Classic Cocktails: Last Call

(This post is part of a series that I’m using to help write my next book, the new edition of 100 Classic Cocktails, and provide inspiration for home bartenders in these times of social distancing. Some of the recipes are ones I’m trying to workshop, and I’m asking my readers to test the recipes at home if able and send me their thoughts on the questions I have. Others are ones I think I’ve nailed that can be easily made with common household ingredients, and I’m sharing them to help my readers keep their spirits up while spending a lot more time at home than usual. I’ll always specify which is which. For more background on all of this, including the book, you can check out the first post in the series here. All posts will be tagged “(100) Classic Cocktails”.)

My manuscript deadline is looming, so this post will be the last opportunity to influence the contents of Classic Cocktails before it comes out! To that end, I’m skipping the history and the theory and just listing the cocktails I have lingering questions about. If you have feedback on any of these, give me a shout at info@herzogcocktailschool.com as soon as you can!

Don’t worry, I’ll still keep this blog series going after the manuscript is done. There’s a lot that I’ve learned that I’d like to share, and plenty more of these recipes are easy to make at home in a socially distant world. (Plus I now have an interesting story about the Lemon Drop, which is a sufficiently unexpected outcome of all this that I think I have to share it.)

In the mean time, however, if you’d like to help me out and/or see your name in print in the book’s acknowledgements, mix up one of these and tell me what you think:

Diamondback

(Lower-Octane, Original Version)
1½ oz. ~80-proof Rye
¾ oz. ~80-proof Apple Brandy
½ oz. OR ¾ oz. Yellow Chartreuse

Stir with ice. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with maraschino or brandied cherries.

(Higher-Octane, Contemporary Version)
1½ oz. ~100-proof Rye
¾ oz. ~100-proof Apple Brandy
½ oz. OR ¾ oz. Green Chartreuse

Stir with ice. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with maraschino or brandied cherries.

Question(s): Did you try the lower- or higher-octane version? Within that version did you try it with ½ oz. or ¾ oz. of the Chartreuse variety specified? Did you find it well-balanced, too spirit-forward, too sweet, not spiritous enough, or not sweet enough?

(Inconveniently, this is both alphabetically first and the one on the list that has the most permutations to inquire about. Your feedback on any one of them will be helpful data in working out an overall consensus; the rest of these are much more straightforward.)

Gin Rickey
1½ oz. Old Tom Gin or London Dry Gin
Juice of ½ Lime
3 oz. Club Soda

Juice half a lime into a highball glass. Add ice, gin, and club soda, and stir. Garnish with the spent lime shell.

Question(s): Is this palatable or too sour? Does it need more soda, more gin, or both?

Jasmine
1½ oz. Gin
¾ oz. Lemon Juice
½ oz. Campari
½ oz. Curaçao or Triple Sec

Shake. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

1½ oz. Gin
¾ oz. Lemon Juice
¼ oz. Campari
¼ oz. Curaçao or Triple Sec

Shake. Serve without ice.

Question: Is this better with the extra ¼ oz. each of Campari and curaçao, as in the top recipe; or without, as in the lower?

Margarita
2 oz. Blanco Tequila OR 1½ oz. Blanco Tequila
½ oz. Triple Sec
½ oz. Lime Juice
1 tsp. Simple Syrup (or agave syrup, or another sweetener)

Shake with ice. Strain into a chilled cocktail grass with a salted rim. Garnish with a lime wheel.

Question(s): Is this better with the additional ½ oz. of tequila, or without? Additionally, what sort of sweetener did you use, and did you find it improved the drink, compromised it, or had no discernible effect?

Pegu Club
1½ oz. Gin
¾ oz. Triple Sec or Curaçao
¾ oz. Lime Juice
2 dashes Angostura Bitters OR 1 dash Angostura Bitters and 1 dash Orange Bitters

Shake with ice. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

Question: Is this better with both Angostura and orange, or with just Angostura?

Seelbach
1 oz. Bourbon (~50% ABV preferred)
½ oz. Triple Sec
7 dashes Angostura Bitters
7 dashes Peychaud's Bitters
3-4 oz. Sparkling Wine

Stir all but the wine with ice. Strain into a chilled flute and fill with sparkling wine. Garnish with an orange twist.

Chill all ingredients. Combine bourbon, triple sec, and bitters in a flute and stir, then fill with sparkling wine. Garnish with an orange twist.

Question(s): Which way did you prepare it, and did you enjoy it? What was the proof of the bourbon you used, and did the whiskey flavor come through enough (or too much) for your tastes?

Vodka Espresso
2 oz. Vodka
1 oz. Fresh Espresso
½ oz. Coffee Liqueur
½ oz. Simple Syrup

Shake until foamy. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with three coffee beans, if available.

1½ oz. Vodka
1 oz. Fresh Espresso
¾ oz. Coffee Liqueur

Shake until foamy. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with three coffee beans, if available.

Question(s): Which variation did you use? Did you find it overly sweet or not sweet enough? Too spirit-forward or not spiritous enough?

Vodka Sour
1½ oz. Vodka OR 2 oz. Vodka
1 oz. Simple Syrup
¾ oz. Lemon Juice

Shake. Serve up.

Question(s): Is this better with the additional ½ oz. of vodka, or without? And is the below version perhaps even better?

‘Lemon Drop’
1½ oz. Vodka
½ oz. Simple Syrup
½ oz. Triple Sec or Curaçao
½ oz. Lemon Juice

Shake. Serve up.

Whiskey Sour
2 oz. Bourbon
¾ oz. OR 1 oz. Simple Syrup
¾ oz. Lemon Juice

Shake. Serve down.

Question: Is this better with ¾ or 1 oz. of simple syrup?

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The Collins, the Fizz, the Rickey, and the Highball

Or, “Long Drinks Part Two: Carbonated Boogaloo.” (It’s been a long lockdown, OK?)

It’s time for another post with a whole bunch of recipes, in the same spirit as our earlier discussion of juice-forward drinks but this time focusing on recipes lengthened with sodas. They fall into three broad categories.

“Highball” is a blanket term for simple two-ingredient combination of a distilled spirit and a carbonated mixer over ice, occasionally with a citrus wedge or other garnish. The mixer is usually flavored but plain club soda is sometimes used.

Strictly speaking, the Gin and Tonic and any other drink along those lines belongs to the highball category, but if someone orders a ‘highball’ without specifying further, they’re generally expecting a glass of whiskey with ginger ale or club soda rather than, say, a Rum and Coke. Highballs are straightforward, and I find a 1:2 ratio of spirit to mixer is a pretty solid baseline. Particular recipes follow at the end of this post.

But first, let’s talk about their historically more interesting cousins: the Collins and the Fizz. Why more interesting? First, because they require a bit more technique than highballs do. And second, because they’re very tricky to tell apart. A Collins is made with a spirit base, usually gin, and lemon juice, sugar, ice and seltzer. A fizz is made with a spirit base, also usually gin, and also with lemon juice, sugar, ice, and seltzer.

