December Drink of the Month - Shirley Temple

Ann and I are not big social media people, but I think now that our Christmas card has been sent out, it is safe to announce it here that we are expecting our first child at the end of March. This is beyond exciting for us, but the one downside is that I've lost my primary taste-tester and drinking buddy. Over the holidays, I wanted to make sure that Ann had something to drink when everyone else was enjoying holiday cocktails. Taking a cue from her grandpa, I decided to create a batch of fresh grenadine for Shirley Temples. This was their treat at her grandparents' house (and I got an earful when I threw out an ancient bottle of 1970s grenadine), and I wanted to recreate it for her and her sisters.

Pomegranate "jewels" ready to juice

As an added bonus, pomegranates were on sale at the beginning of December. I've covered this in the blog before, but real grenadine is not made from overly-sweet cherry juice. Instead, it is a sweetened pomegranate molasses (and "grenadine" comes from the French word for pomegranate). Home-made grenadine is much darker and richer than the pale red store-bought stuff, and it tastes a little different as well. I've made it before using store-bought pomegranate juice, but to make this extra special, I juiced my own pomegranates. I've included the instructions for making your own grenadine below with lots of pictures, but first, here is the recipe for the perfect Shirley Temple:

Fill a Collins glass 3/4 full with ice

Pour 3/4-1 oz grenadine (or to taste) in the bottom of the Collins glass.

Top with lemon-lime soda or ginger ale, leaving room in the glass to stir

Happy customers

Stir well with barspoon to combine.

Top with a maraschino cherry (homemade if you please, store-bought if you're serving minors) 

The Mason girls preferred Sprite Zero in their Shirley Temples, but my nephew Joey was a big fan of Vernor's Ginger Ale (as am I). My niece Molly just wanted the Sprite, no syrup or cherry. You can't please them all... 

Home-Made Grenadine

Here are the instructions for making home-made grenadine, from pomegranate to syrup:

Cut open pomegranate and carefully remove all the "jewels" (seeds). This is best done underwater - fill a large bowl with tap water, and cut each pomegranate in half under the water line. This reduces splatter - otherwise you wind up with a kitchen that is stained bright red from exploding jewels. Continue to work the fruit underwater to separate the seeds from the membrane. 4 pomegranates will produce approximately 2-3 cups of syrup.

Hazards of working with
pomegranates

Juice the pomegranate seeds using a kitchen juicer. Alternatively, you could use cheesecloth, but that is bound to be messy. Skim off any frothy residue and transfer to a medium pot.

Bring the juice to boil, and continue to heat over medium-high heat until the juice has reduced by half, approximately 15-20 minutes. Remove from stove and weigh the molasses using a kitchen scale.

Return the molasses to a medium-heat, and add an equal weigh of table sugar. Stir to combine fully, and allow to cool. Transfer to a sterilized mason jar for storage. Will keep for 2-3 weeks.

These kiddos hope you enjoy your Shirley Temples!

November Drink of the Month - Peychaud's Punch

On the occasion of our anniversary, Ann was nice enough to secure us the ultra-secret back room, nestled in the wine cellar of Corndance Tavern. In addition to having excellent food, Corndance has one of the best cocktail menus in town. There were several new drinks for me to try, but the most intriguing was the "Peychaud's Punch," which featured the venerable bitters as a star ingredient. The best thing about sitting in the cellar room at Corndance is that the bartender is right next door, and she was nice enough to give me the recipe for the drink, handwritten on the back of a torn-off piece of menu. Not every restaurant or bar is willing to be so generous with their recipes (see, for instance, the cryptic instructions I received at Culinary Drop Outs for the Room Service cocktail), so I'm grateful to whoever was behind the sticks that night for being willing to share!

