April Drink of the Month - The Apra-Daquiri

Meet Charlie!

I have a confession to make - I've tried to write this blog post about 10 times in the last two weeks, but something kept getting in the way. I would try to make it down to my bar each night to craft a relatively simple cocktail - I had all of the ingredients in stock, and all I needed to do was juice a lime and measure out spirits. But each night, when things finally calmed down, and I would contemplate trekking down the stairs, I would hit a wall. I hear being a new parent does that to you...

For those faithful readers who have not heard the good news yet, my wife, Ann, and I welcomed our son Charles Joseph Kiley (Charlie) into the world on March 24 at 5:49 pm. He's just passed the one month mark now, and he's gaining weight like a champ (I wish people were as excited when I gained weight... or when I pooped for that matter). There are many, many wonderful things about parenthood, but surviving the first month (and accompanying sleep deprivation) did take a toll on my mixology time. Luckily, as noted above, this month's drink is pretty simple.

One of the benefits of living in your wife's home town is that you have easy access to eager babysitters. Ann's parents were nice enough to take Charlie for a few hours during week number two, so that we could run out and grab dinner together (just the two of us) and debrief/decompress from the first two weeks of parenting. We went to the LaSalle Kitchen, which has a great little bar program. My wife, being a big fan of anything with rum, ordered a drink called the Apra-Daquiri. This was her first cocktail post-baby, so I thought it would be appropriate to memorialize it here on the blog. The folks at LaSalle Kitchen were nice enough to pass along the recipe (yay!), which I have included in picture form. Below, you will find my slightly modified recipe. I use apricot liqueur instead of apricot nectar, and cut down on the simple syrup to help adjust the sweetness level. Here is my adjusted Apra-Daquiri recipe:


In a cocktail shaker, combine:

1.75 ounce silver rum (I used Journeyman Road's End)
0.75 oz lime juice
0.75 oz Rothman and Winter Orchard Apricot*
0.5 oz orgeat

0.25 oz simple syrup

Shake over ice, strain into a highball glass. Garnish with a dried apricot or lime wheel.

*Rothman and Winter is found in most good liquor stores. They also make an excellent Creme de Violet, which I use for my Aviation cocktails.

I hope you enjoy your Apra-Daquiri!

March Drink of the Month - The Gosia

Our drink for March is one of my own creation, inspired by a bottle of Żubrówka (Polish bison grass vodka) that I found at a Mardi Gras party. I'd never tried Żubrówka before, but I knew it was a favorite among bartenders, and that it went exceedingly well with apple juice. I did some light reading this morning, and found that most experts ascribe the following taste notes to Żubrówka: vanilla, lavender, thyme, "spring flowers," and, of course, grass. Żubrówka is made by steeping vodka in the tall grass that grows in the Białowieża Forest (which is favored by the local bison - hence the name). Żubrówka has a slight yellow-green hue, and usually is bottled with a blade of grass in the bottle.

My muse for this month

I wasn't quite sure what to do with my bottle of Żubrówka (apple juice was nowhere to be found), but I remember reading that it also paired well with lime. Inspired, I decided to try my own riff on a Margarita, using Żubrówka and Saint Germain (a personal favorite for elevating Margaritas). The lime accents the grassy notes well, and the Saint Germain provides a little bit of sweetness (along with Cointreau), as well as some other floral notes to compliment the earthy Żubrówka. It is a slightly bracing, slightly sweet drink with a nice acidic backbone from the citrus to keep everything together. It was a hit at the party, so the only thing left to do was find a name for my creation.

Long time readers may remember the entomology of the name "Margarita" (need a refresher? See this post from 2013 - wow, I've been doing this for a while now!). For those readers who have not been around that long, the short story is that the Margarita was a take on the popular "Daisy" drink during Prohibition. A brandy drink with lemon and Cointreau became a tequila drink with lime when brandy was hard to come by. "Daisy" was a nickname for Margaret, hence Margarita (or "little Margaret). Since this drink uses Polish vodka, I decided I would use the Polish word for "daisy" as the name for my new drink. Unfortunately, "stokrotka" is super hard to pronounce, as I was informed by everyone at our party. The name I ultimately settled on is a better fit however - Gosia is a Polish nickname for Margaret (or Małgorzata in Polish), so it better fits the name scheme for the Daisy/Margarita. Now that you know where that odd name came from, enjoy the recipe below to make one at home:

In a Boston shaker, combine the following:

2 oz of Żubrówka*

1/2 oz Cointreau

1/2 oz Saint Germain

1/2 oz lime juice

Shake over ice for 10 seconds, and strain into a coupe glass (no margarita glasses please, we're using vodka here!)