They may seem like they’re the same damn thing, except that fizzes occasionally have egg whites or yolks added to them (more on this later), and people sometimes say the fizz should be smaller or that it should be served without ice for some reason. That’s pretty thin, and for this reason I was prepared to scratch the whole fizz operation out of Classic Cocktails as redundant, until I read Dave Wondrich’s notes on the traditional distinction between them in his excellent book Imbibe! Here’s how I would summarize his findings:

The Collins is a built drink, prepared in the glass it’s going to be served in. It uses a ton of seltzer - 6 ounces, in Wondrich’s recipe - and is served in a tall glass to accommodate all that liquid. Because the preparation process doesn’t chill the drink in any way, it is served with ice. It is expected that the ice will melt, and that it will chill and dilute the drink over time, because it is expected that a drink this large will take a while to consume.
The fizz is a shaken drink. All the chilling and dilution it needs comes from the ice in the shaker; it is then strained into a glass and topped with seltzer. It is served without ice, because it’s already cold and no further dilution is desired - but because there is nothing keeping it cold, it is meant to be drunk quickly, before it warms up. Consequently, the amount of seltzer is lower, more like 3-4 ounces against the Collins’s 6, and it is served in a correspondingly smaller glass.

Put another way, the Collins is oriented around being a slow sipper, while the fizz is meant to be drunk more like a shorter cocktail. Everything else about each flows from this: preparation, service on or off the rocks, glass size, even the presence or absence of egg. You can easily dress up a fizz by adding egg whites to the shaker, but you emphatically do not want to try that with a Collins, where you’ll have drippy unintegrated egg swirling around in the glass for the good long while it’ll take you to finish the drink. This is why the fizz can be doctored into other things and the Collins basically can’t. It’s also why certain cocktails come in ‘fizz’ versions, not Collins versions - most notably the Southside, a shaken combination of gin, lemon, sugar, mint, and sometimes orange bitters, which is sometimes topped with seltzer and rechristened the Southside Fizz. The lack of ice also lets the fizz’s effervescence play a starring role (and even an acrobatic one) in the drink’s presentation, as it most notably does in the Ramos Gin Fizz.

And then there is the Rickey, a sort of half-sibling to both the Collins and the fizz. It is fizz-sized, but it is built in the glass and served with ice like a Collins. Its main distinguishing feature is a lack of sugar, followed by its preference for lime rather than lemon juice. It is necessarily the sourest-tasting of the bunch, and it assumes a certain amount of lingering ice-melt to offset its limeyness. The original Rickey was made with whiskey, according to the tastes of its creator and namesake Col. Joe Rickey; but the Gin Rickey has been the more popular sibling for most of their history, heightening the apparent similarity with the Collins and the fizz.

Got all that? OK, let’s do some recipes. These are all super easy quarantine cocktails, but I have the same mild Question for My Tasters about each of them: are you happy with these proportions? As always, drink as many or as few as you like, just let me know which drinks you tried and which spirit(s) you used when providing your feedback!

Tom Collins (pictured)
2 oz. Old Tom Gin (traditionally) or London Dry Gin
1 tsp. Sugar
Juice of 1/2 a Lemon (~3/4 oz. Lemon Juice)
6 oz. Seltzer

Combine gin, sugar, and lemon juice in a Collin glass or other tall glass (if you have a 12- to 16-oz. beer glass lying around, that’ll do nicely) and stir until sugar is dissolved. Add seltzer and plenty of ice, and stir to mix. Enjoy slowly over the course of an afternoon.

For a John Collins, substitute whiskey for the gin; for a Ron Collins, substitute rum.

Gin Fizz
2 oz. Old Tom Gin (traditionally) or London Dry Gin
1/4 oz. Sugar
Juice of 1/2 a Lemon (~3/4 oz. Lemon Juice)

Shake with ice. Strain into an 8ish-oz. highball or juice glass without ice and fill with 3-4 oz. of seltzer. Drink quickly, while it’s still laughing at you. Rum, whiskey, or brandy may be substituted for the gin if preferred.

For a Silver Fizz, add an egg white to the shaker and shake once without ice to unfold the egg proteins before shaking with ice. For a Golden Fizz, add an egg yolk instead.

Southside (pictured)
2 oz. London Dry Gin
3/4 oz. Lemon Juice
3/4 oz. Simple Syrup
~8 Mint Leaves
1 dash Orange Bitters

Shake all but the bitters. Strain into a chilled rocks glass and dash bitters on top. Garnish with a smacked sprig of mint.

For the Southside Fizz, strain instead into a 6- to 8-oz. highball or juice glass and dash bitters on top. Then fill with 3-4 oz. of seltzer and garnish with a smacked sprig of mint.

Gin Rickey
1 1/2 oz. Old Tom Gin (traditionally) or London Dry Gin
Juice of 1/2 a Lime (~1/2 oz. Lime Juice)
3 oz. Seltzer

Juice half a lime into a 6- to 8-oz. highball or juice glass. Add ice, gin, and club soda, and stir. Garnish with the spent lime shell. For a traditional Rickey, substitute whiskey for the gin.

Bourbon Highball
2 oz. Bourbon
4 oz. Ginger Ale or Club Soda

Combine in an 8ish-oz. highball or juice glass with ice and stir.

Gin and Tonic
2 oz. Gin
4 oz. Tonic Water

Combine in an 8ish-oz. highball or juice glass with ice and stir. Optionally, garnish with a wedge of lime.

Cuba Libre
2 oz. Aged Rum
4 oz. Coca-Cola (or similar)

Combine in an 8ish-oz. highball or juice glass with ice and stir. Garnish with a wedge of lime (essential here - both for flavor and because without it, this is simply a Rum and Coke).

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The Long Drinks Project

“Long drinks” is a broad term for mixed alcoholic beverages of appreciably greater volume than is the standard for cocktails. In practice, many long drinks can be more precisely described in other ways (e.g. tiki drinks, highballs, bucks, etc.), and the generic term “long drink” is sometimes used to refer specifically to simple combinations of spirits and juices in which the latter predominate.

It will not surprise my readers to learn that these drinks - the Screwdriver, the Cape Codder, and the like - are not ones that I ordinarily order or make. It’s not that they don’t taste good, necessarily. They can and often do! But they’re usually simple and not terribly spirit-forward, two things I don’t look for in an adult beverage.

In any case, a number of them will be included in the book, and this is another category that makes for a pretty perfect twofer post: I’d love to get feedback on the recipes, and I can virtually guarantee that every single one of you will be able to make at least one of these at home.

After a lot of research and contemplation, I determined that I wanted to use the same proportions for these across the board. I don’t want drinkers to have wildly uneven experiences if they’re making all of these at home based on my book, and I do think it makes sense to think of these drinks as having parallel structures until proven otherwise. My working proportions are 1 1/2 oz. of spirit to 4 oz. of juice, which with an eighty-proof spirit gives a mixed drink about 11% alcohol by volume, or something in the ballpark of a glass of wine.