The recipe as I received
it, on the back of a menu

Before we dive into the drink itself, a quick word on bitters, and their use as cocktail ingredients. Bitters, as we have them today, are the descendants of the various health tonics and miracle potions that were made popular by charlatan street vendors. They have a mixture of botanical extracts (most popularly gentian and cinchona bark) steeped in high-proof alcohol. Mixing bitters with wine was popular in the 1800s (usually for their supposed medicinal benefits). From this was born the modern cocktail, which was composed of "spirit, sugar, water, and bitters." The Old Fashioned is the premier example of an early cocktail with spirit (originally brandy, now commonly bourbon), water, sugar (now sometimes combined as simple syrup for easier mixing), and bitters (Angostura in this case).

Peychaud's bitters were made by an apothecary in New Orleans (originally from Haiti) named Antoine Amédée Peychaud. Like Angostura bitters, Peychaud's bitters have a gentian base, but they are sweeter and more floral. Peychaud's bitters are essential for a proper Sazerac. Peychaud's bitters are fairly potent - clocking in a 35% ABV (or 70 proof). This is comparable to many full-bodied spirits (which usually are bottled around 40% ABV/80 proof). Angostura is even more potent at 45% ABV/90 proof. Despite the high alcohol content, bitters can be purchased by minors. In Minnesota, where supermarkets are forbidden to sell anything but non-alcoholic beer (hello St. Pauli Girl Non-Alcoholic Malt Beverage), bitters can be found on the shelf and purchased every day of the week, even Sundays (hello Blue Laws, which have followed me to Indiana). This is because bitters are considered "unpalatable" in large quantities, much like mouth wash and cough syrup. A determined teen might still go after a bottle of bitters and try to stomach it out for the buzz, but the price (8-12 dollars for a 5 oz bottle) is prohibitive, as is the laxative qualities that some bitters ingredients possess in larger doses.

Despite this, some bartenders recently have been experimenting with using bitters as a featured cocktail ingredient. Bitters are usually measured by "dashes," and the tops on bitters bottles are designed to regulate the flow of liquid using a drop or dash (and when the bottle top goes bad, look out - you might wind up with a brown drink or stained hands!). One dash is roughly 1/32 oz, and most drinks call for a maximum of 3-4 dashes (1-2 is more common). However, there are a category of "bitters-forward" drinks that contain as many as 1-2 oz of bitters! These drinks appeal to the "quadruple IPA" crowd that pride themselves on being able to cut through immensely bitter flavors for a full-palette experience, but I would never call such a drink my cup of tea (remember, I got into bartending because I found most beer to bitter for my taste - that's why I can fairly well guarantee I'll never have a Negroni as the drink of the month). This doesn't mean that all bitters-rich drinks are off the table, however - and the drink this month is one I am happy to recommend to anyone!

Peychaud's Punch features a strong dose of Peychaud's bitters - 10 heavy dashes, which comes out to somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2 oz, depending on who is doing the dashing. While you can free-measure your bitters using the dash top, for consistency's sake, I would recommend using a jigger to measure your bitters. I use 1/3 oz (somewhat splitting the difference) in my recipe. It adds sweetness to the drink with 1/2 oz of simple syrup, and additional sweet and herbal flavors with 1/2 oz of Green Chartreuse (because of this, you could expect the drink to be green, but the bitters have such a strong color that our finished product has a beautiful deep red/purple hue). The base of the drink is mescal, which supplies a smoky undertone. Finally, lime juice provides a little acid to cut the sweetness. The resulting concoction starts smoky, stays sweet on the tongue, and has just the slightest bitter after-taste (in a good way, not in a hop-bomb IPA way). Here is the recipe for your Peychaud's Punch:

My sister Katie came up to
visit and gave this drink
her seal of approval!

In a mixing glass, combine the following:

1 1/2 oz Mescal

1/2 oz fresh squeezed lime juice

1/2 oz simple syrup

1/2 oz Green Chartreuse

 1/3 oz Peychaud's Bitters (10 heavy dashes)

Shake over ice, strain and serve in a coupe glass.

I hope you enjoy your Peychaud's Punch!

