After a brief hiatus, Mixology Monday is back! This month my friend Lindsey Johnson takes charge and orders something brown, bitter, and stirred. From MxMo founder Paul Clarke:
While punches, sours and flips are essential parts of every cocktail fiend’s drinking diet, perhaps no other style of drink is as dear to our booze-loving hearts as those potent mixtures of aged spirits, amari, aromatized wines and liqueurs, sometimes (sometimes? Almost always!) doctored with a dash or four from the bitters shelf.
This seems like a good occasion to post another cocktail from my session with David Shenaut and the producers of Ilegal Mezcal. Here’s the Mexican Train:
2 oz Ilegal reposado mezcal
3/4 oz Carpano Antica sweet vermouth
1/4 oz green Chartreuse
5 drops mole bitters
Stir, strain, and serve up in a chilled cocktail glass. This is a mezcal-driven variation on a Tipperary, tied together by one of my favorite pairings, Chartreuse and chocolate. The bitters are the housemade mole bitters from Beaker and Flask. Bittermen’s Xocolatl bitters would probably work nicely too, though without any mezcal on hand I can’t try out an exact recipe (hence the lack of photograph this month). Regardless, it’s an interesting drink to try out when a discerning brown, bitter, and stirred order comes across the bar.
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If you’re in Portland today, consider stopping by the inaugural Northwest Spirits and Mixology Show at the Jupiter Hotel. Admission is free with proof of hospitality industry affiliation, otherwise $10 with registration here. The show is industry only from 12-4 and open to everyone from 4-7.
The Oregon Bartenders Guild is contributing to the show with a few mixology demos. I’m working the “classic to contemporary” slot, tweaking a classic cocktail. I’ll be making and serving a Bols Boulevardier:
1.5 oz Bols Genever
1 oz Campari
1 oz sweet vermouth
Stir, serve up with a cherry or orange twist. This drink is traditionally made with bourbon, so I’ll be using Bols to tie it into the trend toward white whiskeys (Bols is made from about 50% malt wine, an unaged grain distillate). This has been one of my favorite genever cocktails to order when I’m out at bars that are still developing their own drinks; the ingredients are widely available, it’s easy to make, and it’s really tasty. My demo is slated at 5:25 and I’ll be sampling the cocktail from the OBG booth for sometime before.
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I recently received a marketing email saying that whatever one drinks on St. Patrick’s Day, “you better be sipping on something green.” It then went on to describe a cocktail made with tequila and Midori. Because nothing says Ireland like tequila and melon liqueur…
Personally I could care less about drinking green and am perfectly happy with good stout and Irish whiskey. For the latter, I’ve been fortunate over the last week to sample more than 20 Irish whiskeys as part of Lance Mayhew’s informal “tasting panel.” Lance provides a primer on Irish whiskey here and fellow taster Geoff Kleinman makes some great recommendations on his new blog, Drink Spirits.
If you’re in a cocktail mood, my favorite mixed drink with Irish whiskey is the Tipperary, made with Irish whiskey, sweet vermouth, and Chartreuse. As a bonus Chartreuse does happen to be green, though the final drink won’t be.
Finally, there’s the elephant in the room, the extremely politically incorrect Irish Car Bomb. If you’re in a real Irish bar tonight you should not order one of these. Even so, I do have a soft spot for the drink, and judging by the number of search referrals this blog is getting for Irish Car Bombs today other people do too. Here’s photographic evidence that everybody loves an ICB. Or if you want to make this drink more sophisticated and stable, try the Defusion, a deconstructed version of the drink I served at Carlyle. Finally, if you really want to be adventurous, make it with Upright’s Oyster Stout. We tried it at Branch and it puts Guinness to shame.
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After a one-month hiatus, Mixology Monday returns with the theme of “Money Drinks.” As our host Beers in the Shower explains, this theme is open to multiple interpretations. One of the ones he offers is this:
I feel a “Money” drink is something you can put in front of anyone, regardless of tastes or distastes about the spirits involved. Come up with a drink or a list based on spirits about drinks that would appeal to anyone. example: turning someone onto a Corpse Reviver #2 when they like lemon drops.