Juice-forward drinks are often elaborations on one of three classics: the Greyhound, the Screwdriver, and the Cape Codder. Here are my takes on a bunch of them. Today’s Question for Tasters: Which drink(s) did you try, and were you satisfied with these proportions? If you weren’t, what would you change (or did you change) to bring the recipe more in line with your tastes?

Note that almost all of these are vodka drinks. In case you don’t have vodka, I note common substitutions in a couple of cases; other substitutions won’t help me much, but you’re welcome to try them recreationally.

Greyhound
1 1/2 oz. Vodka
4 oz. Grapefruit Juice
Combine ingredients in a tall glass with ice and stir.

Salty Dog (Elaboration on the Greyhound)
Prepare in all respects like the Greyhound, but rim the glass with salt before making the drink. (For guidance on salting the rims of glasses, see the previous post.) The Salty Dog may also be made with gin in place of the vodka.

Cape Codder
1 1/2 oz. Vodka
4 oz. Cranberry Juice
Wedge of Lime
Combine liquid ingredients in a tall glass with ice and stir. Garnish with the lime (it is expected that the end user will squeeze the lime into their drink to their personal taste; the lime juice is actually essential to this drink).

Sea Breeze (Elaboration on the Cape Codder)

1 1/2 oz. Vodka
3 oz. Cranberry Juice
1 oz. Grapefruit Juice
Wedge of Lime
Combine liquid ingredients in a tall glass with ice and stir. Garnish with the lime, as in the Cape Codder.

Bay Breeze (Elaboration on the Cape Codder)
1 1/2 oz. Vodka
3 oz. Cranberry Juice
1 oz. Pineapple Juice
Wedge of Lime
Combine liquid ingredients in a tall glass with ice and stir. Garnish with the lime, as in the Cape Codder.

Screwdriver
1 1/2 oz. Vodka
4 oz. Orange Juice
Combine ingredients in a tall glass with ice and stir.

Harvey Wallbanger (Elaboration on the Screwdriver)
1 1/2 oz. Vodka
1/2 oz. Galliano
4 oz. Orange Juice
Combine vodka and orange juice in a tall glass with ice and stir. Float Galliano on top (i.e., pour it gently down the back of a spoon so it forms a layer above the rest; this is traditional for the Harvey Wallbanger, although why it became traditional to float a liqueur on top of a drink that’s nearly the same color, I do not know).

Further Elaborations on the Screwdriver
Back in the Disco Days, many drinks with “clever” and “risqué” names were created as riffs on the Screwdriver, in which some characteristic of the added or substituted ingredients became a descriptor for what kind of “Screw” the person wanted. I may or may not bother to share this information in Classic Cocktails, but if you’re bored at home, here are some Screw variations to play around with. Note that these are stackable - one can have, e.g., a Slow, Comfortable Screw Against the Wall, etc. - and that the Slow Screw is usually the base upon which the others are built:

Comfortable Screw - Add 1/2 oz. of Southern Comfort
Fuzzy Screw - Add 1/2 oz. of peach schnapps
Hard Screw - Add 1/4 oz. of overproof rum
Slow Screw - Add 1/2 oz. of Sloe Gin
Screw Against the Wall - Add 1/2 oz. of Galliano*
Screw on the Beach – Add 1/2 oz. of peach schnapps and replace half the OJ with cranberry juice
Screw with a Bang - (Same as Hard Screw)
Screw with a Kiss - Add 1/2 oz. of Amaretto
Screw with Satin Pillows - Add 1/2 oz. of Frangelico
Left-Handed Screw - Replace the vodka with gin
Mexican Screw – Replace the vodka with tequila (sometimes called “Screw, Mexican Style”)
Wild Screw - Replace the vodka with bourbon
Screw Between the Sheets - Replace the vodka with equal parts brandy and filtered aged rum†
Screw in the Dark - Replace the vodka with an aged or black rum†
Cold Screw - (Sometimes tacked on, referring to the ice)
Elderly Screw - Add 1/2 oz. of elderflower liqueur‡

Notes
(*) Generally if Galliano is the only thing added to the drink, it’s still called a Harvey Wallbanger. The “Against the Wall” moniker is deployed only when more than one Screw variation is employed simultaneously.

(†) For rum categorization reference, see the previous post about the Daiquiri. The aged and filtered style of rum common to Cuba and Puerto Rico and generally labeled as “white” seems like the most appropriate one for the Screw Between the Sheets, though if you don’t have that, choose a lighter-bodied “amber” rum aged 1-4 years should work. For the Screw in the Dark, I recommend an aged “amber” rum rather than a sweetened black rum, because the drink is already going to be fairly sugary; but this is a matter of personal taste.

(‡) St. Germain, the first elderflower liqueur, wasn’t released until 2007, long after the heyday of these Screwdriver elaborations. But it’s tasty, you can make a pun out of it at least as readily as you can with with the rest of these liqueurs, and these days it’s likelier to be in most homes than most of them are. So feel free to give it a try as an update to this tradition.

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The Hot Toddy, the Queens, and Substituting Spirits by Strength

Without going into too much detail (I want to keep this round shorter than the last one, after all), I’d like to take a few minutes to discuss spirit strength, and the many ways it can affect one’s process.

Any distilled spirit will include ethanol and water in some proportion, as well as a variety of other substances that contribute flavor and texture. As a general rule of thumb, ethanol will be a better carrier for most of these other flavor chemicals than water will. It is thus often (if not necessarily) the case that stronger spirits will be able to deliver more flavor than weaker ones. At least, up to a point, after which the increase in the proportion of ethanol can overwhelm the palate and render any further increase in soluble flavors irrelevant.

Unless labelled as ‘cask strength’ or something similar, most distilled spirits - gin, whiskey, rum, etc. - are sold at a proof that is at most in the ballpark of 100º, which is to say 50% ethanol by volume and 50% water, the flavor chemicals being dissolved and making up a negligible percentage of the total volume. In the U.S. at least, they are also sold at at least 80º, which is to say 40% ethanol by volume and 60% water.*

A plurality of distilled spirits on the market are sold at exactly 80º, and the most common proof after that is almost certainly 100º, which is also the proof at which bonded spirits are sold.† In general, spirits also tend to cluster in strength around 80º and 100º even if they’re off by a few points, which makes these reasonable benchmarks for what a person is likely to have in their house. A 102º whiskey is probably a fair substitute for a 100º whiskey in a cocktail, and so on. (There is another, smaller cluster around 90º, which I’m not addressing for the time being.)

It will probably not surprise you to learn that my personal bar skews disproportionately towards higher-strength spirits, in part because I appreciate the flavor they can deliver, in part because I like how well they stand up in cocktails, and in part because the local and small-batch distillers that I tend to favor often make stronger spirits, in order to better showcase the quality of their work to audiences who don’t know them yet. This is perfectly fine for making cocktails at home, because high-proof spirits tend to hold up quite well against mixing, and using them allows you to match stronger flavors against them. But for testing cocktail recipes that are meant to be as universal as possible, having mostly high-proof spirits poses a problem.