Notes:
*Only one note this month - there are other bison grass vodkas on the market, but Żubrówka is officially licensed by the Polish government, and far outshines its imitators. Make the investment. Apparently, if you can find stuff from Poland, the flavors are a bit stronger. The US government bans the strong Polish stuff, so the bottles sold here are a little different, but still excellent.

I hope you enjoy your Gosia! 

February Drink of the Month - Shudders in a Whisper

Passion fruit syrup. A tiki drink's best friend!

As I mentioned last month (okay, I wrote my "January" post three days ago, but who's counting? At least I got this one written during the month of February), one of the best birthday presents I received was the wonderful Smuggler's Cove cocktail guide. I'm still making my way through the book (it''s lengthy, and has a wonderful history of tiki culture, luminaries in the field, and detailed descriptions of their methods), but the most useful thing I've found so far is their rum classification system. Some tiki books I've found focus on the regions from which a rum originated. While I enjoy rum from Barbados as much as the next person, I've had trouble in the past trying to keep my rums straight when making drinks that often call for a mix of 3-5 different sugar cane distillates.

The Smuggler's Cove system helps clear this up for me. They break down the spirits first by raw components, then by distillation method, and finally by length of aging. They develop 21 categories, but they list 8 as essential categories for building your own "speed rack" of tiki rums. If you noticed sticky tabs on my Journeyman rum from last "month," that was my own attempt to follow the Smuggler's Cover method. Here are their eight essential rum categories, along with the brands I've purchased to use in my home bar. Each category lists component first, followed by distillation method, and then age (lightly aged = 1-4 yr; aged = 5-14 yr; long aged = 14+ yr):

1) Molasses/Evaporated Cane Rum - Pot Still - Lightly Aged:  Journeyman Road's End Rum

2) Molasses/Evaporated Cane Rum - Blended - Lightly Aged: Appleton Estate Signature Blend

3) Molasses/Evaporated Cane Rum - Pot Still - Aged: Diplomatico Reserva

4) Molasses/Evaporated Cane Rum - Column Still - Lightly Aged: Flor de Cana 12 year

5) Molasses/Evaporated Cane Rum - Black Blended: Gosling's Black Seal

6) Molasses/Evaporated Cane Rum - Black Blended Overproof: Lemon Hart 151

7) Fresh Can Juice - Cane AOC Martinique Rhum Agricole - Unaged: Rhum J.M. White 100 proof

8) Fresh Can Juice - Cane AOC Martinique Rhum Agricole - Aged: Clement V.S.O.P 6 Years Tres Vieux

With these eight rums and a number of homemade syrups that they list at the end of the book, you can make most anything in their tome. For this month, I decided to make one of the author's (Martin Cate) original concoctions. It features passion fruit, which was on sale this month at my local Meijer. I was able to make plenty of fresh Passion Fruit syrup, which elevates the drink significantly (and I also made a bunch of hurricanes, because, duh). Shudders in a Whisper, a drink Cate whipped up for a photo shoot, is bubbly, fresh, tangy, and boozy. It made a great sipper, although my drink mixing partner Zack and I both agreed that could use a little less seltzer. Below is the recipe for Shudder in a Whisper - make it yourself and let me know if you agree (I'll list our recipe modifications in the notes below):

Our coupe glasses overfloweth - use a snifter if you
have one to avoid this issue!

In a Boston shaker, combine the following ingredients:
3/4 oz lime juice
1/2 oz passion fruit syrup*
1/2 oz pear liqueur**
1/4 oz Drambuie
2 oz seltzer***
2 oz column still aged rum (#4 above)
2 dashes Peychaud's bitters
1 dash Angostura bitters

Shake over ice and strain into a brandy snifter (or if you're me, and your snifters don't exist, a coupe glass will do)

Notes:
*To make the Smuggler's Cove passion fruit syrup, combine equal parts passion fruit puree and 2:1 rich simple syrup. You can make the passion fruit puree using fresh fruit (its ripe now) or buy frozen
**We used pear brandy from Black Star Farms in Traverse City, MI. It is tasty stuff!
***We reduced the seltzer to 1 oz and added an additional 1/4 oz of pear liqueur - its less watery and more potent in our estimation with this change.