The drink I’m posting today meets that definition. It also brings in the money, thanks to the strategic use of pyrotechnics. Here’s the H’ronmeer’s Flame,* one of the newest additions to Carlyle’s cocktail menu:
2 oz rye whiskey
.75 oz Ramazzotti
.75 oz Carpano Antica sweet vermouth
Stir all of the above, strain into a chilled cocktail glass, and flame an orange zest over the surface of the drink. (To flame an orange zest: Take a large swath of zest, toast with a lit match, and squeeze the oils through the flame.)
Creatively speaking, this is not the most inventive cocktail in the world. Call it a variation on a Manhattan or Boulevardier. But the cinnamon notes of Ramazzotti make it a perfect amaro for winter cocktails and the ignited oils from the orange zest give the drink appealing aromatics. Almost as importantly, the light show that results from spraying citrus oils through a flame is a great conversation starter that inspires other customers to order the drink. When you want to bring in the money, fire is your friend.
*Yes, I sneaked a Martian Manhunter reference onto my cocktail menu. And yes, this makes me happier than it rightfully should.
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The nanny statists in Oregon have declared that smoking a pipe is henceforth illegal in the few cigar bars that survived the smoking ban intact. Now what am I going to do with all my pipe tobacco? Work it into a drink, of course! It’s not illegal if it’s not fire.
This month’s Mixology Monday theme is “new horizons,” in which A Mixed Dram encourages us to try a technique or ingredient we’ve never used before. I’d actually planned on posting something other than what I’m posting now, but that particular experiment is still in the works. Instead I tried my hand this weekend at flavoring liquor with smoke.
My friend David Barzelay suggested the method: put wood, leaves, or tobacco in a large pot, set them smoking, insert liquor in an elevated, smaller pan, and then place a lid on the whole thing for half an hour. I decided to try this with pipe tobacco and sweet vermouth with the goal being a sort of smokers’ Manhattan. (Why not smoke the bourbon? Because bourbon costs three times as much as the vermouth and I didn’t want to ruin it. I can already see Caleb cringing at the thought of molesting his favorite spirit that way.)
Unfortunately I was a little short on the necessary equipment. My large pot with lid was in the service of soup at the time, so I had to use a smaller one. And not having a pan small enough to fit in that pot I had to instead use a vegetable steamer with a steel bowl laid inside it. I didn’t actually own a vegetable steamer so I had to buy one. That I finally bought a vegetable steamer not for cooking vegetables but for adding tobacco to liquor tells you everything you need to know about my personal habits. Take out that life insurance policy on me now, folks.
The process was pretty straightforward. I added a layer of aluminum foil to the pot to protect it from the tobacco (probably unnecessary) and set the stove to high heat until the leaves started smoking. Then I turned down the heat and dropped in the steamer and bowl with 6 ounces of vermouth. I put on the lid and after a few minutes turned the heat off entirely and let it rest for 30 minutes. The first run didn’t impart quite enough flavor, so I ended up repeating this with one more 10 minute smoking period.
This worked out decently well in a Manhattan, with the flavor of the tobacco coming through in a balanced cocktail. It also came with a thicker mouthfeel and slightly sour aftertaste. I’m not sure if that’s the result of tar from the tobacco or heat damage to the vermouth. I’d have to experiment with a larger pan that dissipates heat better or with cold smoking to know for sure. In any case, adding a bit of unaltered vermouth fixed things up. So now when the Oregon smoking cops come around, I can mix up a Ceci n’est pas une Pipe to evade detection:
2 oz bourbon (Bulleit)
.75 oz smoked sweet vermouth
.25 oz sweet vermouth (Noilly Prat)
2 dashes Fee Brothers’ old fashioned bitters
If I keep experimenting with this I want to use cold smoking, either with a device like Lance has at 50 Plates or this smoking gun that Barzelay pointed out to me. For now, though, I’m glad to have a new technique at my disposal, even if I don’t keep using it exactly in this manner. Thanks to A Mixed Dram for hosting this month and to David for spurring on a new idea.
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Jacob Grier is a freelance writer, barista, mixologist, and magician in Portland, OR. He writes, eats, and drinks a lot. His articles have appeared in The Washington Post, Reason Online, The Oregonian, and other publications.
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