years, the foundation has given out millions of dollars to fire departments around the country for equipment, training, and facilities - a good chunk of that in Boston and Worcester.

Two days down, five to go. And remember - tonight, we drink for AccesSportAmerica!

Negroni Week Day 1: backbar

I'm undertaking a little project for Negroni Week. For six out of these seven days, I'll be hitting a Boston-area bar that I haven't been to before, where I'll have a Negroni for a worthy cause. (The exception being Wednesday, when I'll be making Negronis for a worthy cause.) First stop: backbar.

backbar [lowercase lettering theirs] is Somerville's entry in two major bar categories: the Speakeasy and the I-Clearly-Should-Have-Come-Here-Sooner.

While it's well-hidden, it isn't the dark, secretive atmosphere that a lot of neo-speakeasies have. There's a massive skylight over the bar, for one thing, and the furnishings make it feel more like you're drinking in your artist friend's living room than worshipping at the Temple of High Mixology.

In short, there's a good reason this place has gotten noticed. But enough about that, on to the cocktails.

backbar has several Negroni specials on the menu this week, of which the Negroni Milk Punch is the one you see above. They have a rotating milk punch special on the menu, so for those who like milk punches, this is the place to come.

For those who don't know what a milk punch is, and have visions of some heavy dairy-Campari concoction, fear not. There are milk punches that consist of milk, liquor, ice, and grated nutmeg, available at some holdover bars in New Orleans, of all places, but backbar belongs to the other school of milk-punch-making.

In this school, the milk is deliberately curdled, usually by the addition of lemon or something similar, and the milk solids are strained out. This leaves just the liquids, with their suspended proteins and whatnot. The flavor of pure milk liquid is, like maraschino liqueur, Chartreuse, and a host of other lovely ingredients, basically impossible to describe to someone who's never tried it.

What it does for a cocktail is similar to an egg, in that it tends to mute other ingredients and quietly slip in its own flavor at the back. It is dissimilar in that it doesn't thicken the drink, being mostly water. In point of fact, backbar adds orange juice to this one for body.

For those keeping score, that means we have a standard Negroni (Campari, Punt e Mes, and Ford's gin), with milk liquid and a splash of orange juice added in. The bartender then took an orange peel to the rim of the glass for an aromatic finish.

The resulting palate was mostly milk-muted Campari, with little sweet, bitter, and herbal amendments by the other ingredients, and a big burst of orange oil on the nose. A great way to begin an evening, but you'll probably miss the subtleties if you're a few drinks in.

Finally, I'm sure you're all wondering where the money from backbar's Negronis goes this week. The answer? Wine to Water, an organization that rebuilds wells, provides sanitary filtration systems, and generally aims to increase access to potable water. According to their website, they've done so for a quarter of a million people since 2004. And their preferred fundraising technique is selling wine.

One day down, six to go. Check back in tomorrow - and don't forget to join us on Wednesday, when I'll be behind the bar, making Negronis to raise money for AccesSportAmerica!

Negroni Week

Monday kicks off Negroni Week, co-sponsored by Campari and Imbibe Magazine. What's a Negroni week, you ask? It's a time when over one thousand bars around the world will donate a portion of their Negroni revenues to charity. In other words, a time when you have no good reason not to drink Negronis.

We're getting in on the action in our own way. Our event next week is for the benefit of AccesSportAmerica, an organization that trains people with disabilities in extreme sports, to help them achieve higher function. If that sounds awesome, that's because it is. The Negroni, naturally, is one of our featured cocktails.

But there's no reason that should be your only Negroni this week. There are twenty-one participating bars in Boston alone, raising money for everything from the Sean A. Collier Memorial Fund to the MSPCA, and another two dozen across the state. (You can find a list of participating bars here.)

Negroni Week runs from June 2 to June 8. If you've ever wanted to compare all the Negronis in your neighborhood, you couldn't pick a better time to start!

Brooklyn

1 1/2 oz. rye whiskey
1/2 oz. dry vermouth
Dash or two Maraschino liqueur
Dash aromatic bitters

Four out of the five boroughs of New York have cocktails named after them, of which the Manhattan is by far the most famous. Staten Island, somehow, is the teetotaler.

When the other three borough-cocktails are mentioned, it's usually to pan them. Embury tells us that far more Manhattans than Brooklyns are made even in Brooklyn, which, while definitely true, is perhaps rubbing it in a little too much. It's a very pleasant drink from time to time.

Among those who bother to make it, there are two schools of the Brooklyn. One simply makes it a dry Manhattan (implicitly making the sweet Manhattan coextensive with the Manhattan category). This, too, is an enjoyable cocktail, but there isn't much reason to give it its own name.

I prefer the second school, which adds Maraschino liqueur to the mix, creating a decidedly different drink. Maraschino fills out the body and adds a sweet, earthy dimension to the flavor profile.