I hope you enjoy your Shudders in a Whisper (even if the name is a little creepy)!

January Drink of the Month - Oaxacan Daiquiri

Ann and I ended our 2016 by traveling to New York City for Christmas. Ann crossed off an item on her bucket list by seeing the Radio City Christmas Spectacular, we saw Something Rotten in its last few weeks on Broadway (hilarious!) and we were able to make it on to the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon with standby tickets (and we even made it on the broadcast when someone in the row ahead of us won an ugly Christmas sweater. All of these were noble pursuits, but I was perhaps most excited to explore some of the finer craft cocktail bars in NYC. Without making reservations ahead of time, we encountered disappointment at PDT (although the setup was fun to see - its hidden behind a sliding door in the back of an old phone booth in a hotdog shop) and Dead Rabbit Grog and Grocery. However, the experience we had at Death & Co. NYC more than made up for any of these disappointments - even Ann who was not drinking (because baby - coming soon to a theater near you) had a magical couple of hours talking with out excellent and skilled bartender while she sipped an over the top virgin pina colada.

A lack of yellow chartreuse (because baby - chartreuse is expensive!) keeps me from replicating my favorite drink from that night (a Yellowjacket with mezcal, yellow chartreuse, and jalepeno infused goodness), but I was lucky enough to find Death and Co's beautiful book in our local library, and I found plenty of wonderful recipes in there (as well as a shout out to my alma mater in the form of a profile of Holy Cross priest and drink connoisseur Fr. Bill Dailey). The end of the book featured a whole set of riffs on classic drinks, with over four pages devoted to daiquiri variations. A daiquiri is a simple combination of good rum, simple syrup, and lime juice. Some of the riffs published by Death and Co. went far afield from that simple construction, but my favorite only added one ingredient: mezcal.

Ingredients on display. Note the sticky on my rum, explained
in the notes section below.

Mezcal, the native spirit of Oaxaca, Mexico, is made from the pina (nut) of the agave plant (unlike Tequila, which is made in Jalisco, and made exclusively from blue agave). Many of the native Mexican spirits are regulated by region. When Ann and I went to visit my parents for Christmas, they had just returned from Jalisco, the home of tequila. But the fine people of Jalisco also make a mezcal-like spirit, which they call Raicilla. Like mezcal, it is smoky and sweeter than tequila. It packs a punch, and not everyone loved the drinks I made using my bottle of raicilla. But substituting it for mezcal in the Oaxacan Daiquiri riff from Death & Co. was a wonderful application of this fine spirit.

Scotch haters, beware. This drink is equal parts tart, sweet, and smoky. Rum provides a strong backbone for a strong smoke flavor, which is mellowed by the sweet rum and simple syrup on the finish. My parents promptly turned up their noses to this drink, but I've found myself making this drink whenever I want something simple and flavorful. It will certainly be a staple in my home bar menu, and I hope you might try it out as well! The recipe for the Oaxacan Daiquiri follows.

In a Boston shaker, combine the following ingredients:

2 oz Pot Still Lightly Aged* Rum**

3/4 oz simple syrup

3/4 oz lime juice

1/4 oz mezcal or raicilla***

Shake over ice for 10 seconds, strain and serve up. Garnish with a lime wheel if you are feeling fancy and have company over. Omit if you are drinking alone in your basement while writing blog posts.

Notes:

*Ann got me a wonderful Tiki book for my birthday: Smuggler's Cove: Exotic Cocktails, Rum, and the Cult of Tiki. They have their own helpful classification for various types rum, which I've found immensely helpful. I will try to use their system when making rum drinks on the blog in the future (and I'll feature one of their drinks next month, so get ready). If you notice the little sticky tab on my rum bottle (pictured above), this comes from their rum classification system, and it is really helpful!

**I used locally made Road's End Rum from Journeyman's Distillery. It is slightly overproof, and is excellent. It was actually recommended by the Smuggler's Cove folks in their book, so good on you Journeyman!

Ungarnished Oaxacan Daiquiri, because I made it alone
in my basement while writing a blog post.

***Mezcal is much more common in the US than Raicilla. But if you find yourself in Jalisco (say in Peurto Vallarta), pick yourself up a bottle. If using mezcal, make sure to avoid anything with a worm - its a cheap gimmick that is not representative of some of the fine mezcal now found stateside.

I hope you feel bold enough to enjoy your Oaxacan Daiquiri!
 

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!