October Drink of the Month - Corpse Reviver #2

Halloween was celebrated last Monday and The Walking Dead is all the rage right now, so you might expect this to be my inspiration for fixing up a "Corpse Reviver" this 1st, which is where we get the term Halloween, from "All Hallow's Eve"). In his honor, we'll find a drink for November which celebrates one of the saints instead of zombies and ghosts (or at least one th month. However, my boss is Roman Catholic priest, and he is not the world's biggest fan of Halloween. He feels that the holiday detracts from the celebration of All Saint's Day (on Novemberat can pull double duty and celebrate both!).

This week, I was asked to bartend for a "Drinking with the Saints" marriage enrichment event (another reason its great to be Catholic). Their speaker focused on the example of three saints, and I was asked to develop a drink to pair with each of these saints (there is an excellent book called Drinking with the Saints which tackles this task for every day of the year - but we chose to come up with our own drinks for the event). One of saints that the speaker chose was Saint Bernadette Sobirous - a young woman who, at the age of 14, saw an apparition of Mary in a grotto near Lourdes, France. Mary's message was to encourage the world to prayer and penance, and the water of the Grotto is world renowned for its healing properties. I thought the most appropriate drink to celebrate the life of Saint Bernadette would be a few fingers of whiskey - after all, whiskey comes to us from the Irish word meaning "water of life." But that hardly fits the bill for a cocktail night, so we settled on the Corpse Reviver #2 instead.

Why a Corpse Reviver? Well, its equal parts a geographic nod to the ingredients, gallows humor, and bad puns. First, geography: the key ingredient to the Corpse Reviver #2 is Lillet Blanc, a French aperitif, similar to Cocchi Americano. It is made in the southern Bordeaux region, about an hour and a half north of Lourdes. Next, gallows humor: Saint Bernadette is one of a particular class of saints know as "incorruptibles" - her body has not decayed after death (this is one of the weird parts of being Catholic). This is sometimes viewed as a miracle which helps one's cause for sainthood. What better drink for an incorrupt body than a Corpse Reviver! Finally, bad puns: The Corpse Reviver is so named because it was originally used as a hangover cure! Since the water in the grotto in Lourdes is held to have healing power, then we should made a drink that also has healing properties - the miracle cure known as the "hair of the dog."

Today, we'll be making Corpse Reviver #2. There are many Corpse Reviver variants, and the "original" Corpse Reviver was made with cognac, apple brandy, and and sweet vermouth. Not a bad formula, but not excellent either. Luckily, this drink was improved upon with the Corpse Reviver #2. This drink mixes the botanicals of gin, two sweet/bitter ingredients in Lillet Blanc and Cointreau, sour lemon, and the bracing bitter of an absinthe rinse. Here is the recipe for the Corpse Reviver #2:

Pour a small amount of absinthe into a martini glass and swirl to coat the glass*. Set aside.

In a mixing glass, combine the following ingredients:

1 oz dry gin

1 oz Lillet Blanc

1 oz Cointreau

1 oz fresh lemon juice

Shave over ice and strain into the absinthe coated glass.

*Instead of the dash and swirl method, I prefer to keep my absinthe in an atomizer and mist it over the glass before serving. It gets a better coverage while not overpowering the drink. This is also how I make my Sazeracs.

I hope you enjoy your Corpse Reviver #2!

September Drink of the Month - The Puckered Dutchman

While bored at work a few weeks ago, I found myself browsing the Food Network's list of "Best Summer Drinks" and bookmarking a few that seemed worthy of trying later at home. One that stuck out for me was a drink called "Dutch Timidity" from Food Network personality Justin Warner. The drink pictured is a very pretty light purple (almost blue) and it contains one of my all-time favorite cocktail ingredients: crème de violette. The rest of the drink is composed of genever (he spells it "jenever" because he is snooty (okay, Wikipedia also agees with him), but I learned to spell it with a "G," and you are stuck with my sensibilities - and Wikipedia thinks my way is acceptible as well), lime juice, and Aperol. If this blend of ingredients sounds familiar, it should. The very first drink I ever wrote about for my blog (a drink that still remains one of my all-time favorites) is the Aviation - a blend of gin, lemon juice, crème de violette, and maraschino liqueur. It is pretty easy to see that Warner's Dutch Timidity is a riff, introducing similar but slightly different ingredients. Dry gin is replaced with old, Dutch-style, malt-forward gin (genever). Lemon is swapped for another citrus in lime. And maraschino is replaced by Aperol - another bitter & sweet liqueur.