Just to keep things clear, for the rest of this post, if I describe spirits as “high[er]-proof” or “high[er]-strength”, I mean they’re roughly 100º, and if I say “standard-proof” or “standard-strength”, I mean they’re about 80º.

Consider two ounces of 100º whiskey. In that, you have one ounce each of ethanol and water, as well as the flavors carried (mostly) by the ethanol. In two ounces of 80º whiskey, you have 4/5ths of an ounce of ethanol and associated carried flavors, and 1 1/5ths ounces of water. These will play differently in a cocktail - not necessarily enough to be noticed by every person or in every recipe, but enough that we can’t automatically assume that you can substitute one for the other in equal proportions. Both the respective total amounts of ethanol and water and the ratio between the two are different.

Now, given 1 3/4 oz. of high-proof whiskey, you end up with 7/8 oz. of ethanol instead. Let me switch to decimals to make this clearer: that works out to .875 oz. of ethanol, compared to .80 oz of ethanol in a 2 oz. pour of standard-proof whiskey and 1.00 oz. of ethanol in the same pour of 100º-whiskey.

In other words, 1 3/4 oz. of high-proof whiskey gives you an amount of ethanol (and ethanol-delivered flavor) that is closer to what you’d get from 2 oz. of standard-proof whiskey that 2 oz. of high-proof whiskey would supply. So much closer, in fact, that the difference between them is less than 1/13th of an ounce of ethanol, and appreciably less than the change you’d get from adjusting the total amount of either whiskey by a quarter of an ounce (which ranges from 1/10 oz. of ethanol to 1/8 oz. of ethanol in the 80º-100º spirit strength range).

My goal with this book is to compile benchmark recipes. I’m not a world-class cocktail bar trying to help you replicate their careful compositions exactly at home: I’m trying to give readers a good starting point that they can adapt to their own tastes and bar selections as needed. I want these recipes to be as good right out of the box as they can be, subject to reasonable expectations and constraints, but I’ve never seen a jigger that got down below the quarter-ounce range, and I don’t want to assume that my readers will have access to tools that even I don’t. All of which is to say, I’ve concluded that 1 3/4 oz. of high-proof whiskey and 2 oz. of standard-strength whiskey are going to be reasonably interchangeable to the standards I’m observing.

That said, they still aren’t perfect substitutes (and I haven’t really touched their different water contributions, either), and so it will be useful to check that assumption against some hard evidence from my *ahem* research team.

Onward to cocktails!

You’re getting a twofer again today. Our Quarantine Cocktail is the Hot Toddy, made yesterday because it was snowing here in Cambridge and there’s nothing better for winter weather. When making Hot Toddies or any other hot drinks, remember that you don’t want to heat the liquor directly. Ethanol is more volatile than water, so if you put into the pot for your toddy or hot apple cider, you’re just going to boil it off. Heat the non-alcoholic ingredients separately, then mix them with room-temperature alcohol.

*Mug with moustache guard courtesy of the inimitable gift-giver Tristyn Wade.*

Hot Toddy
~4 oz. Boiling Water
1 1/2 oz. Standard-Proof Whiskey OR 1 1/4 oz. High-Proof Whiskey
1 tsp. Sugar or Honey
Lemon Wheel
Cinnamon Stick

Heat water in a pot. Put sugar or honey in a mug with lemon wheel and cinnamon stick. When the water comes to a boil, remove it from heat and pour it into the mug. Stir until the sweetener is dissolved (the cinnamon stick is great for this). Add whiskey and serve.

The Hot Toddy is less a drink than a style of drink. You can substitute any spirit for whiskey here - though I’d recommend limiting yourself to aged ones - and you can used ground cinnamon instead of a stick, or substitute cloves or nutmeg to taste. Honey is a pretty traditional sweetener here, but I’m fond of using a sugar cube, which is simple, aesthetically pleasing, and conveniently about a teaspoon by volume.‡

Speaking of aesthetics: to make a lemon wheel, cut a lemon in half, then take one of those halves and slice off the now-exposed flat surface. It’s possibly the easiest garnish there is, and you still have a nearly complete lemon to use for juice if you wish. Lemon wheels float in water and look very pretty.

I’d be interested to hear how you liked the Hot Toddy with these proportions, and particularly which strength of whiskey you were using, once the weather gets cold enough to make these again.

- - - - -

Our next drink, the one I have more substantive questions about, is the Queens. The name refers to the borough of New York City rather than a collection of sovereigns, and it is in fact one of four boroughs that have classic drinks named after them. (Staten Island, you may be unsurprised to learn, does not.)

The Queens, alas, is the least classic of the bunch. Much like the stirred and fortified wine-d Brooklyn is the offbeat Luigi to the Manhattan’s mainstream Mario, the Queens feels at times like the weird sidekick to the Bronx - which is itself a weird drink, a perfect Martini with added orange juice. The Queens follows the same principle, but with pineapple replacing the orange.

Here’s the thing: It isn’t bad! It’s just very tricky to balance. This may in fact account for its low popularity, coming decidedly fourth on the list of borough-named cocktails in frequency of consumption. I’ve probably made more of them while testing this recipe than anyone else has in a single twenty-four hour period in the last hundred years.

And yet, I feel compelled to include it. First, the last edition of 100 Classic Cocktails has a subtle New York theme in the list of included drinks. Things that might not have made the cut in another book - the Bronx among them - were included if they tied into the Big Apple in some way. I consider that part of the book’s internal tradition, and want to take at least some of my cues from that. And second, the Queens itself is already in the book! Or at least a version of it is, going by the equally New York moniker of the Park Avenue.

So in it goes! After extended trials, I think I may have this recipe about right - but if I do, it’s a drink that requires a standard-strength gin, and I simply don’t have any left. Thus, for today’s Question Cocktail, I present to you the:

*What a meteorological difference a day makes.*

Queens Cocktail
1 1/2 oz. 80º Gin
1/2 oz. Dry Vermouth
1/2 oz. Sweet Vermouth
1/2 oz. Pineapple Juice

Shake with ice. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

I have been experimenting with giving this a dry shake and a wet shake as well, like I did with the Bee’s Knees. The pineapple gives off a nice little bit of foam when I do that, but I’m not convinced it does nearly as much as it did for the honey last time, and consequently I’m not considering that part of the recipe just yet. For extra credit, feel free to try a dry shake and let me know how it changes your opinion of the drink.

But the No. 1 question I have for those who are able to make this drink is is: do you like this balance with 1 1/2 oz. of standard-proof gin? Because what I have in my house is just a bit too strong to be sure.

As a final note, canned or bottled pineapple juice is generally fine (and even assumed) in cocktails, in contrast to many other fruits. Pineapples are harder to break down and juice than, say, lemons are, and the canned juice really isn’t bad. But if you’re feeling like a socially distant pineapple juicing session, please don’t let me stop you!

Notes

(*) Proof is a measurement that corresponds to twice the percentage of ethanol in a spirit and is indicated using the degree sign (º). Thus, a whiskey that contained 45% ethanol and 55% water could be described as ninety proof or 90º, both vocalized the same way.