I went with Dutch's Boomtown Bitters, previously written-up, on top. Amer Picon is often specifically indicated, in this and other cocktail recipes, but there's no need to wring your hands if you haven't got it. It's a bitters. Experiment with your own citrus or aromatic bitters until you find one that you like.

I should also note that my above recipe is approximate. The Brooklyn is a great tinkerer's drink. If you find you like it with a tablespoon of Maraschino, more power to you. These proportions should at least have you playing in in the right ballpark.

Dutch's Bitters

Hat tip to The Boston Shaker, which sold me both Saturday’s channel knife and this variety pack of Dutch’s bitters.

Dutch’s is a New York-based bitters maker that I was previously not familiar with. Their products combine flavors popular in a certain time and place in American history.

For instance, right now I’m sipping a 3:2 Manhattan with a few healthy dashes of the Boomtown bitters. These are meant to evoke gold-rush, frontier towns, with sarsaparilla, oak, mint, and coconut, among other things. The whole thing reminds me of smoke and molasses, and seems to thicken the mouthfeel of the vermouth somehow.

In short, I highly recommend the Boomtown. The Prohi-bitters (ginger, citrus, hibiscus) also smells delicious, although their Colonial line (lavender, juniper, rose) reminds me of somehing they’d pipe into a clothing store to increase sales. I’ll post more as I play with them.

http://dutchsspirits.com/bitters/

New Tool!

Finally bought a channel knife. Time to practice.

Thanks are due, as usual, to the Boston Shaker, for sustaining my bar tool habit: http://www.thebostonshaker.com/

Bangkok Special

Bangkok Special

2 oz. 10 Cane Rum
3/4 oz. ginger beer
1/2 tsp honey
2 sprigs of mint
2 drops Sriracha

Combine all ingredients and shake. Serve on the rocks, garnished with more mint.

Yale Cocktail

Yale Cocktail

2 oz. Plymouth gin
1/2 oz. dry vermouth
1/2 oz. crème de violette
1 dash Angostura bitters

Camberville

Camberville

3 oz. Harpoon Summer
2 oz. Privateer True American Rum
1 oz. St. Elder liqueur

Serve with ice.

We have a good local distillery scene in New England, but the brewery world is a force to be reckoned with. That meant I played with beer and cider cocktails quite a lot during my local-ingredients challenge.

Harpoon's summer ale was nice and refreshing on its own. Add rum for body and elderflower liqueur for complexity (and, admittedly, a bit of sugar), and you've got a relaxing long drink for mid-July.

St. Elder is produced in Somerville, Mass., which is what inspired the name. "Camberville" is the nickname for the area along the Cambridge-Somerville border - which, as any map will tell you, is about as arbitrary a line as you can get.

St. Elder, while we're on the topic, is of comparable quality with the better-known St. Germain, but retails for half the price. I think it actually pairs better with aged spirits than its pricier cousin does. If they sell it in your area, I highly recommend getting a bottle.

Niagara Wine

Niagara Wine

1 1/2 oz. Hennessy Cognac
1/4 oz. Luxardo maraschino
1 tsp Welch’s white grape/peach juice
1 dash Scrappy’s cardamom bitters

Stir. Serve chilled but neat.

A response to the Welch’s white grape/peach juice ingredient challenge, and a reminder that a very little bit of fruit juice is all you need in a cocktail. Substituting straight peach or white grape juice, or something similar, like white cranberry juice, should work just as well.

One more thing this drink reminds us is that Scrappy’s cardamom bitters go with everything. (Find them here: http://scrappysbitters.com/cardamon/)

.406

.406

Combine equal parts Bully Boy American Straight Whiskey and Moxie in a rocks glass, with ice. Stir in a drizzle of fresh rhubarb syrup.

The drink is named in honor of Ted Williams, who, like E.B. White and Calvin Coolidge, loved him some Moxie.

Bully Boy’s American Straight Whiskey isn’t quite a bourbon or a rye, being 40% corn, 40% rye, and 20% barley, last I heard. What it is, is delicious. It stands up against other flavors like a rye but is smoother drinking than most bourbons are. It’s one of the few whiskies I’d be prepared to pair with Moxie and rhubarb, simultaneously; most others would either taste foul (hello, Scotch) or get drowned out completely.

Bully Boy makes a whole line of spirits right here in Boston. The skinny is here: http://www.bullyboydistillers.com/bully-boy-american-straight-whiskey.html

Outre-Mer

Outre-Mer

6 parts Rhum Barbancourt
1 part Kassatly Ajyal tamarind syrup
1/2 part Grand Marnier

Stir briskly to keep the syrup from settling. Serve neat.

My neighbor got his hands on some tamarind syrup, and had absolutely no idea what to do with it. “Here, Cocktail Guy,” he said, “You figure it out.” Thus was born the tamarind ingredient challenge, and consequently the Outre-Mer.