I liked Warner's drink, but his mixing is imprecise (using "dashes" instead of ounce pours) and - especially if you use a malt-forward genever - its a little light on the crème de violette. Here is the recipe for the drink as he pours it: 2 oz Genever, 1 oz lime juice, 2 dashes crème de violette, and 2 dashes Aperol. Compare that to my favored Aviation recipe, which is made with 2 oz gin, 1/3 oz lemon juice, 1/3 oz crème de violette and 1/4 oz maraschino. For our drink this month, I decided to find a happy medium between these two extremes (fully admitting that I like a little too much crème de violette in my Aviations). I call this variation the "Puckered Dutchman," an homage to genever's roots and the sour/bitter notes from the lime and Aperol:

In a cocktail shaker, combine the following ingredients:

2 oz Genever*
1 oz fresh-squeezed lime juice
1/3 oz crème de violette
1/4 oz Aperol

Shave over ice for 10 seconds. Double strain to remove any remaining lime particulates and serve in a coupe glass.

*Based on the picture accompanying the recipe, Warner is using "young" genever, which is clearer and tastes more like a neutral spirit. I much prefer "old" genever, which must contain at least 15% malt wine, and has a flavor more akin to whiskey. Old genever is a yellowish-brown in color, so if you use old genever in your drink you will not get the same pretty purple hues as Warner - it will look more like the picture accompanying this post.

I hope you enjoy your Puckered Dutchman!

August Drink of the Month - Green Hornet

This summer has proven one thing to me definitively: I am a terrible gardener. While my wife will happily try to get hanging plants to grow on our porch and water them religiously, even using plant food, I am usually content to forget that I ever purchased a plant and allow it to die an undignified death by dehydration. At one point this summer, I had a small herb garden filled with mint, cilantro, basil, rosemary, and lavender. All that is left at this point is a resilient stalk of rosemary and the sad husks that used to be other plants. However, before their untimely demise, I was able to harvest a few bunches of cilantro and mint. Normally, I would use these in tacos and mint juleps (respectively), but one day while I was bored at work, I stumbled across what seemed like an inventive use for both in a cocktail: a drink the Food Network dubbed the "Green Hornet."

There were a number of problematic issues with the drink as found on their website. First of all, there is already a fairly popular drink of the same name that in no way even remotely resembles the drink they describe. It features Midori (something I've promised to use as sparingly as possible, because gross) and coconut rum with pineapple juice, making it an overly-sweet, tropical concoction. The only connection between this drink and the one we will make today is that they are both green (though markedly different shades). The second problem is that the recipe was written by a cook and not a bartender. Half of the ingredients are listed without ounce pour proportions, which required just a wee bit of fine tuning to make the drink work well. Finally, it is light on the booze - only one ounce of tequila in a 12-16 ounce drink. Clearly we would need to bump this up a bit. However, the original concept of the drink - a mint/cilantro syrup with lime, tequila, and ginger beer, was enticing. Hence, our drink of the month was born. Made to the following specifications, this drink is spicy with a hint of mint to cool you down. It sips almost like spiced ice tea, with only a small, boozy punch at the end to remind you that you're having a cocktail. Here is the recipe that I settled upon:

In a cocktail shaker, combine:

1.5-2 oz tequila (to taste)

1 oz lime juice

1.5 oz mint-cilantro simple syrup*

Shake over ice for 10 seconds and strain into a highball glass filled with ice. Do not fine strain the mixture - the floating bits of finely minced mint/cilantro add to the mouth feel.