(†) Bottled-in-bond is a U.S. government designation that’s been around for a very long time. Bonded spirits are, among other things, certified to be the product of a single distillery in a single distilling season (i.e., half a year), to be aged for four years, and to be bottled at exactly 100º. The consumer thus knows with certainty who made it, when, and where, and how strong the product is - all of which where much more commonly cast into doubt by unscrupulous spirits peddlers when the act was passed than is the case today. Spirits being bottle in bond is nowadays more often taken as an indication of quality or of confidence on the part of the distiller; as a guarantor of authenticity, it’s been largely superseded by other federal statutes.

(‡) This is, incidentally, one of two reasons I’m open to using teaspoons (1/6 oz.) but not any other measurements below a quarter of an ounce. The other is that most people have spoons in their house that, whether or not they’re meant to measure things, do in fact hold about a teaspoon.

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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!

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How to Invent a Cocktail, Part IV of VI

(Recently, my friend Luke quietly published a book of poetry. It's called Abacus, and you can buy or download it here. I created a signature cocktail for the launch party, and because I sometimes get asked how I go about inventing a new cocktail, I thought you might like to see my thought process for this one. It's a longish story, so I've broken it up into six pieces, each of which will be a separate post and conclude with a recipe. Last week's chapter, "What's in a name?" can be found here.)

Chapter 4: Taking stock. Now what have we got?
Incorporating all of the above - the inspiration of Lautrec, the idiosyncratic taste for Gibsons, the love of absinthe, the necessary presence of kirschwasser - I came up with a first draft of the drink. It was going to have a dry gin base, with a quarter or half ounce of kirschwasser, a twist of lemon, a dash of Peychaud's, and possibly a rinse of absinthe. I wanted to import the structure of the Earthquake and adapt it for the audience. I'd paired Peychaud's and kirsch successfully before, so I was confident about that. The one hesitation I had was with the absinthe, which I worried might not play so nicely with the heavy dose of stonefruit. Other than that, I felt confident that I'd just be tinkering with the volumes.

Boy was I wrong.

The absinthe was a clear nonstarter from the very first try. It was complicated, it clashed, it overpowered everything else if there was too much and stuck out like a sore thumb if there was too little. Gone, totally gone.

But once I'd dealt with the absinthe problem, I realized there was a bigger one: the gin. The savory notes of the gin were really coming to the fore, and not in a good way. I thought it might be a problem with the particular gin I was using, so I tried another. And another. Each one worse than the last.

The actual problem was the kirschwasser, of course, which is a tricky ingredient. First of all, it's a strong presence. You usually get all the kirsch flavor you could possibly need with just a quarter ounce. But it's also simultaneously fruity and dry, and either characteristic can pop when you least need it to. You can't reliably use it for a fruit accent, because you might end up drying the cocktail out instead; you can't reliably use it as a better-than-vodka way to dry out a recipe, because the fruitiness can imply sweetness to the palate. And it has the tiniest hint of woody plant matter, like a cherry stem left out in the sun to dry, which you have to figure out a way to work with to have any hope of using this stuff in a cocktail.

It will fight you. Sometimes it will win. But if you can get the hang of it, kirschwasser is an incredible ingredient.

And given that it actually showed up in the book of poetry, I wasn't about to take it out of the recipe. So if it was clashing with the gin, the gin had to go. With the absinthe already gone, that left me with the following recipe:

1/4 oz. Kirschwasser
1 dash Peychaud's Bitters
Lemon Twist

Yeah, not gonna happen. It was time to take this back to the drawing board.

You'll see how this turned out next week, but for now I do feel compelled to say that there is a classic cocktail that uses both kirschwasser and gin, just not in the way I was trying to. It's called the Acacia, and it doesn't go anywhere near bitters or absinthe, balancing the dry gin/kirsch palate with warm, rich, sweet Bénédictine, another favorite ingredient of mine. In other words, I had a decent idea and was playing with it in the wrong sandbox:

Acacia
2 oz. Gin
3/4 oz. Bénédictine
1/4 oz. Kirschwasser
Stir with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a lemon peel.

Note that the garnish is very important in this drink. Twist it over the glass, run it along the rim, and then drop it in. That slight hint of citrus ties it all together.

Stay tuned for next week's post, "Chapter 5: Trusting your gut, even when your gut gives you every reason not to."

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How to Invent a Cocktail, Part II of VI

(Recently, my friend Luke quietly published a book of poetry. It's called Abacus, and you can buy or download it here. I created a signature cocktail for the launch party, and because I sometimes get asked how I go about inventing a new cocktail, I thought you might like to see my thought process for this one. It's a longish story, so I've broken it up into six pieces, each of which will be a separate post and conclude with a recipe. Last week's chapter, "What goes into an artist's cocktail?" can be found here.)

Chapter 2: What goes into this artist's cocktail?
Luke is a case study in how to manage a home bar.

I suspect that most people who keep liquor in their homes do it accidentally, accumulating a seldom-used collection of gifts and one-off acquisitions that they'll someday pass down to their grandchildren, cabinet and all.

There are also some people who become alcohol hobbyists, and like to keep a large bar on hand so that they can conduct experiments and make a wide variety of classics. This group is in particular danger of eventually becoming alcohol professionals. (I speak from experience.)

But the unsung heroes of cocktail culture are people who maintain a small but deliberate home bar, the ones who have one or two cocktails that they know they like, who decide that they should learn how to make those drinks well for themselves, and who are always prepared to make them should they or their guests be in the mood for a tipple.

Luke is one of these. His cocktails are the Gibson and the Old Fashioned, and his house is permanently stocked with the ingredients for both. He makes them carefully and well. He also enjoys absinthe, and has the tools for proper absinthe service.

But that's really it. He has, essentially, a house cocktail menu (and a rotating beer list). It's a good formula, and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys cocktails but finds the prospect of building up a home bar daunting or bewildering. It's also a useful thought for those of us who have large home inventories: if you have a few house specialties, it's easier to prioritize when stocking up.

And for the purposes of our devising a cocktail recipe, it's useful to know the tastes of the person you're making it for. In this case: classic, spirit-forward, enjoys both whiskey and gin, and likes slightly savory things. I can work with that.

Because it's his most idiosyncratic preference, I decided I'd especially like to make something that appeals to his Gibson-drinking side. The Gibson, you might recall from my taxonomy of the Martini and its cousins (if not, see here), is today understood as a Martini garnished with a cocktail onion instead of an olive or twist, like so:

Gibson
2 oz. Dry Gin
1/2 oz. Dry Vermouth
Stir with ice and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a cocktail onion.

The proportions used reflect Luke's preference for a 4:1 drink. I tend to skew towards 5:2; others may like other ratios. As a general rule of thumb, however you like your Martini is how you'll like your Gibson - although lemon-twist partisans like myself should be prepared for a savorier cocktail than we're otherwise used to.

Stay tuned for next week's post, "Chapter 3: What's in a name?"

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Distilled Knowledge Cocktail: The Martini

Damn if I haven't tried to write this post more than once. But we all have our Things, and the Martini is one of mine. And there's a lot to be said about it.