I christened it after the French name for their lingering colonial outposts (the name means, “Overseas”), because the ingredients are French, Haitian, and Lebanese. Other dark rums will also work, but there’s a rich smokiness to the Barbancourt that makes the whole combination taste more exotic.

An addition I came up with later was a single dash of Scrappy’s cardamom bitters (available here: http://scrappysbitters.com/cardamon/), which I’ve found to blend nicely with any individual spirit and more liqueurs than you’d think. This is a perfect milieu for them.

Jen Rose

Jen Rose

1 1/2 oz. Berkshire Mountain’s Greylock Gin
1/2 oz. cranberry syrup
1/4 oz. lime juice

Shake with ice and serve neat.

A gin spin on the Jack Rose, created as a test drive for homemade cranberry syrup. This was one of my earliest ideas for a locally-sourced ingredient substitution, taking the place of grenadine. Properly, grenadine is sweetened, boiled-down pomegranate juice. Cranberries have the same tart, bitter palate pomegranates do; I haven’t yet found a cocktail in which you can’t substitute one for the other.

This of course means you can make a Jen Rose with grenadine, too.

Proposition 3-17 →

My personal favorite thing about Guinness: that they spent two years actively campaigning to make St. Patrick’s Day a U.S. federal holiday. It’s called Proposition 3-17, and while they seem to have given up on making it a reality, that’s no excuse for the rest of us to treat today as a day off. Particularly in Boston, where Evacuation Day conveniently coincides with St. Paddy’s Day.

Vieux Carré

Vieux Carré (dry)

1 oz. rye whiskey
1 oz. Cognac
1 oz. dry vermouth
2 barspoons Bénédictine
2 dashes Angostura bitters
2 dashes Peychaud’s bitters

Stir before adding bitters. Serve neat or with ice, as you prefer.

I’ve been wanting to put this one up for a while. I made these left, right, and center while Mardi Gras was upon us, but they were going down so fast I never got a photo of one. Until now!

"Vieux Carré" is the French name for what Anglophones would call the French Quarter, New Orleans’s oldest, most famous neighborhood. The Vieux Carré is not New Orleans’s most famous cocktail, that honor probably falling to the Sazerac, but it was invented there, at the Carousel Bar of the Hotel Monteleone.

This is a nice cocktail in that all of the recipes are very similar. It’s not quite as formulaic as the Negroni, but it’s reasonably easy to get in your head. Start with equal parts of whiskey, brandy and vermouth. Add a spoonful or so of Bénédictine, then top with equal parts of Angostura and Peychaud’s (ordinarily one or two dashes). All the recipes I’ve seen for the Vieux Carré can be described like this, although they quibble over the precise numbers. Mine is more Bénédictine-heavy than most, but, hey, I like Bénédictine.

The Vieux Carré is most commonly found with sweet vermouth. I have to credit Ted Haigh’s Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails with the knowledge that it can be made with the dry stuff as well. It’s a perfect one-for-one substitution. That’s not always the case - Jon and I had to do a lot more doctoring when we tried to make a dry Americano. But in this case, don’t stress about your vermouth. I just use whichever I feel like that day, or in this case, happen to have on hand.

According to Haigh, this drink had been forgotten at the Carousel Bar itself, until very recently. I’m happy to report that this is no longer the case. The Carousel Bar is, in fact, where I first met the Vieux Carré, during Tales of the Cocktail in 2012.

Peychaud’s Bitters

Very happy to announce I’ve gone out and gotten myself a bottle of Peychaud’s. It’s about time - they’ve been around for two hundred years.

Peychaud’s is the signature bitters of New Orleans, and is essential in both the Sazerac (whose namesake company now produces the bitters) and the Vieux Carré. Followers of the blog may remember a version of that second drink I put up a while back, substituting cardamom bitters for the Peychaud’s. That’ll work in a pinch, but it’s not the same.

Peychaud’s’s flavor profile (there’s got to be a better way to render that possessive) hits anise and cherry notes most strikingly. In addition to being a storied bitters that is often specifically called for, it makes a fun variation for Old Fashioneds, Manhattans, or really anything that calls for bitters. I’m going to enjoy playing around with it.

2013 Summer Cocktail Series Kickoff

I promised to fill in some old favorites when I started this, so here are some highlights from the 2013 Summer Cocktail Series. Now that the weather’s turned, it felt appropriate to start putting up bright, cheery pictures.

The theme was drinking locally, so everything possible was sourced in New England, including and especially the spirits. I allowed myself reasonable exceptions for citrus, spices, sugar (sometimes), and fancy foreign liqueurs without local equivalents (rarely).

This is just a shot of the arsenal. The recipes will come after.

Plate: The Winter Pimm's Cocktail

Plate No. 2, featuring Pimm’s No. 1: the return of the Winter Pimm’s Cocktail. The volumes given for both this and the Bee’s Knees are for two people. Or one person drinking a double.