Top with 3-4 oz of ginger beer, garnish with a lime wheel.

*For the mint/cilantro simple syrup: In a blender, combine 1/2 cup of simple syrup, 1 cup of mint leaves, and 1/2 cup of cilantro. Blend until herbs are finely minced. Bottle and keep for up to 2 weeks in refrigerator.

I hope you enjoy your Green Hornet!

July Drink of the Month - Sloe Gin Fizz

I have now inherited a second collection of alcohol from a grandfather, this time from Ann's maternal grandpa, John Gruber. Apparently once word gets around that you like to mix drinks, people line up to give you their leftovers. Grandpa Gruber was nice enough to give me several bottles of Cointreau (much to my delight), and an assortment of other liquors and mixers. There were several bottles of Creme de Menthe (which doesn't keep so well), but what really caught my eye (besides the embarrassment of riches in Cointreau) were the two bottles of Sloe Gin.

Sloe Gin is something that disappeared for a while from our collective consciousness. Sloe gin gets its name from its two primary ingredients: sloe berries and gin. The beverage is made by steeping small, tart sloe berries in gin, and adding a little sugar. Sloe berries are hard to find, so while a DIY version is possible, it is difficult to do on this side of the Atlantic. Why are sloe berries so hard to find? Because they taste terrible! However, once mixed with gin and sugar, you get a wonderful liqueur with a little pucker and a little sweetness. Sloe gin disappeared for a while in the 60's-70's (like many cocktail ingredients) because people made cheap, icky versions, using low-quality neutral spirits instead of gin as the base and using sloe berry flavored additives instead of actually steeping the berries. The result was a poor substitute for real sloe gin and should be avoided whenever possible.

Thankfully the folks at Plymouth (famous for their gin) have begun bottling sloe gin again. Which is really useful to remember if you want to go into a bar and order a drink that would make your mother blush. Many cocktail ingredients have a shorthand that you can use to order them as an additive in a drink. The most famous of these would be ordering a drink "on the rocks" (with ice), but there are lots more! To add an ounce of sloe gin to your whiskey (which you should never do), you could ask for a "slow" whiskey "on the rocks." Sloe gin goes into a pantheon of drinks that should never be consumed - they exist solely to embarrass the bartender (or yourself) when you order them. The linchpin of these drinks is the classic screwdriver - vodka and orange juice - which gets shortened to "screw" when you order it with add-ons. A morally impaired drinker might choose to order a slow, comfortable (Southern Comfort) screw against the wall (with a float of Galliano - from the classic drink the Harvey Wallbanger made with vodka, OJ, and Galliano), with satin pillows (Frangelico because the French are sissies). Or you could order a Long (tall glass) slow, comfortable screw up against a cold hard (on ice) wall with a kiss (Amaretto because those Italians are legendary romantics). If you want to make it a fuzzy screw, add Peach schnapps (from the classic drink the Fuzzy Navel) or if you like it the hard way, add an ounce of whiskey. The possibilities are endless. A really enterprising pervert could possibly order a Long, Slow, Comfortable, Fuzzy Screw against a Cold Hard Wall with Satin Pillows and a Kiss. But that would be a terrible drink. And it would cost a whole lot with all those add-ins. And don't do it, because you also kiss your mother with that mouth.

That was a long digression to take to talk about the Sloe Gin Fizz, but I think it was worth it, don't you? Now on to the real drink. The first few times I made a Sloe Gin Fizz, I somehow thought that the Fizz portion of the drink came from mixing sloe gin and super-fine sugar. I blame the Esquire article I was reading with the recipe. Regardless of how this mix-up occurred, I spent weeks trying different brands of sloe gin and different variations of superfine sugar trying to make a fizz. Of course, the actual fizz comes from adding soda water, which, well.... duh. Now that I have removed that possible error from your path, here is a simple recipe to follow for a Sloe Gin Fizz - a perfect summer drink that balances tart and sweet with refreshing!