Let's start with the recipe, because I know I have a handle on that. When I sat down to make a Martini for this post, it so happened that I could make a delicious version using just ingredients from Portland, Maine:

Martini
3 1/2 oz. Aria Portland Dry Gin
1/2 oz. Sweetgrass Dry Vermouth
Stir with ice and strain into - what else? - a Martini glass. Garnish with a twist of lemon.

Note for the home bartender: "Garnish with a twist of [fruit]" means take a strip or a small medallion of the peel of that fruit, twist it over the glass to express the oils into the drink, run it around the rim of the glass, and then drop it in. It occurred to me as I was writing that that it often shows up in recipes without explanation, and could easily be confused for, "Drop a piece of lemon peel into the glass," which wouldn't be quite as effective.

Ordinarily, Martinis are garnished with a lemon twist or a cocktail olive (the latter sometimes accompanied by some of the olive brine to make a Dirty Martini). It's easy to overlook garnishes when making cocktails at home, but if you won't take my word that you should avoid doing so in general, please at least take my advice and avoid it here. The Martini is disproportionately defined by its garnish, to the point that one variation - the Gibson - is distinguished today entirely by being garnished with a cocktail onion. There's more to that story, but...well, we'll get there.

I'm a twist man, myself. That little bit of lemon sharpens and highlights the citrus notes already present in the gin; the resulting cocktail is crisp and bracing. To my tastes, the olive garnish slows down the drink - and the drinker - with that heavy, salty/savory flavor. There's certainly nothing wrong with that, and I've enjoyed an olive Martini from time to time. I recommend trying both and seeing which one you prefer. Honestly, that's a good rule of thumb whenever you have a choice between two cocktails.

I also tend to like my Martinis on the dry side, as, it seems, do most Martini drinkers. But just as it's possible to have too much of a good thing, it's possible to have a Martini that is too dry, usually by preparing one without any vermouth whatsoever.

In fact, let's take a moment to review all the ways in which people insist on soiling the Martini's good name, shall we?

The Herzog Cocktail School's Official List of Martiniological Heresies

Serving a "Martini" that's just gin, or gin with a garnish. Often cutesily accompanied by a "solemn look" in the direction of France, Italy, or the vermouth bottle; equally often served on the rocks in a cocktail glass. Even worse if you do this with vodka.
Failing to assume that gin is the standard base spirit unless otherwise specified. If someone asks you for a Martini, respect them enough to assume that they'd have asked for a Vodka Martini if they'd wanted one. If you ask for a Martini, respect the bartender enough to assume they'll make it with gin; if you want vodka, ask for it specifically. "Gin Martini" should be as necessary a phrase as "Whiskey Manhattan" or "Rum Daiquiri."
Assuming that anything served in a cocktail glass can be called a "Martini." For pity's sake, I see menus all the time that list the Sidecar or the Cosmopolitan under the heading, "Martinis." In fact, I can't count (or conceive of!) the number of times I've seen a "Martini Menu" on which not a single drink contained gin, vermouth, or any other kind of fortified wine.
Ever applying the "-tini" suffix to a drink. Ever.
Shaking your Martini without a very good reason. It won't "bruise the vermouth," as is often claimed, but it will dilute the drink needlessly and take away some of the delightful crispness the Martini naturally possesses. Unless you're drinking a Vesper, can explain why I made an exception for the Vesper, or are James Bond, stir.

But why all these rules, and what's the deal with the Gibson, anyway? Well, all that history is part of what makes this such a complicated drink to write about. But with thanks and apologies to David Wondrich, who covers a lot of this in more detail in Imbibe!, I'm going to give it a shot in a second Martini post (I did tell you I had a lot to say, didn't I?). Stay tuned for Part II!

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Bastille Day Cocktail Recipes

Thanks to everybody who came to the lesson at Vanderbilt last night! Here are the official Herzog Cocktail School recipes for the drinks we covered:

French 75
1 1/2 oz. Gin
1/2 oz. Lemon Juice
1/2 oz. Simple Syrup
Fill with Champagne (about 3 oz.)
Shake all ingredients except the Champagne. Strain into a flute and top with the bubbles.

Monkey Gland
1 1/2 oz. Gin
1 1/2 oz. Orange Juice
Dash Grenadine
Dash Absinthe, Absinthe Substitute, or Pastis
Shake with ice, strain into a cocktail or coupé glass.

Stay tuned for a longer recap with pictures!

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Distilled Knowledge Cocktail: The Greyhound

(Not sure what the title means? The Distilled Knowledge announcement should fill in the gaps.)

I'm counting down the days to publication with a series on the cocktails mentioned in Distilled Knowledge. They're an odd bunch, I'll grant, but each serves a purpose in the narrative.

Pride of place goes to the Greyhound, the cocktail that taught us not to mix grapefruit juice with medicine.

As you may have heard, it's a bad idea to drink grapefruit juice if you're on any kind of prescription drugs. It has a tendency to lead to higher-than-intended blood concentrations of your medications, with consequences that range from "mildly inconvenient" to "literally fatal."

You may not know that we learned this entirely by accident.

Researchers were studying the effects of ethanol on a blood pressure medication called felodipine. It was important for the experiment's success that the subjects not know whether they'd been given booze or not, so the researchers tried a variety of mixers (for science!) and concluded that the taste of the alcohol was best masked by grapefruit juice.

In the course of the study, they found that their subjects' blood felodipine levels were higher than expected across the board. Imagine their surprise when they realized they'd made a major scientific discovery "following an assessment of every juice in a home refrigerator one Saturday evening."

Distilled Knowledge Greyhound
2 1/2 oz. Double-Strength White Grapefruit Juice
1/2 oz. Vodka
Stir with ice. Serve on the rocks.

If what you're looking for is a drink with the taste of the booze completely hidden, mixing five parts grapefruit juice with one part vodka is a surefire way to get there. It is not, however, the way the cocktail is ordinarily served; merely an approximation of the concoction the felodipine researchers were using.

Note that if you'd like to add felodipine to this drink and make a Felodipine Greyhound, do not do so under any circumstances. Did you know that it's possible for your blood pressure to be too low? It is, and you don't want to find out what that's like.

On the other hand, there are many other versions of the Greyhound that don't threaten your health nearly as much. These days, it's commonly made with a 3:2 or a 2:1 ration of grapefruit juice to vodka. Personally, I prefer the former; grapefruit juice can be quite a lot when it's the majority of a drink by volume.

Contemporary Greyhound
3 oz. Fresh Grapefruit Juice
2 oz. Vodka
Prepare as above.

I still advise stirring, because shaking a drink that's mostly juice by volume just seems excessive. Note that a fresh grapefruit will yield about 3 oz. of juice, and the Greyhound needn't be a particularly exact drink; if you'd like to remember the recipe as "two ounces of vodka and a grapefruit," I won't stop you.

With a pinch of salt and more around the rim, this becomes the Salty Dog, which I assume is so called because "salty Greyhound" doesn't have the same ring.

With a gin base instead of a vodka one, it becomes...the Greyhound. Yes, this is one of the (many) cocktails that got its start as a gin drink and evolved into a vodka one as tastes changed.

It's first attested in the Savoy Cocktail Book, where it's mentioned as a variation on the older Grapefruit Cocktail, a concoction involving grapefruit jelly. In any case, it was a gin drink, and it would be some years before vodka came into vogue this far west.

Savoy Greyhound

"Take three and a half glasses of Gin and the juice of 1 1/2 good-sized Grapefruit. Sugar to taste, plenty of ice. Shake and serve."

Near as I can figure, that works out to about seven ounces of gin, four and a half ounces of grapefruit juice, and sugar to taste. This would have been a batch, with each drink closer to three ounces total. Still boozier than the modern version, and much ginnier-tasting.

Once introduced to vodka, the Greyhound ran off with it and never looked back. And honestly, I can't blame it; I say this very rarely, but I think this drink makes more sense with vodka. It's a simple cocktail. It hits a few notes (sour, bitter, ethanol) and it hits them hard. Tossing juniper in there seems more distracting than enhancing in this case, and I expect most people who Really Like Gin will prefer not to cover its flavor with an even larger dose of grapefruit.

That'll do it for the first installment. Stay tuned for more!

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Bar Staples

What are the workhorse spirits for a basic cocktail bar? What can you buy inexpensively enough to drink in quantity, that will reliably make decent cocktails?

I've flirted with the idea of a blog series dedicated to this problem, but that's as far as I've gotten with it. My own bar is very idiosyncratic these days, a combination of my poor self-control when faced with a truly novel beverage, my desire to stay on top of local spirits production, and my friends' assumption that unusual spirits are the best gift to bring to any social gathering at my house (they're not wrong, but it means I can find myself with, say, three Maine gins with weird botanicals in my house at once, and no bourbon).

There's also my love of rum, which I've allowed myself to indulge in appropriate disproportion for the last year or two. I've probably got ten or so different kinds on hand right now, depending on how you count it. I could actually tally them up right now, but that might discourage me from getting other rums in the future, and we can't have that.

In any case, I've come back to the idea of a series on workhorse spirits because my own personal list is outdated. I can remember a time when Bulleit and Bully Boy were reasonable choices for general-purpose whiskey mixing: pretty darn good and reliably available for thirty bucks, sometimes less. Not so anymore.

Whiskey, in particular, has gotten a lot more expensive in a relatively short time. I don't begrudge the distillers their success one bit, mind you. I adore sipping a nice glass of Whistlepig or Gunpowder, and I believe they're worth every one of the many pennies they cost. But sometimes you want to throw a party, and for that, you need a decent knockaround base spirit that isn't chasing the high-end sipping market.

To that end, I'll be doing a series on spirits that hit the sweet spot for me. How actionable this intelligence is will depend very much on your tastes and where you live. I'll try to stick to brands that are at least theoretically available outside of greater Boston, but there are weird local price fluctuations that may make my recommendations unreasonable (or unnecessary) in other parts of the country. Myers's rum, for instance, is pretty reliably more expensive than Gosling's or Rhum Barbancourt at liquor stores near me, which has to be some kind of Cambridge Triangle effect.

I'll try to incorporate general advice as well, since the particular contents of any list like this will change over time. I'm also creating a new sub-page under "Spirits" where I'll be keeping track of the most reliable workhorses I come up with. Happy drinking!

(This is, incidentally, not the exciting announcement I teased in the Patriots' Day post. It is merely an exciting announcement, and quite unrelated to that one, which is still pending.)

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Prohibition Cocktails

Finally getting around to putting up the recipes from our Repeal Day party - which, in case you're wondering, went very well:

We'll definitely be using the model again, so keep a look out for announcements on other holidays. In the mean time, here are the recipes we covered:

Hanky-Panky
1 1/2 oz. Dry Gin
1 1/2 oz. Sweet Vermouth
2 dashes Fernet Branca
Twist of orange or dash of orange bitters
Stir with ice and serve neat.

The first patron to consume this drink is said to have downed it in one gulp, and then exclaimed, "That is the real hanky-panky!" At that time, and in Britain especially, which is where it was invented, the phrase would have meant something like "black magic," and the whole sentence roughly, "That's so good I can't believe it." Its *ahem* other connotations, particularly in the United States, didn't exactly hurt the drink's popularity during Prohibition, when speakeasy bartenders were serving titillating drinks like the Between-the-Sheets and the Monkey Gland. (In our age of Screaming Orgasms and Slow, Comfortable Screws Against the Wall, it all seems a little quaint and innocent, doesn't it?)

Those who know me know that Fernet Branca is, in my view, the most foul drinking concoction yet conceived of by man. Yes, it's worse than Malort - and by a long shot. Yes, it's worse than Dr. McGillicuddy's peppermint schnapps. Yes, it's worse than plastic-bottle Popov vodka. It's like someone took a perfectly good bottle of Amaro Meletti and threw all three of those in there, with a little Aunt Jemima's for color. By what hanky-panky it has brainwashed so many otherwise-reasonable people into claiming that they like it, I have no idea.

Having said all of that (and much more besides; don't get me started), I have to compliment the Hanky-Panky Cocktail, for being the only drink I have ever had that uses Fernet Branca well. It adds a suite of interesting flavors, including its signature menthol, saffron, and bitter bite, all of which are able to contribute without overpowering one's senses because there are only two drops of the stuff. Perhaps the secret to using Fernet Branca well is to treat it as a non-potable bitters, and never use more than a dash. In any case, it and the little, remarkably essential bit of orange oil are enough to pull this cocktail's flavor profile far away from the sweet Martini it would otherwise be.

Scofflaw
1 1/2 oz. Rye Whiskey
1 oz. Dry Vermouth
3/4 oz. Fresh Lemon Juice
3/4 oz. Pomegranate Grenadine
Shake with ice and serve neat.

Another Prohibition drink-naming style is the "laugh about how illegal all of this is" school. The Three-Mile Limit falls into this category, named after the distance one had to travel off the coast before reaching international waters and legal hooch. So does the Twelve-Mile Limit, invented shortly after that distance was quadrupled.

The Scofflaw is another such funny case. I assumed for a very long time that "scofflaw" was a general old-fashioned word for a ne'er-do-well, but it actually referred to scoffing at one law in particular. The Boston Herald held a contest, to see who could coin the best term to describe all the people flagrantly and frequently violating the Volstead Act; "scofflaw," submitted by two different people, was the winner. So, in a purely technical sense, one could argue that the teetotaling '20s kingpin Arnold Rothstein was less of a scofflaw than the average speakeasy patron.

As for the drink, which is somewhat similar to its cousins the N-Mile Limits, this is a nice case where what you see is what you get. It's sweet and it's tart, and it's a bit smoother and more complex than it would be without the vermouth. The end result is what you would get if a Brooklyn and a Jack Rose met up for a little law-scoffing and ended up with a little hanky-panky.