In a cocktail shaker, combine:

1 oz Plymouth Gin*

1 oz Plymouth Sloe Gin

3/4 oz fresh squeezed lemon juice

1 barspoon simple syrup or superfine sugar**

Shake over ice for 10 seconds. Strain into a Collins glass filled 3/4 full with ice. Top with soda water and serve!

*You can sub other gins/sloe gins for the Plymouth brand, but this is the most authentic version of the cocktail.

**This is a "to taste" kind of measurement here. You may choose to omit any sweetener, as the sloe gin is plenty sweet on its own, but a little simple syrup does help balance out the tart lemon juice.

I hope you enjoy your Sloe Gin Fizz!   

June Drink of the Month: Room Service

Down in my basement bar, I have a little mini-fridge/freezer combo. Usually I keep it stocked with the essentials - simply syrup, citrus fruit, etc. This morning, however, I noticed a theme: the whole bottom shelf is filled with RED. There are a couple of reasons for this. It is cherry season in nearby southwest Michigan, so of course I had to make a new batch of brandied cherries (OK, two batches - we got an industrial cherry pitter as a wedding present, and it is AWESOME). I also just found what I think are the very last blood oranges of the season, so I made another batch of Charred Rosemary & Blood Orange Shrub. And I made some homemade grenadine, because store bought stuff sucks. That's four mason jars full or red liquid on its own, but I also have another jar full of strawberry simple syrup, kept on hand just for this month's featured cocktail:

We made a pitcher full to celebrate
my dad's birthday. Perfectly
acceptable serving method, as long
as your little sister knows just how
much gin is in the drink and doesn't
try to pound half the pitcher
thinking it is a lightweight
champagne drink.

While Ann and I were traveling in Arizona in in April, we stopped through Scottsdale and visited their mall (its huge and quite luxurious). Across the street was a little spot we decided to try for lunch called Culinary Dropouts (how can you resist a name like that?). They had an excellent little cocktail menu, and Ann ended up picking a sparkling drink that they called "Room Service." The menu told me that it was a combination of Prosecco, Plymouth Gin, lemon juice, and strawberry simple syrup. Ann loved the drink, so we asked the waiter for the recipe for us to try at home. Sometimes restaurants will be incredibly accommodating and will happily hand out recipes for home bar guys like me. However, Culinary Dropouts was a little more secretive. All the waiter would tell me was that the drink used gin and strawberry syrup in equal proportions. Armed with this knowledge, Ann and I entered the Bar Lab (TM) and started tasting possible recipes (a really arduous task, I know).

Any time you are replicating someone else's recipe, your own taste ends up playing a factor, so I will readily admit that we might not have gotten the recipe exactly correct. The one I will publish here is made to Ann's standards. She loves sweeter drinks and can often do without lemon in her drinks. If I were to make this to my specs, I would probably bump up the lemon juice in the recipe by 1/4 to 1/2 ounce. Keep that in mind if you are playing along at home - always adjust these recipes to your taste!

To make our version of the Room Service cocktail, combine the following ingredients in a Boston shaker:

2 ounces Plymouth Gin

2 ounces strawberry simple syrup*

1/4 ounce fresh squeezed lemon juice (again, if this was for me, I would use at least 1/2 ounce)

Shake over ice and strain into a coupe glass. Top with 2-3 ounces chilled Prosecco and garnish with a frozen strawberry slice.

The remains of the strawberries used
for our syrup. Still quite good with
a champagne pour-ove!

*The process to make strawberry simple syrup is quite simple. Warm 1 cup distilled water and slowly add 1 cup granulated sugar, as normal. Once the syrup has combined, add 1 1/2 cups fresh or frozen (pitted) strawberries (fresh are better, but frozen work just fine here) to the syrup and brind toa quick boil. Reduce to simmer for 3-4 minutes and then allow the liquid to come to room temperature. Double strain the syrup through a fine mesh strainer and cheese cloth and bottle for up to 3 weeks.

I hope you enjoy your Room Service cocktail!