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Day 7: Trina's Starlite Lounge

Apologies for the lack of visual for this post - I have no idea what happened to the relevant photograph, but it's time to put this series to bed either way. The final bar on my Negroni Week list was Trina's Starlite Lounge in Inman Square. I went there Sunday evening for dinner and the completion of my quest.

Trina's is a homey place, cool and dark on the inside. They advertise "drinks and air conditioning" on a sign above the entrance.

Their service station looks like a house kitchen, with mid-century powder-blue cabinets and a squat white fridge of similar vintage, covered in magnets. The whole place is decorated with Americana, most especially advertising signage and old cocktail shakers. Dark wood paneling suggests a pub or tavern past.

It's clearly a regulars' bar; the bartender was bidding a patron farewell by name as I sidled up. On Mondays, they have an industry brunch, to cater to folks for whom Monday is the weekend. There's surprisingly little of this type for Boston's barkeeps and restauranteurs, and Trina's is well-known and respected for it.

As for the cocktail, it was the most classic, archetypical Negroni I'd had all week. It tasted like a bitter orange peel with a burst of sweetness. A good ruminating drink. It was the right way to finish the experiment.

This week forced me to give more consideration than I ever had to the Negroni, naturally, and to its role in the wider cocktail world. In the end, I come back around to the bold and bitter classic recipe as the proper standard version of the cocktail - although if many are to be consumed in a fairly short period, a lighter variation is definitely preferable.

I do come down more harshly on the game of ingredient substitution than I did before we started all this. The Negroni is a recipe, not a category heading. Not everything containing potable bitters qualifies. The formula, though standard, is not fixed. It can be tweaked, stretched, and twirled around a spoon, if you like, but the end result should bear some resemblance to what was started with, if you're going to use the name.

Well done on that front at Trina's. It's also worth noting that their food is delicious (I'm assuming my experience is representative). I had a baked haddock to follow my Negroni, on a bed of sauteed spinach and sweet potato bacon hash. Yes, it was as good as it sounds. I highly recommend it.

Money from my Negroni went to the Sean A. Collier Memorial Fund. I expect Boston-area readers will recognize that name; the Fund will provide annual scholarships in his name at both MIT and the Boston Police Academy, and maintain a permanent memorial to him in Cambridge. The Globe has more detailed coverage, for those who are interested, but you don't have to read the article in order to donate.

This was a fascinating undertaking, from both the mixological and the philanthropic sides. My compliments to Imbibe and Campari for making Negroni Week a major, annual event; and to the 1,325 (at last count) participating bars around the world.

And if you missed out on the fun, don't worry: with numbers like that, they'll be back in 2015.

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Day 5: Nebo

Day five and Negroni fatigue was setting in. Even the weird-spin versions were still high-sugar, big on syruppy cordials and fortified wine. I was flagging. I needed a drink that could remind me why I was doing this in the first place.

Kudos to Nebo's Jenna, who mixed my favorite variation all week. It came just in time.

It starts with a house-infused Carpano Antica vermouth, which sat three days with basil, orange peel, and lemon peel. (The basil was more of a subtle herbaliness than what you have in mind.)

Then they add the Campari - real, honest-to-God Campari, because after all they were the ones sponsoring Negroni Week. Jenna informed me that all Campari sales, Negroni or otherwise, counted for charitable purposes; and that, in her view, ditching the red bitters was cheating. She had a point.

Ingredient No. 3 is G'Vine's Floraison gin, which has grape-flower as its primary botanical - so primary that if there were any others, I couldn't tell you what they were. Very light, slightly sweet, and delicate. The success of this Negroni owes much to the success of this gin, and each is in its subtlety. Non-gin-drinkers might even appreciate G'Vine - it hasn't got the heavy evergreen taste that turns some people off.

They also add a bit of Bénédictine, and garnish the concoction with a double-skewered lemon peel and a maraschino cherry. Served down and on the rocks, as it ought to be.

So. Damn. Good.

This Negroni - I don't recall it having a kitschy name, which is fine since it was pretty clearly a Negroni - has a lower sugar content than most of the others. The folks at Nebo also deliberately eschew the bitter-on-bitter tactic - Campari was undoubtedly less than 33% of this drink.

But enough about what the cocktail isn't, let's talk about what it is.

Fresh, light, and invigorating, it hits your system like water, but crosses your tongue like all the reasons you ever liked a Negroni decided to visit you at once. The nose is precisely what it should be: gin-dryness, Campari's distinctive aroma, and the whole pervaded with the essence of citrus - in this case, of lemon. (I'm told the local Campari rep calls this the "Citrus Burst Negroni.")

The body of the sip is like chilled mineral water - all the work is in the details. A wave of Campari-bitterness covers the tongue on the swallow, tinged with the citrus infusion and the Christmas spices of the Bénédictine. Slowly, but noticeably, the aftertaste evolves - resolves, even - through a citrus crest to an appetite-whetting bitter finish. Each sip begets another. I could hardly put it down long enough for a photograph.

Remember, a Negroni should be refreshing. It should put more back into you than it takes out. If it feels like work, you're doing it wrong. A+ work at the Nebo bar.

And apparently, my timing was doubly good - they had just recently set up the outdoor-dining tables, so the bar was practically deserted. That left me plenty of time to chat with the bar staff, sample the G'Vine gin straight, and swap blog information with Jenna, who maintains one of her own.

My Negroni, as well as all Campari sales during that week at Nebo, served to benefit the Italian Home for Children in Jamaica Plain. The Italian Home started as an orphanage after a 1918 flu epidemic left a lot of Boston's children parentless; today they specialize in programs for children with learning disabilities and behavioral or mental health issues.

If you missed out on Negroni Week, you can approximate the experience by giving them money at this link while having a drink at Nebo.

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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!

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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!

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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!

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Yale Cocktail

Yale Cocktail

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

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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.

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Plate: The Bee's Knees

Here’s something fun to kick off the week: decorative plates for HCS recipes! We’re going to have these for a lot of the drinks we post going forward, but we’re back-filling a little to get started. Enjoy the Bee’s Knees, ren… — Here’s something fun to kick off the week: decorative plates for HCS recipes! We’re going to have these for a lot of the drinks we post going forward, but we’re back-filling a little to get started. Enjoy the Bee’s Knees, rendered in pen and ink!

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Classic Cocktails: Last Call

The Collins, the Fizz, the Rickey, and the Highball

The Long Drinks Project

The Hot Toddy, the Queens, and Substituting Spirits by Strength

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

How to Invent a Cocktail, Part IV of VI

How to Invent a Cocktail, Part II of VI

Distilled Knowledge Cocktail: The Martini

Bastille Day Cocktail Recipes

Distilled Knowledge Cocktail: The Greyhound

Bar Staples

Prohibition Cocktails

Day 7: Trina's Starlite Lounge

Day 5: Nebo

AccesSport Young Professionals' Event (Also, Day 3)

Day 2: Russell House Tavern

Negroni Week Day 1: backbar

Yale Cocktail

Jen Rose

Plate: The Bee's Knees

Recipe Blog

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